9 Afro Dystopian Rap Albums As Dark And Droll As 2019

The decade is on its deathbed. The empire has crumbled. America's jig is up. The 2010s will likely go down as the deadliest era in rap, too. We lost too many voices — to overdoses and unexplainable tragedy — before their prime (Some of them: Lil Skies, Mac Miller, Fredo Santana, Doe B, Bankroll Fresh, XXXTentacion, Nipsey Hussle, Juice WRLD). The only thing worse is the unspoken irony. In the winter of our discontent, so much chart-topping pop rap sounded mind-numbingly content.

As the year went on, I found myself listening to a lot of rap that was hard to listen to — full of sonic dissonance and emotional distance, and pregnant with something rarely present in dystopian tropes: the sounds of blackness. A couple of years ago Angelica Jade Bastien wondered aloud in Vulture, She was talking about the cinematic and small-screen boom in dystopian narratives and our predictable absence from them. Too many dystopian threads