This month in the best hip-hop has everything from deconstructing the genre by younger generations to the return of revered scene leaders.
Despite a global pandemic, musicians were far more active in 2021 and had time to create their finest work. It resulted in some of the best albums in years.
Hip-hop and myriad mutations of electronic music are the critical contemporary cultural lenses through which we view the creation of new ideas and aesthetics.
These are the best hip-hop albums released this September, including new records from Little Simz, Injury Reserve, Moor Mother, and Blu.
Black Encyclopedia of the Air from Philly-based poet and musician Moor Mother fuses activist hip-hop with a warm, jazzy groove and an experimental spirit.
To overcome our collective dis-ease and ideological polarization, we must practice pluralism. We must continue to experiment, to oscillate between and beyond poles to find solutions.
In an age when the personal is political feels as necessary as ever, we identify most with experimenters who transcend the throwing-shit-at-a-wall, banging-on-pots-and-cans approach. These artists occupy the earthly just as much as they occupy the mechanical and the celestial.
It's tempting to proclaim this moment in black pop as something akin to 2018's political Year of the Woman -- Year of the Sista, if you will. But today's unapologetically progressive female black pop artists stand on the shoulders of a most impressive cohort from the '90s and early '00s.
The prominent Birmingham music festival Supersonic returned for three days of experimental goodness, partly curated this year by Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe.
