Staying focused, keeping a steady grind, and never letting up are just a few things that Sergio Kitchens — better known by his stage name Gunna — preaches in his music almost religiously. The titles of his songs such as “Get it if You Want It,” “Don’t Give Up,” and “Outta Sight, Outta Mind” are basically the testaments to his message, and his swooning, melodic raps carry a raw, motivational energy that is hard to deny.

As a native of south side Atlanta’s College Park, Gunna will tell you again and again that there’s no other way to get what you want than to hustle for it. These hard-working attributes can be credited to his life of grinding before music and his love for high-end clothing at a very young age.

Stock X is a shoe platform with everything imaginable and all real. One was a standard model of the shoe that typically sells on secondary markets for $160; the other was an ultra rare model designed by the rapper Eminem that can fetch more than $20,000.

More than 20 years into his career, Eminem is still breaking records on a regular basis.

Slim Shady’s March 2 concert at Westpac Stadium in Wellington, New Zealand set a new attendance record for the venue, according to the New Zealand Herald. It was also Westpac Stadium’s fastest concert sell-out.

Catch the new video for Skies’ Gunna collab “Stop the Madness,” directed by Sara Lacombe, up top. Lacombe is known for her previous video work with Migos, Meek Mill, and more. The latest Skies video was first teased via a pair of behind-the-scenes photos back in February.

The Based1 and DruArmada-produced track is taken from Skies’ debut studio album Shelby, which also featured collabs with Gucci Mane and Landon Cube. At a TIDAL-hosted show earlier this month, Skies brought his mother—the inspiration behind the album’s title—up to the stage so she could meet fans. “People asked me why I named my album after my mom, and shit, right?” Skies told the New York audience. “This is my backbone, bro.”

Lil Skies has taken his debut album Shelby a step further with an intimate mini-documentary about his mother. After all, the project is named after her.

The doc shows the inner-workings of his album, his behind-the-scenes team and a tearful speech he gave to his mother when he told her the album would be named after her.

“It’s my first real project,” Skies said in a press release. “It’s like a new beginning. This is really like me being born again.”

Shelby currently sits at No. 5 on the Billboard 200, marking a successful debut for the burgeoning artist. It follows his 2017 mixtape Life of a Dark Rose.

Love has been at hip-hop’s center since its birth. That’s including love of the game, the love of money, and love of one’s self. Of course, rap has opened up enough to speak of loving someone else. LL Cool J did so in 1984’s “I Need Love,” when he spoke in a fragile voice about being a lonely superstar on the road. That lent itself to parody, though: How does one get so soft after talking so tough on their debut? But things have obviously changed since the ‘80s. Drake has at least an album’s worth of “I Need Love”s, and acting loveless isn’t synonymous with keeping it real these days.

As a result, many more fans are looking to hip-hop to soundtrack February, the month of lovers. There’s the classics, like Fabolous’ romantic monotone and Ja Rule shouting, “WAH WOULD I BE WITHOUT MAH BABAAYY?!” in his throaty voice. Of course, the boo-loving playlist has had some more recent additions, too. Future opened up his heart post-Ciara for one of his best songs, and Kanye West stuffed acid house, Nina Simone, and a Chief Keef feature into an album only to close it with a soul-sampling dedication to his now wife. Nicki Minaj also managed to throw in a cute Slick Rick reference in one of the great love songs of our time.

Most casual music fans would probably classify Delaware artist Lil West as a rapper, but one listen through his catalog and it’s clear that elements of pop and rock music seep into everything he makes. He cites Saosin, HIM, Underoath, and AFI as early influences, and says that emo music informed the way he communicates through songs.

And it probably wouldn’t have happened without the internet. On the heels of his new EP Vex Part 1, we asked Lil West to write about how he developed such an eclectic taste in music, and he shared the details in the best/most convenient way he knows how: via text messages.

Listen closely to Migos’ biggest hits and one has no choice but to become well-versed in their singular lingo (sample: “Versace Versace Versace, Medusa head on me like I’m ‘luminati”). The Atlanta trio — comprised of Quavo, Takeoff, and Offset — have established themselves as trendsetters in hip-hop, constantly inventing catch phrases unique to their vocabulary. Dating back to their first mixtape, 2011’s Jugg Season, when they were rapping about trapping with pots and pans on the corner, their street slang was elastic enough to stick with the youth. Songs like “Bando,” “Versace,” “Hannah Montana,” “Chinatown,” “Pipe It Up,” “Look at My Dab,” “Dat Way,” and “Bad and Boujee” have influenced pop culture and the entire English language by bringing their North (or “Nawf”) Atlanta roots to the mainstream.

While talent will always be paramount, much credit for Chicago’s hip-hop renaissance should go to the people behind the scenes. The ones nurturing aspiring musicians, covering them in local media, and providing them with opportunities to perform. The internet has made it easier to listen to music from the other side of the world than it is to take the train a few stops to see a local band play a five dollar showcase, but regional music scenes are still vital.

The trouble is, they’ve had to navigate rapidly changing, unfamiliar waters like the rest of the music industry. Places like Baltimore, Detroit, and the Bay Area are overflowing with gifted artists, but are now trying to assemble a puzzle out of familiar pieces like blogs and local radio, as well as new shapes like curated playlists and social media co-signs

His biggest hit, “Lucid Dreams,” is soothing and intuitive, with a heartbroken melody and a sample of Sting’s “Shape of My Heart” — it’s the “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss” of 2018. Like that P.M. Dawn song — one of hip-hop’s most controversial crossover hits, back when crossover hip-hop hits were still controversial — “Lucid Dreams” is lush loner music, an inheritor of the emotional hip-hop of the last decade, delivered with the raw texture of the SoundCloud rap generation and a deeply keen sense of pop efficiency.