ACV's Top 10 Best Hip Hop Albums of the 2010s

The decade provided us with so many genre-bending and out-of-the-box albums and so I thought it worthwhile to explore what I think are the greatest Hip-Hop albums of the decade (not mixtapes).

The list is entirely subjective, in choosing a project I used the following criteria: commercial success, its impact on the rest of the decade, audio quality, the degree to which it pushed/encapsulated a genre, and just all-around enjoyability. These albums do not represent, for example, the most successful commercial albums, nor the most influential albums, but rather an average cumulation of all these criteria.

10. Flying Lotus - Cosmograma (2010)

It is without a doubt that the Hip Hop underground was at its best from the late 90s all the way to the mid 2000s. With the likes of Mos Def and Talib Kweli being more commercially successful than most Gangsta rappers or Jiggy rappers, the Underground flourished for almost a decade. In my opinion, some of the best music was made in the Underground around the same time. The rise of Neo-Soul and conscious rap would be championed by the three great producer Goats of Underground rap: J Dilla, Madlib, and 9th Wonder. However, with the death of Dilla in '06 and Kanye West's quick jump to global super-stardom in 2007, in the blink of an eye the Underground disappeared, and even more so, experimental jazz producers disappeared. At the turn of the decade, the throne was empty and it seemed like the world of Jazz-fusion had disappeared from the mainstream eye; until Flying Lotus' Cosmograma.

Hip Hop was so different in 2009 than it had been a year-and-a-half before, minimalism was at its peak and the rise of EDM overran the music world. Flying Lotus was already a rising star in the world of Hip Hop and especially in the sphere of live DJ performances. His 2008 album "Los Angeles" was an Ode to Dilla, and truly you could already see Lotus testing out the limits of Hip Hop Jazz-fusion. Yet, what Cosmograma represented was a break from the form, there is absolutely no cohesive structure to the songs on the album, and instead Lotus introduces what seemed like the peak of psychedelic Hip Hop; as if Stankonia was produced by Daft Punk with side production from Dilla and Quincy Jones. A sonic trip around the galaxy, quite literally meant to translate an audio Odyssey, the album features one of Thundercat's most acclaimed performances in "MmmHmm", as well as hard-hitting Hip Hop core electronica songs such as "Zodiac Shit" and "Recoiled". The record features his aunts Harp, the famous Alice Coltrane, on the song "Drips//Auntie's Harp", a cathartic short song that brings you to tears. Lotus' Cosmograma is arguably his best work, and the best album by a producer from the decade.

9. The Weeknd - House of Balloons (2011)

It is so easy to understate The Weeknd's reign over the 2010s, the Scarborough singer has dominated the charts like never before seen in the entirety of popular music; indeed, no one has done it like him. House of Balloons is by far the most influential project on the list, and easily one of the most influential albums in all of history; from pop music to rap, this album would change the direction of modern music to no return.

Although a mixtape, its monumental presence in the subconscious of the music world, as well as the revamped version "Trilogy" released in 2012, makes it inappropriate for me not to include in this list. From being a homeless vagabond marching the streets of Toronto, (and Montreal), for the greater part of 2009 and 2010, the young Scarborough native quietly released a 9-track mixtape in the spring of 2011. With Frank Ocean's Nostalgia Ultra released a few months prior, these 2 mixtapes would create a new RnB wave: dark RnB. Depressing drug-infused lyrics, loud kicks and melodramatic instrumentals, House of Balloons was walking an uncharted lane. Already in the late 2000s several people critiqued RnB's hyper-sexualization, lack of lyricism and its rap similarities, The Weeknd's House of Balloons pushed this to the very extreme. Ultimately extremely well written, the content-matter is pure self-depreciation, songs like "House of Balloons/Glass Table Girls" give you the feeling of an acid badtrip where you feel so uncomfortable, yet you see still enjoy the incredible production as well as his beautiful vocals. Of course this would be the album that would foster the OvoXo link between Drake and The Weeknd; this is the album that influenced Drake's signature RnB sound. Without this album, the entire wave of RnB rap, as well as all Drake influential rap style, and pop music's more sombre realist content-matter would never exist. It can never be understated, what Frank Ocean and The Weeknd did to RnB music in 2011 would drastically affect the entirety of the music landscape of the world forever.

8. Ab-Soul - Control System (2012)

TDE's hold on the decade comes from more than Kendrick's amazing run, from 2012 to 2018 each member of TDE had the chance to produce at least one classic album, and none is more infamous than Ab-Soul's Control System. Perhaps the greatest lyricist of the decade, Soul Brother #3's life as an artist is one they can write novels about. Saying he's built different wouldn't give Soul enough credit, what you think is a double-entendre ends up being a quadruple entendre. With critically acclaimed mixtapes and a non-major album previously released before Control System, the expectation for this album was at an all time high. Released before Kendrick's GKMC, Control System would present us an Ab-Soul undertaking a Super Saiyan 4 form.

Each track on this project has its own style of production, no song sounds alike, and yet the sequencing expresses a thematic cohesiveness that makes this quite-long album roll through in a blink of an eye. You can go from a suave stoner anthem like "Bohemian Grove" to a nefarious track like "Terrorist Threats", where you have Ab-Soul and Danny Brown exchange anarchist bars that would make any Black man ready to usurp the government. The Kendrick featured track "Illuminate" is perhaps Kendrick's best feature, Soul just has a way to bring out the best out of anyone that hops on a track with him. Throughout the entire project you can practically hold the existential dread that Ab-Soul exudes, yet you can't exactly place your finger on it until the outro track "The Book of Soul", an elegy-like track for his passed girlfriend and ex-TDE member Alori Joh. Victim of suicide, The "Book of Soul" is a beautiful heat-felt goodbye letter to Alori, exploring their first encounter as high-school classmates to his lament of her choice to end her life. The Book of Soul closes what was already an amazing album and sets the tone for Ab-Soul's future where he says: "You used to say I could see the future/You was wrong because you was in it". Ab-Soul translates mental distress into an incredible project and posits the following: even if Ab-Soul gets forgotten in the long stretch of the Underground, Control System is a statement that proclaims: "nobody does it like him."

8. (Part 2) Jay-Z - 4:44 (2017)

Tying Control System at #8, Jay-Z's 4:44 is everything we needed from Jay-Z at 48 years old. My earliest introduction to Jay-Z was the Black Album, which is still my favourite album by him, yet it was his retirement album. His post-retirement album Kingdom Come is considered his worst album, and so for most of my life I seldom experienced Jay-Z at his "best"; although I have always been a Jay-Z fan. 4:44 is grown music, it's not Jay-Z chasing anything, it is a passion project and you can hear it. With production exclusively from Chicago legend No I.D., Jay-Z gets in a pocket that we have never seen from any other rapper ever in the history of rap.

With the loss of 2pac and Biggie at such a young age, 4:44 is what we would expect a living legend would make. Exploring themes of maturity, survivor's guilt, wealth and imposter syndrome, Jay-Z delivers an album about life after the rap game, a position no other rapper except for himself has been able to efficiently explore; although it must be noted, Nas' 2020 album King's Disease explores the same themes. And so, Jay-Z brings us a fresh perspective and kicks us game on how to grow as an emotionally stable adult. His discourse from "Big Pimping" transforms to guilt and a plead for forgiveness on the track "444". 4:44 teaches all the Black boys who were raised in the ghettos and hoods that, maybe just maybe we can dream further than 30 years old, and this is how to make sure you adequately grow as an adult. This is a Jay we have never seen before and easily one of his best albums ever made.

7. Schoolboy Q - Blank Face LP (2016)

Schoolboy Q's success was definitely the biggest surprise of the 2010s. At the turn of the decade, Jay Rock had the hood fame, Ab-Soul was the infamous lyricist and Kendrick was the radio-friendly soon-to-be mainstream superstar; Q seemingly did not have a lane. However, in 2012 his album Habits & Contradiction received unanimous praise, and his 2014 album Oxymoron is to this day considered one of the greatest Gangsta rap albums of all time. You can't listen to Schoolboy Q without wanting to throw up gang signs, his energy is unparalleled and his rawness is as organic as they come. However, Blank Face, regardless of how great Oxymoron was, happened to be one of the biggest surprises the rap has ever seen.

Where to begin, most songs on the album have two or three different motions where the beat switches, the themes alter from an unforeseen introspective Q to a ready-to-die bravado. Q taps into a depth we never knew he could even tap into, the production is as much psychedelic as it is g-funk. Several songs incorporate Oakland swagger, and even the radio super-smash hit "THat Part" featuring Kanye West slaps like nothing you've ever heard before. The surprise Jadakiss verse on "Groovy Tony" catches you by surprise, but you don't even have time to take it in as the song transitions into the second half "Eddie Kane", which includes a cathartic crescendo of delayed vocals by the TDE-signee Lance Skiiiwalker. The heavy hitting gangsta-ass "By Any Means" hist you with a questionable hook that gets explained by Kendrick Lamar's ad-libs "get yours", where Q posits that in the hood, it's free for all, he can't be mad or sad about anything that happens to him, because thems the ropes. But absolutely nothing, and I mean nothing hits like "JoHn Muir", the tenth track on the album. A very simple ballad that, in all, follows Q hitting a lick at several moments of his life, there's nothing deeper to it, but its simplicity make you understand that this entire album, and perhaps his entire career, is an ode to his past life, an ode where Q expresses a thankfulness to still be breathing because, as the song explains, his way of life could have gotten killed in a plethora of ways; and truly we're all thankful that Q graduated from "belling through the motherfucking street" to give us this incredible music.

7. (Part 2) Freddie Gibbs & Madlib - Piñata (2014)

Sharing the 7th spot with Blank Face, Piñata could easily be placed at #1, in fact it's the type of album someone can argue is the greatest rap album of all time. Freddie Gibbs was another rapper that came up in the Wale, J. Cole, Drake backpack era, and so, well into the 2010s without major recognition, Piñata was not just an abrupt presentation to Freddie's prowess, but it was a declaration of greatness; to this day, there exist only one other album in this lane and that is Madvillainy. Produced by the aforementioned underground Goat Madlib, the entire community was surprised to see both of these artists collab. Although Freddie was known as a great rapper, he was a gangsta rapper and never tried to be a conscious/jiggy or commercial rapper; more than anything Madlib is such an exclusive entity in the game that people did not understand how they connected.

Nevertheless, Piñata is like a combination of 2pacalypse and Madvillainy, the lyrics are harsh, rugged, minimally mixed and entirely about the street life. The production on the other hand, well, it's Madlib and there are no words in the English language to explain Madlib's sound. Practically a mythical piece, Piñata is like a ghetto allegory of the fast-life. What's more, Freddie's penskill is at its best, lyricism reminiscent of Jigga's Reasonable Doubt where a metaphor gets mixed with a simile and a double entendre. The features cannot be understated, obviously anybody who gets a request from Madlib to hop on a beat is obligated to follow through, but to get the likes of Raekwon, Ab-Soul, and the South's greatest lyricist Scarface, this album is a fresh source of greatness. Intentionally not made for radio or mainstream consumption, the album was so infamous that it jumpstarted Freddie's late career. There is no album like Piñata out there, and there probably never will be, this album is pure Hip Hop greatness.

6. Noname - Telefone (2016)

I don't care what anyone says, the 2010s had the most successful woman rappers than any other era, and I think we should celebrate that. But in terms of creating one's own lane, none have done it like Noname. At the peak of "mumble" and cloud rap, where lyricism was brushed aside and trap music became the world's popular music, and of course at the height of gun violence in Chicago, a Black flower grew from the concrete. Noname got on a mic, chose soft-happy instrumentals and decided to whisper words of sunny skies, decolonization and ghetto lullabies. Telefone cannot be explained, it cannot be broken down, it is purely emotive, it is something you feel. Each song harbours various themes and stories, each song feels differently, and on each song we discover a new facet of Noname. Much like her name, the project is an enigma that never gets resolved, seemingly like life is.

We can breakdown the bittersweet hit "Diddy Bop" that features Andre 3000's prodigy Raury, a song that makes you imagine those Chicago pink summer skies at 7pm, it brings you back to being an innocent 8 year old having fun outside, blocking out the traumatic scenes of violence. We can turn to the beautifully soft "Casket Pretty", a paradoxical track with a hook that says "All my niggas are casket pretty", where Noname explores the severe trauma of operating in a world where your demise is not even one door step away, it can happen as you sit in your home. The track "Bye Bye Baby" is an empowering allegory from the perspective of an aborted unborn foetus, comforting the woman who aborted it, gracefully exploring the contentious feelings that arise from following through with an abortion. Noname delivers poetry on the caliber of Robert Whitman over instrumentals that bring out the deepest emotions hidden deep within your soul. Telefone is an existential mirror that faces life and fortune, and like life itself it gives no means to alleviate the pain, but it still expresses some form of closure to the listener.

5. Kendrick Lamar - To Pimp A Butterfly (2015)

What is there to say that has not been said before? To Pimp A Butterfly is one of the greatest works of the English language, it cannot be quantified, any attempt to quantify it will surely understate its greatness, its impact, but still, let us try.

Firstly, Kendrick Lamar does not use language in the same way that we do, it can barely be explained, but much like singers Kendrick uses his voice and flow like an instrument, it follows a rhythm as much as it leads it. With production credits from Thundercat, Knxwledge and Flying Lotus, Soundwave's new-wave Westcoast sound gets complimented with jazz and electronica. Furthermore, there clearly is a thematic thread, it's not an unfolding story, it's an unfolding theme that, by the end of the record, regroups all the jumbled puzzle pieces into a singular cohesive picture.

To Pimp A Butterfly is a very confusing title if you're not Black, (sorry I had to say it), it uses the noun "pimp" as a verb, and it can basically translate: "To Manipulate/Use Somebody's Growth". The growth is multi-layered and can reference many things, but the most obvious reference is Kendrick's growth as a commercial commodity. As great as GKMC was, a single album does not make you untouchable, instead when one produces such a great album at the beginning of their career, people usually wait and see if that artist can replicate the same level of greatness. Henceforth, when you produce such a great work at your artistic genesis, all that stands before you is "potential". This potential can be used and/or manipulated by people around you. Throughout TPAB, Kendrick explores how, for example, his neighbourhood homies may view his potential wealth that stands before him. The song "Institutionalized" sets the dilemma in an anecdotal context where Kendrick brings childhood friends to the grammy, but he and they feel uncomfortable because of how far-out this environment is from his friends' harsh reality of poverty. Kendrick seemingly recognizes that it's his responsibility to detach himself emotionally from his past environment and those still within it, because exposing them to this radically different environment can lead to friction and troubles within his relationship with his friends, troubles that he cannot blame them for either. Kendrick doesn't shy away from calling out the predominantly white industry that historically manipulates the potential of Black artists as well, he notes many times that no matter how much praise he may receive, the industry could instantly turn on him on the very basis of his Black pride.

Kendrick is the butterfly, but TPAB is not a statement, to me, I see it as a principle. To me it sounds like a "stay up nigga", a sort of "beware", "don't put your guard down" type of statement. But it is not necessarily a principle that Kendrick subscribes to, I assume that once you reach a certain level of success, people utter that warning at every turn of the corner, and in a way that is a form of "pimping"; it's like saying "beware of your potential." The song "U" is a cumulation of these warnings, it is a schizophrenic soliloquy where Kendrick repeats to himself that it is hard to love himself because of all the anxieties he constantly tries to keep in mind, all the "bewares" he's been told to keep in mind. The ones that seem to trouble him the most are the type of warnings that reference his person, the ones where "don't let this industry change you" become the most overbearing to keep in mind. The second half of the song transitions with his insecurities talking directly to him and expressing in the clearest words that all that is bad, both around him and within him, is the fault of Kendrick and his success. In a way, the butterfly is pimping itself more than any other outside forces. His concluding poem/conversation with 2pac serves as a way for him to stand firm in his ambition and to lessen his own paranoia and anxiety towards being "pimped".

It would take a whole book to break down the entirety of TPAB, and even though it is not his most commercially successful album, it is the album that puts Kendrick Lamar in the English canon.

4. D'Angelo & The Vanguard - Black Messiah (2014)

D'Angelo, the father of Neo-Soul, has perhaps one of the saddest career stories in the world of RnB. To me, he's our generation's Marvin Gaye, and for the longest time we thought that we lost him forever. Bringing the Neo-Soul wave with Erykah Badu in the late 90s, we as listeners still could not help but feel like D'Angelo was not pushing his creativity as far as he wanted to, and as we know now his record label spent more time working his sex appeal than his talent, which would lead to one of the most infamous burnouts in the entirety of RnB history. Thankful that he did not harm himself, the surprise album in 2014 was everything we could have imagined. I'd describe it as a sonic manifestation of a samurai, what D'Angelo manages to capture with his vocals is close to being primordial, Black Messiah is a lion's roar, a lion's roar loud enough to be heard across the galaxy.

Before anything, the album is SO Black, it is SO us, it feels like going to Church on a hot summer day, it feels like the closing night of a cookout when your uncles and aunties are drunk and all the kids are slumped together in the basement; more than anything, Black Messiah sounds like a war cry for Black liberation from white supremacy. Dealing with police brutality and anti-Black racism, it makes you feel the lyrics, and the more you pay attention to the vibe, the more the words become clearer. "The Charade" begins as a good soulful jam, but as it builds up and you can't help but start shedding tears, and the words start to become clear, "All we ever wanted was a chance to talk", and it climaxes into an abrupt smooth end. "Really love", the monster track of the project, is a cacophony of sweet sounds, it speaks of Black love and it sounds like Eternal Grace. "Really Love" reminds the listener that emotions are pure and that love is the purest of them all, tap into its ethereal essence and that's when it's really love.

Black Messiah has no misses, it is pure perfection, it sings to you, it speaks to you, it makes you feel but it also guides you in the exploration of something deeper than just emotions. You're a passive subject where even when something may seem out of place, like the intro to "Back To The Future (Part 1)", it comfortably sets itself into motion and it all sounds in place. "Till It's Done" is one of the most beautiful songs ever written, speaking on Global Warming, racial dynamics, geopolitical warfare, it does not give an answer, instead it posits that these are humanity's question that will persist "till it's done", demonstrating a fine philosophical touch that you rarely see in RnB.

No song on the album can compare to the closing track "Another Life", a song, to me, stands to rival the greatest compositions from Mozart, Beethoven and Bach. Simply a love song, it transports you to another dimension where sounds and images become one, the intricate chord progression arranged between each instrument caress your eardrums. The vocal layers play with your senses and you feel sonically surrounded. With the simplest lyrics, D'Angelo speaks of a love that we can only imagine to experience at least once in our lives. Black Messiah champions not only the Black struggle, but rather Blackness as a whole. It sets out to celebrate our fight, our love, our being; Black Messiah is an anthropomorphic sonic manifestation of Black life.

3. Kendrick Lamar - Good Kid M.A.A.D. City (2012)

Hip Hop corresponds to a culture that began to rise in the 1970s, which we now can argue encapsulate Black culture as a whole. Rap, on the other hand, is a music genre that sort of predates Hip Hop but does not officially becomes its own musical entity until Melle Mel utters the first words on "The Message" in 1982. In sum, rap is ghetto poetry, at its core that's what it is, that's where its from, and whenever something is credited as one of the greatest rap projects, the expectation is that it emulates ghetto poetry. The very albums we call the "greatest rap albums of all time" all reflect something more than the artist themselves. Jay-Z's Reasonable Doubt doesn't just speak on Jay-Z bravado, it depicts Brooklyn at the height of the crack epidemic in the late 1980s. Dr. Dre's 1992 The Chronic is still to this day the most notorious emblem of Black Californian livelihood. More than any album, Nas' Illmatic, considered the greatest rap album of all time, is the most vivid expressive example of the Black psyche of Black youth in the 1990s. And so, Good Kid Maad City sits at #3 and as the highest ranking rap album of the decade, because it successfully depicts Compton to a certain degree we haven't seen since The Chronic and Snoop Dogg's Doggystyle. GKMC is much more than an album, it is an emblem, it is a realist novel that depicts the absurd darkness of South-Central Los Angeles, and the beauty of kinship, love and family in the heat of destitution.

One doesn't exist without the other in GKMC, it's as much fiction as it is a real story, it is as much about the protagonist and the antagonist, it is as much madness as it is goodness, it is as much Kendrick as it is every young Black boy in the hood. Not once does Kendrick set the line that his aggressors are the "mad" ones. Before anything else, throughout the entire album Kendrick is straight SPITTIN, straight bars that are meant to make you say "Got DAMN". It was his major label debut and you can hear his hunger, he does not want you to miss anything. It is less experimental than TPAB but more often than not, experimentation can decrease the greatness of a story and that's what GKMC is, a story, an allegory. It's an expressive album that wants to make sure you see every single detail that Kendrick saw as he crafted the project. I believe that this is Kendrick's best executed album, albeit the goal was simpler than other albums, but it does not diminish the effort of his ambition.

The production varies and is SO Hip Hop, it's dark when it needs to be, it is smooth when it needs to. It manages to fit a Drake feature in a Compton love story, as well as includes a legendary verse from MC Heit in one of the most intense songs of the project. Very few songs from the decade are as iconic as "Maad City", it'll stand as one of the hardest Compton songs of all time. It does not try to do more than it should, the comedic aspects shine as well; Kendrick's parents are natural comedians. "Money Trees" is perhaps one of the biggest surprises of the album, with a very simple beat it is able to capture the stress of living in a volatile environment. But nothing, and I mean nothing in the past decade can stand alongside the 10th song of the album.

"Sing About Me, I'm Dying of Thirst" is one of those iconic songs that demonstrate Kendrick's genius. Although not obvious at first, it's the only moment in the entire album where Kendrick breaks the 4th wall, he breaks the story so that he can tie the whole album together before ending it. As mentioned above, GKMC is not necessarily a true story, it can potentially be a cumulation of several different instances that have happened during Kendrick's life, but it is more likely that they are stories of several different people he's come to know throughout his life. "Sing About Me" explains just that, as the first verse responds to Kendrick's song on Section 80 "Keisha's Song", the second verse seems to allude that it's a response to the story presented in the album. As the album tells, when Kendrick and his friends go to retaliate after Kendrick/the protagonist was set up and attacked by strangers, their rivals shoot back in their moment of retaliation and manage to kill one of their friends. In "Sing About Me"'s third verse, Kendrick admits that he's speaking about "your brother", and that he tells these stories in the hopes of inspiring others who face the same reality. He continues by saying he shares these real stories in the hopes that we never forget him, but in a way alluding that we never forget the real people he's talking about as well. Thus, when we hear the hook "promise that you'll sing about me forever", but this time not sung by Kendrick, we come to realize that the story we are being told is not Kendrick's story but rather a story meant to commemorate a fallen friend in the hopes he's never forgotten.

The purpose behind GKMC's story-telling is the reason why I place it above any other rap album, it's not just ghetto poetry, it's an intentional well-thought out story meant to immortalize real souls that have left this earth, and once you realize that, you come to understand why Kendrick tries so hard to make every single detail so vivid, you understand why Kendrick tries so hard to transport you into this universe; it's so that you sing about him forever, but also so that you sing about his fallen friend forever. And that is why GKMC is the greatest rap album of the 2010s.

2. Frank Ocean - Channel Orange (2012)

Briefly alluded to in the House of Balloon section, Frank Ocean is partly responsible for the drastic change in RnB in this past decade. His mixtape Nostalgia, Ultra set the stage for one of the most acclaimed careers of the decade; the world did not know what was coming the following year when Frank Ocean released the cataclysmic album Channel Orange. The anticipation was torture, from all of the Odd Future features, to his appearance on Jay-Z's Magna Carta, and of course his incredible feature on Watch The Throne's "No Church In The Wild", we all knew that Frank Ocean's first album would be groundbreaking. It's practically a dream at this point, I remember the week before it dropped, I remember the day it dropped, I remember where I was when I first listened to it, I remember talking about it for the rest of the summer; Channel Orange dropped at the heart of my coming of age, a day before my 15th birthday and it has since been an integral part of my teenage memories.

2012 saw the beginning of Drake's domination of the charts, Take Care was released right at the end of 2011, and by the end of 2012, Kendrick Lamar's GKMC dominated the music world's attention. More importantly, the rise of Drill music exploded onto the scene at the same time, and so it seemed like RnB would not have the privilege to share the already full pedestal. However, Channel Orange was a fierce trend-setter, at the same time so classically RnB with tracks like "Sierra Leone" and "Thinking Bout You", while also being an avant-gardist project that mixed folk and pop elements. Before anything else, its mainly dark subject matter makes it the trend-setting album it really is. If there is one overarching theme it is definitely mental health, Frank begins the album with happier-sounding upbeat tracks such as "Sweet Life", "Super Rich Kids" and the beautiful song "Crack Rock". Yet, with a closer listen, you realize that these songs all deal with existential dread, each song seems to capture a life-long yearning to remedy life's absurdity. Frank's penskills were already infamous, but what Channel Orange demonstrated was that Frank's music was so personal, even when the songs were so obviously pieces of fiction, or no matter how base some of the lyrics may be, their simplicity are oh so real; the existential dread hidden in all the nook and cranny of the album are direct reflections of Frank ocean's tormented mental state.

It is impossible to speak about Channel Orange without speaking on the everest sequenced triad of "Bad Religion", "Pink Matter", and "Forrest Gump", three songs that follow each other, three songs where we witness Frank ripping his sleeves wide open to pour out his emotions bare onto the tracks. Before this, the world of Hip Hop as a whole never experienced such an honest and downright desolate discourse on Black queerness. "Bad Religion" is a shout in the dark, a scream to be validated addressed to the world, it is a shout to unrequited love, and most importantly it's a dazzling screech to himself. The double entendre of the anti-queer religious language quietly sets itself in the back of our minds,

"It's a bad religion, to love someone who doesn't love you/

It's a bad religion, to have me feeling the way I do/"

By the end of the song we've come to realize that he's not speaking about unrequited love anymore, but rather he's telling himself that if a religion teaches him to hate himself, then it's a bad religion, it's a bad devotion to lead a lifetime of self-loathing when instead you can devote yourself to loving yourself. With "Pink Matter" following, Frank continues the conversation with himself and questions the pursuit of keeping up a heterosexual facade by entertaining relationships with women, even though he finds enjoyment in the sexual ordeal. The watchful eyes of the "aliens" are always looking, or so he thinks, and its this fear of society's eye that numbs it all and leads him to fall within the grasp of the women. But it all seems for naught, because the monotonous routine of being overly-worried of society's expectations were dismissed in the previous song, and as "Pink Matter" ends and leads to "Forrest Gump", you hear a more confident Frank who wants to lead his potential male interest to the same resolve that he's just acquired. "Forrest Gump" is a beautiful love song that alleviates the somber tones of the entire album, and although there doesn't seem to a happy ending per se, Frank Ocean concludes the album confident in his emotions, confident in his person and confident in the questions that'll follow him throughout the remainder of his life. Channel Orange orange is colossal victory for Black queerness, while also being a musical masterpiece written with a Midas Touch that comes around every so-very few decades.

1. Janelle Monae - The Archandroid (2010)

The debut of Stravinsky's "Rite Of Spring" resulted in a riot, Nina Simone's rendition of "Strange Fruit" will perhaps always be the most powerful performance by an American singer, Tchaikovsky's "Casse-Noisette" will forever stand as one of the greatest composed pieces in all of history. So very few projects can demonstrate multi-instrumental virtuoso, so very few projects can communicate story, emotion, and beauty no matter the context they are experienced in. Janelle Monae stands in a lane of her own as a musician, a singer and an oscar-winning actress. Her theatrical roles is Hidden Figures and Moonlight are spectacular, and her 8 Grammy nominations demonstrate just how much her art is respected. One of the decade's most notorious celebrity-activist championing racial equity and feminist ideals, Janelle Monae closed off the 2010s standing alongside only Donald Glover as being Hip Hop's only artist to successfully transcend music.

Discovered by Big Boi of Outakast in the late 200s, and then spear-headed by Diddy himself, Janelle produced three spectacular albums in the span of the decade, with all three of them being acts of a larger Afro-futuristic story following the android Cindi Mayweather in her fight to free herself, and society as whole, from her dystopian civilization. Writing 10 different blogpost on the intricate saga that Janelle has created in her albums would not suffice, her concept rivals Marcel Proust's In Search Of Time but then adds musicality to the whole project.

To say The Archandroid sonically is great would be an understatement, the layers of tens and tens of different instruments coupled with the multitude of layered vocals makes it feel like you're at the opera and a Michael Jackson concert at the same time. Being Prince's last apprentice before his untimely death in 2015, revisiting The Archandroid, you can't help but see his spirit in each and every song. More than anything, the album is SO Black, some tracks like "Neon Valley Street" are traditional renditions of 1960s RnB, or "Tightrope" that features the rap mega-legend Big Boi, the 808s and the typically-Southern funk claps just makes you want to bust a two-step real quick. Janelle doesn't shy away from having smooth ballades like "Oh, Maker" that are meant to make you empathize with Cindi's current situation in he dystopian world, yet never making you forget that Janelle is addressing our forbidden love that's very real in this world as well. The vocal performance is unmatched, her voice is traditionally so rich, organically so smooth, and the whole is mixed to the utmost quality. No beat is the same for more than 30 seconds, small elements get added every 10 seconds and the album becomes an RnB/Funk/Rap concerto with a heartbreaking story that, spoiler ahead, does not finish well.

In more colloquial terms, whenever artist try to write out these opera-esque stories, they are usually super corny and badly arranged; but the thematic is clear and simple. You are introduced to this dystopian world and the protagonist, you find out she and a human share a forbidden love, forbidden due to her partner being a human being. They try to escape the grasp of this world, and then they are caught. As you think maybe the story will evolve into a possible happy ending, you realize that your hope was in vain, and the story ends there waiting to be continued in the next album. The songs are beautiful, but the story is bleak, paralleling life's beauty even in the darkest times. Even though this album is a grandiose endeavour, Janelle effectively communicates a simple plot that's oh-so real. You can't help but celebrate her skill in writing an ENTIRE universe into an album and doing it so well, well it's never been done before and there was no sacrifice to the quality of each and every song. She does not shy from being experimental, but she executes it astoundingly well every time. The outro "Say You'll Go" is so classically RnB, it's almost like Aretha Franklin singing on a Pharrell produced instrumental. The closing son "BaBopYe" ends this part of the story's saga, and truly the symphonic execution cannot be understated. For a debut album, it's impossible for it album to be this good, this poignant, this intricate, this layered, this classic, this experimental. Even upon its release it received unanimous praise as one of the best, if not the best album of the year. Truly, this album set the stage for Janelle Monae's extraordinary career for the rest of the decade, and it stands as an unmatched literary work in the entirety of the global music canon.