Kenny Segal beats make a science out of zen; in my next life, I want to be me, and meet you again. Barman composes a series of odes from my future self, mad prophetic.
You only have twice in life to find your one and only. My first didn't go so swell. OME found the Blowed, then Hellfyre, and both went belly-up. He has his own thing going on now. Geti found Anticon and never was affiliated again. Guess he's worried. Better make that next one count.
OME and Geti are two of my favorite emcees. They're two of a lot of people's favorite emcees. I have to imagine that pressure is why this project buckles in on itself.
YouTube rap cipher type beats. Stacking syllables doesn't make you deep and the pace here more resembles the Eminem-influenced hacks [hey, Tech N9ne is on this!] than those who have freaked the style superior.
I'm very big on Rhys Langston's idiosyncratic means of writing; verbose because opacity is a virtue, purple because it's a nice color. He makes the tropes of the ouroboric modern abstract scene work for him by subverting them with cohorts. No monotone flow, but he still sublimate the rage.
Sadistik hates his life & so tries to make something larger-than-it. A fool's errand, despite his writing chops.
Hos on my dick cause I look like a drawing of the Prophet Muhammad.
Anā al-Ḥaqq, Anā al-Ḥaqq!
Kristoff Krane forces Sadistik into brevity, where he finds his soul. Incredibly solid offering from both emcees.
Rhys Langston is trying to do a lot instrumentally, which is commendable, but he is unable to command the necessary presence. It doesn't help that he's buried in the mix.
Overwrought & more than a little cheesy; the protracted length affects a greater depth than is actually possessed.
Very real flashes of the skill Buck maintained through his disaffected 2000s, but with a clear & renewed love for hip-hop. He shouts out Open Mike Eagle on this one.
Lyrically important, conscious, sabotaged by a harebrained scheme to make boring and generic trap work for him and for the culture. The culture oft-clamoring for that artifical trap beat, I suppose.
"
I have sorrow for everyone who doesn't grow / The sorrow grows in me so it makes the rest of me not grow / So then we're in the same place and they feel sorry for me / But I'm so hollow, they can't follow the freedom that breeds it's own breathing
(Are you guys laughing?)
Don't laugh, don't laugh, I'm here on my behalf / I've grafted, grafted, I'm plastic, my mask; I can't breath and so I gasp / There's no need to even ask / I ... read more
Ill and timeless, El-Production puts Cannibal Ox' godbody diction to test over beats of hyperstition. Cats still bite this divine style!
Seeing Mac Lethal & Vast Aire on the same tracklist is trippy. Timecapsule for sure.
Sadistik's debut sets the tone for what would follow; a general air of melancholy & ruthless self-critique, unfortunately here accompanied with very flat production.
Scans like demos of an overactive mind; noncomittal but also noncommercial.
Dedicated to Sophia; not to be confused with Sophia from KDxMPC, the one that loves Elaine and airtagged her luggage baggage claim; nor Sophia from Palookaville, the one ingrained in Geti's brain, who got famous and forgot all about Ashkenazi Dave.
I am not what you supposed, nor you I, yet & still I can't get free without you.
Bloom is the mood of the day. Geti muses over the trappings of almost-fame, as artists clamor to be fodder for McDeath. There is no avant-garde anymore. ... read more
I genuinely cannot fucking stand Ransom
I audibly gasped at that last-minute twist, and am now eagerly awaiting whatever comes next for Dennis. It's a wonderful set-up; how do you handle learning those most irrational fears were warranted? Time will tell. KDIV, though, has the least intrusive Anders Holm interludes of a KD project which aid immensely in illuminating the bits of KD's condition that didn't quite fit into the rhymes. The songs are a bit disconnected from the narrative, but the narrative never mattered ... read more
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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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