Today in Hip-Hop — July 22: Lil Durk 2X at 10, Common’s Nobody’s Smiling at 12, and Chicago’s Same-Date Double-Drop

July 22, 2016. Def Jam released Lil Durk 2X, Durk’s second album and — as it turned out — his last for the major before Only The Family took the wheel completely. Ten years later, the record reads like the exact hinge point where Chicago drill left the corner and walked into pop rotation. “My Beyoncé” with Dej Loaf had been quietly cooking on radio since November 2015. On this date, the mixtape sound stopped being a mixtape sound.

Why 2X was the hinge year for Chicago drill

The production credits map the moment more than the tracklist does. 2X pulled in Wheezy, Zaytoven, Sonny Digital, Young Chop, Southside, ChopSquad DJ, DJ L, and Donis Beats — a lineup that starts in Atlanta trap and ends in Chicago’s homegrown drill circle. Zaytoven and Sonny Digital were dragging Durk out of the corner cypher into the ATL commercial pocket. Young Chop, meanwhile, was the same producer who had already broken Chief Keef’s “I Don’t Like” in 2012, so 2X wasn’t a full pivot — it was a hybrid record: half Chicago’s post-Keef drill sound, half the crossover push Def Jam needed to justify the ink. It peaked at #29 on the Billboard 200 and #5 on Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums. That commercial position — real, mid-tier, not top-ten — is exactly why Durk parted ways with Def Jam after this one. His OTF releases on Alamo and EMPIRE outperformed the major-label pipeline within eighteen months.

Chicago’s other July 22 record

Two years earlier — July 22, 2014 — Common dropped Nobody’s Smiling, executive-produced entirely by No I.D. That’s the same No I.D. who taught a teenaged Kanye how to chop soul samples on the same South Side blocks where Durk grew up. The record was Common’s direct response to the drill wave Chicago was living through in 2014: he literally titled the album around the violence in the neighborhoods. Same city, same date, opposite poles — Durk chronicling the corner from inside it, Common surveying the same corner from the elder-statesman side of the microphone. The No I.D. bass thump under Common’s verses came out of the same jazz-loop tradition that had shaped Kanye, and by extension had shaped what “Chicago hip-hop” even sounded like commercially. Two poles, one date, one map.

Wear the No I.D. lineage

Our Common Black America Again hoodie pulls from the 2016 record that carried the same voice from Nobody’s Smiling into national protest — No I.D. deep in the credits, Chicago all the way through.

Shop Now

Also today in hip-hop

• Puff Daddy — No Way Out — 29 years. July 22, 1997. Bad Boy’s founder debut, #1 Billboard 200 with 561,000 first-week sales, “I’ll Be Missing You” atop the Hot 100 for eleven straight weeks as a tribute to Biggie. Grammy for Best Rap Album in ’98. The Hitmen (D-Dot, Stevie J) production defined a chart-facing East Coast sound whose long shadow — for reasons nobody in 1997 could have called — still shapes rap discourse this week. If Roc-A-Fella was the other pole of that same era, we mapped that empire in detail here.
• Petey Pablo — 53 today. Born July 22, 1973 in Greenville, North Carolina. “Raise Up” (2001) put Carolina hip-hop on the Southern-rap map when the South meant Atlanta, Memphis, and New Orleans and not much else. “Freek-A-Leek” went platinum in ’04 and hit #7 on the Hot 100. He also carried Ciara’s “Goodies” to #1 the same year. NC voice, first mover.
• Joey Bada$$ — 2000 — 4 years. July 22, 2022. Pro Era’s decade-marker record, released ten years after the 1999 mixtape that made him the standard-bearer for East Coast boom-bap revival. Peaked at #25 on the Billboard 200. Beast Coast lineage receipt.

Stay creative — The Custom Creative Team

Jon Jones