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2013 Was The Year I Got Into Hip-Hop

I recently posted a retrospective on Childish Gambino’s 2011 label debut, Camp, and how much that album means to me, as well as what it meant in the larger grand scheme for hip-hop. Camp was one of the first albums of the “blog era” that really took advantage of the Internet, but you had some before that. Lupe Fiasco’s The Cool from 2007 is a good example, as well as 2011’s Live.Love.A$AP by A$AP Rocky, which stuck out in the genre for being a mixtape / album that didn’t have a specific sound, or at least clearly have come from a certain place. The Internet became such an important place for rap music, especially when mixtapes became bigger. I downloaded a lot through Datpiff back in the day, and that’s where a lot of folks downloaded the debut A$AP Rocky mixtape, or Chance The Rapper’s first couple, mainly including 2013’s Acid Rap. This, along with Camp, was one of the seminal albums that got me into the genre, along with a few more. The reason I titled this piece the way I did was because most of the albums that got me into rap came out in 2013 (with a couple of exceptions), and instead of doing a ten-year retrospective on three or four albums separately, I figured I’d talk about each album here and take a walk down memory lane, so to speak.

I already talked extensively about Camp in the retrospective I did for it, but I wanted to talk about a few other albums from a couple of years later — Childish Gambino’s Because The Internet, Chance The Rapper’s Acid Rap, A$AP Rocky’s Long.Live.A$AP, and Tyler, The Creator’s Wolf. These albums have more in common than just being released the same year, namely that all of these rappers became huge during the “blog era,” in which a lot of rappers and artists started to use the Internet to their advantage. These were rappers that got big thanks to an online following, and that really shaped my enjoyment of the genre and how I eventually got into it. These few albums don’t necessarily sound the same, but they introduced me to different styles of rap music, and they were all alternative to what was popular at the time.

Aside from walking down memory lane, and talking about my overall experiences with these albums, I also wanted to examine if whether or not that these albums have aged well, especially because of even just a decade ago was a very different time in rap. We can still look back fondly at certain albums or artists, but part of growing and growing up is understanding that certain things that may have been acceptable then aren’t acceptable now. They were never acceptable, but they weren’t as blatant of an issue as they are now. Mainly what I’m talking about is homophobic language that was freely used back a decade ago, but it’s in poor taste now (unless you’re Eminem, then you think you can still say whatever you want like it’s 1999). We’ll talk about this more as we dive into every album, but it’s good to look at the culture in which these albums came from, too.

If anything, these albums probably wouldn’t have existed if it wasn’t for the culture that they came from. Alternative rap, while always having been around, has just taken on different forms over the years. First it was the jazz-rap of A Tribe Called Quest, but then it moved into the indie rap of guys like Aesop Rock and MF Doom, which eventually morphed into Childish Gambino, Chance The Rapper, and Tyler, The Creator. A great example of “alternative rap” is the latter’s sophomore album, Wolf. A founding member of alt-rap group Odd Future, Tyler, The Creator was the main star of the group, although fellow member Frank Ocean would go onto be the biggest star of the group.

Debut album, 2011’s Goblin, was instrumental to his rise, but 2013’s Wolf was my introduction to his solo music and Odd Future. Tyler’s music was known to be “edgy” and shocking, similarly to rapper Eminem from a decade prior, but the difference between both artists is that one of them grew up (hint: it wasn’t Eminem). It’s insane to see Tyler’s growth over the last decade, because he went from a 2edgy4u artist to being a jazz-rap maestro that’s deep, introspective, but still fun and lighthearted. As for Wolf, it’s a record that attempts to be both edgy and introspective, but I think people might only see it as the former, not the latter. Wolf has aged relatively well, but it still features shades of Tyler’s purposely offensive language, and while it doesn’t serve too much of a purpose other than to be shocking, it’s not his whole schtick, thankfully. The album is a little long, and the album isn’t super energetic a lot of the time, but Tyler’s flow is solid and the guest spots are great.

Wolf is a solid album, but A$AP Rocky’s label debut, Long.Live.A$AP, is an interesting case of an artist being “mainstream” that I really like. I really enjoyed this album when it came out, and despite having thought of him in years, I went back to this recently and this record holds up quite well. Rocky’s sound is really cool, because he takes a lot of different sounds in his repertoire, especially when rappers stuck to their regional sounds in the 00s. Rocky’s from New York, but he had a lot of southern (especially Texas), midwestern, and even some West Coast flair to his sound, including some New York and East Coast stuff, but he makes it work. His voice is smooth, his bars are funny and charismatic (despite not saying anything too interesting), and the production is solid, all the while being uneven.

Childish Gambino’s Because The Internet is another record that cemented my love for his music, especially for how different it was compared to Camp, and how much he had improved as a vocalist and lyricist in just a couple years (although I enjoyed his 2012 mixtape Royalty quite a lot, too), but going back to Because The Internet made for a very uneven experience. Some of that album has some of his best songs, whereas the rest is just boring and somewhat pretentious, but not half bad, either. It just leans into being too self-indulgent, but it was a solid alt-rap album, nonetheless, and people started to really pay attention to Donald Glover as a musician. Camp is still my favorite album from him, mainly for its nostalgia, but I do truly love a bunch of stuff from this album, too, especially “3005” and “Sweatpants.”

The last record I wanted to talk about is Chance The Rapper’s second mixtape, Acid Rap, and how that mixtape introduced me to jazz rap, as well as being a record that was quite positive and uplifting, despite having some heavy subject matter. I’m pretty sure I found this mixtape thanks to the Childish Gambino feature, and to this day, that song is still maybe my favorite track on the tape (hilariously ironic because that song is called “Favorite Song”). The mixtape is full of “vibey” jazz-rap that I really enjoy now, because of its laidback sound that meshes really well. While this wasn’t his first mixtape, it’s the one the blew him up, and despite his fall-off in 2019 with his proper debut album, Chance The Rapper had a big run between 2013 and 2018, but this is the first time that a lot of people heard this Chicago rapper.

Okay, now that I talked about these albums, I wanted to beg a couple of questions with all of them — firstly, have these albums aged well, but most importantly, are these albums ones that I’d recommend to someone just getting into the genre? That’s what happened for me, but everyone is different. A decade later, I would say all of these albums have aged well, even if some of the language hasn’t. Wolf is the biggest offender, but at the time, Tyler’s sound was based in shock value, and even elements of horrorcore, but his sound has matured and mellowed out over time.

All of these records have their moments, but I don’t know if I’d recommend these to a first time listener. Some of these albums are really long, and that can definitely turn people off, but these are all “alternative rap” albums, and they stray from the typical sounds, minus A$AP Rocky’s debut; I’d almost argue that’s the one to check out, but maybe even start with something like Camp. That seems like cheating, both because this is a piece about some 2013 albums that I got into at that time as a fresh-faced rap fan, and because I already talked about that in its own piece, but Camp worked really well for me, because it was a pop-rap album, so the hooks were there, but it was also hard-hitting, clever, funny, and catchy.

It had enough to pitch to a newcomer but also the hallmarks of the genre to get an understanding of what it’s about, especially if you’re not familiar with it. Hell, if you were like me, you were more of a rock and metal guy, so something like rap would be very foreign to you. This was still a fun deep dive to do, and all these records are still wonderful, so I’m glad I got back into them. I don’t listen to much rap these days, but I’ve been wanting that to change, so that’s why I spent some time getting into these records. 2013 was the year that I truly got into the genre, because so many formative albums for me came out, and it feels like yesterday that some of them came out.