A blog about hip-hop, jazz, punk, psychedelic rock, funk, and whatever other kinds of music I get inspired to write about. There are too many good sounds out there for me to get to them all, but I'm doing my best.
Habits &
Contradictions was one of the best rap albums of last year, and its replay
value hasn’t diminished at all in the twenty-one months since it came out. This
is all the more impressive since high-concept introspective songs are almost
entirely absent on the album. Unlike fellow Black Hippies Kendrick Lamar and
Ab-Soul, Q doesn’t have much interest in making those kinds of songs. He’s gone
on record saying that he only made “Blessed” to keep listeners from thinking
that he only rapped about parties and drugs and guns and stealing your girl and
being cooler than you. It’s a great song, but it’s far from the best on the
album because it finds him straying from his greatest strengths, which are
rapping about all of the things I just listed.
With “Banger (MOSHPIT),” the second single from the delayed
(due to sample clearance issues) Oxymoron,
Schoolboy Q is rapping about basically nothing. The hook is a bunch of boom
shaka lakas and shouts of “Figg side!” while the verses aren’t really about
anything. But all of this nothing amounts to an enjoyable and compulsively
listenable song because Q is one of the best rappers at turning nothing into
compelling fodder for songwriting (all due respect to Wale circa 2008). It
certainly helps that he’s a great rapper with ever-shifting chameleonic flow
and cadence.
Until very recently, Top Dawg Entertainment’s roster of
rappers was identical to the roster of the four man crew Black Hippy: Jay Rock,
Ab-Soul, Kendrick Lamar, and Schoolboy Q. When TDE signed R&B singer SZA
over the summer, it was an exciting addition to the team but it didn’t really
affect the essential makeup of Black Hippy as it has stood since day one.
That changed a month ago when TDE signed relatively unproven
Chattanooga rapper Isaiah Rashad. Rashad had made the rounds on the internet
with a bunch of loose tracks that positioned him as a good but still developing
rapper, but I have to admit I was worried about him being the first non-Black
Hippy rapper on the TDE roster. Black Hippy has been such a perfectly balanced
and exceptionally talented crew for long enough that bringing in much greener
newcomer brought the risk of him being completely overshadowed or worse yet, being
a poor fit with the rest of the team.
The cat’s out of the
bag: the mysterious rapper or rappers who released a bunch of loose singles this year under
the name Captain Murphy is actually just Flying Lotus.In spite of never rapping on record before,
FlyLo was always the most likely candidate, what with all of the shout outs to
his label Brainfeeder and Murphy’s close association with FlyLo on many of the
initial tracks.Thankfully, after
getting a ton of attention with the secret identity gimmick, Duality really delivers.The character of Captain Murphy is some sort
of cult leader, which is reinforced throughout the tape with audio taken from a
videotape made by Marshall Applewhite, the founder of the Heaven’s Gate
cult.It’s also noteworthy that Duality was initially released not as a
bunch of individual audio files but rather as a long-form video of the entire
project.Duality is meant to be taken as one long psychedelic whole, and the
confusing and sometimes frightening jumble of images that accompanies the music
accomplishes visually what the beats (by a bunch of the best producers in the
instrumental hip hop underground) and Murphy’s pitch-shifted vocals do
aurally.Murphy is a force for evil, and
since the original rap supervillain DOOM doesn’t release nearly as much music
as he used to it’s nice to know that someone is out there causing mayhem in the
darkest corners of hip hop.
After eighteen years of releasing albums of wildly
inconsistent quality, hopefully everyone has started to accept that expecting
Nas to make another Illmatic is
unfair to him and to us as it prevents our ability to really enjoy any good
music that he puts out.We can, however,
hope for the next best thing, another It
Was Written, which Nas has delivered with his eleventh studio album.This is not to say that this album sounds
anything like It Was Written, because
it really doesn’t.The production of IWW, mostly done by the Trackmasters, is
very of its time and is one of the main factors preventing it from truly
achieving classic status, while the No I.D. and Salaam Remi beats are similarly
of this period of hip hop.Both albums
share a tendency toward slickness as far as the beats are concerned, a few
ill-advised crossover attempts (I skip the awful Swizz Beats-produced “Summer
on Smash” every single time I listen to this record), and a few harder songs
(“Loco-Motive” and “The Don”).This
sonic inconsistency and the existence of a few outright duds is exactly what
made it take so long for people to come around to IWW, and it clouds the most important element of Life is Good: Nas hasn’t rapped this
well or seemed to care this much about rapping in ten years.“Loco-Motive” and “A Queens Story” feature
remarkably vivid storytelling, and the last verse of “World’s an Addiction”
might be the most jaw-droppingly incredible verse from any rap record this
year.After the good-but-not-great Distant Relatives album with Damian
Marley, the terrible Untitled, and
the weak Hip Hop is Dead, it’s great
to have Nasty Nas back.
After making two albums in 2012 that were focused on
specific styles (Hair’s trippy
psychedelic folk rock and Slaughterhouse’s
heavy space garage), he abandoned stylistic unity for his third record of the
year, Twins.“Thank God for Sinners,” the first song on
the record, might be the catchiest song he has ever written.“They Told Me Too” sounds like an outtake
from the Slaughterhouse sessions that
was left off that album because it wasn’t dark enough.“Would You Be My Love” harkens back to the
fuzzier edges of the British Invasion.“Inside
Your Heart” is a pop song drowned in sludge that ends in a mess of feedback.“Ghost,” the longest song on the album, is a
hazy psychedelic jam with repetitive lyrics, wordless vocals, and one of the
coolest guitar solos of Segall’s career thus far.The other songs are similarly all over the
place, but the album feels strangely coherent, anchored by Segall’s voice and
the ever-present fuzz that he has drowned all of the guitars in.The album sounds like the work of a band
exploring the many dimensions of their sound, which is all the more impressive
since Segall played all of the instruments himself, and only brought on a
handful of guest vocalists.He’s said in
interviews that he’s not going to try to make this many albums again next year,
which is unfortunate, but his 2012 will go down as one of the best years any of
the garage revivalists have had in the last decade.
Meyhem Lauren has been generally overshadowed by his more
immediately entertaining colleague Action Bronson in the recent revival of a
New York underground hip hop scene, but Respect
the Fly Shit, the first of two free albums he released this year, has begun
to change that perception.Respect the Fly Shit was recorded over a
few days in a hotel room during SXSW, where Lauren hunkered down with producers
Tommy Mas and Harry Fraud and a rotating cast of fellow New York
knucklehead rappers.The end result is
twelve tracks of wildly entertaining boom-bap, and a veritable who’s-who of New
York’s current underground, including Action Bronson, AG da Coroner, Despot, Heems, and
the scene’s bitter old uncle Sean Price.Lauren raps about a life of luxury that he probably doesn’t actually
live, but it’s so weirdly specific and odd that it’s very endearing.Instead of rapping about his rims or driving
around in his other other Benz, Lauren boasts about his fingerless driving
gloves that he uses on his way to five course feasts.Half of the song titles reference food in
some way (“Pan Seared Tilapia,” “BBQ Brisket,” “Grown Man Pallets,” “Peruvian
Desserts,” “Juevos Rancheros,” and “Radioactive Tuna”).There’s even a love song (his first love
song, as he helpfully points out in the intro to the song), “Let’s Hold Hands,”
where he repeatedly asks the object of his affections if she want a baby and
describes her as “the color of an egg bagel, you know that Simpsons
complexion,” which might be the strangest description of a beautiful woman I’ve
ever heard in a rap song.
"Fingerless Driving Gloves"
"Pan Seared Tilapia" (feat. AG da Coroner, Action Bronson & Despot)
