every year is a great year for rap music. these are my favorite songs from 2024.

1. slimegetem - "hellraiser" (ehuncho6)
i'm gonna pull myself back from the brink of diagramming the entire history of washington dc music just to contextualize this, the most ignorant and abrasive and nihilistic and infectious rap song i heard all year but here's the still too-long abridged version: dc area rappers have spent the past decade or so burying deeply into the "dmv flow", an insular, tightly-wound, punch-in heavy tunnel vision rhyme pattern that keeps getting more insular, tightly-wound and tunnel vision-y with time. more recently the dc production sensibility has begun to catch up to the flow in terms of density / intensity / uniformity, lately with producers like trapmoneybiggie ^[1] and ehuncho6 of the petro gang collective landing at an almost psychedelic clanking propulsive sheet metal industrial sound. think 06 soulja boy with a bounce beat swing and a horse rotorvator sample pack.

slimegetem is rapidly becoming the most internet-visible rapper working in this mode. "mashallah i cooked him" was his breakout viral hit, going off on tiktok over a "philly muslim tangin" clip (and, later, an egypt muslim hooping clip) but "hellraiser" was the one that really clicked for me, every time i played it i had to run it back like a thousand times and it always makes me feel like my teeth are falling out of my skull.

he might not be the greatest rapper to come out of this scene, at least not by any traditional metrics, but he is the most brutally focused, which is ultimately what the design calls for. the best dc music (like the best internet music) has always been recursive by nature and he's spent most of the year relentlessly making the same song over and over and over and over, perfecting the formula, hitting those same clanging beats, same flows, same lyrical touchstones - he drac'd 'em, he cooked em, he killed em, he's a young demon, etc., etc. - but there is a frenetic almost escalatory approach to his process, so much so that even he frequently seems surprised by the increasingly outrageous words that coming out of his mouth. it's obvious why this over performs on social media - it's a lot closer in spirit to viral punch-in-heavy shock agents like lazer dim/rxkneph/babytron than to regionally / thematically aligned peers like skino or jg wardy but my oldest old head interpretation is this is just True Gangsta Rap, some spitting in the eye of the white gaze business in the spirit of efil4zaggin and old rap-a-lot with a palette that would make schoolly d proud.

(slime also spawned my favorite music criticism of 2024, this one loose tweet with exactly two likes that says everything i am trying to say here only much more succinctly: "I just turned slimegetem music off on [sic] its still playing am I cooked??")

2. 41 - "hate the real" (mcvertt)
last year i told you that the jersey club / ny drill fusion was the best thing to hit east coast rap production since pete rock horns and this year we finally got its inevitable "t.r.o.y." sure, sexy drill was wonderful, the defining sound of tri-state post-rap in 2024, but for now i am going to have to go with mournfully watching tiktok in the club drill as the objective peak of the form (temporary opinion). mcvertt, the principal architect of this whole rhythmic shift, had a relatively quiet year otherwise but relatively quiet works on this one. it's slow and fast at the same time, zeroing in on the more minimalist elements of jersey club while 41 continue their low key high intensity run as the most functional rap group of their generation. think of them as the east coast answer to migos - a natural chemistry, an intuitive sense for songcraft, essentially one very effective flow shared by all ~three members ^{[2] and} still confident enough to break out of their formula even when the market results don't bear out (the streaming numbers on "hate the real" are not exactly booming by their usual standards which i'm only going to take as further evidence of its excellence).

3. nino paid & babychiefdoit - "coolin" (5kjordn, krager, maajins, jonoftf)
i love it when unexpected rap collaborations across regions and (micro) generations not only deliver but actually transcend. nino paid is a wiser-than-his-age 22-year-old from landover, md, a ~lyricist~ in the introspective/depressed lineage of a starlito or scarface who tends to sidestep traditional dmv production trends in favor of a more subtle/emo/cloudy approach, babychief is a 16-year-old from the south side of chicago working firmly in his city's drill tradition but applying a frenetic zoomer energy and palpable sense of fun to it. they both have had outstanding years in their respective lanes but i wouldn't have even considered that they occupy the same universe until they ended up recording this one together live on twitch via streamer/tastemaker/aspiring studio engineer plaqueboymax's "in the booth" series.

"coolin" doesn't neatly fit into either artists existing catalog, it's just this short burst of off-the-cuff positive energy shit talking music. i recently read ice-t's 1994 "cop killer" cash-in book the ice opinion and it mostly has aged into obviousness or irrelevance but he did have one simple idea that will stick with me: "too many people take shit talking seriously because they have no frame of reference." nino and chief are having so much fun hating on their imagined (?) opps here that it actually feels wholesome in context. bonus points, too, for getting off an actual chorus ("baby chief dropped out of school but youngin still jump out of cars") in under two minutes and for bringing back that classic trope where rap dudes will spend an entire song bragging on all the horrible delinquent shit they've done before dropping a half sarcastic "kids stay in class" warning.

yes it is a bit depressing how random twitch streamer guys have become the de facto gatekeepers for next gen rap music in a rapidly collapsing post literate world but on a spectrum that also includes aidn ross buys donald trump a cybertruck and kodak black pops percs like a trained seal for kai cenat, plaqueboymax seems downright noble. at least his interest in rap music is somewhat rooted in artistry (which is more than we can say about the previous wave of gossip-hound hip hop gatekeepers-turned-influencers). i can't think of a more respectable application of cultural capital accrued from being internet famous for no particular reason than learning fl studio and inviting your favorite artists to record in your weird gamer clan airbnb. ^[3]

4. kurious - "i don't even exist" (mono en stereo)
the trick to enjoying to new rap music as an adult is to only pay attention to rappers who are either under the age of twenty five or over the age of fifty. upper west side old head kurious jorge, who you probably remember from his mf doom collaborations but you should remember from "walk like a duck" (if not "mansion and a yacht"!), had an unexpectedly great year, loving life, questioning his very existence, wearing crisp fitteds and weird top hats, dropping a great album and an even better mixtape. the laziest take on this stuff is that he's "only" doing a doom homage but first of all come on now if anyone is allowed to play in the villain's tool box it is jorge, that's his man (doom exec produced the album, recorded back in 2019, and his estate released it through his metalface imprint, the provenance on the mixtape tracks isn't clear but they are very much in the same style) but also the doom aesthetic is kind of perfect for the type of weathered-old-head-accepting-reality raps that kurious has aged into. he's floating on "i don't even exist", ricocheting from one philosophical polarity to the next in the same way doom might have except with no mask on: "beyond money i'm meaning that he gets to his gift / a part of him of him in hell but he out to uplift / these people don't keep it real yeah life is a bitch / but still such a blessing the question is why we resist?" (frequent homeboy sandman collaborator mono en stereo's production on this run has been really nice too, illustrating how the doom sound was as much a function of curation as it was composition - the beat on this was just lifted wholesale from an old library funk record.)

a tangent: i've been thinking about doom's "?" a lot lately, and how kurious' penultimate verse there serves as his portal back to reality on operation doomsday. of course the doom persona was evolved in part as a reaction to the loss of his brother subroc but roc specifically only gets a few passing mentions on the album - a cracked brew for on "gas drawls", a nod on the "doomsday" hook. otherwise it's mostly doom burrowing more deeply into his own imagination, donning the mask, building the myth, chewing on pop culture / street culture, focusing on world building and word play. it's only after kurious plods through on the last track, spelling out roc's name and punctuating with an "only we save we" kicker that doom pivots from name dropping ferris buller and quoting t ski valley to delivering what is the realest verse of his entire damn career, the realest verse of anyone's damn career, one of the most painful/lovely works about grief ever written in any medium. so i say all that to say this: now that doom has finally gone back where his brother went it's heartening seeing jorge having this laaate career second wind, working broadly in doom's wheelhouse but talking plainly about life/living/surviving, once again playing physical world anchor to his friend's more mystical presence.

5. skaiwater - "play" (skaiwater, bankroll got it)
skaiwater's #gigi, would far and above be my album of the year if i still listened to albums. the nottingham-born/internet-raised/los angeles-based rapper/singer/producer's debut offers both a synthesis of the entire history of internet rap and makes a strong argument that what frank ocean does is not actually all that different from what playboi carti does (all emotions are ecstatic). i'd like to write a longer piece about the album at some point because there is a whole lot going on there but one of the many great things about it is how reverently skai approaches a number of regional micro-genres that are otherwise too often reduced to near-meaningless signifiers in the soundcloud sector ("internet pigeonholes") - jersey club, br funk, jerk music. "play", for instance, is pure new orleans bounce, with brown beats and triggers propping up a distant "strawberry letter" type melody while skai sing-raps about crying in the shower in a boisterous almost '09 rich kidz tone. (if we are being real a lot of the soundcloud-era shit that was described/dismissed as "emo rap" in its time in fact descended from atl swag rap but that is another conversation for another blog post that will never happen.)

6. star bandz - "yea yea" (cyrusxo)
another (!) sixteen-year-old chicagoan who has been killing shit, star bandz hits the rare sweet spot as a teen rapper who sounds like teen trying to sound like an adult but not entirely succeeding, evoking shades of the greatest mind-is-old / heart-is-young kiddie rapper of all time roxanne shante. that shirley temple with a switch blade swagger. cyrusxo first posted the "yea yea" instrumental as a "your stepdad type beat" but it's more than that, chopping the fuck out of the same old ahmad jamal loop that ski used for "feelin it" and then slathering it all in stuttered footworky hi hats. good shit.

7. ebk jaaybo - "boogieman" (yvnng ecko)
adult diaper old heads might tell you that new rap songs don't have choruses anymore but i would argue that the choruses have simply stopped announcing themselves. the scratched samples, r&b melodies and call-and-response chants of past eras have almost entirely evaporated in favor of long memorable stretches pure rapping, repeated a few times. probably this is a result of the shift towards the studio-engineer-as-songwriter-carving-songs-out-of-endless-half-freestyles-in-pro-tools model or maybe it's just a matter of song structure bending to the whims of the tik tok algorithm. either way incarcerated stockton street legend ebk jaaybo's short/perfect/bleak slapper "boogieman" might be the most blatant example of this phenomenon - it's damn near all hook - 16 bar chorus / 8 bar verse / chorus repeats - and the hook is about how the hook is not a hook. it is definitely a hook.

8. $ilkmoney - "2 fah 1 bo-berry brandon biscuit special" (khalil blu)
divine council was one of the more underrated crews to emerge from the mid-'10s soundcloud sludge and it has been exciting to see the core members spread out into different corners of the underground in the wake of their breakup - producer icytwat gravitated towards rapping over scorched proto-rage / post-memphis beats via asap rocky's awge imprint, cyrax has been doing a plugg / bone thugs hybrid and $ilkmoney has gotten into a psilocybin-enhanced politically-charged and wordy boom bap shout rap zone at the mid point between early ice cube and late bigg jus. i had long held out hope that they would one day reform and fuse their now very divergent styles into a magnificent new thing.

so it was disappointing when, seemingly out of nowhere (though i don't read the underground gossip tea leaves too carefully these days so who knows), icy started airing out the other members on twitter, claiming they gave chlamydia to minors and clowning $ilk for "scream[ing] on beats about white people all day" ^[4]. he followed that with an extremely underbaked diss track sehay, its a eater" (since deleted, i guess its also a deleter) which was uh not the best idea because it opened the door for $ilk to go scorched earth / universe devouring with his own response. "2 FAH 1 BO-BERRY BRANDON BISCUIT SPECIAL" is packed with the type of devestating minor grievance head shots that could've only come from a former friend ("you couldn't roll a blunt until you fucked with us!"), all delivered with so much conviction and intensity that even his unironic call to "spiritual lyrical warfare" lands. there's a b-side too!

9. future - "where my twin @" (metro boomin, g koop)
fake future fans think it's all about fucking hoes and slamming promethazine fours while the real ones are still out here scanning his discography for its most empathic moments. in the same way 56 nights was more about the suffocating nature of being alive than the specific time dj esco spent in a dubai jail cell, "where my twin @" spins a (presumable) salute to the then incarcerated young thug into a song that is more broadly about freedom and being free. the whole ysl trial was such a fucked up farcical indictment of our legal system it is honestly a shock it didn't spark more conversation nationally. i'm sure it didn't help that most rappers outside of thug's immediate circle seemed downright scared to even say his name. cowards.

10. glorilla - "yeah glo" (b100, go grizzly, squat beats & lil ronnie)
memphis has been so pivotal to the sound of 21st century rap music - with one million "pussy rappers" making one billion project pat cover songs, an entire generation of cool kid underground rapper treating nth gen car stereo tapes as canonical texts, the whole city of atlanta building both their trap and crunk music empires on an m-town skeleton, etc. - and while the city has produced no shortage of local legends and significant street level stars of their own during this time it still feels weirdly underrepresented in rap at a mainstream level. so it has been great to see glorilla, a memphis artist who basically materialized out of thin air with two classic tracks in 2022, ascend to actual crossover star status while remaining mostly true to her roots.

"yeah glo" feels like an explicit acknowledgement of the city's convoluted and long tail influence - the hook calls back to juicy j's eternal "yea ho" chant but the track doesn't directly sample three 6 mafia. instead it borrows from "run up get done up," a local 2007ish hit from the st louis crew da banggaz314, a track that was so deeply indebted to atlanta's crime mob that it is usually misattributed to them. and of course, crime mob was basically doing three 6 mafia cosplay the whole time. so yeah watch memphis take they styles back, for real on this one. it's only a shame that glo didn't get present day stl star sexyy red to jump on the remix and close the circle (it would certainly be preferable to the both of them doing whatever the hell they did with "wipe me down".)

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11. skrilla - "shoestrings" (yari)
i'm not even sure of what to call the recent wave of slow crawling dead eyed completely demonic post-drill shit that has been coming out of philadelphia recently, i only know it has produced some truly amazing records. but like so many other contemporary street rap scenes it has remained a mostly insular one, almost completely impenetrable to outsiders unless they want to play weirdo reddit lurker / gang voyeur-vulture which is is the most hideous way to approach this wonderful thing called rap music. enter skrilla, who lies slightly to the left of this scene sonically and socially, and stands as maybe its best ambassador. he's a little more mature, a little more present, more focused on old guard rap targets like language and religion (he's a santeria practitioner). this might be too early or generous a comparison but he sort of feels like an east coast answer to husalah, in terms of his ability to combine street knowledge, spiritual inquiry and a sort of goofy loose limbed charisma. he released a ton of music in 2024, dropping two full lengths and frequently reaching across regional lines for a bevy of great collaborations but the relatively minor solo cut "shoestrings" was my favorite: "how you jump inside the waters with them sharks ain't grow a fin"?

12. common & pete rock - "all kind of ideas" (pete rock)
it is always annoying when some old heads make some half decent new music and then less discriminating old heads jump online to claim that the new shit is just as good as the old shit when it clearly isn't anywhere close so i won't make any such claims here but i do think this is the finest recent example of old heads making new shit in the style of the old shit. of course i would've preferred it if, by some miracle, com and pete actually made a record that sounded entirely new and also was somehow as powerful as their best material but that's never going to happen so this will do.

i think part of the reason the explicit nostalgia bid works so well for both of them here is the stuff they were both doing in the '90s was already so transparently nostalgic. the beat really does sound like a main ingredient outtake and it's great to hear pete on the mic again. it's funny to think that, after all the passive aggressive/aggressive aggressive tensions between him and cl smooth it finally occurred to him that he can go get another rapper to fill cl's shoes which i am certain was his thought process going into this whole project. common remains charming in his own special way, best stumbling around word-associative punchlines in the dark before landing somewhere profound like "cash rules everything around me... except my mind". it's as if the past twenty five years of cranky instagram posts and weird neoliberal shilling never happened.

13. oodaredevil - "pick up the pieces" (​kelewya)
producer kelewya has been kicking around the upper-middle-underground circuit for a few years now - making elegant medieval tay-k-core with iayze, making white guy gunna pastiche with his brother talinwya, making yeat songs with yeat - but it's dallas' oodaredevil (pronounced "daredevil") whose style best does justice to his big little slinking beats. on "pick up the pieces" he raps in all bent run-on-sentences, moving between garbled autotune and clenched jaw cowboy twang, locking into repetitive phrases then springing right back from them. there is something incredibly sticky about the whole construction, "wake up get bread in the morning / wake up get bread in the after-noon" will never leave my brain. (btw does anyone else hear a bit of that kele swing in that "big weeknd & carti song?)

14. morally rich jake - "buss a grape" (?)
some more dmv crankage because actually that's all i listen to now. obviously morally rich jake is the best rap name since earl sweatshirt.

15. jp - "bad bitty" (jp & p tha producer)
milwaukee gave us the new nelly and you losers made him a meme.

16. larussell, p-lo, malachi & richie rich - "what we doin" (p-lo)
yeah yeah there is a palpable corniness to vallejo rapper/entrepreneur/backyard concert promoter larussell's whole thing, not so much because of his unrelenting positivity (which is welcome, mostly) but more because of the ~you gotta respect his independent hustle~ angle which seems explicitly designed to appeal to temporarily embarrassed small business owner sect. it's the same marketing model that helped propel fellow mid-to-middle brow bay acts like berner and mistah fab to legend status (master p too though that's obv a more complicated story) but also like all of those guys larussell has an undeniably great ear for beats and an instinct for surrounding himself with the exactly the right people so whatever. anything that brings more p-lo to the people is welcome. i don't know if this would've been my larussell/p-lo choice without the narrative boost of seeing the coolest old head living richie rich blowing his knee out and straight rapping right through it but rap is nothing without context and i'll never forget that beautiful clip.

17. playboi carti - "evilj0rdan" (cardo got wings & johnny juliano)
it feels like fifty years ago but it was in fact early 2024 when playboi carti was drizzling out a handful of new videos in the supposed lead up to his eternally forthcoming i am music project, sidestepping traditional dsp releases and dumping them exclusively on instagram and/or youtube. this was an annoying choice but also a conceptually sound one: '00s mixtape mood board aesthetics have been quite fashionable in recent years, ever since tyler put dj drama all over call me if you get lost, but it always strikes me as self defeating when these faux-mixes are given standard issue commercial releases. the mixtape format was first and foremost defined by its illegality! burying a track on an ig reel and letting only the most obsessive fans dig it out themselves is maybe the closest a rapper today can come to really recreating the hand-to-hand grey market canal st / sunoco tarp / cdr burn / broken mediafire link distribution methods, at least without disappearing entirely. plus the lo-fi fuzz that built up on all the fan rips that were eventually ported other platforms help lend some authenticity to all the dj swamp izzo drops. "evilj0rdan" was the highlight of this otherwise hit-or-miss batch, splitting the difference between the hiccuping baby voice of his pre-wlr leaks and the grimier, more future-inspired sound he's been playing with recently. some great props in the video, too: a hello kitty mug, a g-wagon spare tire cover, wielded like a shield, and, most unexpectedly, a still sealed copy of mr bungle's 2020 reunion lp.

carti is still still doing album release date edge play with his increasingly insufferable fanbase and at this point i can only commend him for it. fuck them kids.

18. che - "i rot i rot" (​runna, ​natecxo & che)
rappers used to rock now they rot. got it.

19. jaeychino f/ slimegetem - "me vs me" (sjr, jonah abraham & 3rdup)
i'm sliding in one more from morally reprehensible slime. here he's playing in fellow internet-savvy dmver jaeychino's sonic world, which means more cloudy/washed-out internet music than heavy metal free car crank/clank but it works well for the both of them.

20. cash cobain f/ bay swag & ice spice - "fisherrr (remix)" (cash cobain, fckbwoy & whoisjiggi)
i never quite went all in on sexy drill, the stripped down and romantic club rap subgenre pioneered by bronx rapper/producer cash cobain, but also i was never mad to hear this, his flagship hit, when it did pop up on the radio. and, contrary to popular opinion, i thought ice spice did a good job on the remix, with her line-for-line rebuttal to cash & bay's original first verse providing a welcome symmetry .

21. chief keef - "2 times" (mike will made it & shawn ferrari)
almighty so 2 might've been the project to finally push chief keef into the prestige legacy artist territory he so deserves, however briefly ^[5] but i was more partial to the less ceremonious dirty nachos tape, comprised of his previously lost/partially leaked sessions with mike will made it, unmixed and loaded with blown out trapaholics drops. like much of the project, "2 times" had been floating around the leak circuit for a while but i don't think i heard it until the tape came out. and it's great, just keef doing keef things, shaking out new flows and growls, zooming into the narrow/specific/juvenile-like exercise of writing around the phrase "2 times" and then taking great pleasure in gradually wriggling out of its rules. after so many years of keef being perceived as the ur- anti-lyrical antichrist mumble rapper sent to destroy the genre it is funny that he now stands as one of the most focused and craft-oriented writers on this entire list but that is what always happens and also he alwayshasbeen dot gif.

22. mello buckzz - "move" (dj roc)
23. dcg shun x dcg bsavv - "[steppers freestyle]" (keezo kane)
two quick absolute bangers, beat jacked from from opposite ends of the 21st century chicago dance music spectrum - mello buckzz on dj roc's footwork classic "pop baby" and the dcg brothers over keezo kane's enormous james brown chopping stepper / skater anthem "ga ga ga" (yes ll hit it first but the dcg boys did it best.)

24. yuke - "ian goin" (​karakuli)
@trollge3712 4 months ago i feel like i could use this to het water out of my phone speakers

25. kendrick lamar - "not like us" (mustard, sounwave & sean momberger)
the best thing about rebranding this series as "favorite rap" rather than "best rap" is it affords me the freedom to put this particular song at #25 and not at #1 which, by any other zeitgiest barometer measurement, is where it should objectively place. as someone who has spent the past fifteen years begging everyone to turn off drake's godawful dogshit music you'd think i'd be able to take some pleasure in his alleged downfall but i've been completely unmoved by it. for one because we all know he is going to be right back in ten months with the worst song you've ever heard everywhere but also because there was not one point in the battle where kendrick just flat out said that the man makes godawful dogshit music. instead he just went all in on the qanon-tier ^[6] anyone i don't like is a secret pedophile and i'm the only person alive who can uncover their crimes conspiracies because that is the only critical lens left for americans. ^[7] i mean, he could've straight come out on the his hair wack his gear wack his jewelry wack tip and still fully decimated him. or alternately he could've played it cool and just brushed dude off with complete nonchalance. why do i suspect that this single shot from one of the more talented lyricists residing in the colonized territory of atlanta stung aubrey harder than anything kenny had to say: "do you really think i need a fuckin drake verse?"

on the other hand i cannot deny that "not like us" is a good song, sure. it's maybe the first kendrick record since "alright" that works better as an actual song than as a ~performance of excellence~ (or catharsis). it's exactly the sort of song he should've been making back in 2017/2018. you know, back when stinc team and sob x rbe were peaking doing similar shit with only a fraction of his visibility. as a matter of fact the ratchet/jerkin/hyphy lineage that "not like us" nods to has been the dominant sound of the west coast for the past twenty+ years now, so its both satisfying to hear it manifest a huge crossover hit and frustrating to think that most of the country was only willing to finally and fully embrace it after it got an express blessing from the world's only pulitzer prize winner/amateur pedophile hunter.

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[1] okay okay i can't resist just one footnote to close this particular loop : biggie is a portugal-born, netherlands-raised producer who has cited his parents' native cape verdean music as a principal influence more so than the late-era go-go crank that it vaguely echoes (he also posts kudoro and zouk type beats on youtube) which has that ethnomusicology graduate program application calling to me like the green goblin mask because most early go-go scholarship traces the genre back to west africa, there is a whole chapter in the beat about this! ^

[2] + dee billz in the rich the kid / skippa the flippa position. ^

[3] an embarrassing amount of my favorite rap music this year came out of the max ecosystem - he cut the third best 41 song of the year the same day that he recorded "coolin" and their second best won one of his song wars competitions a few weeks after that. he was also instrumental in the rise of manic viral atlien lazer dim 700 who i've now mentioned twice which means i probably should've made some space for him on this list but i didn't so fight me. ^

[4] this especially lost me because is screaming on beats about white people not the best thing a rapper can possibly do? ^

[5] which means what at this point ? a half assed zane lowe interview and 24 hr spotify billboard in times square + landing at #38 instead of #84 on some generalist pub eoy list that no one will ever read) ^

[6] the beef even had its own q figure! ^

[7] here's a free thinkpiece for someone more boring/bored than me: drake's the patron saint of millennial narcissism and kendrick of millennial anxiety and the whole beef has been a product of them both careening towards their most chaotic incarnations as the universe decenters millennials and turns us all into paranoid washed boomers. i don't know i'm sick of thinking about this shit. ^