Golden-age rappers make a digital-age leap — and survive

In 2016, De La Soul, one of rap’s most elemental groups, had to start from scratch. After elevating hip-hop in the late 1980s and ‘90s with a four-album run that rivals any in the history of the genre, the trio found itself snake-bitten by its own inventiveness — specifically its copious use of samples as inlays in a fanciful mosaic, which swept it into protracted legal battles that kept the music inaccessible well into the post-Napster digital age. As the members continued to seek restitution (even releasing the albums for free at one point out of frustration), they crowd-funded a new album on Kickstarter. And the Anonymous Nobody…, a largely sample-free affair in silent protest of the hostage situation around their catalog, overhauled the De La sound for an internet-connected era, taking 200 hours of recorded audio from the soul band the group toured with and melding it into a sweeping amalgamation of funk. Both their misadventures and eventual sonic migration charted the distance between the hip-hop world that De La Soul helped build and the one it found itself navigating online, challenging its very identity in the process. If the group was doomed to be anonymous to a generation of young rap fans, it would lean into that obscurity in pursuit of creative freedom. “This is about a person selflessly giving everything they could to make something cool or new or fun or better happen,” Trugoy the Dove told The New York Times that August. Being unplugged from the archive proved liberating.

Selflessly making something cool or new or fun or better happen in the autumn of one’s artistry has been a challenge for many of De La’s golden-age peers. Rummage through the late-career work of artists like Public Enemy, Ice Cube and KRS-One, and you will feel a pretty dramatic drop-off from the punchy provocations of their groundbreaking days. Some of that is a given: The fire can’t burn forever, artists often fade with age, and rap has often been quick to carbon-date prospects who can’t even rent a car yet. But there is also an obvious threshold requiring reorientation, a point of no return where one’s grasp of their own art and its function no longer aligns with an impetuous zeitgeist. It is quite difficult to be on the cutting edge of a creative movement twice in a career, because movements change. Comparing rap in the ‘80s to rap in 2024 is like comparing the NBA across those same eras: They are two different games, played at different speeds and to different standards. Often, new albums from elder rappers have the feeling of still playing by the old rules, too restricted in their movements to keep pace.

In recent weeks, two pioneers of the golden-age rap revolution have released new albums that buck the pattern: LL Cool J’s The FORCE, a dynamic showcase of adaptive evolution, and MC Lyte’s 1 of 1, a personal manifesto for surviving the times. Both pull off an acrobatic feat of staying true to the identities that defined them as artists without feeling bogged down by all the history: up-to-speed but not trend-chasing, mature but not fossilized. Instead of self-indulgently doubling down on past triumphs or desperately chasing relevance, these albums benefit from a recommitment to craft, with slight but sharp shifts in perspective that refurbish their still-potent voices.

Once described by Alan Light in Rolling Stone as “something rap has never seen before — a genuine pop superstar,” LL Cool J set the archetype for the charismatic hip-hop stud, a crossover artist standing at the center of Def Jam’s foundational dynasty with a voice as booming as his lyrics were suave. Since the death of MTV, his magnetic pull has gradually waned: There hasn’t been an LL album in over a decade, when 2013’s Authentic seemed to cement a steady descent into obsolescence for the legend.

Throughout the 2000s, he’d continuously put out records in search of one last hit. The music was heavy on slow jams, angling for radio and packed with head-scratching features. The period was epitomized by the Brad Paisley collab “Accidental Racist,” a clumsy conflation of white stereotyping and Black anxiety in which he literally rapped the words, “If you don’t judge my gold chains, I’ll forget the iron chains.” The song felt not just cringey but swagless, seemingly exposing a loss of the ranginess he once radiated.

By that point, he didn’t need the work. Since 2009, LL has starred in the CBS procedural NCIS: Los Angeles, fronted the reality competition Lip Sync Battle and served a five-year stint as Grammy host. He was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2021, and has moved into a liminal space between artist and effigy — ascending like Snoop Dogg to a level of cultural ubiquity that makes stepping away from rap music not simply viable but justifiable, his hip-hop legacy becoming a kind of avatar for eternal unc status. In the interim, he seemed noncommittal about rap’s position in his expanding job hierarchy and conflicted about just how much he had left in the tank. In 2016, he announced a short-lived retirement, and in 2023 he appeared to scrap a comeback record for fear that it simply wasn’t up to snuff: “I’m really Trying to figure this album out. SMH,” he wrote in a deleted series of tweets. “Just not feeling this album is worthy of being released. I tried.”

It was shortly after that spell of doubt that he announced the mulligan that would eventually become The FORCE, a project for which he’s said he had to teach himself how to rap again. The learning curve clearly wasn’t too steep, because the album feels like an athlete rediscovering his limberness, his dormant muscle memory activating all at once. It is the kind of work that wouldn’t have even felt possible around the time of Authentic: LL hasn’t sounded this loose and comfortable since the ‘90s, and he does so while trying on new hats — the Kangol still fits, though — and reckoning with where he fits into rap now. “It’s like I died and came back, different faces and ages / On their phones and computers, no one is readin’ the papers,” he raps on “30 Decembers.” “And these kids don’t even know who I am / You don’t know you in the presence of a real made man.” It’s this slight in particular that seems to be driving him the hardest. I often think of LL’s 2017 tweet providing younger generations of rap stars with an ultimatum — “If I hear one more terrible rap record I’m gonna have to do it to these meatballs.” At the time, it felt more like a finger-wagging reprimand than a genuine threat — but The FORCE is animated by that very desire to show the kids how it’s done, and remind everyone else who he was — and still is.

His first and perhaps pivotal act was commissioning Q-Tip as his primary producer. Seemingly ageless, Tip remains among the most ingenious beatmakers in rap, vintage yet chic. Having succeeded once already at this kind of revival exercise with the farewell A Tribe Called Quest album, We Got It from Here… Thank You 4 Your Service, here he leads LL through a series of beats that sound like rumbling, tagged-up train cars. LL treats each one as his own canvas, and it can be awe-inspiring watching a master cut loose. He goes stride for stride with Eminem on “Murdergram Deux,” playing around in Shady’s backyard with shuffling, multisyllabic raps carried out with a mischievous air. Songs like “Saturday Night Special” and “Passion” are coolly and calmly executed, and there is a smoothness to all he does that honors his standing as a playboy charmer. The two halves of his persona — a ladies’ man of all-around appeal soaking up a lavish life, and a commanding entertainer dead-set on substantiating his timelessness — are in perfect balance.

If The FORCE finds LL Cool J affirming his reputation, then 1 of 1 finds MC Lyte reappraising hers. A prodigy who wrote her incisive crack era polemic, “I Cram to Understand U (Sam),” when she was only 16, the rapper has struggled to recoup what is owed to her, on the back end and in the public consciousness. She was the first woman rapper to release a studio album, to be nominated for a Grammy as a solo artist and to have a gold single. Despite honors like BET’s I Am Hip-Hop award, her impact countering rap misogyny and helping to usher in a more grounded rap movement have not been weighted as heavily as the accomplishments of her male contemporaries, and she has been transparent about her label and publishing disputes, officially reclaiming her name from First Priority Music in 2021. Only the third MC Lyte album of the 21st century and the first since 2015’s Legend (which was released independently and is not available on streaming), 1 of 1 exudes a clarity of purpose befitting an artist who, on the one hand, has nothing left to prove, but on the other, is painfully aware that she has yet to receive her due. Lyte has described the album as “a second coming of age,” which feels fitting: The songs are charged by self-improvement, full of accumulated wisdom from an underrated overachiever.

Lyte made the album with her pastor, the Grammy-winning producer Warryn Campbell, who has existed at the intersection of gospel and rap his entire career, and together they bring her mission-minded music to a devotional place. Campbell ushers her toward reflection with beats that jump across time, from boom-bap to jazz rap with soul sampling and choir direction, and she struts through each with a matter-of-fact delivery that suggests fortitude. On “To RockThe Mic,” Lyte paints rap as a calling that she answered and cannot ignore: “Can’t be stopped by even what I been through / What I been through coulda shook my mental / But I kept it all together, I was meant to.” The pent-up restlessness of nearly 30 years spent on rap’s margins is unleashed in bobbing verses that casually deploy her technical savvy. For every song about the obstacles she has faced throughout a tumultuous career there is one on the character-building of enduring such complications. On “Lyte Ghost Lil Mama,” she raps indignantly but with composure, as if trying to explain her situation to a friend — being between deals, a label losing faith in her and scrapping a song with The Neptunes, not owning the publishing for a hit song — but the sashaying follow-up “Kick Back Relax” is eased and unwound, carrying the relief and release of unclenched shoulders. “Stress ain’t nothin’ but a test,” she pledges, and in both modes her flows feel sturdy and battle-tried, moving with artisan-like grit and efficiency.

That persistence comes with a hunger for reform. At one point on 1 of 1, a skit finds Lyte canvassing in New York City to become Mayor of Hip-Hop. “My platform is change,” she tells a prospective voter on the streets of Flatbush. It would be more accurate to say that her platform is restoration. She wants a rehabilitation of the rapper, and reinstatement of old school values — not an uncommon stance among rappers of a certain age, but Lyte comes at the call to action from a more empathetic place. “We got the whole world lookin’ at our game, lookin’ crooked / While the man overtook it,” she raps on “Music Is,” before asking, “Can we take it back, claim it for keeps?” The question is rhetorical. The album plays like the first step in Lyte’s master plan to get things back on track. You don’t have to believe what she believes to feel the weight of her efforts, which seek out a higher cause — or rather, see rap as a means to greater advocacy.

Both LL and Lyte are anchored by the same ideals on their new albums: faith and activism. Across the two records, there is spirited music of praise and protest grounding the comebacks. The FORCE opens with the militant “Spirit of Cyrus,” a vision of taking on the cops later underscored by the Pantherisms of “Huey in the Chair.” “Nucleus of the culture, so he is African sculpture / Carved by the gods and clappin’ at all these vultures,” LL raps, drawing a line between his stature and the responsibility that comes with it. A song later, on “Praise Him,” he teams up with Nas, seeking to solidify himself as a rap savior. 1 of 1 opens with the gospel-infused “Thank You,” where Lyte turns rap into a holy undertaking: “You’re the Lyte because I made you, never be afraid to / Stand tall against ‘em all and protect what I gave you,” she raps, quoting His words to her as she takes up her mantle with renewed vigor. With protection as her mandate, she, too, stands up against violent policing and corruption on “Change Your Ways,” before asking other rappers to do more. Though the song veers dangerously close to respectability politics, this resolve for all rappers — including her — to put the needs of their constituency before personal gratification provokes bold exhibitions that treat rap as the crusader practice she has dedicated her life to.

For each artist, thinking of themselves and of rap as vessels for some kind of higher power seems key to their renewed focus. It’s right there in the title of the LL album — The FORCE, as if he is tapping into some kind of sacred continuum like the one from Star Wars. The cover art has the phrase that acronym represents, “frequencies of real creative energy,” scrawled in squiggly lines that imitate wavelengths. In activating those frequencies, MC Lyte and LL Cool J are able to draw upon the ever-elusive essence, the flow that pours out of all great hip-hop, no matter the era. Drawing it out requires a certain flexibility, so much confidence in one’s artistic identity that there is no fear in modifying it. These new records feel like evidence that such conviction can sustain rappers through shifts in form and approach, keeping them tethered to an ever-changing world without losing a grip on the essential qualities that made them originals in the first place.