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Was 2013 really the best year for hip hop?
RnB/Hip Hop | Friday 11th October 2013 | Conor
A recent post on Noisey claims that 2013 has been the best ever year for hip hop. It’s fair to say that this article has been massively divisive, causing heated debate between people on both sides of the fence.
Yes, it’s undeniable that 2013 has been a great year for hip hop, with the author singling out Tyler, the Creator, Kanye West, Danny Brown and Kendrick Lemar amongst others, but to say it has been the best year for hip hop ever is quite hyperbolic.
In any case, any argument that 2013 has been the best year is surely incomplete without giving Action Bronson a mention, a man signed to VICE's own label. 2013 has seen him break from the underground with frightening ease and confidence as well as boasting a live show as good as any artist of any genre doing the rounds at the moment. Maybe there was a word constraint, but to give frequent mentions to Drake over more deserving artists such as Death Grips seems to be a massive oversight, substituting one of the most important artists of the genre in recent years.
A more suitable argument would have been that 2013 has been the greatest year in hip hop for a long time but to say it surpasses late 90s hip hop surely cannot be taken seriously. Take 1996 for example, a year which saw the release of Nas’s It was written, Jay Z’s Reasonable Doubt and both Machiavelli and All Eyes on me from 2pac, which when combined sold more than 16 million copies. I guess it’s a matter of personal taste, but to put Drake’s Nothing Was the Same in league with these albums seems extreme.
By Conor Giles
