Great rap cliques come to define eras. NWA, the Soulquarians, and Atlanta’s Dungeon Family steered the 1990s from toys in cereal boxes and grunge, towards inner-city neo-soul, G-funk, and stanky Southern-rap. Reflect on the early 2000s and you best mention the colour coordination of Dipset, the commercial strong-hold of G-Unit and later, the globe-straddling romance of Young Money.
But who will people remember when they come to look back on the era we live in now? They’ll be talking about Top Dawg Entertainment, the record label built around Black Hippy members Kendrick Lamar, ScHoolboy Q, Jay Rock and Ab-Soul.
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Sure, TDE are not the only rap crew likely to be looked on with retrospectively gold-tinted glasses. A$AP Mob and Pro Era have been doing it for the East Coast for about a minute, Gucci’s Brick Squad have held it down, and Odd Future have integrated rap, commerce and the internet so well that they’re bound to get themselves a two-hour Culture Show special in 2034. But none of them made the astronomic indent on 2014 like TDE. Yes, it’s only been two months but the collective have started the year proving they’re still nothing to fuck with.
Kicking it off at the beginning of the year with a total of seven Grammy nominations, Kendrick scored TDE a homerun. He didn’t actually win any awards but who cares? The committee legitimised Kendrick’s music with the nomination and the public’s almost unanimous reaction to him losing solidified his position as the people’s champion.
good kid, m.A.A.d city is the cornerstone to this prestige, but it’s a year’s worth of extra-curricular work that cemented it. Everyone knows about the “Control” verse but it’s not the only thing that Kendrick did in 2013. Last year he featured on thirty-one different tracks, twelve of them official single releases. From Emeli Sande to 50 Cent to The Lonely Island, Kendrick’s ubiquity is making him a star. This approach, albeit on a smaller scale, is implemented with the rest of TDE’s roster, with ScHoolboy Q, Ab-Soul and Co racking up the guest features. No artist on the label put out a record in 2013, yet it was probably the label’s busiest year. They were building toward something, with Anthony “Top Dawg” Tiffith announcing that the collective plan is to put out six records this year.
The first of those releases was Cilvia Demo from Tennessee native Isaiah Rashad, who was the first non-Californian artist to join. Rashad’s place in the crew seems natural, stoking the fire of the crew’s Dungeon Family-cum-next-gen-Cali flow. He breathes introspection and anxiety into soundscapes that owe as much to Andre 3000 as they do the West Coast, while consistently producing hooks that would make Chance The Rapper jealous.
The hooks on the record’s two stand-out tracks are provided by freshman TDE family member, SZA (whose 2013 track “Aftermath” tops any atmospheric hug-your-pillow lowkey pop playlist). The first, “Ronnie Drake”, is a melancholic shout-out of love to the fam, “the strippers, the hoes” in the face of police discrimination. The second, “West Savannah”, provides the narrative of staying up all night listening to OutKast and not talking about suicide. She has the voice to bring Top Dawg’s music directly into the ears of passive listeners, not only producing her own music, but offering an accessible vocal into the hook of their choruses. They know it, too, slotting her nicely onto another feature on the group’s second release of 2014, ScHoolboy Q’s Oxymoron.
It’s convenient that Rashad’s Cilvia Demo and Schoolboy’s Oxymoron dropped within a month of each other. ScHoolboy features on the closing track of Rashad’s record, “Shot U Down”, a song which flows nicely into the first track on Oxymoron, acting as the calm hustle before the storm of ScHoolboy’s shouts of “Gangsta, gangsta, gangsta”. It’s an example of how the artists within TDE’s roster compliment each other, standing upon one root sound, but branching out into slightly different directions, starting to really build their own empire.
Released today, pre-sales of Oxymoron are nearly twice that of good kid, m.A.A.d city, a strong indicator of how TDE have increased their spread over the last year. The record itself is wild, songs like “Gangsta” and the Jay Rock featuring “Los Awesome” transporting you to a coke-white Escalade, ashin’ blunts while cruising down the interstate. The record has its cute moments too. The Suga Free featuring track “Grooveline Pt 2” spits lines about “your pussy juice being super sweet” over what could be the score to a D’angelo-inspired rap-cosplay porno. Or maybe it’s just the assonance of purely blunted fucking. What did you expect, cuddles and boxes of chocolate? ScHoolboy Q goes hard.
The rawness of Oxymoron is a nice counterpart to the quietly confident stoner charm of Isaiah Rashad. Rashad’s work is raw in a different way, honest, hitting up the listener directly. In an interview with Complex, he stated: “ It ain’t like with the intention of turning up to it, that’s not my shit. I just want you to vibe out to it. Have a good time and put you in a certain mood. It’s real peaceful, real calmful”.
In an interview with The Breakfast Club, ScHoolboy Q noted that competition within the TDE camp sparrs them onward into creating better material. “When I got over there to TDE they motivated me, you know? I was Kendrick hype man and I saw it keep growing. Like he was having like 30 people at the show then next time we do a show it’s 100 people. Then from 100 to 200 and so on and so on. Now it’s sold out. You get what I’m saying? It just motivated me like I’mma really do this next project. I’mma really, really do it”.
Like Wu-Tang detailed New York or Death Row sketched Compton’s streets, this year, Top Dawg Entertainment are reshading hip-hop in current-day California.
And they’ve still got four albums left to release this year. Fuck me.
Follow Ryan on Twitter: @RyanBassil
