Hip hop, long an outsider, is now part of the pop culture mainstream

Hip hop, like any genre, has its great periods and its fallow ones. For old heads, the golden age was the late 1980s, maybe into the early '90s. But you don't need to go back in history to pinpoint one of hip hop's greatest years. Just take 2013.

The year saw albums by hip hop titans, including Jay-Z's Magna Carta Holy Grail, A$AP Rocky's Long Live A$AP, Kanye West's Yeezus, Drake's Nothing Was the Same and Eminem's Marshall Mathers LP 2.

Beneath the superstar level, too, there were great recordings: Earl Sweatshirt, the youngest Odd Future member, offered a more muted brand of nihilism last year with his album Doris; New York's big man Action Bronson and his ferocious Strictly 4 My Jeeps single showed him as a force to be reckoned with in his hometown, and went viral after he performed the song at St Hilda's community centre for a group of pensioners in London; eccentric Detroit rapper Danny Brown's acclaimed album Old was a return to his maniacal raps, shrill giggles and boom-bap beats; and Pusha T's extraordinary My Name is My Name included appearances from Kendrick Lamar, Rick Ross and many others. Among the women, singles from Angel Haze, Iggy Azalea and Nicki Minaj continued to make mainstream radio playlists.

But the most exciting has to be the way hip hop has stormed into any area it fancies over the past year. While rap and rock have been cross-fertilising since Run-DMC and Aerosmith teamed up for Walk This Way in 1986, 2013 saw hip hop's biggest names taking the music in all directions. "Borders and barriers just aren't there," says hip hop producer and DJ The Last Skeptik. " Yeezus is experimental in a lot of ways and it's exciting that it's allowed to be. People are now considering hip hop as just music, where before it was treated as this very strange thing that a lot of people didn't give a s*** about. This year it's everywhere."

It was impossible to talk about popular culture without also talking about hip hop last year: if Miley Cyrus' twerking at the MTV Video Music Awards became one of the most discussed moments of the year, one of the reasons it went viral was that it took from hip hop and stirred up a debate about cultural appropriation.

Although the appropriation of rap styles and cultures by the white mainstream has long existed, the presence of instant news and comment via the web meant it was now a common talking point, rather than just within the hip hop world.

Rap is being deconstructed more than ever, from questions of whether Jay-Z is bolstering a new kind of black identity by going vegan (albeit temporarily), to whether feminists can enjoy the genre, or how dangerous the commodity fetishism rife within the culture is.