It’s one of my favorite songs of the year. It’s a very clever song with an imaginative and catchy hook and is from far enough left field to still make me smile. It’s far too self-indulgent and so is occasionally grating and occasionally repetitive. However, it doesn’t have anything strong enough to push you to seek it out. This one is not quite as good as their debut, but it is still reasonable and has some clever lines. We didn’t get a chance to cover the previous FLACO album Gunsforgirls when it came out. Here, we’re going to go over five albums that didn’t lend themselves well to a full review, but that we still wanted to talk about. – been a lot of music out this year and it’s easy for some albums to fall to wayside. Coltrane, Kanye, Joy Division and now Uzi. There are a few songs that I return to over and over again, because while situations change, and while I change, these songs remain true. This is the song that I’m going to keep coming back to. The space this song has to be raw and emotional feels unprecedented in the genre and it fills it completely with Uzi’s story of his ex and substance abuse. Taking the hook of “Push me to the edge/All my friends are dead” and making an anthem of it just to slur it past comprehensibility is the cleverest thing that I have seen all year. However, rap is more than lyricism and to judge a genre by a single lens can only ever be limiting. Lyricism has long been a hallmark of rap and the seeming repudiation of that by some of the newer rappers was naturally going to meet a backlash. Mumble rap has been used as a pejorative more than a descriptor. This is the year of trap and that’s proved divisive. There was no question for me that this was going to be the song of the year. I played it on repeat for the next couple of days. I don’t think I actually did anything that day but listen to this song. I was in a fairly crowded office and just trying to keep my head down and get some work done. I remember the first time that I heard this song. It’s quite easily one of the best songs of the year. It’s a singular achievement and a compelling statement. It’s a complex piece with huge swathes of fascinating sounds and human for all of that. It benefits from a really strong folky spine and wraps it with idea after idea. These layers and more come in to play in “Rican Beach”, which somehow keeps them all moving together at once. A folk-rock concept album is already out of place in 2017, but a Nuyorican one is unique anywhere. Hurray For The Riff Raff’s album, The Navigator, is a lot of things at once. This is the rare song that’s better without the Kendrick remix. That central boast of “Mask on / Fuck it mask off” could have very easily come off as empty, but Future keeps far too dark and heavy for that. Future’s viscous flow is the star of the song though. That flute lick is insistent and endlessly listenable. That grimy, submerged beat is some of Metro Boomin’s best work. This is one of the defining sounds of 2017. If so, “Mask Off” is one of the reasons for the shift. Rap has been the new rock for years, but this may have been the year where it begins to vie with pop for dominance. However, it is also a lot of fun and something unique in a year which pushed all the boundaries of rap. It feels thrown together quickly, and justly so. Like its inspirations, this song is neither deep nor profound. Interpolating the earworm of a hook from “Wannabe” to list out what he’s looking for is both clever and effective. The result of all of this dedication is an almost bubblegum pop-rap ode to his perfect girl. Aminé actually not only got all five of the actual Spice Girls to sign off on this, but literally went to a Spice Girls show at age 5 and got a Sporty Spice Barbie right after. A love letter to the Spice Girls is just not what rappers were doing back then. It wasn’t that long ago that you would need to go pretty far left-field to find someone like Aminé, and even further to find a song like “Spice Girl”. No one can make creating the future look as cool as he does. It is trademark Frank Ocean that it works so well. It is both dense and wandering and so listening becomes an almost pointillist experience as you pick phrases and words from the stream. He’s never been the most overstated of singers, but “Chanel” is stripped down like nothing before. Secondly, this more subdued sound works really well. First of all, getting singles from him so soon after he released a pair of albums feels almost like excess after his long quiet period. I’m truly grateful for this new phase in Frank Ocean’s career. It took some tricky filtering, but these are our top five songs of 2017. There were both big name releases and stunning debuts that, while fantastic, just could not find a place on this list. It’s been a good year for music and culling contenders for this list needed a fair bit of soul-searching.
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