Perhaps that’s why she was able to craft one of the most audacious debuts in modern memory: Whack World, which strung together 15 one-minute songs, a gleefully fast blur of accents, genres, and outfits. ![]() ![]() Tierra Whack is acutely aware of an environment in which attention spans are shrinking and new music never stops coming out: “I’ll listen to a new song and I only want to hear 30 seconds of it before I tell you, ‘Nope - trash,'” she explained. Monster launched a narcotized sonic revolution that influenced an entire generation of rappers and proved that one man’s heartbreak is that same man’s resurrection. During “Codeine Crazy,” Future’s hoarse voice tracks every granular and painful aspect of addiction. On the two-part “Throw Away,” he’d compare a woman to a discarded pistol and then cry about the thought of her moving on. Future fashioned himself as a misogynistic philanderer who couldn’t shake his dependency on codeine and, more deeply, the love of his life. Then Monster introduced a grand, dramatic, and tragic arc. Fans revolted, critics scoffed, the engagement disintegrated, and Future was left for dead. Future had burned much of his goodwill after the release of his second studio album, Honest, which saw him simultaneously pivot to often edgeless, streamlined pop and loving odes dedicated to his then-fiancée, Ciara. In retrospect, the project was the first salvo that’d launch one of the most successful mixtape runs in music history, but when it arrived in 2014, it felt like a curiosity. On Monster, Future became more - more ruthless, more depraved, more destructive, more toxic. RELATED: ROLLING STONE’S BEST SONGS OF THE DECADE LIST It’s a shame those two won’t be hooking up to make music together in the decade to come. For instance, David Bowie had been making music for nearly 50 years when Kendrick Lamar released his sprawling, self-interrogating hip-hop masterwork To Pimp a Butterfly, but Bowie, eternally living in the moment, still took major influence from Kendrick in crafting his incredible farewell album Blackstar and it’s thanks to mutable pop visionaries like Bowie that the world can even imagine a pop context for something as challenging and multi-faceted as To Pimp a Butterfly. What was so fun about the 2010s was the way so many artists from across genres seemed to draw from the same well of wide-open possibility, of discovery happening in real time this is reflected in the albums that made our best-of list. Meanwhile, icons like Paul McCartney, Paul Simon, and John Prine kept up with the youngsters by making some of their best music in years, If indie-rock looped back to the Nineties, hip-hop did the opposite, evolving faster than any other style of music as it got more emo (thanks, Drake) and more political and more sonically deep-space out-there all the same time. ![]() After being left for dead in a chillwave puddle 10 years ago, indie-rock got back to its gloriously messy guitar roots, with bands like Parquet Courts, Japandroids and Car Seat Headrest making fantastic albums. In the 2010s, the biggest artists were also some of the biggest innovators - from Kanye West creating his monumental over-the-top opus My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy to Beyoncé connecting her life story to a history of African American expression on Lemonade to Chance the Rapper blowing up with a free mixtape that was full of psychedelic realism to Taylor Swift and Kacey Musgraves and Frank Ocean pushing the limits of the conservative genres they eventually broke out of entirely.Ĭountry had its most adventurous decade ever, whether that spirit came through in the fire-spitting lyrical honesty of the Pistol Annies, the hardbitten literariness of Jason Isbell or an almost unclassifiable work like Sturgill Simpson’s soul-tinged song-cycle A Sailor’s Guide to Earth.
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