In the brief history of rap and hip hop, we have seen the intermingling and ultimate blending of rapping and singing. We've seen it progress at an exponential pace over the last six years since Drake got hot. Similar to the way rock 'n roll established a tradition of electric guitars, Kanye and T-Pain get a lot of credit for blending auto-tune with the voice and popularizing singer-rappers, but they were players in a progression of the genre. As artists followed them, Yeezy and T-Pain followed others. A few years ago, Drizzy claimed he was the first successful singer-rapper, which is important to note, because it feels like a matter-of-fact assertion due to talented singer-rappers not really coming in high volumes before him. I don't intend to undermine his statement, but by consequence of my argument, I will end up indirectly undermining his statement. My argument is simply that rappers have sung before, rappers have sung well before, and rappers have used singing alongside rapping in very good ways before. While Drake might be the best (a point I will not contest), he was not the first to successfully sing and rap.

1984: Slick Rick's Weirdly Good Singing

The first time a major rapper sang and did well with singing was Slick Rick on "La Di Da Di" (1984). For a dude with a raspy voice and an eye patch who can't sing, he sings pretty well. Rick's trick pretty much set the stage for singer-rappers, because he doesn't try to go too high or too low. He hangs right in his wheelhouse vocally and uses his coarse voice like sandpaper to smooth out a feminine persona. The Grand Wizard Ricky D was likely not the first to pull this mono-register trick, but he was the first rapper to make a big record with it. His singing was not a defining trait of the song by any means, but it remains a nifty feature.

1989: Biz Markie's Bad Singing

Biz Markie was an okay rapper, and more importantly for the purposes of this article, an awful singer. In a very different way from how Slick Rick's voice was like sandpaper, Biz's voice was like a sandwich made of sand. But it didn't matter. He put words together that people liked and that people felt connected to. He got to the 9th spot in the Billboard Hot 100 by 1990, and showed that even if you didn't know what the hell you were doing with your voice, you could rap and sing, and people might get behind you.

1990s R&B: Closer to the Future

Before I get to Lauryn Hill, it is worth noting that R&B artists like Keith Sweat and Blackstreet utilized rappers and intermingled sultry R&B with punchy reverberating rap. Sometimes rappers were credited for these verses (See: Blackstreet), sometimes the R&B artist took all the credit (See: Keith Sweat). Either way, these features were an important bridge between the already-popular iterations of rappers who sang and what we have today in artists like Migos.

1999: Lauryn Hill Is Here

With her album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1999), Ms. Hill combined an album of mostly singing with frequent raps. Her singing voice wraps itself around whatever groove she's on top of, but her rhythm when rapping is reminiscent of a title fighter's jabs: inconsistent, but not random. Lauryn's contribution was the conception of rap as a complementary addition to singing. "Lost Ones" might be the pinnacle of the album's rap-singing combo. She contorts vowels to fit the rhymes of her message and sings a hook like she was still in the middle of The Score. (NOTE: This is actually the best song on the album, it just doesn't have any rapping; this is also the best line any rapper has ever sung)

2000: Nelly Begins to Blend Singing and Rapping

I wish there were a behind-the-scenes story about the making of Country Grammar (2000) in which Nelly went way over budget with his beats and just ended up having to sing all the hooks even though he couldn't sing because he couldn't afford Ashanti or J-Lo or D'Angelo. That story doesn't exist, but it feels true. Nelly's voice is so strained and nasally, it feels like he is a bad singer. But if you listen to "St. Louie," "Country Grammar (Hot Sh*t)," "Ride Wit Me," "E.I.," and pretty much every other song on the album, he lays his voice on top of the beat without slumping it. It's really tough sometimes to tell whether he is singing or rapping, and that's what he changed about the dynamic between the two. He blurred the distinction. If you wanted to draw a clear line from Drake's development to one artist, it's Nelly. Drake has a better voice, but were it not for Nelly deciding to unnecessarily sing everything (See: "Ride Wit Me"), I can guarantee Drizzy would not be what he is now, stylistically. (NOTE: Nelly is criminally under-appreciated he deserves a national holiday he deserves a seat in public office he deserves so much more credit okay I'm done)

Mid-2000s: Kanye West, Akon, and T-Pain

Kanye's College Dropout (2003) did some strange things with singing. I'm not saying they're good or bad things, but they shaped the ways rappers who followed Kanye sang. Firstly, he opted to sing out of tune and harmonize with himself out of tune (See: "We Don't Care"; "School Spirit"; "Through the Wire"; "Family Business"). Secondly, Kanye actually tried to sing even though he wasn't the best, but it wasn't facetious like Slick Rick, it wasn't obnoxious like Biz Markie, and it wasn't lackadaisical like Nelly. He switched registers and would lose all bass in his voice (See: "Spaceship"; "Slow Jamz"). Thirdly, he auto-tuned all of the humanity out of his voice until it sounded like how I imagine Siri would sound if you spilled Sprite on your iPhone (See: "The New Workout Plan").

Akon, like Nelly, has a strong case for "Most Under-Appreciated Rapper of the New Millenium." Pretty much what Kanye did out of tune, Akon did in tune at the same time as Kanye (See: Akon's debut album, Trouble (2003), was recorded the same year as Kanye's debut album). And that is worth at least a footnote in the history of rap. Akon's most astounding development was basically singing for an entire album and still being recognized as a rapper. When Nelly and Kanye rapped, they were mostly rapping, but when Akon rapped, wasn't he mostly singing? The question isn't rhetorical--it's sincere, because Akon paired rapping with singing more closely than anybody had at that point.

T-Pain got pretty much the exact recognition he deserved. He may have been slighted in that he can actually sing reaaallllly well. Other than that, we all recognized how novel he was at the time, then we collectively got tired of him. I'm not a cynical hip hop purist who thinks T-Pain was garbage because of his insistence on auto-tune. Like I said earlier, his adherence to auto-tune is akin to the place of electric guitars in rock. His formula was an innovation, in that he was very crafty in using his voice as an extra synthesizer, but it was an innovation he never went anywhere with. He made the same songs for three albums, and after Thr33 Ringz (2008), we kind of let him drift away. The impact of his music remains resonant today.

2009: Aubrey Arrives

After Kanye returned to our consciousness with the publicized death of his mother and his fourth studio album, 808s and Heartbreak (2008), the stage was set for somebody, anybody to come in and turn the intense sadness which Heartbreak's sound afforded into something else. Drake was that dude. Listen to So Far Gone (2009). If there were no discernible words, that EP would be so sad, but it's not. Even though some of it is really really sad, it's not sad in a hopeless way. Drake spun the melancholy thread into a quilt of introspection, but unlike a quilt, Drizzy's sound was ice-cold.

Debates about Drake are odd because we're not used to a dominant dude being dominant by talking about getting strippers out of their lifestyle. It's similar to the hesitance, and sometimes rage, provoked when calling Steph Curry the most dominant basketball player in the NBA (even though he is, guys, he's totally dominant and you're lying to yourself if you deny that he is unguardable in 2015). It's the same thing because, historically, the most dominant basketball player was some type of tall, strong, fast, or some combination of those traits. Steph is little (by NBA standards), weak (by NBA standards), and definitely not faster than any of the guys he plays against. Drake is not abrasive, he is not violent, he does not follow in any tradition that resembles gangster rap, yet he is probably the best rapper right now. His wit is second to none, his method is just as reflective as his catalog of hits, and he does not try to be anything he is not. He's dominant, just in a different way than we've seen before. And he found this dominance by slowly arriving at it between singing and rapping.

2015: Everybody Else Found a Way

(NOTE: Travi$ Scott might be the beginning of a revolution in not only rap, production, and digitized singing, but in performance; listen to "3500" and watch this dude in the years to come, rare talent)

Future, Migos, Post Malone, Rae Sremmurd, Nicki Minaj, Young Thug, Ty Dolla $ign, and a bunch of others capitalized on the digitization of the singer's voice and the fluidity between rapping and singing. The idea that Future and Game can be on the same song--and that song would allow for both to flourish and steal the show in tandem--is baffling and encouraging. It's important to note that the impact of the dynamic between rapping and singing is not exclusive to rappers. The trend has forced producers to account for a new, tougher-to-manage fabric of rap songs than just looping up beats and adjusting verses and hooks. Producers like Hit Boy and Metro Boomin' are just as pivotal to the movement as the voices we hear on their beats--sometimes more important. The trend's growth, death, or stagnation is entirely dependent on the dynamic between production and lyricism that has not been at such a critical balancing point since "Nuthin' But A G Thang" (1992). Like Dre and Snoop's G Funk masterpiece, the trend is fun to watch and it's even more fun to hear.