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.
Recently I went to see Macklemore & Ryan Lewis kick off their European Tour here in London. It’s probably the first time I’ve ever felt old at a gig, because unbeknownst to be it was freshers gig. But then I just used unbeknownst in a sentence so I guess that was inevitable, freshers week or not.
While most of the gig was compromised off their cheesy club tracks, occasionally they rolled out their unique form of beautiful hip-hop. Tracks like “Same Love” personify why we love Macklemore & Ryan Lewis on Lesson Six. Relatively untouched subject matter, on-point lyrics and Lewis’s moving production.
Great video to Macklemore & Ryan Lewis’s second single from their album The Heist coming out next month. You can tell these guys have fun making music and just enjoy themselves. This is also really similar to Macklemore’s song/video And We Danced which is hilarious in its own right. With this single and the previous single Same Love, we can expect a variety of different styles on the album.
This time last year we had to extend our 2010 tracks of the year just to give everyone credit for a great year in music. It turns out, that 2011 was no slouch either and over the next week on the site, we’ll hopefully prove that with more tracks in our recap of 2011 in Cliché-Free Hip-Hop. So with that being said, here’s numbers 50 to 41 in our tracks of the year countdown.
Just a couple days ago Macklemore released a video for And We Danced, the crazy, entertaining song off of the Unplanned Mixtape. The video speaks for itself, but it just goes to show that there is both a serious, conscious side to hip-hop and a fun side too.
Doing anything for the next five minutes? You should probably spare it for this.
It’s good to see Macklemore get the attention he deserves recently. He’s genuinely trying to do something different, with meaning, and is doing a great job with it. If you’re the only person reading this blog who is new to Macklemore, that’s something you might want to address. With a full album on the way soon, he’s only going to get bigger.
Wings, the first single from the upcoming album by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis made news around the hip hop world with the impressive video about sneakers. Macklemore and Ryan Lewis team up with Ray Dalton on the second single of the upcoming album. A very upbeat single with fast paced production from Ryan Lewis, double time raps from Macklemore and a catchy hook by Ray Dalton. This just makes me want to here the full album more.
Macklemore X Ryan Lewis – Can’t Hold Us Feat. Ray Dalton by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis
Like we need another hip-hop track about trainers, right? Actually, wait up, this one actually has a point to it and an incredibly well produced and realised video. It’s taken awhile but the video for Macklemore’s “Wings” is finally out and boy was it worth the wait. In fact, just watch it and then get amped for the full album coming later this year.
Another month goes past and more release dates have been announced and we’re back with another list of what you should be putting on your radar. Hopefully people are finding these lists useful, as it’s stupidly tough to get updated lists of these dates.
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.
