Game 50 Cent Raps Mvp' title='Game 50 Cent Raps Mvp' />The Best Rapper Alive, Every Year Since 1. CREDENTIALS Coloring Book, Ultralight Beam, live performances on Saturday Night Live and at the ESPYs, Magnificent Coloring Day Festival, staying independent. The good guys are supposed to be boring. Chance the Rapper opens Coloring Book with a declaration His life is good. Hes got a girl, and a child, and hes happy. Always San Chome No Yuhi. He bellows, almost embarrassingly earnest, about what he has to be thankful for. Its triumphant and euphoric, over brass backing and the cooing of mentor Kanye West. Stephen Curry brought fans to their feet in China with a performance ripped right out of his MVP highlight reel. Then Magic Johnson had them standing during a sombre. All NFL employees receive the leagues comprehensive benefits program as part of any salaried position. Sesame Workshop is the nonprofit media and educational. Get the latest news on celebrity scandals, engagements, and divorces Check out our breaking stories on Hollywoods hottest starsThis shouldnt work. Great art, were told, is rarely made by the good guys, the happy or the content. Ambition isnt measured in what you have, its striving for what you want. Hip hop is for those strivers, and braggadocio is rarely applied to things so pedestrian. Unless youre Chance. Im not pointing this out to suggest something as anodyne as Chances potential importance as a role model, or the part joyous music can play while the world burns around us. Instead, Chances persona is impressive because Chance has created a world for himself, out of the unlikeliest of parts, and 2. He went from outsider to the center of the rap universe. He had the best verse of the year on Ultralight Beam, arguably the best full lengthI mean, mixtapeand seems committed to a level of artistry few can match time he performs. And he did it while remaining his own goofy, good hearted, Christian selfan archetype we havent seen in hip hop before, and an innovation in and of itself. The sound of Coloring Bookand of Chance the Rapper, writ largeis one of openness. Hes excited about his life, and wants you to be excited about your life, too. But, more than that, hes trying to bottle up that feeling. Hes trying to evoke exactly what his particular brand of happinessone colored by empathy and nostalgia as much as pure moment to moment joyfeels like musically. And over the past few years, hes come thrillingly close. Hes carved a soundmajor chords and warm keyboards and stuttering drumsthats entirely and recognizably his own. Coloring Book didnt arrive fully formed Chance has been shaping his unique brand of music since 2. Day, refining what his artistry means and sounds like with his close knit band the Social Experiment for years. The Game 50 Cent Raps Mvp' title='The Game 50 Cent Raps Mvp' />This album, though, was where everything cohered. His rapping is instinctual, bounding from carefully measured measured bars and wordplay to rapturous and guttural expressionism. Not since Kanye West has a rapper so plainly attempted to put every feeling they had into their music. In the process, hes emerged as one of the savviest music industry players in an unstable environment. In 2. 01. 6, several artists used the still nascent streaming economy to their advantage, getting ahead of the sea change the music industrys long been struggling with. Drake signed up with Apple Music, getting millions of dollars and billions of streams in the process. Frank Ocean, with some deft maneuvering thats remained largely under the table, slid his way out of his label contract and released Blonde independently, for which streaming accounted for most of its listens. Chance, too, is at the forefront of a new kind of music industrybut he was the only one to predict it first. For likely close to half a decade, Chance has been fending off label offers, even when the career path seemed hazy and the potential for failure seemed, to everyone but him, great. Instead, he was the first to figure out how the artist succeeds with the internet, rather than in spite of it. His other releases were completely independent, and his latest came with a partnershiplike Drakes and Frankswith Apple Music, which in its ambitions to corner the streaming market has begun operating as a de facto Medici family for artists like Chance. If that deal were to dry up tomorrow, though, Chance has proved he is nimble and inventive enough to handle any changes, and has a rabid fanbase that will follow him anywhere he chooses to go. Its not Jay Z style moguldom its something more modest than that. Something we havent seen before. Toon Twister 3D on this page. Brendan Klinkenberg. HONORABLE MENTIONS Q Tip, Kendrick Lamar, Young Thug. In Sept. 1. 99. 1, Q Tip rapped that the job of resurrectors is to wake up the dead. He delivered the line in the same verse, on Jazz Weve Got, that saw him explain the aim is to succeed and achieve at 2. Twenty five years later, at 4. Q Tip brought the members of A Tribe Called Quest together to record a new album. During that process, in March, founding member Phife Dawg passed away. But Tip and Jarobi and Ali Shaheed Muhammad didnt forget their jobs, and in November they released We Got It From Here. Xbox 360 Profile Editor Free'>Xbox 360 Profile Editor Free. Thank You 4 Your Service, the final Tribe album. They resurrected the dead. The album is a miracle, in large part because of Tips rapping. In his post Tribe solo work he explored the possibilities of a more jazz and scat inflected style, and the results sounded less written and more like tossed off freestyles than the brilliant displays of rhyme found on those early Tribe albums. Not here, though. He obviously had things he needed to sayabout his country, about music, about aging, about friends, present and lostand his lyrics sounded more deliberate and calculated than they had in years. This focus resulted in finely crafted verses like his contribution to Lost Somebody, in which he memorializes Phife and tries to explain the sometimes coarse texture of their long relationship. Malik, I would treat you like little brother, that would give you fitsSometimes overbearing though I thought it was for your benefit, he raps, nearly out of breath but still enunciating. As youth driven as hip hop is, Tips performance in 2. Kendrick Lamar didnt release career defining work in 2. To Pimp a Butterfly and good kid, m. A. A. d city, respectively. Instead, Untitled Unmastered, a rough collection of apparent studio leftovers, felt of a piece with the storm of jazz and American turmoil that produced Butterfly. Many of the songs were studio cemented versions of live late night performances many of those songs were brilliant. They left no doubt that Kendrick is one of the best rappers in the genres history, but they didnt deepen his story or lead the listener down a new, surprising path. Elsewhere, he contributed verses to songs from Beyonc, Danny Brown, A Tribe Called Quest, the Weeknd, Travis Scott, Kanye West, DJ Khaled, Maroon 5, Sia, BJ the Chicago Kid, and Isaiah Rashad, among others. Of those, Really Doe, Goosebumps, No More Parties in L. A., Holy Key, and Wats Wrong were most deserving of praise, but none felt essential. Its hard to imagine that hed perform any of them during a show of his own in five years, the way certain guest features of, say, Jays have penetrated his solo catalog. In some ways, Kendrick Lamar was in cruise control in 2. But what was startling is that his cruise control output now matches other rappers career making years. Young Thug may never be the best rapper alive for as long as he raps, but thats in keeping with his artistic mission. Unlike Kendrick Lamar, who raps at a scholarly level, armed with history and precedent, Thug raps to complicate the act itself. What he does under the banner of hip hoptoying with song structure, exploding his voiceprompts critics and listeners to coin words and subgenres. Still, in 2. 01. 6 he released some of his most streamlined projects to date.