East Atlanta Santa 3, Gucci Mane (Atlanta)

This dropped right before Christmas 2019, and not being much of a hip-hop maven, it took a bit of research to discover that this is the rapper's fourth Christmas collection, after East Atlanta Santa in 2014, East Atlanta Santa 2: The Night GuWop Stole X-Mas in 2015, and The Return of East Atlanta Santa in 2016. I judge hip-hop based on whether a song or an album gets my attention without my having to know anything historical about the artist, and that's where Gucci loses me; there's a bunch of things that clearly link back to other recordings he's made or his personal history. I'll point out a few songs from this that stuck out to me, like "Jingle Bales Intro," the dancehall-reggae influenced "Drummer," the ballad "Snow" that rides over top of a wildly mutated sample of a Boyz 2 Men song, "Slide," and "Time Flies By." You might also like the "12 Days of Christmas," which is transmuted into the world of drug dealing, and even hip-hop can't resist throwing in a kid-sung number, "WWGD Outro," even though it, and the rest of the album, is wildly explicit -- something I won't hold against it or I'd have to delete at least half the punk rock entries from this site. (There's a clean version.)