Jeff Weiss Honorable POW Recordings Mention: Gabe Nandez, “Scumbag” I just said that she lives in Minneapolis and that she’s what I imagined music and culture would sound like in 2024. To be honest, I couldn’t quite articulate it because some people are irreducible to easy summaries. When she played at the POW Festival, at least four people went up to me mildly perplexed and blown away, asking who she was and what’s her story. It’s braless music, which sounds a little strange to type, but not when you watch the video and understand that it’s intended to conjure it’s own sense of freedom - apart from arbitrary delineations of past perceptions or previous lines in the sand. It’s like a cosmic tundra float hovering between FKA Twigs, The Internet, and Princess Nokia, but located entirely on its own evolutionary coordinate. The beats slink somewhere in the constellation next to electronic, but it’s not dance music. She sings in an opiated liminal state, but it’s not quite R&B. Ness raps but this isn’t exactly hip-hop. She coined the phrase “bra-less music” to describe her sound, and it’s far more accurate than any trite adjective or narrowly defined genre tag. If Ness Nite didn’t exist, only the future could have created her. EVAN GABRIEL Honorable POW Recordings Mention: Ness Nite (feat. Sometimes, hypnosis happens simply through the repetition of a strange phrase. Fat blunts and dirty Fanta supplant any semblance of a conscience. Nü Age brethren Kent Loon feigns dizziness, bending corners, and careens towards destructive pleasure. There’s the uneasiness of being too high while sitting still for too long. Promoters get the abridged rider, and the fast pace of Chester’s nascent career bleeds in between snare crashes: “Should be on a flight out to Belgium, but missed it fucking with this chick back in Berlin, I’m slipping, room swirling, I’m sippin still.” But the orchestral, pendulum-swinging stabs in the distance cloak the atmosphere in uncertainty. The bonus track on the hallucinatory Spring Mirage, “Khaki Loafers” might sound eerily similar to a ton of rap beats. With their brushes dipped in only a few colors, Chester Watson and Kent Loon paint one of the most menacing and astute distortions of 2016. JEFF WEISS Honorable POW Recordings Mention: Chester Watson & Kent Loon, “Khaki Loafers” The thing that makes you unsure what Tye will do next - unload the clip on the audience or himself. Beyond the AK-47 rap chops and the haunted devil baritone singing, there’s that intangible quality. Authenticity is overrated, but if you’re going to buy into an artist, you need to believe the character. What could easily become histrionic instead becomes harrowing. Someone who’s aware that if you reveal a gun in the first act, it has to go off in the third. It documents the 22-year old, ex-basketball star-turned-opera-scholarship-singer turned psychedelic suicide street rap ascendant, spiting in double-time, searching for his soul while clutching a semi-automatic. If you read Jon Tanners’ excellent profile of the Dallas rapper, you can learn the background of the psychological breakdown that led to its creation. It plays out like the “Codeine Crazy” video crossed with Don Giovanni crossed with Z-Ro. With all due respect to the duo of Gosling and Stone, “La La Land” from T.Y.E is the only “La La Land” we acknowledge. Honorable POW Recordings Mention: T.Y.E, “La La Land” Especially that person you’re thinking of. In case you disagree, I recently spoke to the ghost of Big L and he applauded us for leaving off everyone we left off. If we didn’t believe they deserved a spot on the regular list, we wouldn’t be putting out their music in the first place. Before our top 50 songs of the year, we’ve included a standout song from each of POW Recordings’ rap or rap-adjacent artists. In the interest of including as many deserving artists as possible and for the sake of variety, album-oriented rappers (Isaiah Rashad, Ka, Kendrick, Aesop Rock) appear on the albums list, but not here. Hence, this list skews towards rappers who made singles with videos that played on the YouTube Rap City of your imagination.
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