21 Hip-Hop Albums That Reflected The Politics Of Race, Space And Place In 2017
It's impossible to overstate how golden hip-hop shone in 2017 — the shattered Billboard records, the most-streamed genre recognition from Nielsen. Industry hype aside, rap reflected our collective conscience, and national crisis, like never before. While the power of playlists (and the ability to juke streaming stats with song loops) set new standards, the long-play album remained the definitive format for artists intent on making timeless creative statements. And artists got pretty (DAMN.) creative within those confines.
Jay-Z and Tyler, the Creator averted respective midlife and quarter-life crises with their most mature confessionals to date. GoldLink and Open Mike Eagle erected memorials to the erased cultures, and cribs, of their upbringing. Lil Uzi Vert and Future went hyper-emo over loves lost and loathed. Big K.R.I.T. and Cyhi The Prynce transcended the traps and clichés of Southern rap. Kendrick Lamar exposed his prophetic struggle on an altar of self-sacrifice. And Rapsody reigned supreme over nearly everybody.
In a year this robust, it would be easy to make an exhaustive list of the best releases. Indeed, the Internet is chock full of them. But hip-hop did not ascend to new heights in a vacuum. It's sonic uprising happened amid a national backdrop of political upheaval, racial discord, violent demonstrations and revelatory reckoning around the systemic abuses of power and gender inequality that hits so close to home in this genre.
In hip-hop, as elsewhere, the personal is always political. Where you're at, so to speak, and how you choose to cultivate and represent that space – whether real or imagined — matters.
It's as true today as it was 15 years ago, when academic Murray Forman published his book The Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip Hop. "The music I was listening to was always articulating place-based identities — whether it's Hollis, Queens or Brooklyn [or] South Bronx," Forman recently told me, recalling his original inspiration for the book. He chose to look at this "defining aspect of the sound" in a "larger, deeper sense," he says, "not just as a hip-hop thing, but a thing about racial identities and the way places get attributed to certain people in society."
In the same spirit, NPR Music's roundup of the year's 21 best hip-hop albums is themed around the politics of race, space and place. Among 2017's best LPs, these are some that challenged or complicated America's record on race, detailed a strong sense of place while critiquing widespread cultural erasure, or broke conventions of genre, gender and identity within the space of rap itself. — Rodney Carmichael
Vince Staples, Big Fish Theory
The feminist essayist and poet Adrienne Rich once wrote that "an honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word 'love' — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other." She was
