Top 5 Alive 2023

Written By: Anthony Seaman

         The concept of being Top 5 Dead Or Alive has been around in rap since before anyone ever took the time to write it down as a hard list. Jadakiss claims ownership of the phrase, and it’s Jadakiss so why bother arguing even if he’s definitely not the actual first. This phrase has been the spark to hundreds of heated debates, where names of cemented first ballot Hall Of Famers are conjured (the classic 5 being Biggie, Pac, Jay, Nas, Rakim) rappers who defined culture in ways we tend to forget due to their omnipresence (Kanye, Drake, Wayne, Eminem, Snoop) regional Gods (Scarface, Ice Cube, Common, Busta Rhymes, Skepta) alien level wordsmiths (Lupe Fiasco, Andre 3000, Black Thought, Ghostface, Noname), underground forefathers (MF DOOM, Roc Marciano, Kool G Rap, Kool Keith, Aceyalone), innovators who turned their backs to the music industry or passed too soon (Big L, Big Pun, Lauryn Hill, Mos Def, Nipsey Hussle) once in a lifetime characters (Pimp C, ODB, E-40, Missy Elliott, Busta Rhymes), and new generation legends (J. Cole, Kendrick, Future, Nicki, Young Thug). There’s never any trophies given out to whoever is considered the Best Rapper Alive every year the way sports send Most Valuable Player awards to their brightest stars. This is an attempt to correct that. In art there are no winners and losers, but rap has toed the line between competitive sport and art more than any other format. The quest to out-wit and best an opponent goes back to the days of kids on street corners playing the dozens or breakdancing in front of crowds for approval. Hip-Hop at its core is about sharing the perspective of the auertor and DJ in unison while a crowd parties or nods on, and every calendar year 5 artists stick out as the most essential MC’s who complete that task. Some years there’s only 2 or 3 standouts, some years you can choose between 10 people. The core of this award comes to these categories;

Quality Of Rapping

• Are you expanding the playbook with flow, presence, lyricism, content, songwriting?

• Are you better than your peers?

• How often do we as listeners sit back in amazement, laughter, or appreciation at the level of rapping we’re listening to?

Quality Musical Output

• How good was the album / features / singles you officially released this year?

• Did you put out multiple quality projects or was it a mixed bag?

• Are we constantly going back to enjoy the work you created even months later?

Impact On The Genre

• What is the conversation within your sphere centered around, and how much of it is you as an artist?

• Did you break out of your sub-genres sphere into the greater zeitgeist or into multiple other realms?

• Are you equally or more popular than you were last year?

• When we look back at this year, who are the people that will stand out?

        Sales never come into play, what the MetaCritic average is for your last project is irrelevant. When you leave your house, check your timeline, kick it with friends, open YouTube, who do you want to hear? Who can you not avoid? Who is everyone trying to sound like? Who is everyone trying to be better than? Who is living up to their own shadow? Who will we look back on in 10 years and think about most? Being underground or mainstream is a minor note, but rather what waves did you cause in your scene? How does it compare to the other scenes within this sprawling ecosystem of hip-hop? There’s no pre-set requirements for the Top 5 like we’re the college football bowl games, it can be all underground, all international, all mainstream, all west coast, all auto-tune, all middle aged; but whoever is selected are the best of the best. Each of these artists has created masterful work, outshined their peers, become representatives of a time or a scene that they are champions of, or are just so omnipresent and openly praised in the hip-hop world that they can't be denied.

Veeze

Midwest (Detroit, MI)

First Top 5 Alive - 1st Midwest All-Star

Best Verses: “Not A Drill” Verse 2 - “GOMD” - “ATL Freestyle Pt. 1 & Pt. 2”

He’s the king of quotables, an elite beat selector, performs gripping hooks and punchline filled verses with a mumbled drawl, and even as a low energy performer he has the charm every slacker character in entertainment has ever had. Ganger (Deluxe) is a 26 song odyssey into classic tropes; groupie love, drugs, quality clothing and hi-fi descriptions of how much cooler he is than you. Every thought flows without a filter, shouting out legends of generations past, NBA role players, and his constant oscillation between cocky king and anxious. The balance between room rattling bangers and hyper intuitive bar crafting hasn’t been pulled off this seamlessly since The Notorious B.I.G. was huffing and puffing in and out of limos. Michigan street rap has bubbled to nuclear levels over the last 2 years. Pouring together scam rap and West Coast indebted drug dealer tales has turned Flint and Detroit into epicenters of style within the hip-hop industry. 42 Dugg, Babyface Ray, Icewater Vezzo, Sada Baby, Babytron and Tee Grizzley have become pillars, influencing or making fans out of the biggest mainstream stars (Yachty, Lil Baby, Future). Few have peaked public interest more than Veeze who's as funny off record as he is when the mic is live. He'll roast fits on Twitter, disassociate in a photoshoot, and keep the childlike goofiness that is typically buried away with layers of stuffy bravado.

Building upon an endless amount of Soundcloud loosies and features have set the bedrock for Veeze to build his own messy technicolor mansion atop. “Not A Drill”, “GAIG”, “Get Lucki”, “GOMD” and “Sexy Liar” all stack up next to whoever your favorite analog obsessed underground acts may be, while the hooks and beats outlast any mainstream contemporaries attempts to be innovative. Song structure is secondary, allowing his consciousness to be free over ethereal keys and time flattening percussion. Some songs are bookended with refrains, some are endless poems detailing life as someone who still can’t believe they’re famous. Ganger is curated as whole much like it's individual parts. It's a sprawling hard drive dump from the hundreds of hours spent in studios across the country the last 4 years that would sound more unfocused if the music slipped enough upon listening for you to care. A majority of the beatmakers are local stars or relatively unknown names (MitchGoneMad, Rocaine, Tye Beatz, Pat Swish) imprinting their names to the game outside of one major placement from Pooh Beatz (“What’s Poppin?” / “Suge”). Without super producers and allowing modern styles like NY Drill and Jersey Club to inject themselves in, it allows Veeze to expand from within. Bit by bit deepening the playbook of what Detroit rap can sound like. He’s created the kind of catalog that can only be successful today; so distinctly in conversation with the mainstream trends but proudly adverse to hooks and traditional “singles”. Like an episode of Seinfeld you lose focus for 2 minutes and you fine yourself in a whole new world scrambling to connect how we got here, most of the time with no reason to be found. Fresh life has overgrown from Detroit into the rap zeitgeist, with Veeze as the newest and brightest bud within the knotted vines.

Billy Woods

East Coast (New York City, NY)

3rd Top 5 Alive ('19, '22) - 9th East All-Star

Best Verses: “Soundcheck" Verse 1 - "Facetime" Verse 2 - "Living Curfew"

    At any given moment Billy Woods is going to rap at a higher level than any working rapper. Maps is the 2nd installment into his full length collabs with underground wizard Kenny Segal, and a Travel Channel ready anthology about the pro’s, cons and oddities of tour life and intercontinental travel in a post-pandemic world. We Buy Diabetic Test Strips, the newest release from his Armand Hammer outfit with Elucid harkens back to the swirling familial world building of Aquemini, but one that has Fantastic Damage and Vaudville Villian as North Stars instead of Parliament Funkadelic and A Tribe Called Quest. While most of the underground follows suit with the Griselda indebted neo-boom bap sound that is easy to replicate (one MAYBE two verses per song with no hook about clothes, drugs and “being the realest” and a simple drum break and loop combo) Woods has pushed the envelope far the other way. Anything Segal, JPEGMAFIA, August Fanon, El-P, DJ Haram provide (along with a sea of other collaborators) are from the farthest corners of their hard drives. Awkward time signatures, living sounds never looping, instruments from across the globe; nothing is off limits. His voice is brooding, and nearly every verse is a verbalization of impending doom from the perspective of someone who’s too aware to ignore what seems inevitable. Retiring from rap and becoming a writer of theological essays or Kafka style novels wouldn't surprise anyone, as his pen game stand shoulder to shoulder with some of the best in modern times. Even the comedic moments that slide in sound fit for a gallows stand up set rather than conversational wise cracks. Layering in singers or echoing war chants provides a depth that the gritty brutality the other side of the East Coast spectrum rarely provides. 

            Give him ethereal mood music, it becomes the canvas to appreciate disastrous smells and ethnic foods (“Agriculture”). Pass along glitching sci-fi scores, you’ll receive new couplets to live life by and poetic recollections of Larry David like situations (“Woke Up And Asked Siri How I’m Gonna Die”). Sloppy late night jazz renditions lead to musings of a New York native's melancholy about the world that molded him changing before his eyes (“NYC Tapwater”). Aesop Rock, Noname, $ilkmoney, Danny Brown, Curly Castro, Earl Sweatshirt; take your pick. They’ve all paled next to Woods. Elucid is his only match on record, but with his own southpaw style anyone at any moment can be duped next to Elucid. To top it all off Woods’ Backwoodz Studioz imprint has also had an explosion of releases from Fatboi Sharif, Blockhead and Fielded, creating a ground zero for some of the most inventive hip-hop and rap adjacent music in America. Raising popularity, praise from his peers, quality albums, and a shock factor to every verse that leads one down a YouTube rabbit hole on African history or a visual essays about what happened to sour diesel weed have allowed Woods to become a star in today’s online inhabiting hip-hop, and an all time legend in the process. 

Danny Brown

Midwest (Detroit, MI)

2nd Top 5 Alive ('11) - 10th Midwest All-Star

Best Verses: “Ground Zero" - "Down Wit It" Verse 1 - "Orange Juice Jones" Verse 1

    After 15 years of being a professional rapper Danny Brown has pushed, destroyed and rebuilt expectations of what hip-hop should sound like 10 times over. He's been an underground institution, a proud representative of Detroit's rich musical history, and an artist constantly looking to find new highs in every sonic basin he can screech into. For years XXXX, a follow up to the breakthrough album XXX, had been teased as the next installment to the Danny Brown discography. Instead Scaring The Hoes and Quaranta keep the same format of his famed breakout, just in 2 different bodies. XXX showed the duality of Danny; one side of the album dedicated to the obnoxious drug fueled Tazmania devil zooming within, while the other was a grown ass man who is thoughtful and well aware of the struggles he and his cohorts survived. Scaring The Hoes found the chaotic half of himself diving full steam into the glitchy chasms of experimental genre fluid rap he helped create with Old and Atrocity Exhibition, but has excavated to new depths thanks to collaborator and unabashed fan JPEGMAFIA. The duo released Scaring The Hoes and an accompanying DLC Pack that saw JPEG's production at it's most ambitious, bringing the motor mouthed Danny into a zone he hadn't sniffed in nearly a decade. Diving back and forth with JPEG for 2 projects reminds us just how nimble Danny can be. Whether it's over blown out industrial drums or over-compressed R&B samples he's at home throwing his feet on the coffee table. The absurdity of his lyrics remains intact behind muffled vocal mixing making his already signature register a new instrument all together.

  On the flipside Quaranta is his most somber album. Kassa Overall, Quelle Chris, Skywlkr, and Kaelin Ellis headline the production team that strips back all the psychedelia JPEGMAFIA bathed him in. The beats at times only feature drums and some light ambiance letting the dark side of his accidental exile from rap pour out. Reignited struggles with addiction, the pandemic and a budding podcast had kept Brown busy since the 2019's uknowhatimsayin'?, but now sober he takes the time to recognize his slip ups and what he's learned along the way. He's loved, lost, looked inward, and for the first time seems so sick of what he's done that he might finally have reached a turning point. The album cover shows everything this album represents; the barren headshot of a man who has over his whole career used cartoons or heavily edited photographs as covers to create a Dionysian monster that sparsely showed any humanity. Thematically the shame and regret from his partying have always snuck into songs, but now there's nothing to hide them behind. Returning from solitude as just a guy who's been through the wringer rather than a pill popping sleep paralysis demon gives him the opportunity to master a new chamber. At 42 years old he's the head of Bruiser Brigade (ZelooperZ, Bruiser Wolf, J.U.S., Fat Ray, and Chip$), a label that he's carried the freak flag for for over a decade that in the last few years has created critical darlings who are just beginning to go farther than Danny ever could. The Danny Brown Show podcast exists at the nexus of stand up comedy, rap, and deep Internet culture and is a riot that platforms his sparkling charisma. At this point in his career he's rapping with friends, expanding a legacy that is already lauded in the eyes of fans, and is an unquestioned Hall Of Fame rapper. Now he's well becoming a well rounded entertainer and person, for what seems like the first time.

MIKE

East Coast (New York City, NY)

First Top 5 - 4th East Coast All-Star

Best Verses: “Sentry” - "Snake Charm" - "Thug Anthem"

           This one is a long time coming. MIKE has been the torch bearer for New York's haziest deconstructions of what rap music can be for nearly a decade and it all came to a head this year. Beware Of The Monkey was released late December of 2022 and was the bgeninnig of a 12 month tear featuring his solo album Burning Desire, a collaborative tape with Wiki and The Alchemist titled Faith Is A Rock, and an instrumental tape under his DJ Blackpower pseudonym Dr. Grabba. As an artist he's always toyed with analog fuzz, the static of old TV's and the disjointed chops of distorted samples creating new universes on each track. Reflecting the brain fog birthed of trauma and the coping mechanisms to tamper down said trauma was his specialty. After each release you were always left rooting for MIKE to find peace through his sorrows, and while the pitfalls always show up he's jumping over them with glee for the first time. He weak spot was always as a writer, with his nostalgia laden production and freefrom pockets doing the heavy lifting to keep one interested. Maturity and expansion into working with more battle tested rappers has forced growth in his writing to which he's not only competent but straight up witty in his wordplay. On "Bless" with 10k cohort Sideshow, MIKE dishes quick and tight body blows about self improvement, while on another Alchemist produced track, "Sentry",  he produces existential questions and loose thoughts in a speedy flow that perfectly counters Earl's slurred musings.
                 Only through a full body of work does MIKE truly spread his wings. Burning Desire (which may be his best album to date), is meant to quell short attention spans with 2 dozen short songs bursting at the edges with everything from the blown out tension of "African Sex Freak Fantasy", the speedy horn ensemble "98", and the sensual bounce of "Set The Mood". Don't look to closely into the labeled "concept" of the album (billed as a dark romantic horror) but rather lay out and enjoy the journey through the most accessible album in a catalog of challenging futuristic hip-hop. Stripped back from the ambition of Burning Desire is Faith Is A Rock, a one-v-one barfest with fellow Yankee representative Wiki. The duo have pefected thier chemistry over the years and leave space for the other to act as a yin to the others yang. Wiki is a more traditional lyricist, but MIKE takes every opportunity to one up or draw even with someone I previously saw as tiers above him as a spitter. This entire year could be a fluke where verses like "Real Hip Hop" and "Thug Anthem" live in a vacuum, letting MIKE return to being a discombobulated mumbler through the malaise. But more likely than not we're watching in real time someone grow into their final form, not just as a musician but a man ruling indie rap. In this time period the label he heads, 10k Global, also saw 16 new releases hit the world from himself, Sideshow, Jadasea, DJ Paradise, and Niontay among others with everyone gaining steam in their own careers. As his cohort pursue greatness in their own form, MIKE watches his popularity grow by proxy. Burning Desire saw his first entry into a chart of any kind peaking his head into the Apple Music charts upon its release. How the world accepts his art is something only time can tell, but at the trajectory he's going he'll be accepted and praised with open arms.

RXK Nephew

East Coast (Rochester, NY)

First Top 5 - 2nd East Coast All-Star

Best Verses: “Long Song" - "Yeezy Boots" - "Minute Made" Verse 1

            In 50 years when i’m a grandfather, when this website has been bought out by a BlackRock company or TikTok, and we all have to wear heat retardant suits to go outside and check the mail, I’m probably not going to have my grandbaby sitting on my knee telling him about much because I already have the memory of a goldfish at 26 years old. But deep down in the recesses of my brain will be the memory of me cry laughing in the middle of the night listening to “American Tterroristt” for the first time. 3 years ago when it came out RXK Nephew was still in my mind the Robin to RX Papi’s Batman, an idea that today could not be farther from the truth. From then to now everything that made “American Tterroristt” one of the single funniest and most exciting rap performances of the decade has been smoothed out into clear form. The unpredictable punchlines of a young Wayne, the extremely online nonsensical explorations of Lil B, the trap lord ruthlessness of Gucci Mane, the targeted battle rap mindset of Papoose and Joe Budden; it’s all there and entering new levels release by release. The last 12 months has seen 9 albums hit streamers, each one distinct from the other capturing boom bap, electro-fusion, traditional trap, whatever you consider the funky nostalgia of Harry Fraud, and plugg music to name a few.

The way his bars are crafted sound like scribblings of a madman. He can hyper analyze any situation down to the aglets on a pedestrian's shoes, or come up with jabs that seem fit for a middle school lunch table. The drunken piling onto a single target could go on for a couplet, or could go on for 5 minutes straight without a breath. You never know exactly what version of Neph you’re going to get day to day and in that he’s the perfect living totem for what 2023 rap has been. In a post-Drake world everyone can do every kind of sub-genre. You either become a chameleone to the world around you or you burrow deeper into yourself to create an irreplicable sound that white kids with a cracked FL Studio program in Europe will remaster in a way you couldn’t have imagined in 18 months tops. Somehow Neph has done both, a distinct punch in Pablo Juan-ish delivery that ranges from silky sweet talker to manic Mr. Hyde that can find a home in any beat. Love songs, drug abusing songs, party songs, serving family songs, fuck Kanye songs. Whatever the newest album is is a safe entry point into his catalog because no matter what the next 2 tapes to drop will make you think it’s a whole new man. Sometimes with these “best rapper” convos we look purly at bars (of which Neph has when he’s in the mood) but we’ll overlook how much fun someone is to listen to, how exciting and invigorating their style is. Carrying the Real RX torch from Papi as he dips in and out of jail forced Nephew to be a monster. The furvor in making music at such a high creative clip doesn’t even feel like something he’s in control of; a year like this only comes from an unfathomable ether. You can never harness it, but just lean into it when you’ve been chosen by it. If there’s anything Nephew has perfected this calendar year it’s letting loose and we’re all to be thankful for that.