Great list, my favourite of the year.
My five made the list… that could be a first
Good stuff @Prob500
thank you for putting the effort in.
Haven’t you just described hip hop?
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Theory: Everyone here is old-fashioned so stuff that doesn’t come out on CD doesn’t register as much (no SOPHIE here either is there?)
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Nope
Yeah I think it would be a stretch to call Young Fathers hip hop now. A lot of their songs don’t really have rapping on it at all.
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I think that you’re going to need to make your peace with the fact that hip hop just isn’t as massively popular on here as indie guitar music and that’s almost certainly always going to be the case.
There’s a definite analogy to metal, there is a thriving heavy music community on here and some fab chats and recommendations come out of it but a lot of people are put off by the more screamed vocals and so it rarely makes the end of year polls. And that’s ok.
The same applies to hip hop, a lot of people like it and know a lot about it on here but when you look the whole user base the minority interests get drowned out in the most popular stuff which tends to be indie guitar.
At this point someone then has to throw their hands on the air and go “I thought this place was different, I thought everyone here was open minded and tried different things”
And I think we are, compared to the vast majority of the population, and there is a wide variety of different loves here, but in aggregate we’re by and large indie rock fans with a bunch of other niches too but none as popular as that one.
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I think you’re misunderstanding me and it’s probably my fault because I’m bad at explaining it properly.
I’m not suggesting that this is just an indie space at all and I would rather die than join the Noel Gallagher “real music real haircuts brigade”.
I’ve tried to explain my position on this for years and I never get anywhere so I don’t know why I bother but here it is, one more time:
You actually put your finger on the issue yourself when you said that you had several indie LPs in your top 10.
Let’s imagine that there are only 5 dissers and they all vote on their top ten albums of the year:
Disser A likes indie* and Hip Hop
Disser B likes indie and drone /ambient
Disser C likes indie and Jazz
Disser D likes indie and metal
Disser E likes indie and electronica
Now you poll those dissers and work out the Dis albums of the year and what do you get? 10 indie LPs. That doesn’t mean that people on Dis only like indie it just means that it’s the intersect, it’s the middle of the Venn diagram and it is therefore ALWAYS going to get more votes.
You said you were never going to make your peace with the idea that indie will always be more popular on here than hip hop, what about other genres? Does it bother you that loads of amazing music was produced in the metal genres this year that is totally unrepresented in the Dis list? Will you vow not to rest until Rolo Tomassi, Svalbard etc are represented?
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by “indie” I mean anything generally guitar based in a fairly loose sense.
One of the things I find odd is that when Kendrick Lamar releases an album it places reliably in the top three of the user poll and when he doesn’t there is no sign of any hip hop at all. I’m not knocking Kendrick - he’s great, he’s almost certainly the single greatest artist working in hip hop at the moment - but he’s not so much better than everyone else that the rest of the genre disappears.
I don’t get the mindset of people that (rightly) love Kendrick’s records but don’t seem to even listen to any other hip hop. There’s obviously a wide range of music under that banner, and I get that there are some barriers to the indie kids liking some of it, but I would have thought that anyone that liked Kendrick would get a lot out of Saba or Noname or Jean Grae for instance. There was little sign that anyone had even bothered to listen to those (hardly obscure) albums when they came out.
Well I can’t answer to that at all I’m afraid. Never been a huge KL fan (although his production on daytona is one of the highlights of the 2018 musical year I must admit) and I can’t see why people who don’t like hip hop would give him the time of day apart from just the rubber necking that his infamy inspires.
That pretty much sums up my view of Run the Jewels (the other indie kid approved hip hop act). I love Kendrick though.
Well there’s the problem in a nutshell… If we all liked the same things we would have a bigger impact on the vote! 
Now if only everyone who liked hip hop had voted for Hermit and the Recluse like I said in the first place… 
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Someone mentioned upthread about not being able to get hold of some hip hop lps on vinyl and I think rtj know how to market themselves to the indie kid crowd with colour vinyl pressings etc whereas most of the stuff we’ve been discussing certainly not available, at least in the UK, on vinyl. I know I would love a Noname lp. Not sure what’s cause and what’s effect in terms of visibility /popularity and the physical lp marketing though.
For run the Jewels not to be confused with E Lp marketing.
I’m so sorry
There’s probably something in that. As a physical format junkie I’m currently enjoying my pink vinyl copy of the Freddie Gibbs album and hoping that Whack World will come out on vinyl.
The contrary argument is that the fact that all this music is available pretty much free means there is no excuse for not exploring music outside your ‘main’ genre. Surely when people had to actually pay for records if they wanted to hear them it was less likely that someone that was ‘mainly’ and indie listener would investigate a hip hop album?
If I thought that people actually discovered new music by looking at what was in the racks at the local record shop your point would be a strong one. I think the bigger problem is that people are actually largely discovering music via algorithms that suggest stuff that is like the stuff they listened to last week - leading to a paradox of more availability/less discovery.
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Oh I totally agree with you there, I’ve never been a fan of letting Spotify or iTunes or whatever feed you what it thinks you should be listening to based on an algorithm.
I think that streaming can and does encourage people to listen outside of their comfort zones although I also think that genre preferences will always be a thing. The amount of music you can stream is mind boggling and having favourite genres can help to make it more manageable as long as it’s not a box you can’t escape from. For all the hip hop people might branch out into listening there will always be J pop records, metal records or folk or whatever that have to pass us by. No one gives every genre a fair crack because we’ve only got two ears and 7 days a week.
Of course there’s always stuff we miss and we all have genre blind spots but nothing would bore me more than listening to the same sort of stuff all the time - if I find myself in those sort of ruts I go searching for something completely different. Even though I’ve never really got on with metal for instance I still try to listen to the heavy albums that people are raving about - often it’s not for me but sometimes things really stick and it’s great to have your horizons enlarged. It’s so easy to do nowadays.
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It’s something I feel strangely guilty about, but I listen to precious little hip hop these days. I used to love it, but I guess the style of hip hop I liked has gone out of fashion somewhat. I was always picky about the sound of rapper’s voices, and that seems to have got worse the older i’ve got. I keep trying, but I don’t find a lot of modern hip hop very appealing (particularly anything trap based, or excessive use of autotune), and I find a lot of styles of rapping a bit off putting.
I’m also a total lyric heathen, which is obviously a bit of a non-starter when it comes to hip hop. I like the sounds of things rather than what the words mean. That said, I still get very easily put off by too much braggadocio or bitches and bling style lyrics. I’ve always found the production side of hip hop more interesting and involving.
I love the abstraction of Shabazz Palaces and Anticon style stuff, and always loved the looser end of hip hop with Blackalicious, The Roots and Jurassic 5. The Kanyes, Kendricks and Jay-Zs of this world do absolutely nothing for me.
I think i’m basically just shit with hip hop. 
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Well exactly, I’d agree with all of that. Interesting to note that not having things in your favourite list of the year doesn’t mean you aren’t necessarily trying them (like with you and metal). I tried that Saba album several times and I’m afraid it didn’t do much for me. Sorry.
Anyway we have reached consensus I think: yay music, variety is the spice of life, there’s a lot to love in hip hop beyond kendrick.
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There’s still stuff out there for you. Try the album this is from:
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