It’s clear that the 23-year-old rapper is just being herself, flapping her arms around a vast parking lot with a squad of girlfriends, one of which flashes a 42-ounce bottle of malt liquor, all of which shout the infectious chorus at the top of their lungs. But it’s GloRilla’s husky, snarling delivery that makes “FNF” best-of-year material.
Nevertheless, the CMG signee came, saw and conquered thanks to her hair-swinging hit record, “FNF.” The Hitkidd-produced beat is immediately enjoyable, inciting mischievous excitement by way of its simple dark piano melody and a drum pattern to get even the most reluctant partygoer out of their seat and onto the dance floor. Memphis newcomer GloRilla dropping one of the biggest hits of the year was probably not on most music fans’ bingo cards. Can 2023 carry the same momentum and “big energy”? Only time will tell until then, check out Billboard’s Best Hip-Hop Songs of 2022 below. The quality of hip-hop records in 2022 came from all walks of life and different sectors of the map, keeping us engaged, intrigued and hungry for more. Kendrick Lamar’s precision and innate ability to connect with listeners remains second to none, as proven on “Rich Spirit” and “N95,” while Jay-Z’s agile wordplay continues to be at a hall-of-fame level after rattling off an impressive 80-bar melee on DJ Khaled’s Grammy-nominated “God Did.” Vince Staples - who delivered a top-five effort on Billboard’s Best 20 Hip-Hop Albums of 2022 - doled out quality records as well, whether it was the DJ Mustard-anchored single “Magic” or the criminally underappreciated gem “When Sparks Fly.” Also, no one expected the Memphis rookie GloRilla to cause tremors in the genre with her earthshaking anthems “FNF” and “Tomorrow 2.” Her surplus of hits allowed men and women to get loud and rowdy together as they chanted her lyrics with gusto.Īnd when we weren’t in a partying mood, we received doses of high-octane lyricism and thoughtfulness from our most well-spoken MCs. Once the ball dropped, Gunna ignited the flame with his club-ready single “Pushin P’,” which made the 16th letter in the alphabet top-tier on social media. If anything, the term is helpful at least as confirmation that young rappers, like them or not, are making new sounds and rendering themselves purely unintelligible to closed minds, as hip-hop has always done.Hip-hop experienced twists and turns throughout 2022. But “mumble rap” is more ill-fated than “trap,” “gangsta,” “backpack,” or “boom bap” - or even “mumblecore,” which is now an accepted genre of film - given that the term is, by design, more a messy put-down than a coherent musical (or aesthetic) assessment.
“Trap,” which theoretically describes hard Atlanta street rap, has somehow come to include all bass-heavy synth beats with stuttering hi-hats, regardless of where they come from or what kind of rapping goes over those beats.
Granted, most popular subgenre terms become reductive after a point. As long as I continue to prosper, I’ll take mumbling to the top.” “I’m not saying I really be spitting,” he recently told The Breakfast Club, “but I feel like I open up my mouth, or I be harmonizing and singing. being “overrated” and disparaging of ’90s rappers and their fans as “old and washed up.” Once Yachty shot back at Pete Rock, fans and critics rallied around “mumble rap” as hip-hop’s great generational fissure - even as Yachty himself has pointed out that he doesn’t really mumble on songs. Two months later, Wiz Khalifa used the term “mumble rap” on Hot 97 to describe “lil homies” who “don’t want to rap” as hip-hop’s dominant fad, prompted by an Ebro question regarding Lil Yachty and Lil Uzi Vert.īut it was Pete Rock who truly popularized the term in September when he criticized Yachty in a couple of Instagram captions, following the upstart’s comments on the Notorious B.I.G. 1 single, “Panda” - a song so wildly unintelligible that the rapper spent 90 percent of his video interviews last year repeating the lyrics slowly so that fans could understand what he’s even saying on it.
The sentiment has been kicking around since last April, thanks largely to Desiigner’s no. Which brings us to the other way to think about “mumble rap” - as a reclaimed pejorative that fails as a musical description, and that gets trickier to define the more rappers it encompasses. They’re two very different personas who make very different rap music. I say “apparently” because - outside of being young, and being black, and being rappers - Lil Uzi Vert and 21 Savage don’t have much in common. There are two ways to think about “mumble rap.” First, as a loose contemporary hip-hop subgenre that apparently includes rappers such as Lil Uzi Vert and 21 Savage as well as the other, aforementioned examples. Kendrick Lamar Will Never Rap Harder Than He’s Rapping on ‘Damn.’
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