The Moors took Europe out of the dark ages. This shit is too uninnovative to bear the name; Cookin Soul supplies soundtracks for sundowning and Nack's not going out that way. He proves that much.
2Mex grapples with indie rap fame; thousands of people know your name even as you lack mass acclaim. There are people who would scream your name, stand in line to see you, toss thousands your way. He also grapples with how little any of that shit matters. You can tell the barista Your Fanbase Will Destroy Her all you'd like, you're still dealing with funerals, heartbreaks, and mass surveillance in the era of tekno-gnosis.
"Understand / I would trade my entire fanbase / for one ... read more
I am still taking recs & will be for a while. Leave me one through my bio.
LO2 is a total departure from the first tape, the only throughline being the emcees themselves. Obijuan has since picked up his flow and looms. is here frenzied, hardly legible through his fury. Chickenscratch. The languid.oceans project, though, was never particularly calligraphous, and the style shift is welcome. dylantheinfamous, though, crumples the parchment.
Gruff and grizzled, perfectly executed return-to-form for the NY MC par excellence. Drums clattering like piano keys in condemned housing.
Edward Skeletrix is infatuated with stock photos, the subtle unhumanity emanating from pictures made to be universal. The music is much the same; attempts at wresting expression out of a captured genre, of forcing his humanity to seep through the cracks of industry. Art is Sucking The Life Out Of Me.
From the very onset my barrier-to-entry for a lot of the plugg and rage so highly praised by my contemporaries has been the prevalence of entirely vapid materialism, an unquestioning and ... read more
I think the narrative about this album sounding like a bygone era, a non-existent New York are misguided; this sound is refined specifically to meet this current moment. As popular and alternative lanes become further polarized, crystalize into specific sounds / demographix, you feel this creeping resentment in the underground. Emcees who'd've had a chance at recognition two decades back playing out the same old tracks, less and less satisfied with themselves & the game. LTD VOL.1 ... read more
Obijuan and looms.' collab just feels late. Obi had much better lo-fi cuts years before this tape, and having dylantheinfamous produce the whole thing was a nonsensical misstep. It's grasping at sounds they've already mastered.
a Rosaura, Javi y mi viejo mundo.
My great grandmother passed last week. She was born in Olá, Panamá. I've never been. My — her — family made a big effort to assimilate. Not her. Not really. She drank bone broth into her old age and moved away some years ago, down to Florida. Someplace further South, more familiar for her as her hair greyed. We didn't speak as often as I wanted. I didn't know how. I won't forget. "Aiii, mijo.."
"It ... read more
Death Grips has only ever gotten less impressive to me as I've heard more industrial & experimental hip-hop. The reputation this tape has seems entirely disparate to the content of the tape itself, which is relatively watered-down, catchy colloquial takes on contemporary experimentalisms.
Clutching with mine tattered hands, ground to nubb'd finials draped in scarlet. The instruments with which I receive have been abused. While every word connects, connects, these sounds flash me back to lecherous, putrid theatres, eyes leaking, beading into silver screen. Instrumentals so maximalizing, resembling only the drabe catharsis-salesmen, liberal eclectics, resounding like psycho-cinematic fusillade. Maybe I should just read her book.
In some ways, though likely fewer than I noticed, this is the little sister record to who told you to think??!!?!?!?!. Both are musings on identity, not so much as an individualized facet of presentation but as a historical phenomena. Identity, since inception, has been a trapping that misunderstands our very nature; or, as MCPB puts it, "Beliefs are the police of the mind!"
Triple parentheses are used by anti-semites to indicate Jewishness. Jewishness is ... read more
The informant yelled "Black Power!,"
There's a noise in my head; creaky creepshow psychedelia creeping through my mind, vitrified. I thought we already told Bessie! Words clamoring out the punctograph — can you *feel* it? — Trismegistus killed Moctezuma, made barren waste of West-land materia prima. We're here in the hereafter, committing to be unwise, just in time for a Chinese sunrise. Those twinkles are traitors; timoneering astral bodies wayfound new worlds ... read more
I've enjoyed Son Doobie since his appearance on Tha Grimm Teachaz' LP, & always been a fan of Cypress Hill, so my West Coast kick leading me here was well-reasoned. Which Doobie U Be? is accurately funky, zany, and catchy. Both Son Doobie and Tomahawk Funk's lyrical stylings are less-so on substance, more-so on fun, and it works, save for a few outdated lines and throwaways that would have benefited from a little more forethought.
Taking recs for the foreseeable future to work off this funk. See my bio for the link; please, keep requests anonymous. I want to hear calls of the void, not a familiar voice
.
One of those few frustrating moments I can only conclude something is not for me. I cannot point to any one thing that does not jive with me, any one wack line or throwaway beat. Yet and still I am unmoved, and unable to interrogate that as I usually would. I think I just don't like his voice.
Exile's been stagnant for two decades and wasn't interesting when he started. Blu's lyrical ability scales directly with the quality of production he's put on. The shit is mids at best because no risks are taken & don't have to be to appeal to the 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭–hip-hop head posers. Nostalgia baiting an album that wasn't great in the first place.
The Blowedian answer to contemporaneous jazz rap acts.. think Tribe, but West Coast. It's fine for what it is — no doubt autocephalous heresy to the 2pacalypse acolytes of the day — but we count far more convivial congregations among its contemporaries. Ones not so troped out & substanceless; many also Blowedian!
"Stop saying that fucking word!"
Of course, N.W.A. and Fellowship did come from the same cafe, and it's all love between them cats, but there is tension between the sounds; waves clamoring like wet metals against each other, each hoping for a good, clean, loss. Blackshirts in the streets beat their former brothers.
Creative Differences is a thrashing death, a beast-too-burdened splintering its sinew into chainlink; finally, something to call its own, finality, a gate to keep. ... read more
This thing is a fuckn time capsule, capturing the sound of, no doubt, many a [blank] youth. Me, though, I'm too young for nostalgia.
Shit is too high-quality to be a proxy, too reminiscent of past peaks to be a pastiche. This is how conscious emcee ages gracefully; it takes rarity! Regardless, the reflections on coming-of-age and the accompanying quotidian rage are appealing. Military recruiters in the cafeteria, throwing pamphlets and hiding they hands.
We still here. Nack raps big on his five-percenter ish again and lays down exclusively fire verses. Coincidence? 7 in 10 Gods say NO..
"They couldn't possibly become anything other than / What had been demonstrated in front of them"
I seen the illest rapper in the world with my own eyes on Friday. No mediation in the meditation, no invisible decorum, one particularly barbaric yawp was the highlight of my eve: "𝘞𝘐𝘓𝘓 𝘛𝘏𝘌𝘠 𝘍𝘌𝘌𝘓 𝘛𝘏𝘐𝘚?". Avanti! Only barbarians are able to rejuvenate a world in the throes of collapsing civilization. Only barbarians refuse to ... read more
Create an account to rate and review albums.
Recent Review Comments
On Navy Blue - Sir Render
"@TheNevermeant Every reason a person goes to therapy today is related to the system. Obviously. Nothing exists outside it. There isn't anything else to go to therapy for."
On Navy Blue - Sir Render
"@TheNevermeant I am not. Psychology's origins are in asylums, straitjackets, the carceral state. To this day it exists to criminalize and pathologize difference. This is not a matter of simplification, but of history, and my point has already been made by the bulk of the post-modernists."
On Navy Blue - Sir Render
"@TheNevermeant They don't, though. Psychology has always been a weapon against the fight for radical change. People are not capable of fighting when they're not drowning in misery. They get complacent. Therapy can help people cope — that's bad. I am against the industry built around coping. The same bastards who did this to you are the ones telling you to cope with it.
There is no healing here. We are still in the machine. There is only getting used to it — and that, I find abhorrent."
On Navy Blue - Sir Render
"@TheNevermeant No, I have an issue against every system of therapy. For precisely the reasons I described; it is the process by which individuals are made to assume responsibility for systemic failures. Training the Koala who's tree has been chopped down to carry on, despite."
On Serengeti - KENNYV
"Dyknow what I mean?"
On Navy Blue - Sir Render
"@Mmmvbnn2 When did I attack the listeners?"
On Navy Blue - Sir Render
"@Mmmvbnn2 You'll notice I used the term therapy-rap in my review, rather than therapeutic. Because, again, my issue isn't that it's peaceful or whatever, but that it's a regurgitation of the stupid uselessness of therapy as an industry. Its grand arc is one of *surrender.* Of *acclimating to the world* instead of *changing it*"
On Vince Staples - Cry Baby
"@dj_digo I may have had a phase"
On Navy Blue - Sir Render
"@handsomenapkin There are exactly two sentences pertaining to audience perception and both are tied back to the content of the album."
On Vince Staples - Cry Baby
"@DallasDaMusical I dont think it sounds very good"
On Navy Blue - Sir Render
"@ALLcaps000 He hated the socialists of his day, and he was right to. They were resentful crypto-christians and he saw everything wrong with them. As did Marx."
On Navy Blue - Sir Render
"@ALLcaps000 A communist."
On Navy Blue - Sir Render
"@JohnCena1337 By therapeutic I don't mean soothing, calming per se; I mean reminiscent of therapy."
On Navy Blue - Sir Render
"@JohnCena1337 Then I think the question answers itself. Obviously I would like an album that makes me feel good. But at that point you've abstracted the term therapeutic far beyond anything resembling my critique, which regards the mindsets and language pushed by the actual therapy industry and their application here, in this album."
On Navy Blue - Sir Render
"@JohnCena1337 What does the quality of being therapeutic mean to you? To me that is a description of the lyrical content of the album — to which my answer is a resounding NO."
On Navy Blue - Sir Render
"@ALLcaps000 I am not a nihilist. There's a war going on outside and the lines have already been drawn — through you. Recognition of "the self" — whatever that means — as the battleground. The only way you can attain inner peace in these conditions is through submission."
On Navy Blue - Sir Render
"@Mmmvbnn2 My point is not that it's *wrong* to say that the album is therapeutic, quite the opposite. It *is* therapeutic and that is *bad.* His music now is bland and pacifying, the album's message is a disgusting response to the status quo and being "at peace with yourself" is acrid to me."
On JAY-Z - The Black Album
"@Bot10Exists I did."
On Serengeti & Polyphonic - Dont Give Up
"@hazyvizions Always funny what people cling to. This was one of my least favorites."
On RicofromJupiter's review of R.A.P. Ferreira - Purple Moonlight Pages
"@RicofromJupiter T.A.Z. by Hakim Bey 👁"
On JPEGMAFIA - EXPERIMENTAL RAP
"@usur_disc350 When did I say Future's misogyny can't be criticized? What I said was that his art is worthwhile and it isn't pointless. Peggy's is pointless. He has no substance, he only whines and reduces women to punchlines. He makes them platitudes out of earnest."
On JPEGMAFIA - EXPERIMENTAL RAP
"@CutieZenUwU I'm not going to argue with a Polish teenager about what is and isn't racist. Your total lack of respect for trap is self-evident and you're willfully disengaging with the point to screed about the genre. You're a vulture."
On JPEGMAFIA - EXPERIMENTAL RAP
"@CutieZenUwU "Any trap artist for that matter" is a racist caricature. Any circle in which I am notorious is comprised entirely of losers.
Art can and does handle misogyny in ways that are interesting and revealing. Future is a misogynist as an expression and an extension of his own pain. All of these rap personas are characters, inseparable from their bodies of work. Future's art is worthwhile. This is drivel. There is no point to the misogyny, no statement, no expression. The whole thing was recorded — seemingly — so he could hear his own voice."
On J. Cole - The Fall-Off
"@DivineAura Hip-Hop was built out of the exact opposite, a sibling to funk evolving out of jazz and vocalese. It started with scatting. The gritty realism was a byproduct of labels and their making the genre more marketable. You can talk about real issues, personal experience, expression, etc, without being a realist. Most rappers do. J. Cole does not."
Advertisement