Welcome to Media Events by Drew Millard, where you can find high-level cultural commentary at recession-proof prices. Today, we’re talking about the most important rap albums from 2011, a year full of new superstars and unexpected comebacks, and one whose then-nascent trends are now part of all the music around us. 

At some point in this post, a paywall will pop up. You will need to pay a dollar, and in exchange you will be able to read this blog post, as well as all the other posts on Media Events, for the next 24 hours. It’s a bargain, I promise. 

So squeeze into your skin-tight jeans and strap on your Mishka snapback with a gigantic eyeball on it, because we’re going back in time.

I have been working on this post for so long that I’ve forgotten why I actually started writing it. But, for whatever reason, a couple of weeks ago I became convinced that 2011 was an incredibly important year for modern hip-hop. My conviction I remained led me to make a gigantic list of every rap album and mixtape from that year I could remember, and then look up a bunch more. 

Honestly? 2011 was stacked as hell. It was also a transitional year for hip-hop, an interregnum as we transitioned from Atlanta’s mid-to-late-2000s hegemony to our current landscape, in which “the internet” is just as valid a region for rap to come from as any other. Though it was the year of Kanye and Jay Z’s Watch the Throne as well as Drake’s Take Care, Jay had already peaked, Kanye’s peak was near its end, and Drake’s peak hadn’t really begun. The old heads of today were 2011’s young whippersnappers, and though nobody realized it at the time a grip of new stars were about to come out of the woodwork. 

2011 would, at times, serve as the coming-out party for Black Hippy, SpaceGhostPurrp, Future, 2 Chainz, Danny Brown, Frank Ocean, Action Bronson, Meek Mill, A$AP Mob, and The Weeknd. Odd Future was going supernova; Das Racist was about to implode; Juggalos were nearing cultural normalization. It was the twilight of the era when the best way to get a rap career going was to release mixtape after mixtape until you blew up. Speaking of which, Kevin Gates and Chief Keef were just around the corner. 

A lot of the year’s significance, I think, comes from the fact that we were also in the midst of a technological shift. Radio was dying as the primary medium for hip-hop discovery, and blogs and YouTube were taking its place. Odd Future and Mac Miller each showed that the internet could be a tool to build a massive fan base while operating just outside of the mainstream, in the process becoming more popular than many who operated within it. Kreayshawn’s “Gucci Gucci” and Tyler, the Creator’s “Yonkers” helped set the new paradigm for the music video as a momentum-boosting tool. Nah Right and 2DopeBoyz were unfathomably important, but way less cool than Cocaine Blunts. Rap Tumblr was unfathomably popping; that fall my friend Kate and I started one on a whim and it literally blew up overnight. Like, A$AP Yams followed us. I don’t say that to brag, but to say that this shit was happening all the time and the barrier between indie and mainstream felt more porous than ever. 

It was also the last gasp of the pre-streaming era. Spotify had just launched that summer, but I don’t think I even downloaded it until late 2012, and only because I was by then a full-time music blogger and felt like I needed to for Work Reasons. For a few years, though, Spotify still sucked if you were a rap fan, because you could only get the “official” parts of an artist’s catalog — the good shit was still on Datpiff, Livemixtapes, and Bandcamp, or hiding in obscure Zippyshare links you could only find on somebody’s Blogspot. Until 2015, I still mainly listened to music on an iPod. I had so much music on my old MacBook that I had to offload it all to an external drive. I’ve still got it in the other room, and it has more French Montana on it than you can possibly fathom. 

All that is to say that the following list of the 21 best hip-hop projects of 2011 is entirely subjective. My rankings are based on a number of factors, including influence, importance, musical quality, and my own personal preferences. 

Honorable Mentions:

• Main Attrakionz — 808s & Dark Grapes I & II
• Trouble — December 17
• Chief Keef — Bang
• Fabolous — There Is No Competition 2
• Fiend — Tennis Shoes & Tuxedos
• Tyler, The Creator — Goblin
• French Montana — Coke Boyz 2
• Kanye West & Jay Z — Watch the Throne
• Lil Wayne — Tha Carter IV
• Keak da Sneak & DJ Fresh — The Tonite Show (Sneakacydal Returns)
• Travis Porter — From Day 1
• Gucci Mane & V-Nasty — BayTL (mostly not kidding)
• Lil Ugly Mane — Playaz Circle
• New Boyz — Too Cool to Care
• Vulkan the Krusader — V for Vendetta
• Kendrick Lamar — Section 80
• ADD+ — When Pigs Fly
• Ab-Soul — Longterm Mentality
• Action Bronson — Dr. Lecter
• Young Jeezy — TM:103
• Gunplay — Inglorious Bastards
• Mr. Motherfuckin’ eXquire — Lost in Translation

21. Starlito and Don Trip — Step Brothers

Everybody loves a good duo, and these dudes were a great duo. Tennessee titans trading punchlines over good beats, what else do you need? Also significant because Lito and Trip both got kinda screwed by the major label system of the late aughts and were able to put the pieces back together by teaming up. Both of these dudes are genuinely nice guys and were genuinely friends; I once interviewed Starlito and Don Trip called me up right after and was like “hey you can interview me too if you want.” 

20. DJ Quik — The Book of David

DJ Quik is a musical genius and we are lucky that he chooses to continue to put out records. Also, Suga Free is on this record which gives me an opportunity to remind you that Suga Free now lives in the woods and spends a lot of time fishing. 

19. Shady Blaze — Shady Bambino

There will be more “cloud rap” showing up on this list, and most of it is more directly tied to things that ended up happening in hip-hop later on, or was “significant” in its time. But if I had to pick something from the cloud-rap canon that I personally still enjoy, it’s 100 percent this bad boy. Entirely produced by Squadda B of Main Attrakionz, whose way with samples was wholly his own, pitching and looping shit so quickly that your brain starts vibrating between your ears. History will absolve Shady Blaze and Squadda B. 

18. YG — Just Re’d Up

Including this one not so much for the quality of the mixtape itself — like with Star Wars, the sequel is better — but because this was YG reaching his final form, synthesizing the LA Jerkin and gangster rap scenes and grasping towards a sound that would define his city for damn near the next decade. 

17. Rittz — White Jesus

I don’t think I can adequately explain how excited people were about this tape when it dropped. Rittz came into the game hot on the heels of Yelawolf, who was supposed to be the next Eminem but instead became the guy whose mid-career move to Nashville paved the way for Jelly Roll’s pivot to country. Anyways, Rittz was the connoisseur’s choice of country fast-rap, and still is. He never quite found his place in the industry and kinda ended up bouncing around, but my god could this dude rap. Also shouts out to DJ Burn One, who sequenced White Jesus and produced like half the tracks on it. 

16. Soulja Boy — Skate Boy

Soulja Boy was always sneaky-cool and kind of a genius, but this was the first time I can remember that people were like “oh shit, this Soulja Boy mixtape is tight.” I think this had a lot to do with him getting really into The Pack and making songs with Young L, another producer I would absolutely add to my underrated hip-hop producer fantasy football team. I profiled him one time and during the course of our day together he demanded that I let him freestyle for me to demonstrate how good he was at freestyling. Anyways, this tape is from the time where Soulja Boy made a bunch of shit that predicted the stuff that gets posted on Hyperpop Daily. 

15. French Montana and Waka Flocka — Lock Out

I’m not sure if anyone besides me actually enjoyed this mixtape, but I always thought it was cool. French and Waka were two of my favorite rappers back then, and so if nothing else this is a good excuse to shoehorn these two into one blurb. Actually wait no what am I hedging for, this mixtape was sick. There’s half a dozen songs on this thing that were absolutely better than whatever thing from 2011 that you like more than this. Those songs are “Weed & Drinks,” “Wingz,” “Dat All,” “Move that Cane,” and especially “I Want It” and “Promise.” The two guest verses from outside of French and Waka’s respective camps were Trouble and — I swear to god — Prodigy. 

14. Frank Ocean — Nostalgia, Ultra

I’ll talk later on in this list about how 2011 was the year that “PBR&B” briefly became a thing, but this is about Frank Ocean and Nostalgia, Ultra. This was the time when an R&B artist singing over Coldplay and “Electric Feel” and “Hotel California” was this really crazy thing that felt totally out of left field. Even still, Frank Ocean didn’t feel to me like this revolutionary-in-waiting. The main thing I remember about this mixtape was that I liked it because it was really, really chill. The secret is that making really, really chill music is also really, really hard. Additionally, you may be aware that a year after this mixtape Frank Ocean ended up taking over the world. 

13. Araabmuzik — Electronic Dream

No rapping on this record but oh my fucking god could this dude play finger-drums. Dipset Trance Party lifestyle forever. I would also like to shout out Salem’s King Night, because I would have put it in this list had it not come out in 2010. While it’s not a rap album per se, it had rapping on it. 

12. Blu — NoYork!

A record way too challenging to come out on a major label, and yet Blu used his major label budget to get beats from Flying Lotus, Samiyam, Daedelus, Knxwledge, and Sa-Ra Creative Partners. A great snapshot of the early 2010s Low End Theory-adjacent scene and also project whose unauthorized leak helped Blu garner an unfair reputation for being “difficult.” Also remember when he and ScHoolboy Q had beef? I was going to put ScHoolboy Q’s Setbacks on this list too but only now just realized that I forgot, so let’s say that ScHoolboy Q’s Setbacks was also the 12th-best hip-hop project of 2011. 

11. Curren$y and Alchemist — Covert Coup

We’re big Alchemist fans in our house. He makes beats that are for adults, but also not boring. I needed to get Curren$y on this list and this was the best thing he put out in 2011. Now that I think about it this probably is my favorite Curren$y album though. 

10. Juicy J — Blue Dream & Lean 

In 2011, Juicy J got re-popular by making two Rubba Band Business mixtapes with Lex Luger. Then at some point he signed to Wiz Khalifa’s Taylor Gang which was both a good short-term idea and a bad long-term one. I can’t remember exactly when the Taylor Gang thing happened, but regardless, Juicy J also put out Blue Dream & Lean that year. It’s my favorite of those three tapes because it’s a bit more artfully sequenced than the others and also finds him turning his new catchphrase “You say no to drugs / Juicy J can’t” into an entire song. You should really listen to all of them in order to understand how the Juice Man resurrected his career, but you’ll never be able to understand the power of the coalition he was able to put together of already-existing Three 6 Mafia fans, frat dudes, and hipsters unless you were there. 

9. Drake — Take Care

If we’re being honest, this album is the reason that Drake is Drake and not Big Sean. While Drake had put together some decent verses and some pretty good songs before this, Take Care was a seismic leap forward for Young Angel, a true artistic statement from an era when major label hip-hop albums were defined by their thirst for radio play and as a result sounded like disjointed, paint-by-numbers nonsense with interchangeable lists of collaborators. On Take Care, meanwhile, Drake created a musical world, one whose internal logic was so consistent that it somehow made sense that Drake gave Kendrick Lamar an entire song, “Buried Alive,” and that in retrospect feels like Kendrick’s first diss track against Drake. If Lil Wayne doesn’t come out at the Super Bowl halftime show I’m gonna be pissed. 

8. Lil B — I’m Gay

See, we weren’t done with cloud rap. This wasn’t the first time the Based God put out a cohesive project, but it definitely caught a lot of people by surprise. I feel like I should do a better job of selling this record to people because it’s one of the ones in my top ten that people might not remember and/or haven’t listened to, but this is the 15th blurb I’ve written today so I’m kinda cooked. Just listen to it, it’s good I promise. 

7. Future — Astronaut Status

I’m kinda cheating here because this technically came out in early January 2012, but it was the culmination of Future’s 2011 mixtape run that found him pumping out a bunch of hits (or at least soon-to-be-hits) like “Racks” and “Tony Montana” and “Same Damn Time” that straddled the line between novelty and incantatory profundity, and Astronaut Status is the tape that made a lot of people say “holy shit this guy’s really good at making music.” Future, of course, turned out to be one of the more influential artists of the decade. He carried on the tradition of the Dungeon Family (friendly reminder, he’s Rico Wade’s cousin), turned Wayne and Kanye’s experiments with AutoTune into an artistic practice that a bunch of people copied, was early to work with producers like Sonny Digital and Mike Will Made It and Metro Boomin, and also said and did a million cool things. Every music writer who existed in 2011 wrote at least one joke riffing on how there was a rap group called Odd Future, and also a rapper named Future, who was himself odd, and that they were popular at the same damn time. A $50 check from Noisey just materialized on my desk. 

6. Meek Mill — Dreamchasers 

There’s a video floating around from 2008 or so. It’s of Meek Mill, fresh out of jail, rail-thin with a head full of dreads, live on Batcave Radio, Philly’s old underground hip-hop show. Somebody throws on a beat, and he starts freestyling. You can barely hear the instrumental in the clip due to the sheer volume of Meek’s voice, full of all-caps urgency, but whatever it is, the DJ keeps having to loop it back because Meek Mill simply will not stop rapping. After rapping for six minutes straight, Meek declares he’s done, only to double back and go back in, his bars even more forceful than before. The video has more fake-out endings than the last Lord of the Rings movie, because Meek Mill fucking loves rapping. 

There’s a whole arc of Meek’s career before Dreamchasers. He dropped the Flamerz series while affiliated with T.I.’s Grand Hustle imprint, but things fell apart and he wound up on Rick Ross’s Maybach Music Group imprint alongside Wale, Pill, and Stalley. It was a great time for rappers who blew up on blogs. Parts of Dreamchasers haven’t aged particularly well, mainly the light-hearted R&B hooks that crop up for time and almost always sound goofy next to Meek’s intensity. But Meek’s star power overwhelms almost any flaws the tape might have. The title track, featuring Beanie Sigel, is still one of the most affecting rap songs I’ve ever heard, featuring Meek and Beans telling starkly detailed stories of poverty over a beatific instrumental courtesy of All Star. “Ima Boss” still goes hard. “Tony Story” is a masterful work of songwriting, and the beat is way weirder than I remember. The version of this one that’s on streaming services has different sequencing than the one I had on my iPod back in 2011, and it’s mixed in a way that makes some of the tracks sound completely different. Maybe there were sample issues or something, who knows. 

5. The Weeknd — House of Balloons

I forgot this came out in 2011 until I was almost done making this list, so that meant I had to bump all the other records up one spot. I would like to formally apologize to 2 Chainz’s verse on Jeezy’s “SupaFreak,” which was so good that I had initially ranked Jeezy’s TM:103 at 21 just so that I could mention how amazing it was. Anyways, this was a record that would, along with Frank Ocean’s Nostalgia, Ultra and How to Dress Well’s Love Remains, form the holy trinity of the fake genre “PBR&B.” I think that even though people agreed that The Weeknd was very good at the time, very few of us would have pegged him as the big winner of the class of 2011. Anyways, come for the light dubstep, stay for The Weeknd rap-singing over Siouxsie and the Banshees. 

4. SpaceGhostPurrp — BLVCKLVND RVDIO 66.6

I relistened to this for the first time in a while this morning, and I was surprised by how normal this sounded. If Lex Luger’s take on the classic Three 6 Mafia was to update it by making it sound hyper-intense and clean, and then get Juicy J to rap over it, Purrp’s was to lean into the murk and make the beats sound like they come from Hell. At least that was the idea; Purrp was also just a teenager so everything was also super goofy and punctuated by cartoon sounds. The dichotomy he forged between silly and somber, juvenalia and graveyard nihilism, ended up being way bigger than anyone could have possibly imagined, especially SpaceGhostPurrp. 

It felt like SGP was absolutely going to blow the fuck up in 2011 — his RVIDXR KLVN crew was implicitly positioned as a Floridian Odd Future, he showed up on that Juicy J mixtape on this list as well as on A$AP Rocky’s debut tape, and people talked about him like he was a production genius — it felt like the whole shebang was over by the end of 2012. He put out an album on 4AD of all places, it was really good, he did a few features here and there, then almost completely disappeared. It turns out that things did not go well for SpaceGhostPurrp for a while there; he had a falling out with A$AP Mob, fell into some money problems, semi-flirted with the alt-right, and created and deleted dozens of Twitter accounts. 

Anyway! SGP remains one of the most important artists of this era; as much as it can be said that a single person “invented” something in the arts, SpaceGhostPurrp invented both “SoundCloud Rap” as we understand it as well as “phonk,” both the term and the genre that is really popular among Eastern European dudes and also dudes who work in vape shops. (That’s not a shot at phonk, it’s just that I first found out that phonk was a thing when I kept hearing it in vape shops.) Also, Denzel Curry was in RVIDXR KLVN and he’s still huge. Purrp is still making music, and from what I can tell he seems to be more stable than he used to appear to be, so here’s to hoping he can still take over the world. 

One thing I do not miss about this era is artists switching the vowels in their names to Vs and Xs and shit and then having to google how their names are stylized every time I type them out. 

3. 2 Chainz — Codeine Cowboy / T.R.U. Religion

Lumping these mixtapes into one because they’re both good. I’m not going to write a big thing about 2 Chainz because everybody knows about 2 Chainz, but one thing I’m realizing is that 2011 was a big year for second chances. Juicy J made a comeback; DJ Quik put out his best record in years; Soulja Boy was in the middle of reinventing himself; Starlito and Don Trip teamed up for a comeback; Curren$y was in the midst of his post-Cash Money comeback; and Tauheed Epps, a former college basketball player turned member of the Ludacris-affiliated duo Playaz Circle, changed his name from Tity Boi to 2 Chainz and started rapping his ass off. Fun fact: 2 Chainz is older than Danny Brown, whose XXX we are about to talk about.

2. Danny Brown — XXX

Oh, you thought I’d forgotten Danny Brown on that long-ass list of rappers’ circa-2011 second acts? Nope! I did that on purpose because I wanted to create some “dramatic tension” that hopefully enticed you to keep reading. Anyways, Danny Brown became a rap star by making a record about how he was too old to become a rap star. Or at least, that’s one of the things XXX was about. It also deals with Detroit’s urban decay and the choices people’s circumstances force them to make, plus mind-boggling amounts of drugs amid zany shit-talk and dark jokes. Brown was one of the earliest American artists to incorporate a Grime influence into his work, and his sonic adventurousness helped widen the sonic conception of underground rap — not to mention help him get oodles of show money from playing dance festivals, setting the template for how rappers would pay the bills for years to come. 

1. A$AP Rocky — LIVE.LOVE.A$AP

There really was a murderer’s row of talent on this thing, and Rocky had enough charisma to keep the focus on him. He trades bars with ScHoolboy Q, Main Attrakionz, SpaceGhostPurrp, and Fat Tony like he’s trying to assemble the internet-rap Superfriends; he gets Clams Casino to make a non-ambient banger in the form of “Bass”; Squadda B’s instrumental for “Leaf” is so sublime that it makes the absolute nonsense Rocky raps over it sound deep. Texas producer Beautiful Lou’s beat for “Kissin’ Pink” is an abstract masterpiece and probably the most leftfield instrumental that anyone’s ever busted out a Big Moe flow over. You already know Burn One’s all over this thing, too. 

Not only the record that still holds up the best from 2011, but also, conveniently for me, the most representative of the time. A$AP Rocky successfully took all these micro-movements happening in internet rap, from cloud rap to phonk/SoundCloud rap to country-rap revivalism to using the word “swag” as every possible part of speech to a bunch of other stuff I’m probably forgetting, and blew it up to stadium size. Back then as is the case today, Rocky wasn’t the greatest rapper in the world, but he was really cool, he had fantastic taste, and he was really, really, really ridiculously good-looking. Pair that with a couple instantly iconic videos in “Peso” and “Purple Swag,” toss in the genius-level visionary that was A$AP Yams, and you get a mixtape that both announced Rocky as a star and positioned him at the epicenter of a new generation of hip-hop. 

Did that new generation turn out exactly how we assumed it would? Absolutely not. Purrp went off the deep end, Yams died of an overdose, A$AP Ty Beats, who produced “Peso” and “Purple Swag,” left the group and I haven’t heard about him since. Too many people on this mixtape who should have blown up didn’t reach the level they should have, leaving room for cheap imitations to step in. But the specter of 2011 is still haunting hip-hop, and maybe that’s enough.