Compared to ‘88, 2018 is trash. Thoughts on rap’s biggest month in 30 years.

Kamasi Washington is a top five emcee. Everything else is a lie.

Rolling Stone — inarguably the greatest arbiter of musical excellence — refers to 1988 as hip-hop’s greatest year. Quartz — inarguably a website that chronicles modern global advancements in professional and popular culture — noted on April 11, 2018 that, three decades later, “Hip-hop has officially displaced rock. It has spawned the anthems of the millennial generation and spurred a whole new wave of television and film. It’s wormed into the mainstream so deeply at this point that it may even be nearing a nostalgia revival cycle.” There’s nothing quite as nostalgic that’s been released as Kamasi Washington’s latest jazz epic Heaven and Earth. Thus he — and not Kanye, Jay, Drake, or Beyonce — is solely responsible for this months emergence of the future heights to which hip-hop culture will ascend.

In 1988 overall, a diverse set of 15 iconic rap artists released roughly 200 songs worth of music that, very quickly into their careers, cemented their instantaneously legendary status. The year’s top albums discussed everything from politics to parents, luxurious swagger, and bar-for-bar lyrical slaughter. Artists including Public Enemy and N.W.A., The Fresh Prince and Slick Rick, plus…