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" The rap music you hear on the radio represents only the very tip of the very tip of the iceberg in terms of the rap music being made and released at any given moment. In the era of cheap broadband, giveaway mixtapes, which were once considered promo items secondary to &amp;quot;official,&amp;quot; label-sanctioned albums, have become the primary medium where the form&amp;#039;s new talents and new ideas are developed. With little beyond a GarageBand recording session and a little cash standing between any aspiring hip-hop artist and a major online mixtape distributor like DatPiff, there&amp;#039;s an unimaginably vast number of mixtapes being released every day. Here are a few recent standouts. Gunplay, Acquitted      Through his ebullient, idiosyncratic, and occasionally flat-out reckless social media presence and willingness to act up for the media, Miami rapper Richard Morales Jr., aka Gunplay, has established a reputation as something of an overgrown 12-year-old ADHD case, albeit one with a lot of tattoos and a history of very public cocaine abuse. His fans, on the other hand, have had to learn patience on a level worthy of a bodhisattva while waiting for his official debut record to drop. After a lengthy spell under house arrest during which he released a number of unofficial mixtapes and, going by his Twitter, spent a lot of time playing Xbox, he&amp;#039;s celebrating his release with Acquitted, his eighth tape for Rick Ross&amp;#039;s Maybach Music Group. Despite the manic aura he puts out, Morales&amp;#039;s music carries a surprising amount of emotional depth and nuance. Acquitted alternates between tear-up-the-club anthems like &amp;quot;Cocaina (Que Linda)&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Topside&amp;quot; (featuring ascendant Atlanta MC Young Scooter), and then ones like &amp;quot;Salute Me&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Bible on the Dash&amp;quot; that drip both swagger and regret in equal measure, like something off a vintage Merle Haggard record. Mr. MFN Exquire, Kismet      First things first: Yes, the NSFW cover of Mr. MFN Exquire&amp;#039;s latest, Kismet, is indeed one of (if not the) the most memorable pieces of album art to bless 2013 so far. And although it&amp;#039;s considered a cheap critical shortcut to use record covers to describe their contents, it&amp;#039;s hard to avoid the fact that it perfectly sums up the combination of trippy headiness and bare-ass raunchiness that Mr. MFN specializes in. His 2011 breakthrough mixtape Lost in Translation was aimed at a certain type of slightly salty rap fan common to his hometown of Brooklyn who shuns not only the pop rap on the radio but the over-refined aesthetics that have been taking over large swaths of the hip-hop underground. Between then and now he&amp;#039;s grown more sonically ambitious, and Kismet boasts moments of flat-out psychedelia like the organ-drenched &amp;quot;Hoes I Don&amp;#039;t Remember&amp;quot; and the proggy synths behind &amp;quot;I Was Drunk When I Wrote This,&amp;quot; but as his choices in titles suggest, he&amp;#039;s still the kind of dude you can imagine hanging out on a stoop arguing about when exactly Mobb Deep fell off. DJ Mustard, Ketchup      If even just reading the words &amp;quot;Rack City&amp;quot; causes the song&amp;#039;s unshakeable minimalist beat to lodge itself firmly in your brain, you already know a little something about what California beat maker DJ Mustard is capable of. He&amp;#039;s the foremost artist in a niche style called &amp;quot;ratchet music&amp;quot; that forswears the pummeling maximalism of trap producers like Lex Luger for frame-rattling kick drums, a few handclaps, the barest sketches of synth melodies, and little else, and the results suggest a more stripped-down take on the electro-rap that ruled L.A. in the pre-gangsta days. The lack of sonic adornment to hide behind demands strong and highly confident rappers, and despite the success of Mustard productions like &amp;quot;Rack City,&amp;quot; Young Jeezy&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;R.I.P.,&amp;quot; and 2 Chainz&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m Different,&amp;quot; on Ketchup he sticks to performers like YG, Ty Dolla $ign, and E-40 who are better known for their mixtape work than their chart performance, but who can do Mustard&amp;#039;s work justice. -- Miles Raymer is a music writer based in New York City who has contributed to the Chicago Reader, Vice, Pitchfork, and others. Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/music/a23148/best-new-rap-mixtapes-2013/>