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The excess of Kanye West’s My Beau­ti­ful Dark Twisted Fan­tasy — the most cel­e­brated 2010 album in hip-hop, and maybe any genre — left me feel­ing more than a lit­tle turned off. A thought that entered my mind (but not my blog) was that the album rep­re­sented a moment in hip-hop that mir­rored some kind of thresh­old crossed by “pop/rock” in the 1970s. Excess, after all, seemed to be the com­mon denom­i­na­tor between the var­i­ous sub-genres that blos­somed in the mid­dle of that decade: prog rock, glam rock, arena rock, funk, and disco all come to mind. This hunch was not accom­pa­nied solely by despair, but also hope. After all, it was that excess that gave way to punk rock, hip-hop, and so on. Unfor­tu­nately, I wasn’t pay­ing much atten­tion in 2010, or I would’ve known that the rev­o­lu­tion was already in progress.

Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All (OFWGKTA) is the name of a hip-hop col­lec­tive that you’ve prob­a­bly heard of by now. They’re hav­ing a big year. They per­formed on Fal­lon and at the MTV Woodie Awards. They were all over SXSW. Even NPR is on board. And — as if to make this as neat a pre­sen­ta­tion as pos­si­ble — Kanye, him­self, tweeted that “Yonkers,” the video by OFWGKTA leader, Tyler, the Cre­ator, is “the video of 2011.”

Like I said, if I’d been pay­ing atten­tion, I would’ve known about them last year. OFWGKTA got lots of play from “the web’s most influ­en­tial blog­gers” on Sir­ius XMU’s Blog Radio. They had albums fea­tured on year-end lists by Gorilla vs. Bear (Earl Sweatshirt’s Earl, at #12) and Pitch­fork (Tyler, the Creator’s Bas­tard, at #32). Pitch­fork also pub­lished a pretty nice arti­cle in Octo­ber, “The /b/ boys: Odd Future and the Swag Gen­er­a­tion,” which focuses on the state of inde­pen­dent hip-hop and how dig­i­tal natives are cir­cum­vent­ing the tra­di­tional label-centric method of releases. Last month, Pitch­fork did a fea­ture on Odd Future mix­tapes — “mix­tapes” is the wrong word, as the only thing these albums have in com­mon with mix­tapes is that they were released dig­i­tally and for free — but either way, you’ll notice that the group released 11 of them in 2010. Infor­ma­tion about OFWGKTA is easy enough to come by, and even if you’re not inter­ested in lis­ten­ing to the music, I’d encour­age you to learn more about this group. A great start is The Rap Up’s Defin­i­tive Guide to OFWGKTA.

OFWGKTA fas­ci­nates me for a lot of rea­sons. Their con­tent is com­pellingly dark and bizarre, they’re mostly teenagers, they’ve got dis­tinct voices and styles, and they’re really good at what they do. Most of all, they are, as their name sug­gests, odd. They’re weird and dif­fer­ent. The hip-hop land­scape that they’ve stormed is plagued by same­ness, stag­na­tion, and over-production. OFWGKTA stands out by being weird, cre­ative, and authen­tic. Which is not to say that they are what they rap — if that were the case, most of them would deserve life-sentences, at least — but that they aren’t try­ing to fit them­selves into any rap arche­types. “Odd Future” is an appro­pri­ate name. These young dudes are really odd.

More impor­tantly, these young dudes are the future of hip-hop, or at least one very bright part of it. They’ve been com­pared to Wu-Tang Clan because of the size and vari­ety of their col­lec­tive. They’ve been com­pared to Eminem because of the bal­ance of com­i­cal and vio­lent lyrics. For the same rea­son, they’ve been labelled as hor­ror­core and com­pared to Insane Clown Posse. XXL deri­sively called them “Black Jug­ga­los.” Where these com­par­isons may be fair, they’re woe­fully incom­plete. OFWGKTA isn’t rein­vent­ing hip-hop, after all, they’re just doing it with more energy and per­son­al­ity than we’ve been accus­tomed to since the 1990s, and they’re bet­ter (and younger) than just about any­body to come onto the scene in the past few years.

Hip-hop has very much become estab­lish­ment enter­tain­ment. The fact that its con­tent has stayed juve­nile — even by rap­pers in their 30s and 40s — is sim­ply a reflec­tion of the state of the estab­lish­ment, of our eternal-teenager soci­ety. OFWGKTA’s out­put is legit­i­mate juve­nilia, but it is in some ways more sophis­ti­cated than estab­lish­ment rap. OFWGKTA eschew excess in favor of excite­ment. This isn’t music I’d rec­om­mend to many of my friends (with­out at least read­ing the NPR piece linked above), nec­es­sar­ily, but I think it might be the most impor­tant music hap­pen­ing right now.