Albums of the 2010s - 2011 - LIVE.LOVE.A$AP.

"I got a mob like A$AP Rocky. I set trends, dem man copy." - Stormzy, "Shut Up"

Here's the album - it's a mixtape, so it's not on Spotify or owt.

There's really only one album from this year you can talk about as setting the tone for rap in the rest of the 2010s. It was hazy, drugged-out, defiantly in-its-feelings, and more than a little bit inspired by the chopped-and-screwed hip hop that had been coming out of Houston at a steady pace for near enough twenty years (at the time, it's nearly thirty now). That album is, of course, Drake's Take Care.

Nine years on, it may be difficult to understand just how mad Take Care was at the time. Drake had actually landed three rap chart number ones beforehand - admittedly one was a collab with 2010 Lil Wayne, 2010 Eminem, and 2010 Kanye West, which is basically cheating, you may as well say "Oriol Romeu won the 2011 Liga Santander, ignoring the fact that Iniesta, Xavi, and Messi were also on the team" - but the instructive part of those hits is the sound. Listen to the collab.

And now listen to "Marvin's Room", which didn't hit the rap chart at all, but is the song that I would point to as the 'most Drake' in his entire career. 

"Forever" is a club banger. Yes, Drake is singing in the way he had already become famous for. But otherwise, this is exactly what you'd expect from a circa 2010 big song. This is the actual sea change that Take Care ushered in. Just as the xx had foretold, the future of music (our present) was space, minimalism, and nocturnal scenes, not the (then-current, now passé) big sounds, bright lights, and catchy pop songs filling up the charts. Those cheery, feel-good songs we had at the turn of the decade to distract us from the all-encompassing Global Financial crisis disappeared in time, first briefly replaced by "big room EDM", and then, more permanently, by the monogenre, which I'll explain later on in the series. Think of the difference between pop before 2011 and pop afterward as the difference between having an amazing time at a club with the music blaring, the drinks flowing, and all your friends by your side, and standing slumped over outside a club in complete darkness, drunk and crying because your [partner] got off with someone else and your seventh triple vodka lemonade isn't sitting right at all. This is why even though "Headlines" and "Take Care" were bigger hits, "Marvin's Room" is the most important one. "Marvin's Room" is why everything sounds like it does right now. It's why Katy Perry went from being the only person to ever score the same number of chart-topping singles from one sole album as the fucking King of Pop (Bad and Teenage Dream both posting five #1s) to having the lead single from her new album hit a maximum of #40. It's why Lorde and all her acolytes even exists. It's also not what I'm supposed to be writing about.

There are two reasons I've chosen to highlight LIVE.LOVE.A$AP. The most important is I don't like Take Care. Like, at all. I like "Marvin's Room" and I like the opening of "Over My Dead Body", but one minute in the biggest problem with the project rears its annoying-ass head - Drake's voice. Eighty minutes of his grating rapping, however broken up by guests like Rihanna, the Weeknd, and his own passable singing, is enough to get anyone crying in the club. A$AP Rocky's rapping goes down much smoother on that front, his voice effortlessly skipping over whatever woozy beat is laid down for it, and you all know how much I prize effortlessness. It would be both pointless and unnecessary to try and explain to everyone how important to me an album I hate is. 

The second is actually each rapper's respective origins - Drake's almost-single-handed creation of a "Toronto sound" (of course it was really 40's work, and all the guys behind the Weeknd played their part, but still) later picked up by acts like PARTYNEXTDOOR is of course notable, but apart from "Informer" by Snow there was pretty much no precedent for Canadian hip hop in the public eye. Drake could shape Torontonian music in his chilly, Houstonian image. Unfortunately for Rocky, he's from Harlem. The weight of the entirety of hip hop history could only have hung heavier on his head had he been born across the Harlem River in the Bronx, birthplace of the genre. To make matters worse, his name is literally Rakim, after the man widely acknowledged as the greatest rapper of all time - for context, NOT EVEN RAKIM'S NAME IS LITERALLY RAKIM. That's a lot of pressure for any new rapper to deal with. That he managed to make a mixtape at all is a madness; that it is such a singular, successful effort is a miracle.

Okay, what's so good about this mixtape? You probably already know this, but hip-hop is fiercely regional and it feels like every major city in the contiguous United States has its own distinct sound. New York has boom-bap - a dark, minimal sound perfected by people like Nas and the Wu-Tang Clan, L.A. has G-funk, the sunnier, Parliament-sampling style, Houston has its artificially slowed down chopped-and-screwed music, the Bay Area has hyphy, D.C. has go-go, Chicago has drill, and so on, and so on. New York was in control as the starting point for rap in the 70s through to the early 90s, L.A. had a brief moment in the sun under the stewardship of those young African American Gentlemen With Attitudes, especially Dr. Dre, and since the mid-2000's, Atlanta has stood as the centrepoint of all things interesting in rap, following Outkast's lead. What's so notable about LIVE.LOVE.A$AP, then, is that it sounds like it came directly from some swamp in East Texas.

Even the New York Times noticed something was going down. A$AP Rocky was the sound of hip-hop shedding its regionalism. It was one thing for Drake to pick and choose the sounds he wanted from all of the US like some sort of musical Expansion Draft for the new Toronto franchise - for a New Yorker to be using triplet flows like Bone Thugs and leaned-out instrumentals like UGK or Three Six Mafia and literally saying "Influenced by Houston, hear it in my music" in the first song on the tape was nothing short of sacrilege. For the first time, the rest of the US was setting trends and New York mandem were copying, rather than vice versa.

I don't want to give the impression that this is one of them albums that's important but that doesn't actually bang, like The Velvet Underground and Nico or something. From the moment that first bass note slides down on "Palace" everyone is firing on all cylinders. The beats produced by Clams Casino - "Palace" sounds exactly as magisterial, lavish, and rich as its title suggests, "Bass" brings the bass, duh - shine brightest, but out of the sixteen tracks by nine producers, no one brings a dud, and no one really deviates too obviously from the vibe. It's not the kind of project that was very obviously produced by nine different teams, which speaks to Rocky's ability to curate. "Trilla" hits that more traditional Noo Yawk vibe with its dusty spaghetti western guitar loop and drums that can only really be described as 'crunchy', and things get almost jazzy on the nostalgic "Houston Old Head", but the masterpiece is probably "Purple Swag: Part 2" a SpaceghostPurpp-assisted return to the beat of Rocky's breakout song where he whips out those triplets and then helpfully explains that he is indeed "the only Harlem nigga on his Bones shit" over heavily-flanged, reversed synth chords.

I haven't really made much mention of Rakim Athelaston Mayers himself. Yes, Athelaston - I don't really trust Wikipedia's source on this but his father was Barbadian, as is my family (my grandad's middle name, from my great-gran's maiden name, is Mayers, so we're probably distantly related because there are only thirteen people on Barbados), and Bajans - West Indians in general, really - give themselves and their children some WACK names so I believe 'Athelaston' one hundred percent. Anyway, his rhymes are serviceable, good even (I don't care, "Couple A, B, Cs, bad bitch, double D's, takin E, I don't give a F, told you I'm a G" is bars no matter how dumb it is) and like I said, his voice works well whatever is thrown at it, but he's not exactly a spiritual lyrical miracle. 

holy SHIT i almost forgot to put this in

That commitment to lyrics, or lack thereof, is probably what endeared him the least to NY oldheads. Sound how you want musically, take from wherever, but there is a tradition of having bars, from Rakim, through Nas, through Jay-Z, through all their fans. Prioritising sound over lyricality is what those idiots down south did (It's important to remember after fifteen years of Atlanta being in charge of rap that they, Houston, Miami, etc, were not respected at all by the orthodoxy on the coasts back in the 90s and 2000s. Witness Outkast getting absolutely no love after winning this award, or the fact that as late as 2007 UGK still needed to write songs like "Quit Hatin' The South"), not the real rappers from the Big Apple, y'see? Can't stress enough how much I hate New York, man.

For his part, he mostly raps about drugs, or bitches, or how he raps (as I've demonstrated, he is kinda obsessed with being a Harlemite who sounds Southern, it's not me reading everything into nothing), and it's fine, nothing special, but it meshes with the music perfectly. This isn't a party record like, I don't know, late Black Eyed Peas, I guess? But at the same time, this isn't really an exploration of the inner recesses of an artiste's unique mind like your Stankonias, your Illmatics, even your Take Cares (another reason it was important Drake released Take Care was the critical acclaim it brought him and established a cultural cache for his own artistry rather than "the kid that sings on Cash Money posse cuts". Take Care stops Drake from being Lloyd 2.). It's just the kind of album you can stick on and zone out for nearly an hour. Alt-rock band Hum (who we will return to) have a song where singer Matt Talbott describes himself as "supine now, and fading out" on B-side "Puppets"; LIVE.LOVE.A$AP is a perfect album to do that to. Lie down, face the ceiling, press play, and fall into that bass drop on "Palace".

What happened next? He did that big "Forever"-style collaboration, it was called "Fuckin' Problem", you may have heard of it, it goes hard.

 

His first two studio albums, LONG.LIVE.A$AP. and AT.LONG.LAST.A$AP, were recieved warmly. Despite completely disavowing "Fuckin' Problem" and telling interviewers he's "afraid of making hits", "Praise The Lord" with Skepta still went double platinum. TESTING wasn't quite as beloved as his previous two albums but all in all, for a guy who only raps about bitches, drugs, and himself, A$AP Rocky has put together a respectable, deep discography. Whereas Two Door Cinema's club debut felt like an ending, LIVE.LOVE.A$AP was a beginning. As you'll see in the honourable mentions, if it wasn't clear from the 2000s, rock was done commercially and critically - at least mostly, as we'll see through the rest of my personal picks - and rap was taking over. Ian Cohen Decade Theory once again vindicated, folks.

i.e., in retrospect, 2000 also feels like the ending of the 90s rather than the beginning of the new century and 2011-2020 is already starting to make more sense as a discrete "decade" than 2010-2019 https://t.co/5zPRjVBDDJ

— Ian Cohen (@en_cohen) June 8, 2020

We've done British rock. We've done North American hip-hop. We should probably check what's going on in North American rock next, yeah?

2011 - Honourable Mentions

There's almost a whole class of rappers who first released in 2011 that went on to define the decade. I've said enough about Drake as well as Rocky, so I'll instead highlight:

Section.80 - Kendrick Lamar - the last time the GOAT wouldn't necessarily sound like the GOAT. Yes, DAMN. is good, grow up.

Lil B - I'm Gay (I'm Happy) - the parentheses were added after the man born Brandon McCartney recieved deaths threats for the original title. Music aside - which you shouldn't leave aside, because his blissed out, Clams Casino-assisted tunes paved the way for people like Rocky to follow -  Lil B is a massive influence on the social media facility any rapper worth their salt needs these days - you don't get Lil Nas X parlaying a TikTok hit into a two-year-and-counting long career without the Based God and his mythic work online. We can just ignore the feet pics. We can, I promise. Rocky was good at this kinda social media manipulation too, by the way: the intro to "Bass" was a publicity stunt, not someone actually threatening someone else on the subway. Sorry to lift the veil.

The Weeknd - House of Balloons - I don't connect with this one because I don't do enough drugs but I can't just sit and pretend like everyone hasn't spend a decade biting it. I'm surprised at how nasty it is - the barrage of sounds on "House of Balloons" and the noisy, dissonant synths on its sister song "Glass Table Girls" are almost industrial. Normies love this shit! How? 

Tyler, The Creator - Goblin - I've already said how influential Odd Future were last time out, and I don't have much more to add, but I'd just like to ask you if you've listened to "Yonkers" recently? I did this week, for the first time in maybe years, and it's exactly as horrible and jarring and irresistable as you remember. Just a friendly reminder. Also if you don't burst out laughing at "I'm not gay, I just wanna boogie to some Marvin" in light of the past three years you are a better person than I.

Frank Ocean - nostalgia, Ultra. - along with the debut from the Weeknd, and the upcoming debuts from SZA and fka twigs, there was very briefly something called "PBR&B", to denote its hipsterdom but also its Blackness. Frank Ocean has since established himself as the pre-eminent artist in the world, let alone R&B singer, let alone PBR&B upstart, but this is where he started. As a member, no less, of the homophobic Cali skater kid collective Odd Future, for some reason. The video for "Oldie" shows his position: he fit in, but never fully, and he was impatiently looking for something else. Of course, we now know he found it.

James Blake - what you will notice as this series proceeds - I don't know at what pace, I can't be relied upon to consistently post - is a slow, slow convergence of disparate genres to the mythical "monogenre", influenced by everything, sounding like nothing. James Blake, on James Blake, pulls dubstep, Dilla-esque drum trickery, his father's folk music, and his classical piano training into something that somehow makes sense. An album that should absolutely not work but somehow does. A real triumph. You can also hear how well he would fit into the R&B and hip-hop (read: African American) milieu of the coming decade - is the slow fade-in of chords on "To Care Like You" really that far off the slow fade-ins on "Marvin's Room"? The next ten years of pop music would contend "no, no it's not."

Beyoncé - 4 - she'd been royalty since Destiny's Child, and either Beyoncé or Lemonade is the ONE in terms of her ability to completely dominate everyone's headspace whenever she feels like it, so 4 probably goes under the rader, but "Countdown" still goes and so does "Love On Top". This feels like her only 2010s album where she's just kinda happy and vibing rather than exasperatedly proving to us mortals that she is, indeed, the greatest human to walk the earth.