i was hoping someone would have the Actually Good Rap lists on this thread

rap is inadequately subgenred imho. there is no way to convey This Thing

i think what you're saying is you're unfamiliar with the various subgenres. off the top of my head conscious backpacker bounce east coast west coast dirty south trap and there are rappers who are genres to themselves like mf doom, del, or kool keith

i think this is true but have some reservations because i have tried to do "clearly these two are similar" exercises before and found that no widely used label covered

i think an issue here is that "rap" as a genre tracks the vocalist specifically. it's uncommon for that portion of the music to stay nailed to a particular genre. the beatmakers are in control of a lot of the musical feel, and those are chosen by the producer. rapper might be producer, might not

there are relatively few producer-forward albums that use multiple rappers, comparatively. some producers will release albums of their instrumentals that have been used on various rap tracks.

it's a lot like what gets labeled with the "EDM" genre, there is wide variability, and it has names, but if you're not swimming in it you dont necessarily know what those names are

i also think edm has this problem, crucially i know all of the edm labels and also find them inadequate to explain e.g. why i think like four dubstep artists are almost idm but there is no label describing the manner in which they are almost idm

tldr my knowledge of rap labels is terrible, and also, i am terrible about labels so really i am the problem twice here

dubstep? you mean nu-skool breaks?

or do you mean, like, grime?

trying to highlight how fluid subgenre labels are in the first place

lmao yes. i essentially end up giving up and carving out each artist as a special case most of the time

sidenote, i never actually got into nu skool breaks when it was a thing but listening to some now i get how i made the association with dubstep

I second Aesop Rock. Very very strongly. The GOAT bar none in my view I can also recommend clipping One debates if they're "actually good" (I don't know) but I also quite like Run the Jewels