My Top 10 Albums of 2024

1) The Past is Still Alive / Hurray for the Riff Raff / 2024

Because I grew up around a lot of rich, racist country-loving folks, I’ve had a lot of trouble sinking into good folk and country my whole life. I never thought 2024 would be the year folk and country albums would dominate my listening for long stretches. Hurray for the Riff Raff is the culmination of this new turn for me. A queer boricua cowgirl crooning about fentanyl, love, and highways, Hurray for the Riff Raff frequently pushed my despair into the sublime, transforming my grief into nostalgia. The first song “Alibi” reminds me of the worst times of my life, but not the terror and sickness, but the love of friends like Gionni Ponce during those times. These songs convince me to love, to dream, to try against the odds.      

Favorite Lyric: I used to think I was born into the wrong generation. But now I know I made it right on time to watch the world burn with a tear in my eye to watch the world burn I’m right on time. 

2) I DREAMT I FOUND A RED RUBY - Francesca Wexler - 2024

Francesca Wexler’s music makes me feel like my most beautiful, intelligent, and heavy self. Top-notch pen game with a complex range of queer emotions on lush beats. The music feels like the best sort of edible high in the summer sun. I literally feel warmer when I listen to it. This was my soundtrack for the entire summer, including my trip to Guatemala and El Salvador where I fulfilled my lifelong dream of reading the book I wrote on my mother’s life in the homeland surrounded by loved ones and comrades. 

Favorite Lyric: All my angels work the night shift. 

3) GNX - Kendrick Lamar - 2024 

It’s painful to watch so much of hip-hop culture be saturated with rappers’ lowest vibrations, completely self-abandoned to gluttony, amorality, egoism, and horrifyingly bad politics. Kendrick’s presence in the culture this year felt like a rare voice of authority trying to carve out a pocket in the culture where bangers and reason could co-exist. I was surprised by how much the fury and hatred he unleashed during the beef spoke to my own frustrations with the US at large and how much I needed that release valve. As ugly as the beef got, it was incredibly impressive to watch Kendrick remain grounded and emerge a fuller artist. GNX is some of my favorite Kendrick for its playfulness and groundedness. 

Favorite Lyric: Starting to see spaceships on Rosecrans. I see the aliens hold hands. They wanna see me do my dance.     

4) Lonestar Luchador - That Mexican OT - 2023

That Mexican OT feels like the first true heir of Big Pun’s legacy. That Mexican OT combines mariachi chillidos with Pun-level wordplay in a classic Texas country lean. Lonestar Luchador is brilliantly crafted with hilarious Ralph Barbosa skits and conceptually tight-knit songs that dive between bravado, trauma-dumping, and just pure fun.   

Favorite Lyric: I had to congratulate her parents cuz they made em a bad bitch. 

5) DEIRA - Saint Levant - 2024 

Rapping and singing in English, French, and Arabic, Saint Levant is the Palestinian lover boy you didn’t know you needed in your life. Because who said surviving and resisting a genocide can’t be sexy af. These dreamy tunes made my Chicago summer days magic, without asking me to stick my head in the sand either. Thank you to Lin Flores for turning me onto this. 

Favorite lyric: I hear the sounds of the bombs in our sleep, but I never in my life heard the sound of defeat. 

6) Dark Times - Vince Staples - 2024

Vince Staples deserves just as much love as Kendrick.  I think he is who people think J. Cole is. This is spiritual psychedelic rap, the album ending with a woman’s vision of the universe’s slow struggle to the perfection of our souls. I love Vince because he has a way of holding the agony of living and making it bearable, his calm steady voice slowly sinking into your subconscious. I don’t typically find his songs catchy, but after a few listens, I get hooked by the feeling and the space it opens in me to feel peace. This album traverses all sorts of heartbreak with ten toes planted in the concrete.

Favorite lyric: I don’t need your flowers, I’m living. The first time I saw a million dollars I squinted.  

7) Few Good Things - Saba - 2022

Saba taught me how to move through a Chicago winter with this album. The soundscape couldn’t fit the city better. The project dropped in 2022 when I was distracted by JID, Pusha T, and Amindi. I’m glad I returned to it though because this album is every bit as worthy and incredible as those three. Dominated by blue-gray soundscapes and gritty lyrics about how weird it is to survive and thrive in a burning world, Saba’s growth in this project is incredible. 

Favorite Lyric: I got everything I could ever need / and i try to keep that in mind / whenever i meet a man trying to sell a dream

8) Crying, Laughing, Loving, Lying - Labi Siffre - 1972

December 2023 I crash land in India full of PTSD symptoms and the shock of the move to Chicago still fresh on my nervous system. Labi was a crucial part of my healing as I cherished the unimaginably cool moments with my new family, ate delectable food, and fell deeper in love with Anushka. I listened to Labi while practicing a difficult set of new qi gong movements and breathing through the pain. The opening song allowed me to enter a space of reverence with my loves and losses, and the rest splayed playfully out, setting me up for my year of exploring folksier sounds. Shoutout to the student who turned me onto the project. 

Favorite Lyric: I am free man and my father he was a slave. I have been broken but my children will be saved. Saved for the fire of man’s desire. Saved for tomorrow with today’s sorrow. Saved for a Jesus who does not need us. Saved for the lovers I pray they will discover.  

9) Chromokopia - Tyler, the Creator - 2024

Tyler’s paranoia-packed album came just in time to shake me out of my fear of the ever-rising tide of fascism with lyrics that are equal parts soulful and mischievous. It’s great to hear Tyler be his whole queer self on such energetic production.

Favorite lyric: give a fuck bout pronouns, I’m that n**** and that bitch. 

10) Hells Welles - Jesse Welles - 2024 

I found Jesse Welles through his song about the assassination of the UnitedHealth CEO, and his politically sharp folk with biting satiric lyrics has won me over so powerfully, he slid into this last spot in the final minute. He’s equally capable of making me seethe, laugh, and cry with croons that are equally soulful and goofy. He has a whole album on nature, giving odes to bugs, trees, and whales and two others making political commentary on everything from the genocide, cancer, modern-day slavery, and more. I’m just happy to have found someone as angry and silly as I feel most days. 

Favorite lyric: the dead don’t feel honor, they don’t feel that brave. They don’t feel avenged. They’re lucky if they got graves. 

Honorable Mentions (in no particular order)

La Isla - Rels B 

Mind Blade - Malev da Shinobi 

Antitesis - YoungShiva

Cowboy Carter - Beyonce

Please Don’t Cry - Rapsody

If My Wife New, I’d be Dead - CMAT

Where I’ve Been, Isn’t Where I’m Going - Shaboozey

Alligator Bites Never Heal - Doechii 

Javelin - Sufjan Stevens 

The Long Game - Marlon Craft 

The Bitch is Back by Roxanne Shanté

The Bitch is Back / Roxanne Shanté / 1992

Roxanne Shanté is simultaneously a controversial and overlooked figure in hip-hop history. She is most remembered for “Roxanne’s Revenge,” a diss track she recorded at the wee age of fourteen. For those unfamiliar with this episode of classic hip-hop history, emerging rap group UTFO made the now regrettable decision to sidestep Fly Ty, Marley Marl, and Mr. Magic, going to a rival radio station to drop their single “Roxanne, Roxanne,” released in 1984. UTFO backed out of a show with the hip-hop pioneers when Marley Marl and the crew were in desperate need of money, and to add insult to injury, it was Mr. Magic who identified “Roxanne, Roxanne” as a crowd-pleaser and made it a hit in the first place. Without Mr. Magic, who knows if UTFO would have ever found their audience.

The otherwise unmemorable track is a diss record to a woman named Roxanne, who rejected the rap crew’s advances. In essence, it’s a whole song degrading a woman because she wouldn’t fawn over them and stroke their egos. At the young age of fourteen, Shanté sniffed out the misogyny in their lyrics and penned a fierce rebuttal. She approached Marley Marl, Mr. Magic, and Fly Ty and asked them to let her rock a diss track against the backstabbers. Mr. Magic leapt the opportunity and soon they were recording “Roxanne’s Revenge.”

“Roxanne’s Revenge” is striking for the directness of its barbs delivered in the Shanté’s childlike high-pitched voice. Her flow hopscotches all over the beat with a flat yet energetic intonation. While the music video above illustrates just how green Shanté’s performance skills were at the time, her upbeat nonchalance and jabbing lyricism evince the unmistakable signs of a young genius. “Roxanne’s Revenge” exploded onto the hip-hop scene, embarrassing UTFO bad enough they even sent a cease-and-desist letter to Roxanne Shanté’s team. Shanté’s track was too popular, however. The controversy Shanté cooked up inspired over eighty known tracks revolving around a so-called Roxanne, by this point elevated to mythical status. “Roxanne’s Revenge” would set the tone for Shanté’s career—full of battles and blowouts with the biggest emcees of her day. It is here where her legacy deserves more shine.

In 1985, Shanté took battle rap to new levels of aggression. Before Shanté, battle rapping was a competition in rocking the crowd. Shanté was the first to make direct attacks on your opponent popular—and she was duly punished for it by rap legend and battle rap judge Kurtis Blow, who complained about not wanting to see the culture head in such a negative direction.

Roxanne Shanté’s first album “Bad Sister”—released in 1989, five long years after “Roxanne’s Revenge”"—features Shanté’s adolescent flow and boldness, full of intonations geared to freestyle ciphers and stage performances. The album includes songs about female empowerment like “Independent Woman” and the sex-positive track “Feelin’ Kinda Horny.” Lovers of the Notorious BIG might be interested in the fact Shanté samples the Isley Brother’s “Between the Sheets” in “Feelin’ Kinda Horny,” the same smooth bass lines that Biggie would later make iconic in his club-banger “Big Poppa.”

While her debut album is fun, it’s her second album “The BItch is Back” that I think hip-hop heads would do well to revisit. By the time “The Bitch is Back” dropped in 1992 hip-hop was past Roxanne Shanté. New queens named Latifah and Monie Love, JJ Fad and the Oaktown’s 357, Salt n Pepa and MC Lyte were dazzling audiences with their innovative takes on hip-hop culture, some with pop beats and dance moves, others with razor-sharp lyrics and unforgettable flows. Always down for a fight, Shanté positioned herself against these new emcees, attacking them all on “Big Mama.” When Kendrick Lamar dissed everyone in his “Control” verse, hip-hop heads celebrated him for energizing hip-hop and carrying on a long bold tradition of namedropping in battle rap. They pointed to rappers like 50 cent and Tupac Shakur, who built part of their careers on their aggressiveness and namedropping on the mic. These same hip-hop heads should have been pointing to Roxanne Shanté, who was dissing fools by name at fourteen and who never backed down from a battle, no matter how popular the foe.

“The Bitch is Back” features solid 90s boom bap production and daggering flows that remind me of Nas on Illmatic. That comparison is not made lightly. Both Nas and Roxanne Shanté came out of the Queens housing projects. Whoever doubts me should compare Shanté’s flows on “Deadly Rhymes” ft Kool G Rap with Nas’s flow “Live at the BBQ.” Compare Shanté’s verses on “Big Mama” to Nas’s verse on “Back to the Grill.” Conversations about Illmatic frequently point to rappers like Rakim and Slick Rick as precursors to Nas’s succinct and image-loaded storytelling. Why don’t they point to Shanté when Nas was clearly borrowing from her weaving rhyme schemes and brash shocking delivery in his early work?

“The Bitch is Back” starts with a female emcee hyping up Roxanne Shanté, as the “woman who pulled herself up by her bra straps and known to let them down occasionally.” It starts out strong with a muscular back-and-forth between Kool G Rap and Shanté on “Deadly Rhymes.” Shanté follows that up immediately with the fiery and controversial “Big Mama.” Shanté’s style has clearly matured by 1992. You no longer feel like you’re listening to a teenager. Her verses are thick with internal rhymes that smack you when you least expect it. The album ends with the fiery and feminist “Brothers Ain’t Shit,” calling out men on all their bullshit.

By 1992, hip-hop was booming with dozens upon dozens of classic albums being released. Heads were growing weary of Shanté’s antagonistic antics, whether it was dissing their favorite new acts or fabricating stories about having her record label pay for her PhD (contrary to the widespread rumors, Shanté does not have a PhD). I shouldn’t fail to mention that by 1987 KRS-One made Shanté’s name equivalent with “Steady Fucking.” Being put on blast by one of the greatest emcees ever would definitely do something to your rep. That alone would make it understandable why Shanté’s sophomore project did not take off as much as it deserves. “The Bitch is Back” is definitely worth a re-listen, however, especially in the moments where the radio keeps us hungry for lyrical, message-driven hip-hop.

I owe a lot of the information in this review to Kathy Iandoli’s new book God Save the Queens: The Essential History of Women in Hip-Hop. A glowing review is on its way once I make my way through the whole book. It’s going slow because Iandoli has me discovering and revisiting many emcees from the Golden Age of Hip-hop. It’s been fun. I recommend this album to anyone interested in golden age hip-hop, feminism, battle rap, and boom bap.