Hip-hop 2011: Overlooked mixtapes

saxat från Pitchfork:

"For the past decade-plus, naysayers have repeatedly proclaimed hip-hop's death, but the genre hasn't just soldiered on, it's flourished. Of course, it's no longer the all-conquering Billboard-dominating machine it was at the beginning of the 2000s. Instead, there are a few top sellers (Eminem, Wayne, Nicki, Jay, Kanye, Drake, Rick Ross) some scattered newcomers (Kendrick Lamar, J. Cole, Wale, Big Sean) and then... the rest. An avalanche of DatPiff downloads and improperly tagged .rar files, the internet is packed with terabytes of under-celebrated rap music. While sites like ours have covered a wide variety of these artists, hip-hop is a genre that, in 2011, has a seemingly endless talent pool, yet few filters to sort the wheat from the chaff.

Here, we've sorted through hundreds of tapes (and successfully tuned-out thousands of DJ drops) in order to bring to you a picture of the worthy artists and scenes within hip-hop that haven't gotten much coverage over the course of the year. It's our attempt to look at hip-hop from new angles; so many times, the genre has been covered as if it were all about regions rather than artists. We attempt to look past that limited perspective to find people who might be working within established templates but are excelling within that formula, or artists who may not have fit into a convenient critical narrative but are still making work that stood apart."