So even if below is the most textbook hip-hop list I could’ve imagined, 2015 was also a reminder in the face of a lot of shit in my life that there’s a reason I spent more time on The Fader or 2dopeboyz than any of my economics textbooks, or a reason that people sometimes (ill-advisedly) ask me for music recommendations and I text them thirteen songs punctuated by long and confusing captions which my phone splits up into like six texts probably for their sanity, or a reason that there’s a small but nonzero chance I spend my life working in music. I kept non-rap off my main lists, but truth be told Tame Impala and Jamie xx were probably more important to me in 2015 than any rapper period, both in terms of the minutes they logged on my iTunes but also the degree to which they embedded themselves in and intertwined themselves with my life over the past year. What I did remember, though, was this is the first year I’ve ever been enamored by music that wasn’t rap – not just vaguely entertained as a palette-cleanser in between intense streaks of digging through the Clipse discography, but enthralled. So to look over these lists and think, well, no shit, was not as cathartic as I’d hoped. In the songs that I played over and over all year, the songs that I’d forgotten about after April and rediscovered, the songs that I’d only really played through like twice or three times but months later still felt undeniably important: in this music I saw my entire year laid out. This was, at first (and still a bit now) wildly disturbing, partially because it’d be by definition offputting to be confronted by predictability in something that holds so much value for me largely because of its volatility, but also because the reason I’d done this every year was because in the act of composing a long list that I knew at most ten people would read, I was able to retread my last twelve months in the terms of the music that felt perfectly composed for it. I’ve written a list like this every December for three, maybe four, years now to varying levels of depth and obsession, and this is probably the most straightforward it’s ever been for me – I could’ve called two-thirds of my album list before the ball dropped a year ago.
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