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.
We found a lot of comfort in More or Les’ food themed LP Mastication. For as goofy as it got with its food based silliness, “Big Sugar” was one of the standout tracks for its lyrical focus. Here the Canadian punster, looks at the sugar industry and sees it more as a drug that businesses bended laws to get their hands on.
Take away the cliches like we do, and seemingly rappers run out of fallbacks to revisit when short of ideas. This tends to result in underground hip-hop filled with tracks about ‘laxing or what sports they like and a special kind of artist will get preachy on a greater than thou tip. And now Canadian nerdcore-ish rapper More or Less is determined to get food, if it hasn’t been already, added to that list of staples.
Just in case you missed it, we hosted a night in London for Wordburglar to make his first UK appearance. Since then I’ve pretty much had this mixtape he put on my laptop on loop. It’s a well-compiled mixtape packed full of Wordburglar remixes and tracks from the whole Backburner crew (Timbuktu, More or Les, etc…). Also it’s free…
I’m not sure how this happens but occasionally we hear of great releases literally just weeks in advance. More Or Les’ upcoming album Mastication is a great example, a few rumblings on Twitter and suddenly More Or Les has an album coming out on the 4th of September. Boom. For those unfamiliar go back through our archives and find one of my favourite tracks of the year Wordburglar’s “Rhyme O’ Clock”.
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.
