Listen: French Montana & Max B: Coke Wave If anything is truly wavy, it’s that.-Kathy Iandoli However, a tip of the fitted goes to French on this one, as his solo face time on deep cuts like “Smoking” and “Bricks & Walls” helped him pave his own lane as an artist with skills to stand alone. The DJ Whoo Kid-hosted project-an amalgam of Max B’s “wavy” manifesto and French’s “coke boy” mantra-showcases the two artists trading bars on a number of cuts, the standout being the now-classic title track. At the time, French Montana was merely a street-rap upstart with a Coke Boys crew in tow, but this project cemented him as New York's next star. While he has maintained a semi-consistent track record of dropping tracks while in the pen, his final outside offering arrived at the top of that year, when he collaborated with a young Bronx native on the Coke Wave mixtape. In 2009, Max B was sentenced to 75 years in prison for myriad reasons stemming from conspiracy and weapons charges. Listen: Main Attrakionz: 808s and Dark Grapes II There had been nothing quite like it before.-Matthew Ramirez rapped quietly, cutting bars like your friend who waits until he’s stoned to talk about death: on “Take 1” (released here before it appeared on A$AP Rocky’s $AP ), Squadda confessed, “My album coming November, that’s 20 years of memory/And that’s assuming I’ma live that long.” These two blunted guys laid it bare on top of pointillist bangers that sampled Glasser, Usher, and Willie Hutch. It was a rare feat, and a sneakily poignant portrait of youth–once the hypnotic beats wore off, you were privy to lines about them putting gum wrappers in their mouths to pretend they had grills. On 808s, Main Attrakionz sounded effortlessly cool and totally new.
It’s as much a milestone of post-Lil B rap as it is a weird token from this decade’s obsession with minimal electronica. 808s and Dark Grapes II crystalized not only their style but what would forever be known as cloud rap: featherlight beats with psych flourishes around the edges, Imogen Heap by way of Bay Area slap. In 2011, the California duo Main Attrakionz were another young group who made the blog rounds while pumping out a steady diet of free, eccentric rap. We hope you enjoy reading and debating as much as we did.
The context of a release, both within an artist’s own career and within rap at large, mattered to us, as did replayability: The best mixtapes of the millennium double as some of the era’s best long-playing rap albums, because the distinction between the two has all but been erased. Other than that, everything else–whether it consisted of beats taken from other rappers’ albums or contained all original music, whether it was offered as promotion for a retail album or a standalone release–was up for grabs.
#THE LOX WE ARE THE STREETS TORRENT FREE#
So there was only one hard-and-fast rule to make our cut: a “mixtape” was a free release, offered directly to rap fans. And this year, Chance the Rapper released 14 sleek tracks with Kanye West and Lil Wayne cameos that he called a “mixtape,” and it debuted with the backing of Apple. In the middle of the last decade, after CD burners became cheap and ubiquitous, rappers like Lil Wayne began using them to build international audiences. In 2000, mixtapes were generally still piles of exclusive freestyles sequenced by enterprising DJs like DJ Clue–they were promotional tools, pure and simple. What does “mixtape” mean anymore? In assembling this list, we asked the question again and again, partly because rap continues to redefine the term.