I even cut Holy Smoke’s self-titled release because I’d previewed a solo performance by one of the duo’s members, Jeremiah Jae. (Where’s the fun in making up arbitrary rules if you can’t bend them a little?) I eliminated Ibn Inglor’s Honegloria, even though I didn’t write about it when it dropped in October, because I’d previously written about one of the album’s singles. Anyone I’ve covered in my weekly hip-hop column, in a stray blog post, or in a concert preview was disqualified too-though I did make an exception for an artist I referred to briefly in a piece a couple months ago. So while I think that, say, Joey Purp and Saba deserve even more attention than they’ve received, they’re not here because I wrote lengthy features about both of them in 2016.
But I missed out on covering plenty of artists who put out interesting material this year, and those are the people I considered for this list. Writing about local hip-hop for the Reader gives me an advantage in that I can devote work hours, not just free time, to exploring the variety of Chicago’s rap cornucopia.
One person voted for Common’s Black America Again, which I’d never call “overlooked” myself-Common is a household name in Chicago hip-hop, and it hasn’t been that long since he won an Oscar. As I did last year, I asked my Twitter followers to name their favorite overlooked Chicago hip-hop release of the past year, and once again their responses included a few surprises. Adding the qualifier “overlooked” makes compiling a list even more of a challenge, because you have to guard against the possibility that you’re simply revealing your own blind spots. Year-end “best of” lists can be irritating, of course, because they never perfectly line up with your tastes, but they can be enlightening for the same reason-I’ve discovered many great albums on lists that don’t overlap with my own. Which brings me to the subject of this list: the best overlooked Chicago hip-hop from the past year.
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