Your Hip-Hop History Playlist

At DePaul University, Chicago rapper femdot is known as Professor Femi Adigun. He teaches “Chicago Culture Through Hip Hop” and recently sat down with City Cast Chicago to trace our city’s history through rap music.

Class is in session!

Who Built Chicago's Rap Scene?

According to femdot, people really started paying attention to Chicago as a hip-hop epicenter during the 2010s. But the city’s held a strong place in the scene since the ‘90s thanks to local pioneers like:

Then, enter Kanye West (or Ye): the larger-than-life figure who really put Chicago on the rap map around 2004. At DePaul, femdot’s syllabus begins with the emergence of Kanye, who grew up around South Shore and Oak Lawn. From there, touchstones include Kanye’s “Late Registration” and “Food & Liquor” by Lupe Fiasco.

Segregation in Everything

The early aughts also saw the tearing down of public housing projects like the Robert Taylor and Ida B. Wells homes, displacing Black Chicagoans and physically shifting hip-hop culture.

“ Chicago being such a segregated city … allows every artist to be very specific because you can be 10 blocks away from each other and live in a whole different world or not interact with each other at all,” femdot says.

He tells his students often: “Chance, [G Herbo], and Ye all have family houses on 79th Street. But those are three completely different 79th streets.”

The Blog Era and Drill

Styles get even more hyper-specific zooming into the post-Kanye blog era of the 2010s. Suddenly, rap was seen as a potential career. Wanting to be the next Kanye, artists recorded music at home and pushed it out on early social media platforms. Often, this work was soulful and heavily sampled.

Defining mixtapes of the era include:

Somewhat simultaneously, drill music emerged in the Woodlawn neighborhood. Although the term “drill” is associated with violence, as femdot explains, it came to represent movement more generally:

“If I’m out, and two girls hit my homies, and it’s ‘Yo slide, it’s a two-on-two,’ that’s a drill. Oh, we finna play basketball today and we finna kick it. It’s a drill. Mom brought totino rolls today. It’s a drill.”

The earliest recorded instance of “drill” came in 2009 from Pac-Man. Other pioneers include:

Those are just some the artists who make up femdot's ideal playlist, with recs spanning 30 years 👇

femdot's Semi-Official Historic Playlist

… Plus lots and lots more Kanye.