I Think I Found Out What Makes a Great Rap Album
Passionate discussion about hip hop, whether it be in a barbershop or online under your twitter handle that you swear is cool, has been and is at the core of the hip hop consumer experience. For as long as the genre has been a thing, ardent fans have asked themselves who the best is, and to be the best, you have to make something worthwhile, something great, and that my brothers, sisters and others, is why we’re here. The Hip Hop album. What makes it great?
Now before we get into The Tino Scale, which is what I’ve humbly decided to name this metric for judging a hip hop/rap album, we have to acknowledge a few things. Hip hop is subjective. How great an album is to a large extent always up for debate. This very debate is what differentiates the hip hop consumer experience from the rest of the genres out there. Not only is there competition between rappers to be the top dawg, competition exists between their fans to validate their fandom. What the Tino Scale is, is a way to make these conversations more structured, educated and layered.
The reason I started writing rap articles in the first place is because a young man back in 2013 claimed Joey Badass was a better rapper than Lil Wayne. At the time I knew he was wrong, or at the very least, articulating a very uneducated rap opinion. His arguments were all over the place and based on this weird concept of “meaningful lyrics”. Though partly justified, there’s way more to rap and the rap album than just the “meaningful lyrics”. I’ve distilled these to 5 components, all rated out of two to give a total of ten.
Story and Progression
Story and Progression is a metric that evaluates the ability of the artist to tell a story through the songs themselves, the order of the songs and the sonic soundscape. In this sense, the album can be thought of as a composition of songs that tells a story, stimulates interest and inspires new ways of thinking, being and feeling. “To Pimp A Butterfly” comes to mind when we talk about great story and progression. Drake’s “Take Care” does the same too. If an album’s just a collection of singles that by their own and more importantly as a whole don’t mean anything, it’s done a bad job at this, and will get a low rating on the Tino Scale.
Bopability
Hip hop in its early years largely consisted of the boom bap rhythm. It’s funky, catchy and gets your head nodding in a Kanye West-on-a-plane fashion. Bopability speaks to this head nod. A head nod that can quickly turn into a nae nae, a dougie, a violent harlem shake or tantalising twerk. If the rap album is a continuous drudgery of pain and suffering, though it may get high score in S&P (Story and Progression), it will get a 0 in bopability. Travis Scott’s “Astroworld” has those bops in abundance. Cardi B’s “Invasion of Privacy” too. YG’s “Stay Dangerous” almost has too many bops, it’s like yo chill b, gotta gimme a second to rest and catch my breath.
Technical Soundness
This part of the Tino Scale concerns itself with the quality of the rapping throughout the album. What was the subject matter? Were the rhymes tight? Was the wordplay ill? Were the flows hot? His or her voice and delivery was sound af? A dope rap album should have all these tick boxes checked and therefore be of a high technical level to be considered great. Examples of great technical rap albums include Eminem’s “The Eminem Show”, Pusha T’s “Daytona” and Lil Wayne’s “Tha Carter 2”. A technically deficient album would sound like Souljah Boy’s “The Deandre Way”.
Production
Production concerns itself with the beats fam. Were they grand a la Kanye’s “My Dark Twisted Fantasy”? Did they maintain a hard, thumping pace per 50 Cent’s “Get Rich or Die Trying”? Were they crisp and lush like on Dr Dre’s “2001”? It’s all subjective but what great production on beats shouldn’t do is fade into what’s “current”. And by fade I mean, you couldn’t differentiate it from all the other soundcloud rappers if your life depended on it, which is great torture technique or whatever for all the morbid readers out there. Or a drinking game. Who’s album is this song from? Get it wrong? You drink. You’re welcome.
Cultural Impact
Ideally albums should cause shock waves, whether positive or negative. Today, if an album comes along and has people talking about for weeks on end — maybe an Instagram challenge or two comes from it — if it provides a decent amount of material for meme culture whether directly or indirectly and most critically, if subsequent rap projects have copied the sound from said album, that album gets a high score on cultural impact. Low hanging fruit for this would be Kanye’s “808s and Heartbreaks” and deeper in the troves of rap would be Salt-N-Pepa’s “Hot, Cool & Vicious” released in 1986 which became the first album by a female rap act to attain gold and platinum status in America. High on the cultural impact ting. Very high.
Friends, family, fans and trolls, this is my Code Civil. This is my E=MC². This is my “Thriller”. It’s born out of wanting more educated and fulfilling rap conversations. So go out there. Argue with educated opinions on why Rae Sremmurd’s “SremmLife” is better than Notorious Big’s “Ready to Die”. Godspeed.
