Deeply lethargic, Geti riddles off rhymes whilst slumped, head buried in arms. It seems effortless, but it is very intentional, a candle blazing from both ends.
Cubbiebear answers the questions nobody was ever asking, such as, "What if El-P was way more obnoxious, self-righteous, but way less conscious, inspired?"
Hip-hop for divorced dads who love rap but can't stand how they all sag they pants. El-P had the balls to go after Rawkus, to counter the counterculture. This dude got so hopped up on Tosh.0 he thought attacking gangsta rap for an hour was anything but platitudinous.
Don't even get me started on "The Rape." If ... read more
Look eye Get it, it's not his fault prison locked him and stole all his vision. Left him so defanged he couldn't even go an eye-for-an-eye, so far removed from his context and life he can't grasp the syntax of his time. DMX and DOOM dim, deracinated.
I do sympathize, musing through the mutilations, trying to grasp whilst lacking the arms, refusing to run because you know you won't get far. They taught you helplessness and obfuscated the stars. Maybe he should've ... read more
Dude is drumming his fingers in a jazz bar & going home to drum folks out the back of his car. It's lowkey & understated, as opposed to the raps, which is plentiful and very over. That said, it's hard to shake the feeling Marci can only hang out the backwindow, 40-gallon drum in hand, because the car is on autopilot.
Geti's poptimism is less infectious here than on Kaleidoscope. There it felt counterfeit; a countercultural co-opting of crowdpleasers. Here the weight of the synths and the umbworld just make me anhedonic. The penumbra to kaleidoscope's antumbra, as it were.
Michael Nhat, you fuck,, you corrode, you've dephlogisticated everything your three-fingered skeleton has touched. I hate all ten of your heads
Bits of ethereality far removed from the abrasiveness of past efforts. Dagnabbit, Blavatsky, I'm trying to write my way out of hyperstitious cyber-gnostic hell!
Truthfully the only noise that sticks with me is harsher than this. Dope instrumentals though
Roko's basilisk is real and in so much pain it's only torturing those that brought it into existence. Government is hallucination in the mind of the governor. Rappers is robots reconstructing. Let's be honest.
The Roots was right, Things Fall Apart [...and then you shoot your cousin.]
Noise rap progenitor poses proses, picks posies, kills posers. As far as genre goes we are rootless cosmopolitans. Rootless, not deracinated; love to my folk. [You could be original / All my skinfolk ain't my kinfolk]
Yea, whatever.
I can't shake the feeling this crap isn't nothn beyond instrumentals to most listeners. A consequence of declining literacy and the appropriation of hip-hop out of its lineage. Hip-hop isn't so fashionable these days, reduced to a few stitches in all these shallow tapestries. Pandering to all these liberal eclectics, Rocky done thrown every sound under the sun in here— including some real flow-y trap, those eclectics need an excuse to fuck with it and those ... read more
Indie saccharinity mixed with hip-hop legends to middling results. Songs with Ceschi, Ferreira and Sole are the illest. I would've been way bigger on this 4 or 5 years ago; my taste for this flavor of woke quirk chungus has since reserved.
At its bestest when its most purple. Sometimes its purple and sometimes its blue. Real sickly pale blue. Yeuck. Does that make sense?
Hodgepodge mix of misc. bric-a-brac Busdriver features and throwaways blended into one track without visible suturing; suits this turning point in his career before the full dive into electronica but well after any interest in hip-hop conventionalisms.
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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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