RAP REVIEWS DAILY

 Quick Verdict I Love College was 2009's frat-rap anthem — a Weezer-sampling, keg-standing, bottom-shelf-vodka-drinking celebration of higher education that charmed enough listeners to go platinum and become one of the year's most recognisable singles. Asher Roth seemed like a genuine commercial prospect. Asleep in the Bread Aisle, the debut album that accompanied it, received mixed reviews but demonstrated enough personality to generate real interest in what came next. What came next was two ye

 Quick Verdict In 1999, at the height of his commercial success, Mase walked away from a multi-platinum rap career to become a pastor. Harlem World had gone four times platinum. He was one of the most commercially successful Bad Boy artists of the late 90s. He studied divinity, joined a church, and for four years said nothing about music. Welcome Back arrived in 2004 as his official return to rap. The reception was brutal. The album debuted at number 4 on the Billboard 200 with 155,000 first-wee

 Quick Verdict In 2005, Mike Jones introduced himself to the world by asking a question over and over again: Who? Mike Jones! The call and response was the catchphrase that launched his career. Who Is Mike Jones?, his debut album, debuted at number 3 on the Billboard 200 and went platinum on the strength of Still Tippin' — a legitimate piece of Houston rap that placed him alongside Paul Wall and Slim Thug in the brief mainstream window the Swisha House sound opened. By 2009, the window was close

 Quick Verdict Blueface became famous in late 2018 because he raps deliberately off the beat — a quirk that produced viral memes, a Cash Money Records deal, and a genuine hit in Thotiana, which peaked at number 8 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2019 with Cardi B and YG remixes pushing it into the mainstream. Find the Beat, released March 13, 2020 after three separate delays, is the debut studio album. The title is either the most honest thing Blueface has ever said or an admission that he still has

 Quick Verdict The DeAndre Way is Soulja Boy's third studio album and his most personal — titled after his actual birth name, intended as his artistic statement of maturity and growth. He said he wished to collaborate with Jay-Z, Lil Wayne, Kanye West, and Eminem. None of them appeared. 50 Cent appeared instead, alongside Trey Songz and Lil B. Rap Radar ranked it number 3 on their list of the worst albums of 2010. The album sold 70,000 copies total — Soulja Boy's lowest-selling album to that poi

 Quick Verdict Flo Rida had the formula absolutely nailed. Low sampled T-Pain and a trap beat and went number one for ten weeks in 2007. Right Round sampled Dead or Alive's You Spin Me Round and went number one for nine weeks in 2009. The formula was: sample a recognisable hook, add electro production, deploy Flo Rida over the top, and collect platinum certifications. Only One Flo Part 1, released November 2010, represented the first time the formula visibly failed. The album peaked at number 10

 Quick Verdict In My Defense arrives five years after The New Classic — an album we already reviewed on this list, rating it 3/10 for the exact same reasons we are giving its sequel a 2/10. In five years of public controversy, breakups, label departures, a shelved second album (Digital Distortion), a failed EP, and what was clearly a deeply difficult period personally and professionally, Iggy Azalea assembled enough material to release a second album. Metacritic scored it 39. Pitchfork described

 Quick Verdict Yung Joc arrived in 2006 with two of the year's biggest Southern rap singles — It's Goin' Down and You Know What It Is — and a debut album New Joc City that debuted at number 3 on the Billboard 200. Hustlenomics arrived in August 2007 as the follow-up. PopMatters called him the Good Charlotte of rap: not particularly skilled, not particularly authentic, just in-tuned enough to what's moving units to shrewdly follow suit. Rolling Stone said the album had slack diction, mild drawl a

 Quick Verdict Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded is a genuinely divided album that functions as two entirely separate projects stitched together and calling itself one. The first half — eight tracks of hard rap featuring Cam'ron, Rick Ross, 2 Chainz, Nas, and Drake — is some of Nicki Minaj's best work. The second half is a Euro-trance, dance-pop, and milquetoast R&B experiment that abandons everything that made the first half work. Pitchfork described the dance section as ranging from brittle Euro-tra

 Quick Verdict Blacc Hollywood is Wiz Khalifa's fifth studio album and his first to debut at number one on the Billboard 200 — which makes it the most commercially successful of his career and simultaneously one of his least artistically interesting. Released in August 2014, it debuted at number one with 90,000 copies and has since gone Gold. Metacritic: 54. Pitchfork: 5.6. Spin's Brandon Soderberg described Wiz as a master of half-assed hedging. Consequence of Sound said he was sticking to his

 Quick Verdict Speedin' Bullet 2 Heaven is Kid Cudi's fifth studio album, a 91-minute, 26-track double album of lo-fi grunge and alternative rock with no rap, no guest features, Beavis and Butt-Head skits throughout, and production so raw it sounds recorded on a phone. Pitchfork gave it a 4.0 and called it a failure, and not even a noble one. Anthony Fantano of The Needle Drop gave it zero out of ten — his worst score for any album in 2015 — calling it the musical equivalent of walking a mile on

 Quick Verdict 12 Inches of Snow is the debut album by Snow — a white Canadian rapper from a Toronto housing project who rapped in Jamaican patois, spent eight months in prison for assault, watched his song Informer become number one in the US while he was behind bars, was denied entry to America because of his criminal record, and still somehow ended up with a platinum album and one of 1993's biggest hits. The story of Snow is extraordinary. The album around Informer is considerably less so. Th