"Since this is the West Coast, I like my hip-hop bumpin'"
Bumpin' it is. The Grouch blends the bassier, funk-influenced sound of the yet-to-be-commodified gangsta rap scenes of his milieu with the more unorthodox lyrical and topical stylings of the fledgling abstract scene. Not quite a Blowedian, not quite a G, somewhere in-between, The Grouch here is a perfect emblem of the contemporaneous LA underground.
Myka maintains his deep-voice bubbly flow, a relatively recent development, that hits or misses over this highly psychedelic cincophrenic Jazz rap production courtesy of Last Stat. Multi-faceted and inaccessible, which I respect; muted and reluctant, which I do not. It feels as though Myka hasn't been fully engrained in a song, hasn't embodied it, in some time, which was always a strength of his. I don't advocate dredged sadness in chest, rather, fire in belly.
Slug and Murs sound like themselves again; over a decade removed from their last collaboration and their styles have been made even more distinct. The G-funk influence is well-utilized by Murs, but Slug is not especially well-equipped to hit those grooves. O well. The duo do it anyway, better than most.
I've always been forthcoming about my preference for MIKE's earlier forays into cloud rap; the sample-driven beats burying him in the mix, forcing him to raise his voice to compensate, reflected perfectly the helplessness his lyrics conveyed. His effort here, however, takes the opposite approach. He slurs his words over sparsely-melodied drum beats and it feels like the anxious kind of high this CBD-free shit gets me.
Artists make a habit of fixing what isn't broken, such is ... read more
I don't know what producer this duo needs to bring distinct and appealing energies out of them, but Aesop Rock was a misroll. Trite experimentalisms that sound dated even for 2009 underscoring a notably less energetic showing from the duo.
My favorite rap duos — Nack & vino, Flash Bang Grenada, Nostrum Grocers [RIP 😵💫] — work because the emcees differ enough to bring the best out of each other. Slug and Murs do differ, but when working together, they blend their styles into a slurry of one-note mediocrity. They not only fail to bring out the best of each other, they lose the best of themselves.
I like Slug. I like Murs. But the duo does not deliver for me. The chemistry exhibited on some select features is simply absent here; a little lo-fi, groovy West Coast beats courtesy of The Grouch, yet Murs does not sound at home and Slug sounds very out-of-place. Nothing comes together the way it should.
Yes, yes, hip-hop evolved from Jazz, vocalese, etc, and yes, that tradition has been kept alive in the underground primarily, but folks forget; the Fellowship came out of the same Café that gave us Snoop & N.W.A. You don't have to be scatting over jazz rap instrumentals to be part of the lineage. "Poppier", more bass-heavy, funkier ish coming out the SoCal underground has the same ancestors.
Living Legends picks right up where Fellowship fell off, making good on ... read more
Denizen spent his last leg in California, incorporated some aspects of the local sound but didn't do his due diligence. No Blowedian lineage, no Beatniks. It's cool. Maybe he'll be back now that his family's fed but I doubt it though.
The nuclei of one of the illest albums of last year — also of the decade — have reassembled for a worthwhile spiritual successor. I will not be reviewing the new Ye; I don't care. This, though far from a concept record, and certainly with a breadth of other contents, is a beautiful deconstruction of the man, his influence, and his influences. Wouldn't be no Ye without Reagan.
Denizen Kane is one the illest rappers to have never put out a really good album. I have the utmost confidence that if, through some twist of fate, he and Kenny Segal locked in for a tape it'd easily be one of my all-time favorites. But Denizen walked away. How could he?
Best articulated by Chicago likemind lessgrace, Lastchild; "And meanwhile, I'm slitting my wrists, with pages that I've written / Just to let some muthafuckas know how bad it's gettin"
I ... read more
The spoken word poetry bits stand well above the conscientious raps and the overwrought folk strums; he'd yet to incorporate that poetic license into his writing with the consistency he had in group outings.
Early folk stylings tied in with raps from a Denizen who isn't quite sure where he's going yet. Not West, certainly not Away, rather like a tree he does not move & is thereby not moving.
Every further word I'll ever write is dedicated to Dennis Kim. Everybody needs him & Denizen walks away. He was not selfish enough to believe he had to stay simply because it was the mandate; Denizen walks away. It's one the illest jazz rap cuts of all time, but Denizen walks away. I keep making myself write, but Denizen walks away.
Typical Cats quell their DIY-indie jazz for more coffee shop pop jazz boom bap. Denizen is the MVP of the tape, despite his penchant for pop-hard rock vocal stylings. Qwazaar has little presence, but his cuts are some of the best. Butterfly Knives is among the group's best. Qwel, clearly rattled from the Slug beef seems desperate to prove his battle rap style works on wax; thinking about it too much makes it stop working.
Wet street; dry air;
suede timbs;
graffiti scrawl; northern drawl;
good weed; existential izm;
thatched lattice ephemera;
skinny limbs; catacorner
hood cacophony
Whole new different vibes from Nack, closest analogue being his verse on 1nce. He been on that boastful atmospheric ish and it hits; I'm still thinking they could be mixing his voice better over this styling but I welcome every addition of his to the MastaMind-Poi$un-led Duze Trey renaissance. When he and vino trade verses ... read more
Beholden to too many pop rap tropes, and Nack's Jamaican accent is just funny, but ill content as always from the Tragic Allies crew and Tragedy Khadafi is one hell of a ringleader.
Latest Nack single had me nostalgic.. "It's a difference tween the Allies and them kids tryna tag along!"
Whole crew, but Nack especially is on their conscious five-percenter ish. I wasn't anticipating that track 16 sample.. abstract heads should tap in, learn somn from the fruit of I-slam
Nietzsche identified correctly that the desire to die is dishonest, is actually a desire to have never existed in the first place. You do not desire to merely cease the suffering, but to have never suffered, and this is why actualizing the desire — dying — is so unsatisfactory. It won't erase, nor make up for, that which came before. We mostly recognize this intuitively, accrue slower deaths, escapisms, disassociations, etc. Sadistik recognizes this, escapes through music, does ... read more
Qwel has some classic ish.. elsewhere. I'm a big fan of his delivery and intonations, but his attempts at conscientiousness here fall flat — ginger kids rap the n-word thinking they found the way to do it clever. They never have.
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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."
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