The 20 Best Rap Radio Hits of 2021
I did the pop list last week and the rest will follow this week. It's an interesting time for rap right now, it usually takes two or three years for a new decade to feel like its own distinct era, and it may take longer for 2020s rap as long as Drake and other 2010s stars are still on top. But we're slowly starting to see a changing of the guard, midlevel guys like Big Sean and French Montana starting to disappear from the radio and some of the new wave of stars starting to show a little staying power. Here's the Spotify playlist:
1. Morray - "Quicksand"
#11 R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay, #65 Hot 100
There’s such a wide variety of ways that rapping and singing can be combined, and it represents a pretty huge sector of modern popular music (reflected in the fact that there’s a Grammy category that over the past 20 years has morphed from Best Rap/Sung Collaboration to Best Rap/Sung Performance to Best Melodic Rap Performance). I sometimes take a dim view of this evolution – a lot of “melodic rap” is tonedeaf as singing and lyrically simplistic as rapping – but I think there are still exciting things being done in this area. And I would put North Carolina’s Morray next to Roddy Ricch as one of the best MCs right now who’s doing fast melodic flows that work as both skillful singing and excellent rapping, descendants of Bone Thugs more than a lot of their post-808s & Heartbreak contemporaries.
2. Pooh Shiesty f/ Lil Durk - "Back In
Blood"
#5 R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay, #13 Hot 100
It feels like it’s been quite a while since a rap song as grimy and dark as “Back In Blood” was in heavy daytime rotation on the radio, and the success of his first album for 1017 Records was yet another vindication of Gucci Mane as arguably rap’s greatest A&R man of the last couple decades. Unfortunately, Pooh Shiesty is following in Gucci’s footsteps in other ways and has spent the second half of his breakthrough year in jail.
3. Moneybagg Yo - "Time Today"
#2 R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay, #31 Hot 100
After years steadily on the rise, Moneybagg Yo finally got his first #1 album this year, and he did it while showing a little more vulnerability and personality on A Gangsta’s Pain but also reuniting with DJ YC, the producer of his 2020 hit “Said Sum,” and refining its sound into an even better single, a tight 2 minutes and 16 seconds where not a moment is wasted.
4. Baby Keem f/ Kendrick Lamar - "Family
Ties"
#20 R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay, #18 Hot 100
There are a number of singers who haven’t released an album in about 5 years who still feel ever present in popular culture, from Beyonce to Rihanna to Frank Ocean. But hip hop moves so much more quickly than other genres that it does feel strange for a rapper of Kendrick Lamar’s stature to stay away for this long at the top of his game, and even if his brief return on his little cousin’s lead single felt like just a little taste of what he’s been holding back for the last few years. It works, though, it made me feel more active anticipation for whatever he does next.
5. Megan Thee Stallion - "Thot
Shit"
#2 R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay, #16 Hot 100
Megan Thee Stallion is one of the absolute best rappers working today, but I have to admit announced she was going to release a single called “Thot Shit,” I didn’t necessarily think it would be a song that backed up that assessment. But honestly, there are not that many songs on the radio in recent memory where one MC does three verses and goes the hardest on the last verse, it’s just an incredible performance even by her standards.
6. Lil Baby & Kirk Franklin - "We
Win"
#27 R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay
After Lil Baby conquered the rap game in 2020, he had a fairly standard victory lap year in 2021: did a collaboration album, turned otherwise mediocre songs from the Kanye and Drake albums into hits, and made the soundtrack single for a big family movie. Doing a song with Kirk Franklin and no swearing for a Space Jam sequel feels like the exact kind of crossover move that should be embarrassing for a rapper like Lil Baby, but somehow this is right in his skillset and is a lot of fun to listen to. Maybe Kanye took shots at Just Blaze a few weeks ago because he realized Just upstaged him with the best gospel rap song of 2021.
7. Rod Wave - "Tombstone"
#8 R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay, #11 Hot 100
Another rap song with a gospel choir that’s better than anything on Donda! Rod Wave felt like kind of a one trick pony to me with his first couple hits but “Tombstone” goes a little deeper and does a little more with the melody in his delivery. But this is also a prime example of why loud producer tags don’t need to be at the top of every single song, they really feel out of place here.
8. BIA - "Whole Lotta Money"
#5 R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay, #16 Hot 100
I dug this song when BIA first dropped the For Certain EP last year, and was really happy when it started to take off on TikTok and radio, although less so when the totally unnecessary Nicki Minaj remix became the most high profile version of the song.
9. Roddy Ricch - "Late At Night"
#2 R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay, #20 Hot 100
Roddy Ricch is releasing the follow-up next week, but it's been over two years since his double platinum debut Please Excuse Me For Being Antisocial, and people do seem genuinely annoyed that he’s been relatively antisocial since then, just dropping a handful of songs and one radio single in 2021 that’s kind of a gentler variation of the Please Excuse Me hit “High Fashion.” But “Late At Night” really grew on me as a daily presence on my car radio and reminded me what a strong songwriter he is.
10. Meek Mill f/ Lil Baby and Lil Durk -
"Sharing Locations"
#15 R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay, #22 Hot 100
Lil Baby and Lil Durk released a chart-topping collaborative album this year, but in a weird turn of events, neither of their 2 biggest songs together of 2021 are on The Voice of The Heroes thanks to their features on the Meek Mill and DJ Khaled albums (potentially 3 if their song with H.E.R. takes off).
11. Young Dolph & Key Glock -
"Aspen"
#38 R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay
Hip hop lost a lot of legends in 2021, from DMX to Biz Markie to Shock G, but it was a different kind of heartbreak to lose Young Dolph while he’s still in the prime of his career, after he released his highest charting album and single to date in 2020. Dolph was prolific right to the end, releasing a Paper Route Empire compilation and his second duo album with Key Glock in the last few months, and the great Bandplay-produced “Aspen” was the last song he had on the radio charts in his lifetime.
12. Nipsey Hussle & Jay-Z - "What It
Feels Like"
#24 R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay, #51 Hot 100
Nipsey Hussle, like Young Dolph, is someone whose legacy and significance can’t be really illustrated with radio hits. But I was a little disappointed that nothing emerged as a big posthumous hit for Nipsey to give him the kind of radio spins he never got in his lifetime. And he finally got that to at least some degree this year when Jay-Z recorded a song with an unreleased Nipsey verse that became a hit for the Judas and the Black Messiah soundtrack. Relatedly, I talked to Nipsey Hussle biographer Rob Kenner a while back about the article that made me a villain to Nipsey fans, felt good to air that out and try to get a little closure.
13. J. Cole f/ 21 Savage and Morray -
"My Life"
#14 R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay, #2 Hot 100
In 2002, Rawkus Records released the Soundbombing III compilation, which was full of collaborations that kind of bridged the gap between the Rawkus roster and the rap mainstream, including the single “The Life” that paired “Good Times”-era Styles P. with Pharoahe Monch. I always thought it was weird to relegate Monch to the hook, and those kinds of “backpack meets commercial” crossover events feel like a relic of the pre-Kanye era now. But J. Cole is the exact kind of guy who’d remember and cherish the otherwise fairly forgotten “The Life,” and probably thinks of his collaborations with 21 Savage as merging two worlds in the same way, so he had Morray sing Monch’s hook on what turned out to be the highest charting single of Cole’s career.
#13 R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay, #68 Hot 100
Unless Future drops something in December, 2021 is going to end up being the only year that he hasn’t released an album or mixtape of new material in over a decade. And yet he’s still managed to be all over the radio in the last few months thanks to a steady run of guest appearances. The biggest of those, unfortunately, is a humiliating novelty song where Drake has Future saying shit like “I’m too sexy for this lean, I’m too sexy for the trap.” But Future’s features on 42 Dugg and Gunna’s latest singles have been pretty good.
15. Tyler, The Creator f/ YoungBoy Never
Broke Again - "WUSYANAME"
#25 R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay, #14 Hot 100
Between Tyler, The Creator’s string of Grammy-nominated #1 albums and NBA YoungBoy getting more YouTube views than the biggest pop stars, both of them are very different models for how successful a rapper can be without catering to or being particularly supported by hip hop radio. So there was a kind of weird logic to them getting together for a funky little R&B-ish song that did pretty well on the radio by either’s standards.
16. Megan Thee Stallion f/ DaBaby - "Cry
Baby"
#3 R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay, #28 Hot 100
DaBaby did a number of baffling, unnecessary, and unwise things in 2021 that have left his career in a much worse place than it was in the beginning of the year. One of the strangest, however, was his decision to side with Tory Lanez over the women he shot, Megan Thee Stallion, who DaBaby had made multiple hit songs with. So we’ll never get a whole Megan/Baby collaboration project like people wished for after their entertainingly bawdy back-and-forth on “Cash Shit” and “Cry Baby,” but we’ll always have those songs I guess.
17. Coi Leray f/ Lil Durk - "No More
Parties (Remix)"
#7 R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay, #26 Hot 100
Aspiring rap star turned The Source co-owner turned Eminem foe turned reality show regular Ray “Benzino” Scott has been one of rap’s great villains/laughing stocks for decades. So it’s a hilariously apt turn of events that his daughter is now a rapper who’s gotten higher on the Hot 100 than he ever did, with a song that strongly implies that he’s a shitty father.
18. Moneybagg Yo - "Wockesha"
#1 R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay, #20 Hot 100
In the great tradition of tracks like “I Used To Love H.E.R.” that serenade something besides a person in a metaphorical love song, “Wockesha” is Moneybagg Yo’s loving ode to lean. It’s fucked up, but it’s well written, with that irresistible piano line from a DeBarge album track that’s now been a part of hits in different decades by Biggie, Ashanti, and now Moneybagg.
19. 21 Savage & Metro Boomin f/ Drake -
"Mr. Right Now"
#11 R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay, #10 Hot 100
I was pretty excited that this song got one of my favorite Baltimore rappers Tate Kobang a writing credit on a top 10 hit. But in the year where Drake’s marquee hits were the LMFAO-style himbo anthems “Way 2 Sexy” and “Girls Want Girls,” he still had to embarrass himself at least once on “Mr. Right Now,” offering up apropos of nothing that he dated SZA before she was famous, but dating it to a year when she was 17 and prompting her to respond that no, it was actually later.
20. Polo G - "Rapstar"
#5 R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay, #1 Hot 100
There were a number of Hot 100 chart-toppers in the last year or two that came and went very quickly because the artist had a big enough fanbase to give them big streaming numbers for a week but then the song never took hold at radio. “Rapstar” doesn’t fall into that category, because Polo G is a Chicago rapper who’d been on the rise for a couple years leading up to his first #1, but it still feels like a strangely invisible #1, this weirdly sullen rap hit from a grimly careerist rapper who always talks confidently about how big he’s going to be but never sounds particularly excited about it.
The 10 Worst Rap Radio Hits of 2021:
1. Drake f/ Future and Young Thug - "Way 2 Sexy"
2. Lil Tjay f/ 6lack - "Calling My Phone"
3. SpotemGottem - "Beat Box"
4. CJ - "Whoopty"
5. Mooski - "Trackstar"
6. Cardi B - "Up"
7. Lil Baby - "On Me"
8. Latto - "Big Energy"
9. Migos - "Straightenin"
10. Kanye West f/ The Weeknd and Lil Baby - "Hurricane"
#11 R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay, #65 Hot 100
There’s such a wide variety of ways that rapping and singing can be combined, and it represents a pretty huge sector of modern popular music (reflected in the fact that there’s a Grammy category that over the past 20 years has morphed from Best Rap/Sung Collaboration to Best Rap/Sung Performance to Best Melodic Rap Performance). I sometimes take a dim view of this evolution – a lot of “melodic rap” is tonedeaf as singing and lyrically simplistic as rapping – but I think there are still exciting things being done in this area. And I would put North Carolina’s Morray next to Roddy Ricch as one of the best MCs right now who’s doing fast melodic flows that work as both skillful singing and excellent rapping, descendants of Bone Thugs more than a lot of their post-808s & Heartbreak contemporaries.
#5 R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay, #13 Hot 100
It feels like it’s been quite a while since a rap song as grimy and dark as “Back In Blood” was in heavy daytime rotation on the radio, and the success of his first album for 1017 Records was yet another vindication of Gucci Mane as arguably rap’s greatest A&R man of the last couple decades. Unfortunately, Pooh Shiesty is following in Gucci’s footsteps in other ways and has spent the second half of his breakthrough year in jail.
#2 R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay, #31 Hot 100
After years steadily on the rise, Moneybagg Yo finally got his first #1 album this year, and he did it while showing a little more vulnerability and personality on A Gangsta’s Pain but also reuniting with DJ YC, the producer of his 2020 hit “Said Sum,” and refining its sound into an even better single, a tight 2 minutes and 16 seconds where not a moment is wasted.
#20 R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay, #18 Hot 100
There are a number of singers who haven’t released an album in about 5 years who still feel ever present in popular culture, from Beyonce to Rihanna to Frank Ocean. But hip hop moves so much more quickly than other genres that it does feel strange for a rapper of Kendrick Lamar’s stature to stay away for this long at the top of his game, and even if his brief return on his little cousin’s lead single felt like just a little taste of what he’s been holding back for the last few years. It works, though, it made me feel more active anticipation for whatever he does next.
#2 R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay, #16 Hot 100
Megan Thee Stallion is one of the absolute best rappers working today, but I have to admit announced she was going to release a single called “Thot Shit,” I didn’t necessarily think it would be a song that backed up that assessment. But honestly, there are not that many songs on the radio in recent memory where one MC does three verses and goes the hardest on the last verse, it’s just an incredible performance even by her standards.
#27 R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay
After Lil Baby conquered the rap game in 2020, he had a fairly standard victory lap year in 2021: did a collaboration album, turned otherwise mediocre songs from the Kanye and Drake albums into hits, and made the soundtrack single for a big family movie. Doing a song with Kirk Franklin and no swearing for a Space Jam sequel feels like the exact kind of crossover move that should be embarrassing for a rapper like Lil Baby, but somehow this is right in his skillset and is a lot of fun to listen to. Maybe Kanye took shots at Just Blaze a few weeks ago because he realized Just upstaged him with the best gospel rap song of 2021.
#8 R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay, #11 Hot 100
Another rap song with a gospel choir that’s better than anything on Donda! Rod Wave felt like kind of a one trick pony to me with his first couple hits but “Tombstone” goes a little deeper and does a little more with the melody in his delivery. But this is also a prime example of why loud producer tags don’t need to be at the top of every single song, they really feel out of place here.
#5 R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay, #16 Hot 100
I dug this song when BIA first dropped the For Certain EP last year, and was really happy when it started to take off on TikTok and radio, although less so when the totally unnecessary Nicki Minaj remix became the most high profile version of the song.
#2 R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay, #20 Hot 100
Roddy Ricch is releasing the follow-up next week, but it's been over two years since his double platinum debut Please Excuse Me For Being Antisocial, and people do seem genuinely annoyed that he’s been relatively antisocial since then, just dropping a handful of songs and one radio single in 2021 that’s kind of a gentler variation of the Please Excuse Me hit “High Fashion.” But “Late At Night” really grew on me as a daily presence on my car radio and reminded me what a strong songwriter he is.
#15 R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay, #22 Hot 100
Lil Baby and Lil Durk released a chart-topping collaborative album this year, but in a weird turn of events, neither of their 2 biggest songs together of 2021 are on The Voice of The Heroes thanks to their features on the Meek Mill and DJ Khaled albums (potentially 3 if their song with H.E.R. takes off).
#38 R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay
Hip hop lost a lot of legends in 2021, from DMX to Biz Markie to Shock G, but it was a different kind of heartbreak to lose Young Dolph while he’s still in the prime of his career, after he released his highest charting album and single to date in 2020. Dolph was prolific right to the end, releasing a Paper Route Empire compilation and his second duo album with Key Glock in the last few months, and the great Bandplay-produced “Aspen” was the last song he had on the radio charts in his lifetime.
#24 R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay, #51 Hot 100
Nipsey Hussle, like Young Dolph, is someone whose legacy and significance can’t be really illustrated with radio hits. But I was a little disappointed that nothing emerged as a big posthumous hit for Nipsey to give him the kind of radio spins he never got in his lifetime. And he finally got that to at least some degree this year when Jay-Z recorded a song with an unreleased Nipsey verse that became a hit for the Judas and the Black Messiah soundtrack. Relatedly, I talked to Nipsey Hussle biographer Rob Kenner a while back about the article that made me a villain to Nipsey fans, felt good to air that out and try to get a little closure.
#14 R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay, #2 Hot 100
In 2002, Rawkus Records released the Soundbombing III compilation, which was full of collaborations that kind of bridged the gap between the Rawkus roster and the rap mainstream, including the single “The Life” that paired “Good Times”-era Styles P. with Pharoahe Monch. I always thought it was weird to relegate Monch to the hook, and those kinds of “backpack meets commercial” crossover events feel like a relic of the pre-Kanye era now. But J. Cole is the exact kind of guy who’d remember and cherish the otherwise fairly forgotten “The Life,” and probably thinks of his collaborations with 21 Savage as merging two worlds in the same way, so he had Morray sing Monch’s hook on what turned out to be the highest charting single of Cole’s career.
#13 R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay, #68 Hot 100
Unless Future drops something in December, 2021 is going to end up being the only year that he hasn’t released an album or mixtape of new material in over a decade. And yet he’s still managed to be all over the radio in the last few months thanks to a steady run of guest appearances. The biggest of those, unfortunately, is a humiliating novelty song where Drake has Future saying shit like “I’m too sexy for this lean, I’m too sexy for the trap.” But Future’s features on 42 Dugg and Gunna’s latest singles have been pretty good.
#25 R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay, #14 Hot 100
Between Tyler, The Creator’s string of Grammy-nominated #1 albums and NBA YoungBoy getting more YouTube views than the biggest pop stars, both of them are very different models for how successful a rapper can be without catering to or being particularly supported by hip hop radio. So there was a kind of weird logic to them getting together for a funky little R&B-ish song that did pretty well on the radio by either’s standards.
#3 R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay, #28 Hot 100
DaBaby did a number of baffling, unnecessary, and unwise things in 2021 that have left his career in a much worse place than it was in the beginning of the year. One of the strangest, however, was his decision to side with Tory Lanez over the women he shot, Megan Thee Stallion, who DaBaby had made multiple hit songs with. So we’ll never get a whole Megan/Baby collaboration project like people wished for after their entertainingly bawdy back-and-forth on “Cash Shit” and “Cry Baby,” but we’ll always have those songs I guess.
#7 R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay, #26 Hot 100
Aspiring rap star turned The Source co-owner turned Eminem foe turned reality show regular Ray “Benzino” Scott has been one of rap’s great villains/laughing stocks for decades. So it’s a hilariously apt turn of events that his daughter is now a rapper who’s gotten higher on the Hot 100 than he ever did, with a song that strongly implies that he’s a shitty father.
#1 R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay, #20 Hot 100
In the great tradition of tracks like “I Used To Love H.E.R.” that serenade something besides a person in a metaphorical love song, “Wockesha” is Moneybagg Yo’s loving ode to lean. It’s fucked up, but it’s well written, with that irresistible piano line from a DeBarge album track that’s now been a part of hits in different decades by Biggie, Ashanti, and now Moneybagg.
#11 R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay, #10 Hot 100
I was pretty excited that this song got one of my favorite Baltimore rappers Tate Kobang a writing credit on a top 10 hit. But in the year where Drake’s marquee hits were the LMFAO-style himbo anthems “Way 2 Sexy” and “Girls Want Girls,” he still had to embarrass himself at least once on “Mr. Right Now,” offering up apropos of nothing that he dated SZA before she was famous, but dating it to a year when she was 17 and prompting her to respond that no, it was actually later.
#5 R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay, #1 Hot 100
There were a number of Hot 100 chart-toppers in the last year or two that came and went very quickly because the artist had a big enough fanbase to give them big streaming numbers for a week but then the song never took hold at radio. “Rapstar” doesn’t fall into that category, because Polo G is a Chicago rapper who’d been on the rise for a couple years leading up to his first #1, but it still feels like a strangely invisible #1, this weirdly sullen rap hit from a grimly careerist rapper who always talks confidently about how big he’s going to be but never sounds particularly excited about it.
1. Drake f/ Future and Young Thug - "Way 2 Sexy"
2. Lil Tjay f/ 6lack - "Calling My Phone"
3. SpotemGottem - "Beat Box"
4. CJ - "Whoopty"
5. Mooski - "Trackstar"
6. Cardi B - "Up"
7. Lil Baby - "On Me"
8. Latto - "Big Energy"
9. Migos - "Straightenin"
10. Kanye West f/ The Weeknd and Lil Baby - "Hurricane"
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