Kendrick Lamar, performing in Los Angeles in June, was among the many most vital and inescapable voices in any style of music in 2024.
Timothy Norris/Getty Photographs
disguise caption
toggle caption
Timothy Norris/Getty Photographs
Kendrick Lamar, performing in Los Angeles in June, was among the many most vital and inescapable voices in any style of music in 2024.
Timothy Norris/Getty Photographs
File-breaking mainstream hits. A brand new era of artists rising to grab their second. Rappers out and in of courts. A pair of the largest names within the sport remodeling their careers by taking their rivalry to generally 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 had been watching and listening all yr lengthy, and so they’ve gathered collectively to clarify crucial tales of hip-hop’s 51st yr. There was the ascendance of recent dominant voices in Southern rap, a lot 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 all of a sudden 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 could have celebrated its landmark fiftieth anniversary in 2023 by wanting again at its personal historical past, however in 2024, it shot ahead like a cannon blast.
