A daily chronicle of creativity in film, TV, music, arts, and entertainment, produced by Southern California Public Radio and broadcast from November 2014 – March 2020. Host John Horn leads the conversation, accompanied by the nation's most plugged-in cultural journalists.
Hip-hop remains a powerful force in the music industry and pop culture at-large, yet 2014 was a pretty bleak year for the genre. We heard very few thrilling singles, and fewer noteworthy collaborations.
What’s more, none of the top artists besides Eminem and Nicky Minaj had a major release, and their work wasn’t well received. 2015 is already proving to be much better, according to Sean Rameswaram, host of the Sideshow podcast at WNYC. As if acknowledging the disappointment of the preceding 365 days, Kanye West introduced his single, "Only One," to the world on New Year’s Eve.
Since then, things have only improved. Sean Rameswaram spoke with The Frame about which artists are making 2015 hip-hop's best year to date:
On February 12, [Drake] put out this short film that had short snippets of new music. The short was called "Jungle" and people were just going nuts over that. The next day, of course, he releases a totally unannounced mixtape/album called, "If You're Reading This It's Too Late." If you want to hear some of it, all you have to do is go to the busiest street corner in your neighborhood and just wait for a car to pass.
Tink is this 19-year-old rapper/singer/actress from Illinois. She's appeared on "Empire." She's been releasing mix tapes for three or four years and has done collaborations with this L.A. production unit called Future Brown and with this New York metal-pop duo called Sleigh Bells. Now, Timbaland has admitted to dreaming about her. He said that in a dream, Aaliyah came to him and said, "You have to sign Tink." And now he's sort of taken her under his wing and is producing her first album.
This is the new currency in hip-hop/pop music: releasing an album with zero advanced notice. Kendrick told us about a week or two before "To Pimp A Butterfly" came out — that's the name of his sophomore album — and it's this 80-minute epic, jazzy, funky, genre-bending mess of poetry, politics, anger, frustration and hope.
If hip-hop had a superhero, in my mind, it would be Action Bronson. He is this extremely overweight Albanian rapper from Queens who — back in 2010 when he was starting out — was a gourmet chef by day and hip-hop lyricist by night. He sounds a lot like [Wu-Tang Clan's] Ghostface Killah. He's been making really awesome mix tapes and independent releases for years, and this year he's finally putting out his first major label release called "Mr. Wonderful."
And The Frame's personal choice: