Kendrick Lamar, performing in Los Angeles in June, was among the many most essential and inescapable voices in any style of music in 2024.
Timothy Norris/Getty Pictures
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Timothy Norris/Getty Pictures
Kendrick Lamar, performing in Los Angeles in June, was among the many most essential and inescapable voices in any style of music in 2024.
Timothy Norris/Getty Pictures
Report-breaking mainstream hits. A brand new technology of artists rising to grab their second. Rappers out and in of courts. A pair of the most important names within the sport reworking their careers by taking their rivalry to typically bitter new heights. In 2024, hip-hop introduced us wave upon wave of large, stunning, culture-shifting moments.
NPR Music’s Sheldon Pearce, Sidney Madden and Rodney Carmichael have been watching and listening all yr lengthy, and so they’ve gathered collectively to clarify an important tales of hip-hop’s 51st yr. There was the ascendance of recent dominant voices in Southern rap, lots of them feminine, together with the noticeable resonance, for a lot of artists within the style, with nation music. The disconcerting trial of Younger Thug left a void in Atlanta — the longtime hip-hop capital — for a lot of the yr, earlier than it ended out of the blue and dramatically. And sure, there was the exceptional present placed on by Kendrick Lamar in his sustained assault on Drake.
Plus: Rodney, Sidney and Sheldon share their favourite hip-hop albums of the yr. Hip-hop might have celebrated its landmark fiftieth anniversary in 2023 by trying again at its personal historical past, however in 2024, it shot ahead like a cannon blast.