BeatRoute Magazine AB Edition - December 2019

BEATROUTE
TOP 10 ARTISTS OF THE DECADE
IMAGE PRESS AGENCY / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
Most Popular Artist of the Decade
Drake
T
here’s
a stat floating around
the Internet right now that
neatly ties up Drake’s dominance
with a little owl-embroidered
bow. According
to someone who pays for
Nielsen chart data, Aubrey
Graham has maintained a
2Nº
position in the Billboard Top 10 during
476 of the decade’s 520 weeks. For
context, that’s over 80,000 hours worth
of OVO-approved music — which we
are pretty sure is the actual runtime of
Scorpion.
But how did the man who somehow
broke social media by lint-rolling his
pants at a Raps game, become the
biggest pop star in the world? Well for
one, you can credit the music itself. Drake
was rap’s first post-bling era superstar,
the first to blur the lines between rap and
R&B seamlessly, and that penchant for
genre smashing carries on to this day.
Championing new sounds has been a major
play to continuously remain relevant
and exciting to both new and old ears.
After the success of his first few projects,
Drake leveled up even further and
took cues from the diaspora he grew up
around in North York. With 2016’s Views
— arguably Drake at his most commercially
and culturally relevant — he championed
and collaborated with dancehall and
Afrobeat artists to bring the global sound
to North American audiences. Unsurprisingly,
the tunes that followed became
some of his biggest to-date.
Tracks like “One Dance” and “Controlla”
set him apart from American rappers and
pop stars regurgitating the same sonic
elements we’ve been accustomed to this
past decade. Drake allowed his once signature
sound to become more malleable,
incorporating and borrowing elements
from global genres. It’s this slight, but
noticeable, reinvention that kept us going
back for more.
Drake’s stranglehold on Internet culture
is another big key to his incredible
success. As far as global megastars go,
Aubrey was an early adopter of internet
culture. It’s been a skill that has set him
apart from his peers and one used continuously
throughout the decade to further
his dominance.
From his early days on MySpace, to
his current Twitter memedom, Drake
embraced and leveraged the internet to
become a lovable, larger than life media
darling, someone even your grandma can
get behind.
Back in 2015, in the midst of his
high-profile beef with Meek Mill, Drake’s
team took to social media and culled a
truck full of memes pointed against the
Philadelphia emcee. When he hit the OVO
Fest stage a few weeks after dropping his
club-banging diss track, “Back to Back,”
Drake augmented his performance of
the song by projecting those jokes on a
screen for all to see. It was like a show
set designed by Fuck Jerry and it was all
anyone was talking about for days.
It’s plays like these that catapult Drake
and his music to the top of the charts
every few months, and it’s why he’s been
able to muscle his way (shout out OVO
Jonny Roxx) to the top of the industry
mountain. His ability to stay top of mind
is unparalleled. He’s the biggest pop star
of the decade because there’s always
something Drake-related to talk about...
hell we’re doing that right now. ,
By AIDEN D’OUST
Kendrick
Lamar
k CONTINUED FROM PG. 7
individualism and originality in timeless albums.
When the 2014 Grammys chose to bestow
Macklemore with all of Kendrick Lamar’s awards
for good kid while also asking him to share the
stage with Imagine Dragons for his performance
at the ceremony—which, arguably, actually
wasn’t that bad—it seemed like Kendrick had
finally taken a loss. But there was triumph in this
defeat: It further galvanized hip-hop fans around
Kendrick Lamar.
In 2016, he went on to win six Grammys for
the critically-lauded To Pimp A Butterfly, a rich,
sprawling album that saw Kendrick’s sound move
deeper into jazz and funk while speaking about
the Black experience in America on a broader
level. The record’s rallying cry, “Alright,” became
immortalized as an unofficial anthem during
Black Lives Matter protests.
DAMN. saw Kendrick Lamar winning five more
Grammys in 2017, and a Pulitzer Prize in Music.
The album was Kendrick Lamar hitting on all
cylinders; covering themes of family, Blackness,
and destiny through tight, melodic, catchy bursts.
The absolute slapper “HUMBLE.”, featuring
production from Mike WiLL Made-It was still an
unapologetically “Kendrick” song, landed at #1
on the Hot 100. He put together a soundtrack for
Black Panther in 2018 and continues to turn in
jaw-dropping guest spots for everyone from Beyoncé
to Taylor Swift (his other #1, “Bad Blood”
in 2015)—not that he’ll ever do one that could
garner more response than his name-naming
verse on Big Sean’s “Control” in 2013—to keep
his catalog varied and relevant.
It matters to listify Kendrick’s decade in
chronological order because at the tailend of
2019, recognizing his accomplishments provides
an opportunity to remember his growth. It’s not
only that he comfortably straddles the line between
pop classics and backpack rap, or that he
effortlessly bounces from sage wisdom to brash
ignorance, it’s the fact that Lamar has structured
his career to reject sonic and thematic binaries
at every juncture. Alongside his undeniable talent,
it’s the secret to his accessibility, relatability, and
impact. And it’s one of the reasons why he was
so captivating during a decade that ultimately
became his. ,
By CHAYNE JAPAL
DECEMBER 2019 BEATROUTE 9