So here it is. Our final part of our Best of 2012 coverage concludes with our top 50 tracks of the year. I’ll avoid the clichés, but this has been a tough list to put together and a special thanks to everyone who produced great music throughout the year for making it tough. It’s been fun.
We’ve still got our guestlists for 2012, which will be coming up each day this week and then we’ll be returning to regular goodness. But for now, enjoy the end of the year with our Top 50 Tracks of 2012.
It’s a cliché itself, but what a great year we’ve had. It’s just been packed with so much great music as hip-hop diversifies, there’s one thing for sure – hip-hop ain’t dead. So why don’t we get down to what you came here for? A list of our favourite albums of 2012 for you to skim-read. Then once you’re done, let us know your albums of the year in the comments below.
Ok, calling this track a remix is probably giving it too much credit. It’s just JJ DOOM’s “Rhymin’ Slang” with some strange synth nonsense in the background. But the video…
Remember that amazing video for “Guv’nor” from a few months back? Imagine if someone vomited After Effect filters all over it. This is the result.
If you’ve got a slight feeling that you might be epileptic, you might want to skip this one.
DOOM’s greatly lauded reinvention of himself as an artist feels like it’s in a strange place, or at least a stranger place than the one he has conjured up for his characters. Luckily, he’s slowed down his output. Which makes sense, he’s a bigger name now and his style is so specific there was no way he was going to keep up his prolific pace he had during the mid-2000s. This sparsity makes album releases feel more like events, something a little more special. Which is all the more disappointing when the long awaited JJ DOOM album Key to the Kuffs is, for the most part, just another DOOM album.
I’ve already had to watch this a couple of times to follow and appreciate it. This is the amazing split-screen video for JJ DOOM’s “Guv’nor”, features DOOM starring straight into the camera twice while rhyming.
As the summer starts to wrap up we start heading into an absolutely stacked Autumn period. But one of the most exciting releases pegged for the remaining summer weeks is JJ DOOM’s Keys To The Kuffs. Producer Jneiro Jarel hooks up with DOOM for the longly awaited which you can listen to in full a few days ahead of time.
“Rhymin’ Slang” has been one of the earliest heard tracks from JJ DOOM’s long awaited album Keys to the Kuffs. I can’t say I’m a massive fan of what must be the ‘original’ version here, especially compared to the version first heard on the Lex Record 10th anniversary release. But it’s still DOOM…
With each and every snippet of JJ DOOM we hear of in 2012, we get more of a glimpse of Doom staying true to his London roots. We already heard “Rhyming Slang” and with Key to the Kuffs due out in a couple of weeks, Lex Records have just released “Guv’nor”. It really sounds like MF DOOM is at his best here, with every JJ track sounding like it has the hijinks of Dangerdoom and the weirdness of Madvillain. Key to the Kuffs is due out on the 21st of August.
Jan 10th
Nov 29th
Sep 24th
At the end of last year Spin Magazine compiled a fairly comprehensive video of video game samples in hip-hop. It started to make a few of us at Lesson Six think how many were actually about video games rather than just sounding like them. The result, a list of our top six tracks about video [...]
Lesson is about progressive & cliché-free hip-hop with intelligent lyrics. Striving for something more than the mainstream perception of hip-hop. This means no misogyny, no glorification of drug-use, no violence and no played out flaunting of personal wealth.
