CACPLEX: "Well Actually, Future Was the Best Rapper Alive in 2015"

The_King_of_Everything

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Well Actually, Future Was the Best Rapper Alive in 2015
Complex just declared that, in 2015, Drake was the best rapper alive. What a joke. Drake isn’t even the best rapper on What a Time to Be Alive.

Like him or not, Drake is built, packaged, and sold to dominate a conversation like this, as if hip-hop were pop trivia, in which assorted vultures and rubberneckers rework an esoteric genre award like “Best Rapper Alive” to mean “Music Industry’s Most Robust Marketing Campaign of the Previous Fiscal Year.”

In which case, fair enough: If you’re reading the relevant industry stats, there’s no denying Drake’s commercial success and general pop impact in 2015. A few months ago, Drake scored his 100th hit, “Hotline Bling,” on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart. He so happens to have five artist credits on the Hot 100 right now. The boy is Rap Game Taylor Swift. He’s a competitive and credible favorite within hip-hop, for sure, but, more importantly, he’s the favorite rapper among listeners who don’t even particularly enjoy rap music, much as Sam Smith is the favorite R&B singer among white people who literally hate music. Drake is popular in the universal sense. He is everywhere he wants to be.

It’s equal parts synergy and coincidence that Future, too, has five artist credits on the Hot 100, including three songs (“Jumpman,” “Where Ya At,” “Big Rings”) that he made with Drake, plus a Ty Dolla $ign feature (“Blasé”), plus Future’s latest solo hit, “Stick Talk,” from DS2. For Future, these more recent songs are something of a victory lap, as they’re not as successful as his street singles, “Commas,” “March Madness,” “Trap nikkas,” “Real Sisters,” “Rich Sex,” and “I Serve the Base,” nor as impressive as certain deeper cuts, “Just Like Bruddas,” “Peacoat,” “Blood on the Money,” “News or Sumthn,” etc.

While Drake dominated the annual commercial metrics, it was Future who truly advanced rap songcraft and best represented the state of the culture.

While Drake dominated the annual commercial metrics, it was Future who truly advanced rap songcraft and best represented the state of the culture. Once a cult favorite and underestimated scion of Atlanta’s Dungeon Family, and then, briefly, a mainstream hopeful, Future is now the most influential rapper of the moment, with traces evident in the styling of young rappers from Chicago, Sacramento, L.A., New York, and, of course, Atlanta. As the Long Beach rapper Vince Staples has noted, contemporary hip-hop has promoted the dope fiend to equal footing with the pusher. Future, with his woozy disaffection and pockets full of spite, is the cold culmination of this “lean-induced self-involvement,” as the music critic Julianne Escobedo Shepherd recently put it.

If there's any one principle that unites Future and Drake in theory, it's self-involvement. Otherwise, the long, fraught kinship between these two rappers yields a few dimensions of contrast. Street rap vs. pop crossover. Real vulnerability and a nice guy's "vulnerability" so-called, and so-propagandized. Raw hostility and meticulous passive-aggression. In 2011, it was Drake who inspired Future in his bid for mainstream success; a bid that ended with Honest sounding rather unlike the artist who made it. In 2015, Future reset, and outdid, himself. Fortunes turned, and so we got to hear Drake stammering about Robitussin over a Metro Boomin beat. There's a clear winner here.

Future is what we briefly pretended the Migos were: a spiritual peak within gangsta rap, whereby a dopeboy renders himself low and, sometimes,indecipherable; yet articulate enough to communicate pain in rich detail. Even in prayer, even in celebration. I don’t mean to suggest that such bold and grotesque expression is unique to Future, when, in fact, it’s hip-hop’s core wonder. And it’s where Drake has always fallen short. For a guy who resonates so acutely with the here and now, Drake’s music is remarkably indifferent to human events and incurious about the world beyond itself. He seems to make music according to the Michael Jordan theory of brand commerce: never let politics or even reality overwhelm your product, which I guess we'll call art.

Drake is hip-hop's continental breakfast; his global appeal is what it is. It's no proof, however, that Drake is the very best that hip-hop has to offer in the way of distinction as of late. Future launched his 2015 mixtape insurgency with abandon, regardless of pop viability, as if compatibility with an incarnate ad campaign like Drake were the very least of his concerns. Erykah Badu once described this sort of coup as an artist's liberation.
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Well Actually, Future Was the Best Rapper Alive in 2015
They lurking :mjpls:
 
hex

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The boy is Rap Game Taylor Swift. He’s a competitive and credible favorite within hip-hop, for sure, but, more importantly, he’s the favorite rapper among listeners who don’t even particularly enjoy rap music, much as Sam Smith is the favorite R&B singer among white people who literally hate music.
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:mjlol:

Perfectly sums up Drake and his stans. This is why I laugh when Drake stans mention Complex, Fader, Grammys, etc. They don't even see him as a rapper really.

Fred.
 
Twilight

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Interesting. They just released an article on the best rappers alive from 1979 through 2015, and named Drake the best rapper alive for 2015 (in addition to 2011 and 2012, with honorable mentions for 2013 and 2014).

The Best Rapper Alive, Every Year Since 1979

Best Rapper of 2015: Drake
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CREDENTIALS: Two No. 1 debuts (If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late, What a Time to Be Alive with Future), first-ever Grammy-nominated diss track in “Back to Back,” “Hotline Bling” highest-charting solo single (tied with “Best I Ever Had”), launched OVO Sound Radio on Beats 1, guest verses on “Blessings,” “Where Ya At,” “R.I.C.O.,” “100”

“I need acknowledgment. If I got it, then tell me I got it, then.” Well, Drake, as far as 2015 is concerned, you had it. Those bars come from a song on What a Time to Be Alive, the second surprise “mixtape” he dropped this year via Apple, with whom he closed a deal that netted him a reported $19 million haul and a bi-weekly radio show streamed to dozens of countries. It’s been a blockbuster year for the Boy for sure. And that’s without mentioning the rap beef that completely dominated the culture for a week and a half last summer and served as the centerpiece for quite possibly the biggest year of his career.

Months prior to Meek Mill’s attack on his credibility, Drake would release If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late, a mix-album that overall contains a marked increase in aggressive content. In retrospect, “Worst Behavior” was the pilot to this sneering 6ix God among men. What’s irking him? We may never know, but listening to songs like “No Tellin” post Meek beef, his attitude is eerily prophetic. “I gotta keep watching for oppos, ’cause anything’s possible/There’s no code of ethics out here, anyone will take shots at you.” It’s like he knew a guy he’d just graced with a big feature verse for the second time would do a complete 180 and call him out for violating the one thing that matters in hip-hop: his authenticity. The accusation was shocking but more so was the imminent validity. The ghostwriter in question does exist; he is credited all over IYRTITL.

Instead of copping pleas, Drake more or less copped to the accusations, dropped a laser-sharp diss track, and absorbed the whole incident as validating energy. If Drake was phased, we never saw it. The biggest rap star in the world shrugged a potentially damaging scandal off and added a new layer of invincibility to his armor. “You all looked in my face and hoped you could be the replacement.” Well, not so fast. “Back to Back” is the diss track that many weren’t sure he was capable of, biting in its “Takeover”-esque factual derisions yet crafted so precisely to be an undeniable club banger. And then quite casually, in the midst of an alpha male chest-thumping and questions of his viability, Drake dropped "Hotline Bling," a song that was so undeniably Drake, and took it all the way to No. 2 on the charts.

But let’s get back to the bars. We may never know the specifics of Drake’s writing process, but if one thing out of the summer’s controversy was crystal clear, it was confirmation that Drake’s final touch is intangible. He’s become the arbiter of his era—a new Drake release brings with it an onslaught of new lexicon, inescapable across social media and even in regular conversation. Squads turned to woes. Cellphones don’t ring, they bling. His feature verses dominate even when others match his technical skill (see “Blessings”). And he’s approaching Jay Z levels of being able to ride any sonic wave and make it his own, word to the mutually beneficial aforementioned WATTBA, which was almost a 100 percent case of Drake adopting Future’s aesthetic. Future had a stellar year—but Drake gave him a plaque, on cruise control, no less. It’s quite clear who the Big Homie is. As artists push hip-hop to new soundscapes, Drizzy is displaying an efficiency at adapting, co-opting, and refining them for maximum appeal, all while he continues to push his own.

Maybe that explains why, much like Kanye once said of Shawn, with Drake, you only saw the wins this year more than any other. “Back to Back” muted the ghostwriter talk all the way to the Grammys. Old foes bowed to him. Potential new ones are thinking twice. And he still hasn’t even dropped the project he’s comfortable with officially designating an album yet. Drake didn’t just hit an undeniable if not surprising peak in 2015—he became borderline infallible. The 6ix God ascended to Mount Olympus. How far away he is from the sun is anyone’s guess. —Frazier Tharpe
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AMcV'88

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no, wait....you mean to tell me that different writers have different opinions......? :ohhh:...well there is a turn up for the books.

the title of the article is factual though...so good for them.
 
DJDONTNOBODYPAYME

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Mike Otherz said:
i cant get enough rap think pieces from the rap music think piece industrial complex. you kids must really give a shyt about these things.
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Nobody really does unless the article tickles their fancy. Some of the people here literally work for them






But in the end tho. Complex has the Loot but they don't have the Hearts. And you can't have the Hearts of the people without the Soul (something you'd actually know how to acquire and not just a guess). Yes that means You, white boy with the Black friends

They'll always be "oh, those guys", that Fox News shyt [race aside].



People aren't actually sitting around reading Complex Articles foreal. They're just Clear Channel status. Or trying to get there anyway
 
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