MED & Madlib's Classic Outtakes

MED has always been one of those emcees whose best asset is the people in his circle. His 2005 debut album Push Comes to Shove was mostly produced by Madlib, with J Dilla, Oh No, and Just Blaze handling the rest of the beats. Those beats were the most memorable part of that album. MED was fine as a rapper then, but he wasn’t yet great at constructing albums, and his best verses tended to appear on songs by other artists (Madvillain’s “Raid” being the main example). As early as the late nineties Lootpack days, MED seemed like he would go down as a weed carrier, rapping on his friends' tracks just because he was around the studio during recording sessions.

He took a long six years to release his second album, the hubristically named Classic, but that time did him well. His roster of collaborators, including Georgia Anne Muldrow, Oh No, the Alchemist, Karriem Riggins, Talib Kweli, Aloe Blacc, and of course Madlib, remains amazing, but as Push Comes to Shove made clear, great beats and good features does not a good album make. But those six years between albums were not wasted. MED came back a better emcee than he’s ever been, riding the beat like a pro on “Flying High” and adjusting his delivery to compliment the beat on every track, and he was able to step back and craft a satisfying start-to-finish album experience the second time around.

Dudley Perkins and Madlib in a State of Emergency

Dudley Perkins is not a great singer by any typical metric of ability, but he has a loose, off-the-cuff informality to the proceedings that makes his singing records, which are released under his birth name, some of his best work. It helps that the two Dudley Perkins records on Stones Throw, A Lil’ Light and Expressions (2012 A.U.), are fully produced by Madlib, who turned in some of his career best beats (check “Falling” if you need some proof). So news today of a new Dudley Perkins/Madlib collaboration was greeted with excitement among the typically fanatical fans of the two artists.

Freddie GIbbs Goes Deeper

Madlib can make magic with three drum beats, some bass, and a string loop. Old soul vocals drift in and out in place of a hook, like the ghost of some pain past. Over this sparse, melancholy canvas, Gibbs weaves a tale of love and heartbreak, of a woman who left him for a sucka and lied about her baby’s parentage. Since it’s Gibbs, he finds room to discuss bagging up heroin in the midst of all of this. Between this and the other five songs we’ve heard from Piñata, MadGibbs is shaping up to be one of the best collaborations of both artists’ careers. I’d list the guests that will be on the record but that list is too long. Piñata will be out in February.

A Rare Madlib Transmission from the Lost Gates

The second Madvillain album. The third Quasimoto album. The Supreme Team and Professionals albums. Rock Konducta. Dozens of jazz projects. Cocaine Pinatas with Freddie Gibbs. I could keep listing announced Madlib projects that have not as of yet seen the light of day, but a longer list would just make me sadder. Since the release of the thirteenth installment in Madlib’s mostly underrated Medicine Show series a few years ago, things have been mostly quiet from his camp. He’s been holed up in his four-room studio space for the last few years, working on new stuff that he doesn’t particularly care to release.

Now, in a rare interview with the Bad Kid, the fans are getting a whole bunch more upcoming albums that can make us sad when they never come out. According to Lib, every few years he goes through a year-long period where he just listens to jazz records and plays a bunch of instruments. He just finished up one of those years, so a ton of new Yesterdays Universe records are on the way. He’s also producing a lot of songs on the new Mos Def record and working on some other hip-hop projects that he doesn’t name. He’s almost done with the third Quas album, finally. On the Madlib getting weird tip, he said that he’s got some “early Kraftwerk-type stuff,” and that he listens to Throbbing Gristle and other industrial music. Based on well how his forays into jazz and broken beat have gone, a Madlib industrial or minimal wave album is an exciting prospect. Little bits of a new Mos song, a great Busta remix, and what could be some of that Kraftwerk-type stuff from his recent performances in London can be heard in the video too. Oh and he mentions an unreleased J Dilla jazz record and electronic record. He’s probably put a few dozen albums’ worth of new material to the side over the last few years, and it sounds like a few of those might actually see release this year. Most won’t.

Madlib the Rock Konducta - "The Mad March"

Way back at the start of 2011, Peanut Butter Wolf put out an edition of the Stones Throw podcast highlighting music that was due out on the label that year. After snippets of two great songs from the still-unreleased second Madvillain album (one of which turned out to be a Doomstarks track), we were treated to “Two from Rock Konducta.” No other information was provided, and two years later the Rock Konducta project was still nowhere to be found. It seemed destined to join the second Madvillain album, Supreme Team, a bunch of recorded but unreleased Yesterdays New Quintet records, and who knows how many other exciting projects in the overflowing boxes of never-to-be-released Madlib music. A shame, since the two Rock Konducta songs on the podcast were a promising move away from Otis’ normal rap/jazz comfort zones.

Even though Rock Konducta appeared to have been left unfinished, ‘Lib didn’t abandon rock altogether. The sixth volume in his Madlib Medicine Show series, Brain Wreck Show, was a mix exploring the farthest out rock records in his crates, including a ton of mind-destroying Brainticket tunes. Soon after MMS #6, Madlib went over to Europe for some (eventually cancelled) shows with the psychedelic voyagers in Embryo. It’s still unclear what those shows would’ve entailed, but based on the advance press it sounded like Madlib would have been onstage with a synth or some other instrument playing alongside the band. Like when he spent thousands of dollars on instruments because he up and decided he was going to make jazz music over a decade ago, it looked for a while like Madlib was going to go full steam into the world of rock. Unfortunately, right after these Embryo shows got cancelled, the Rock Konducta went back into hibernation, and there was little indication that that particular persona would be revived.