Barstool Best of 2015 - Music
It’s officially 2016, and another year has come and went. By any standard, it was a weird, weird year in sports and pop culture. So we at Barstool decided to document the best moments of it for you, broken down into seven blogs by seven categories. Best can mean a lot of things: Our favorite, most memorable, most significant, and most important. This list isn’t meant to be comprehensive or exhaustive, just some of what we’ll think of when we look back on the year 2015.
Music
Caleb Pressley (@dadddixie) – Barstool Dixie
Pick: At. Long. Last. ASAP. , A$AP Rocky
AT.LONG.LIVE.A$AP by A$AP Rocky has a hazy sound, who’s who features, bizarre world views to guitar rifts—blah blah BLAH.
That’s not why I’m writing this. I’m writing this because I agreed to it a while back and it snuck up on me but I honored my commitment because I’m a man of my word. And if I’m going to do it, A.L.L.A is the album to do it on. Point-blank-period-Thank-God-Drake-Called-If-You’re-Reading-This-It’s-Too Late-A-Mixtape-THIS is the number one Hip-Hop album of 2015.
Music, art, people, entertainment, academia, ETC, There is NO substitute for originality. You can’t beat it & you can’t fake it. This album is 18 songs that sounded a bit different than anything else I had listened to before. Good. Give me something I’ve never heard before… Do it in a way I’ve never heard it… Make the first experience one that I want to have a second time. GIVE US ORIGINALITY!! AT.LONG.LIVE.A$AP is the best Hip-Hop album of the year because the first time I listened to it it made me feel a bit different than I had been feeling earlier that day. Its that simple. Its an awesome album.
Anyway, I suppose reading about music is sorta like watching food on TV…
Hope I was a good Rachel Ray
-or Emeril Lagassee if that’s your thing because I am forward thinking and reasonable.
Charlie (@CharlieWisco) – Barstool New York
Pick: Purpose, Justin Bieber
Purpose wasn’t the best album of 2015. Purpose wasn’t the most memorable album of 2015. But it will end up being the most important album of 2015. No matter how you feel about him as a person, Justin Bieber is probably the most famous person and the biggest star in music today this side of Taylor Swift. The media’s obsession with him isn’t an accident: people are obsessed with this kid from preteen girls to college kids to almost-40 year old smut moguls. He’s a superstar and he wasn’t going anywhere.
So when a superstar drops his most mature-sounding album to date that brings him from being a Teenybopper to legitimate Pop Hitmaker status, it’s worth paying attention to. Especially when it’s also good enough to make the people who hate him admit that okay fine, the album was sorta kinda really catch, and Sorry is a great song, and his vocal range is legitimately impressive, and maybe he has more to offer the music scene beyond TMZ headlines and staged pictures of his junk. I don’t think Bieber will ever be able to ever reach Timberlake-level acceptance as a multi-faceted performer and pop star, there’s been too much damage to his public image for some of it to not be irrevocable, but Purpose was a hell of a start.
Zollo (@SquareZollo) – Barstool U
Pick: Drake
While Adele eschews streaming and the major labels blindly squeeze to make money off selling music any way they can, Drake has spent the first half of this decade as a living reminder that these people have it all. fucking. wrong. Whether he’s debuting tracks on Soundcloud for free download, dropping albums with no singles and no marketing, or getting nominated for a Grammy off a diss track, Drizzy has rewritten the book on there being no book, time and time again proving that the formula in 2015’s music industry is simply to be a dope artist and do dope shit and the rest will take care of itself. This played out to a surreal extent this year, with the 6 God dropping 2 albums more or less out of nowhere and both reaching huge commercial success, and coming ohhhh so close to his first Billboard #1 on a random remix he made to play on his internet radio show. Long story short, what a time to be alive.
Connor (@ConIsles) – Barstool New York
Pick: Rodeo, Travis Scott
2015 was an interesting year in music. With the rebirth of a new, much more mature, Justin Bieber stealing headlines, plus names like Drake and Future dominating the past 12 months in music, one artist quietly impressed me far more than any other in 2015 – and that is rookie rapper Travis Scott with his debut album, Rodeo.
Following the release of his prequel to the album, Days Before The Rodeo, Scott was met with expectations higher than Afroman before he takes stages, and yet he was able to silence any and all #haters upon the album’s September release.
With help from the likes of Kanye, Pharrell and even the Biebs himself, Scott created a masterpiece of an album, giving listeners a musical experience hip-hop hasn’t seen in some time. With his grand scale style of rap, paired with the most intense visuals and live performance in the game, Scott has quickly established himself as one of the best musical performers in 2015. Hip hop fan or not, Rodeo is worth your time.
Previously:
Upcoming:
January 2nd Morning-Best Game
January 2nd Afternoon-Comedy
January 3rd Morning-Sports Moment
January 3rd Afternoon-Movie
January 4th-TV Show