You Need Some Paintings in Your House

If you don’t got no art// Connected to all that tough, fake-ass shit you niggas runnin’ around talkin’ bout// You goin’ down like Christmas ornaments in February, nigga// Yeah// You better go get you some motherfuckin’ books, you better go study// You need some paintings in your motherfuckin’ house, son - AA Rashid, “Blessed Times”

Rap has been around for over 50 years at this point, evolving from block parties in the Bronx into a global phenomenon. If we bring our attention to the United States, this is one of the few times in which there is no real center to rap. There are various scenes across the country, each bearing their own particular hallmarks. Chicago is the center of the drill scene. Atlanta is still the home of trap. Detroit has developed a scene based on punchline rapping over piano-driven beats. The Bay Area, the home of hyphy, and Los Angeles still has have their G-funk smoothness. New York will always be in the mix, but it does not carry the weight that it did back in the 1990s and early 2000s.

With this lack of a center both on the mainstream and in the underground, there have been subsections that have crossed geographic boundaries and coalesced around different aesthetic ideals. For this dispatch, I will discuss one subsection that I have noticed coming into prominence over the past decade or so: boutique rap.

You may be wondering to yourself why “boutique rap”? I’m glad you asked that question. I would like you to think about this style in relationship to another space where art and commerce interact: fashion.

Rap exists at a few different tiers, just like fashion. At the bottom, there are stores in the mall that make very serviceable clothing. It isn’t groundbreaking, but it does its job well and it is extremely popular. Think about Abercrombie, J. Crew, Madewell at this level. This is the level at which one would place an Aubrey Graham or a Future. Their music works. It is popular. However, no one listens to it and thinks to themselves that was really groundbreaking.

At the level above these two, we have fashion labels who produce exquisite clothing. The designs are impeccable, the fits are incredible, and the lineage is immaculate. That said, it is very accessible; everyone knows about these lines and wants to buy them to show that they’ve made it. With regard to fashion, we are talking about labels like Armani, Gucci, and Prada. With regard to rap, think about artists like Kendrick Lamar, Tyler, the Creator, and Doechii. All three are extremely interesting, technically sound rappers, and they are also extremely popular with the public.

At the boutique level, we are talking about cult labels, labels that pull the interest of those who are deeply interested in innovative designs and exquisite constructions. The clothing at this level can be clearly avant-garde and creative, but it could also not scan as that amazing on first look. In this second case, a further inspection shows the fine details and intense craftsmanship that when into its creation, highlighting how much further these clothes are above anything else you can buy. In the fashion realm, think labels such as Comme Des Garçons, Maison Margiela, and Phoebe Philo. The rappers who exist at this level are who I’m talking about this week.

To be more academic about it, I define boutique rap as a subgenre of underground hip-hop that puts a premium on exotic production, technical rapping, and exclusivity. With regard to exotic production, I am referring to styles that are experimental or that deviate from the standard boom-bap, kick-drum/hi-hat style prevalent in hip-hop. Technical rapping is dense and knotty. While the lyricist may rap in a slow cadence that doesn’t seem super impressive on first listen, further inspection will show that the rhymes are full of internal rhymes, double meanings, allusions, imagery, and complex structures. These rhymes can—and often do—deviate from the standard rap pattern and can drift into free verse. Exclusivity in this context can refer to both limited drops on either vinyl or in digital form at higher-than-usual prices and sonic accessibility (i.e., whether the music openly challenges the listener).

To be clear, this is not an idea that has just appeared in my head in 2025. This is something that has been developing over the past couple of decades. Each element of this structure has had a precedent, opening the door for this genre’s existence. Let’s start with the first part of the triad: exotic production.

Producing with Less

Hip-hop music has long had a tradition of off-kilter production. There are producers such as the Bomb Squad and the Dust Brothers, with their dense, sample-heavy styles that were radically different from the simplistic production of the time. There are also live bands like The Roots and Stetsasonic, both of which deviated from the sampling and drum machines commonly used in hip-hop production. Plenty of people have used wacky samples to anchor their music. These include Madlib, DJ Shadow, MF Doom, and Biz Markie to name a few. The core of what would become the prevalent form of boutique rap can be traced back to J Dilla.

Due to his unfortunate early passing, Donuts (2006) became his swan song album. On this release, Dilla builds beats around rather long soul/R&B samples and breaks. While DJs have long used these raw materials, Dilla had the idea of pulling longer samples and using them as melodic elements. This idea was capitalized on a few years later by Roc Marciano.

Marciano is one of the true architects of the boutique rap sound. His 2010 album Marcberg stands as a founding document of how this genre would eventually reach the heights it is at now in 2025. On this album, Marciano took the soul loops and styling that Dilla used on Donuts and stripped back the drum layers. The music still had the same woozy quality as Dilla’s and the vocal samples remained prominent in the overall mix, sometimes crowding out the rapper. But, the primary innovation was the lessened importance of the drums.

There are some drums and bass, but they do not thump as they would on a Soundbombing track. If you were to play this album in your car, your trunk will not rattle; none of the beats work in that way. There was a practical, stylistic concern for this sound—Roc wanted people to pay attention to his rhymes—but the effect was that the beats became something more than just something to nod along to or fill up the space. The beats became an event upon themselves with their own language and style. They showed a way forward for hip-hop.

While Marcberg is a less-than-perfect album (Roc’s verses are undercooked at times), its conceptualization as a new way forward for street rap is extremely important. The initial form of this new, drumless production was honed by Roc Marciano’s compatriot, Ka. I have gone on at length about Ka previously, so I will refrain from doing so here. That said, his production truly gets at how effective this new, drumless style of production can be. It is on the base created by both Marciano and Ka that the beat foundation of boutique rap is formed.

Raps on Raps on Raps

The second part of the boutique rap concept is technical rapping. This is not just going fast or stringing words together that sound cool. Technical rapping must stand up under further scrutiny and/or induce a feeling other than “Wow, that sounded cool.” Progenitors of this style of rapping date back to the 1980s. The first prominent example is Kool Keith of Ultramagnetic MCs’s. For example, take this section of “Ego Trippin’”:

In this verse, Kool Keith insults emcees who rap on a simple pattern and with no style by calling them children. He goes on to prove his supremacy as a rapper by both using their rhyme scheme while also deploying several internal rhymes and distinct imagery in the process of doing so. More importantly, his flow is smooth and this sounds very cool at actual speed.

Kool Keith continued to influence oddball rap styles in the years following Ultramagnetic MC’s, with seminal albums such as Dr. Octagonecologyst and Black Elvis. For the record, if you are not familiar with these albums, the Dr. Octagon album is an underground classic, and Black Elvis was Keith going mainstream as only he could: by wearing a plastic Elvis wig and posing as a rock star while spitting free verse raps.

Another rapper of stylistic importance to the influence of boutique rap is the Old Dirty Bastard (a/k/a Dirt McGirt), the wildest member of the Wu-Tang Clan, whose style is dense with internal rhyme and imagery. Return to the 36 Chambers is a masterpiece that gets lost in the mix of rap history. But, I would be doing a disservice to you, fair reader, to suggest that ODB and Kool Keith were the only weirdos in rap. It is at this point that I note the existence of abstract hip-hop.

Abstract hip-hop is a subset that focuses on taking hip-hop music and making it really weird. Abstract hip-hop labels include Stones’ Throw, Anticon, and Definitive Jux, each releasing defining albums for this genre of rap. Rather than writing an explanation of this style, I’ll provide examples. The two examples that I’ll use here are from MF DOOM and Antipop Consortium. The MF DOOM track will be from his collaboration with Madlib, Madvillainy. This is the last track on the album, “Rhinestone Cowboy.”

The density of the flows on this track is awe-inspiring. Still love the line “Known as the grimy limey, slimy—try me, blimey// Simply smashing in a fashion that’s timely// Madvillain dashing in a beat-rhyme crime spree.” It paints an image, it’s dense with style and technique, and it is absolutely counter to anything that you would hear on a mainstream track at the time. For the record, Madvillainy does hold up. It’s maybe a touch too high at points (see “Shadows of Tomorrow”), but the peaks (e.g., “Accordion,” “Curls,” “All Caps”) more than make up for it.

The second track I’ll use to explain abstract hip-hop is from the debut album of Antipop Consortium, The Tragic Epilogue. This is “Rinseflow,” which features one of my favorite Beans verses.

As you hear in that first verse, the lyrics come in a rapid-fire cascade. The imagery fires fast and thick. The lines eschew the idea of basic rhymes if they even rhyme at all. The words are packed with allusions and imagery. The beats from Earl Blaize are ominous and spacy, rather than rugged. They have a rhythm, but the beat actively fights against itself, working to shake you out of the hypnosis that a hip-hop beat can create. If hip-hop is Earth, Madvillain is like Mars. It tracks as hip-hop even though its style is outside of the mainstream culture. Antipop is a moon circling Neptune. You can hear that it is hip-hop, but it sounds so far outside of what you’ve ever understood the music to sound like.

This particularly dense style of rap becomes another foundation for the artists who fall under the boutique rap label.

Economic Challenges

So far, we’ve covered beats and rhymes, the two foundational components of all rap music. The other important part of the art is the commerce. Rap is a capitalist form. It always has been. It always will be. Any attempts to separate capitalism and hip-hop are pointless. Even the weirdest rapper is still trying to make money. So, with this in mind, we consider the last component of boutique rap: exclusivity.

This can take on two particular forms, one of which is newer than the other. The first is actual accessibility. If you listened to the Antipop Consortium track above, the first word that would come to mind is not accessible. Difficult? Challenging? Complex? Off-putting? Those words would absolutely work. This level of difficulty is one component of boutique rap. How can it be exclusive if everyone can get into it?

The other part of exclusivity comes from the ability to find and/or purchase the music. For most music, you go to the record store, pick up the album, and make a reasonable exchange of funds for the product. For example, the current rate for a single-disc vinyl release is about $25, a CD is between $10-15. Boutique rappers charge considerably more than this. The idea was started by Nipsey Hussle in 2013, who released his mixtapes for free but then charged $100 for one of the 1,000 available copies. Hussle would modify this for his 2014 mixtape Mailbox Money, charging $1,000 for one of the 100 copies. All of them sold out every time. In addition, there are rappers such as Ka who do not have all of their music up for streaming, adding further to the exclusivity of the music.

The Houses of Boutique Rap

Ok, now that I have established that a lot of the ideas of boutique rap have existed for a long period of time, two questions arise: When does this genre start to exist? Who qualifies as a boutique rapper?

The answer to the first question is between 2015 and 2016. If you go back to that period, you’ll find a group of albums that are clearly different from what was coming out around them. Around that time, you had mainstream albums such as Kendrick’s To Pimp A Butterfly, Aubrey Graham’s If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late, Travis Scott’s Rodeo, and Future’s DS2. There are three albums that, to me, suggest the start of boutique rap: Dr. Yen Lo’s Days with Dr. Yen Lo (2015), Westside Gunn’s Flygod (2016), Earl Sweatshirt’s I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside (2015) and Mach-Hommy’s Haitian Body Odor.

All four albums, although originating in different locations and with different purposes, encompass the hallmarks of boutique rap: exotic production, technical rapping, and exclusivity. The exclusivity for Yen Lo and I Don’t Like Shit come from their claustrophobic, disorienting nature. They are not easily accessible spaces for the casual rap fan. For Haitian Body Order, you had to be luckily enough to buy one of the 187 CDs he printed for $300. (He did eventually upload it, but a future vinyl repress was priced at $1,000. All of those also sold out.) For Flygod, you had to get your hands on one of the 250 copies of the record pressed. If you would like to buy a copy of it, you can look at the screenshot from Discogs that I took on Friday afternoon to see how much it’ll cost you.

So, it is clear that four rappers who belong in this category are Ka, Earl Sweatshirt, Westside Gunn, and Mach-Hommy. The question becomes who else falls into the boutique label. The first obvious inclusion is Roc Marciano. As one of the innovators of drumless beats, a hallmark of this genre, his inclusion is a non-negotiable. Another automatic inclusion is Boldy James, a man who can only write intricate rhymes. Continuing in the abstract stream, Armand Hammer, the duo of billy woods and E L U C I D, exist well within the realm of boutique rap. There are more, but this enough for the introduction of this idea.

A Starter Pack

So, you’ve read this very long dispatch and are now curious as to where to start with all of this, to learn about what the hell I’ve been talking about. So the first to recommend are the four I discussed above: Days with Dr. Yen Lo, Flygod, I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside, and Haitian Body Order. If you want to listen to more Ka, please refer to my previous write-up about him. For more Westside Gunn, dip into his unfortunately titled Hitler Wears Hermes mixtape series. With 12 entries, they are full of stellar tracks and appearances from rappers you know and like. There is also Flygod Is An Awesome God 2, the mixtape that gave Tyler, the Creator the desire to rap again.

For Earl, he just released a new album, Live Laugh Love, and it is excellent, another example of why he is one of the best rappers working right now. For Mach-Hommy, I will tell you to start with #RICHAXXHAITIAN and Pray for Haiti. If you find yourself into those, his whole catalog is excellent. There are a couple of just fine albums with Tha God Fahim, but they still have things to recommend them.

For Roc Marciano, his collaborations with The Alchemist are superb. Their styles match each other extremely well, producing some fantastic boutique rap. I would personally recommend The Elephant Man’s Bones. It is a bit more inviting than The Skeleton Key, and a clear example of what I’ve been talking about. The best of his solo albums to start with is Marciology. This isn’t a recency bias on my part; I think it is the purest distillation of his project.

You could honestly choose any Boldy James release, but to be more specific and to not show favoritism to The Alchemist, one of the finest producers in boutique rap, I’ll recommend Fair Exchange No Robbery, one of the albums he recorded with Nicholas Craven. While James can rap over any beat like a good Detroit rapper can, he and Craven have an excellent unity.

For Armand Hammer, the best introductions to them are through both Shrines and We Buy Diabetic Test Strips. There is also an excellent album with The Alchemist, Haram, that is worth listening to as well.

As should become clear in your listening, the production is as important in boutique rap as the rapping itself. Aside from Roc Marciano and Ka, some of the major producers in the genre are The Alchemist, Nicholas Craven, Daringer, Conductor Williams, and Preservation. If you find their names attached, you’re, more than likely, working in boutique rap territory.

Conclusion

Although it has existed for about a decade, boutique rap is becoming the standard for more and more of the underground rap scene. The emcees and producers named above have started to convey a sense of elegance and import to the various projects that they collaborate on. As time continues forward and younger emcees come up on the work of these innovators, it will be interesting to see what the future of rap holds for us all.

I hope that you have enjoyed this deep dive. Next week will be a new Spins column. This Friday has been very busy, and I’m confident that a bunch of what has popped up this week will appear in that column. What exactly? That’s for me to know and you to find out. As always, tell your friends and come back next week.