Hip-hop in 2024 was on a wild ride

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NPR

Music

4.4 • 3.2K Ratings

🗓️ 13 December 2024

⏱️ 58 minutes

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Summary

Record-breaking mainstream hits. A new generation of artists rising to seize their moment. Rappers in and out of courts. A pair of the biggest names in the game transforming their careers by taking their rivalry to sometimes bitter new heights. In 2024, hip-hop brought us wave upon wave of massive, surprising, culture-shifting moments.

NPR Music's Sheldon Pearce, Sidney Madden and Rodney Carmichael were watching and listening all year long, and they've gathered together to explain the most important stories of hip-hop's 51st year. There was the ascendance of new dominant voices in Southern rap, many of them female, along with the noticeable resonance, for many artists in the genre, with country music. The disconcerting trial of Young Thug left a void in Atlanta — the longtime hip-hop capital — for much of the year, before it ended suddenly and dramatically. And yes, there was the remarkable show put on by Kendrick Lamar in his sustained attack on Drake.

Plus: Rodney, Sidney and Sheldon share their favorite hip-hop albums of the year. Hip-hop may have celebrated its landmark 50th anniversary in 2023 by looking back at its own history, but in 2024, it shot forward like a cannon blast.

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0:00.0	Support for this podcast and the following message come from the NPR Wine Club,
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0:12.3	you can learn more at NPRwineclub.org slash podcast.
0:16.0	Must be 21 or older to purchase.
0:18.6	A little heads up.
0:20.0	This podcast contains explicit language.
0:27.0	If I could travel back in time to 2023 and tell you that Drake would be taking on his own label after a dramatic fall from Grace
0:39.8	damage what felt like an indestructible brand. You likely would have accused me of listening
0:45.0	to too much push-a-team. I wouldn't have believed it either. But that was 2024 in hip-hop,
0:51.3	full of massive, unexpected, culture-shifting turns. When we celebrated
0:57.2	Rapp's 50-year anniversary last year, amid claims of the genre's decline, we knew we were in
1:03.4	for a wild ride. But who would have imagined the first year of Rapp's second half-century
1:09.4	would be this eventful. Sometimes'm MPR music editor Sheldon
1:13.6	I'm the one that's up to score with him, walk him down whole time.
1:16.6	I know he got some ho in him.
1:17.6	I'm MPR music editor Sheldon Pierce, here with host and reporter Sidney Madden
1:24.6	and correspondent and critic Rodney Carmichael. And we're
1:28.4	breaking down the biggest stories in hip-hop this year. Yes, Kendrick is obviously among them.
1:37.4	If you're like me, you're probably still spinning his new album, GNX. And we know, not like us,
1:43.6	was the defining song of 2024. We also know that
1:47.3	his name has been on everybody's lips since someone, and that his run has been analyzed and
	...

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