Below, you’ll find a lot of mainstay favorites-your Drakes, Kanyes, Kendricks, and Futures-plus a handful of acts you’ll either remember warmly (and sometimes barely remember at all). To mark the release of Ringer Films’ new HBO documentary Juice WRLD: Into the Abyss on Thursday, we’ve collected a handful of staff members from across our website, podcast, and video networks, plus a few contributors and friends, to craft a list of best 100 rap songs of the last decade. While it may seem impossible to make a definitive statement on the 2010s, The Ringer is attempting to do just that. (In this sense, Drake is the perfect avatar for rap in the 2010s-only an artist as chameleonic as him could have the wits and business savvy to routinely produce hits throughout such a topsy-turvy era.) There are plenty of reasons for this rapid evolution-the death of blogs and rise of SoundCloud, streaming services replacing CDs and MP3s, all the good and evil that social media wrought-but the end result is a genre constantly in flux, producing thrilling moments that felt simultaneously disconnected from and in conversation with what came before and after.
1 rap song of the decade was Jay-Z’s “Empire State of Mind” by the end, artists like Juice WRLD, Post Malone, and XXXTentacion were regularly pumping out chart-toppers with songs and marketing approaches that felt beamed in from a universe where Hov never existed. Contrast that with the 2010s-the first no. No similar stretch in the genre’s history produced sea changes so rapidly: The ’90s may have started with Rakim’s lyrical fury and ended with Bad Boy’s glimmering chart dominance, but as disparate as those artists were, the terms of engagement ultimately remained the same.
The wildly divergent threads that make up the cloth of 2010s rap only highlight why it’s so difficult to grapple with the decade, even nearly two years removed from it. When you think of hip-hop in the 2010s, what springs to mind? Is it the THX maximalism of Lex Luger? Atlanta assuming the mantle as the epicenter of the culture? The lyrical revelations of Kendrick Lamar and his TDE cohorts? The Thanos-level inevitability of Drake? The wounded-soul crooning of Juice WRLD?
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