2026 VMA Best Hip-Hop - You Vote
Six rap videos, one ballot, a vote that closes 25 September at 6pm ET. Rank them on the two things this category is for: the writing and the picture. Bars and delivery on one side, world-building on the other, and both halves count. A great verse hung on a lazy shoot loses to a good verse attached to a video that builds somewhere you can walk around in. Judged that way the biggest record here is not the best video, and the prettiest video is not the best rap. A murder-plot narrative finishes above a record-breaking number one, an action short outranks a fashion film, and the most inventive picture on the ballot finishes fifth because the rapping under it is a croon rather than a verse. Every link goes to the official music video, never the visualizer or the lyric clip. The order is the argument, so vote it into shape.
- 1
Cardi B — Safe (feat. Kehlani)
Two halves that argue with each other. The song promises a man who keeps her safe; Arrad's film says the opposite. Don Benjamin plays the boyfriend, the pregnancy leaves her isolated, a confrontation ends with him walking out, and Don Benjamin's return finds her murdered. Cardi writes in full paragraphs, Kehlani carries the hook, and the distance between what the words promise and what the picture shows is the whole idea.
- 2
Megan Thee Stallion — LOVER GIRL
Bounce does the driving. Jacob Dior's beat pulls on HaSizzle's 'Bounce It' and Total's 'Kissin' You', and Megan sits behind the pocket without ever sounding hurried. The staging is built rather than filmed: four dancers in lingerie, a Cupid costume that recreates the cover art, and the martini glass stem she rides like a pole. It signs off on a wolf growling in the dark.
- 3
Don Toliver — E85
Grand Theft Auto logic, played straight. Shadrinsky opens on a Porsche 918 outrunning a pack of police cars, cuts to an interrogation seen mostly through an officer's bodycam, then sends Toliver up to the station roof with a gun he took off a cop. Kali Uchis flies the extraction herself. His is the softest rapping in the top three, all melody and no punchlines, but the chopper landing on the roof pays for it.
- 4
Drake — Janice STFU
Biggest record on the ballot by a distance. A number one debut on the Hot 100, his first multi-week chart-topper since 2018, built on an interpolation of Lykke Li's 'I Follow Rivers' and a great deal of Auto-Tune. The picture is an inventory of wealth: Tala Bressan opposite him, opulent dinners, and the Ferraris parked on polished marble, an F40 through to a Daytona SP3. Handsome, expensive, and not built to mean anything.
- 5
Tyler, The Creator — SUGAR ON MY TONGUE
Self-directed, and it looks like it. Tyler works a tiled room with one dance partner, the space keeps reorganising around him, and the whole thing opens out into the packed rave in underwear. As rap it is a groove and a croon rather than a verse, which is what keeps a picture this inventive down in the bottom half of a rap category.
- 6
Travis Scott — DUMBO
Gabriel Moses shoots it like a fashion film. Half-light, a hotel suite above the city, and the motionless bodies arranged around the room like sculpture while Travis drifts through barely moving. Beautiful, and close to inert. Their third together after 'FE!N' and '4X4'. The bars are texture and the direction is restraint, which leaves the record nothing to push against.
