2011’s Best Overall Music: Wale - “Bait”

With the first generation of mixtape artists crossing over to making album releases that dominate the Billboard charts, it’s apropos that arguably the most consistently dominant performer of that era close it with a mixtape track so enormously grand that it dwarfs his first week top five Billboard album release. Though Wale’s connection to DC has always been a heated controversy and now tangential at best, he hugs DC in the most absurdly pandering of manners here. In under five minutes, he provides the finest argument against gentrification in the Capital City and its now chocolate suburbs. From drug dealers to community activists, local rappers, clothing lines, hangouts and weighing in on hot button topics on local street corners, it’s brilliant. Epic horns and scintillating synths give way to a go go inspired killer, local legend turned pop dynamo, just like the emcee himself.