Category Archives: hip hop

October 25, 2013 · 12:59 am

Tech N9ne: indies buying majors

The Smoking Section has a nice interview with Tech N9ne, who get’s legitimate props for his hard work and business savvy.  Here he describes getting emcees for Strange records.  An independent record label poaching musicians from major labels.

TSS: What are your thoughts on major label record deals in 2014?

Tech N9ne: I don’t know about ‘em. It’s not my world, anymore. I just know that some of the artists I’m interested in have been just sitting on these labels, for years. I don’t like that shit.

That’s why we took Jay Rock off Warner Brothers. That’s why we took Stevie Stone off Ruthless. That’s why if Atlantic don’t quit fucking up, I’m gonna’ snatch Snow Tha Product. She’s supposed to be out, doing her thing. Yeah, she just put out a mixtape. But, fuck that, let her do her album.

TSS: I’m pretty sure I didn’t even get proper press for her mixtape.

Tech N9ne: Yeaaaah. I just retweeted her mixtape. I saw she had 2,000 views in three days. I’m like, ‘Baby girl, you killed it.’ I don’t get anything for that. She’s not my artist. But, I got love for her, because she’s an MC. And, I love MCs.

via TSS Presents Smoking Sessions With Tech N9ne | The Smoking Section.

I think Tech should get more respect for his wordplay and genuine style. But if he has to gain access to greater fame via his business swagger then so-be-it.  And I think another powerful independent hip hop label with Tech, Jay Rock, Rittz, and Krizz Kaliko could make some really gooooood music.

Leave a comment

Filed under capitalism, do-it-yourself, hip hop

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , ,

October 18, 2013 · 8:11 pm

Brasilintime: culture and syncretism

Hip hop syncretism — the aggressive combinations of sounds and players from many cultures.  Here visible in the nice B+ film — Brasilintime w/ a cadre of great drummers and DJs.   It includes:

–> One of the best examples of cultures appropriating culture ad infinitum when Jay Rocc cuts up “Apache.”

–> The Brazilian parallel with “Comanche!”

–> Not enough Nelson Triunfo.

–> Babu’s scratch session which seems the most inspired and flexible — connected to the music.

–> Paul Humphrey and Ivan “Mamao” Conti seem to jam exceptionally well together.

–> The inspired chaos of the polyrhythms made when six drummers get down and DJs cut on top of each other is a little much at times.  Maybe my ears aren’t big enough . . .

–> The graphics seem excessive in the first half.

–> Hip Hop’s version of the colonial lens includes shopping for rare records in the field.  American learning is commensurate with getting a bargain or getting something that other people can’t as easily get.  In this case we get Paul Humphrey, Derf Reklaw and James Gadson shopping for out-of-the-ordinary percussion instruments and Cut Chemist, Egon, Madlib, Jay Rocc, and Babu shopping for records.

In some ways we can call this syncretism — where distinct cultures inform each other – exchanging language, food and music.  The nod to difference that comes when the American DJs and drummers acknowledge they don’t know something about Brazilian music is matched by the assumption that they can buy and lift chunks of that music for western audiences.

I don’t have any problem with people traveling to other nations — there is something funky about this particular narrative — hunting for nuggets of music seems so crass at points.  Like Egon getting the group price for all the records the crew was buying.

I dislike it when the specifics of the culture blend into the background and I like the moments of the film where the details pop out.  The interviews with Brazilian drummers make this film (despite my linguistic inabilities to get chunks).  I’ll probably mark some cue points in the video and chop it up — take the parts that I like and leave the rest on the digital scrap heap.

Leave a comment

Filed under colonialism, cultural appropriation, funk & soul, hip hop, music

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

October 16, 2013 · 4:41 am

2013 BET Cypher grades

Spride gets an A+ for after-effects advertising.

Kendrick A

Jay Rock B+

Schoolboy Q B

Wax B-

Rittz A-

John Connor B

A$ap Ferg B+

A$ap Twelvy B

A$ap Rocky B

Joell Ortiz B-

Crooked I B

Action Bronson B+

Lil’ Kim B+

Not really freestyles, but it’s nice to see good artists throwing verse against verse.

I would love to see Killa Mike, Black Thought, some of those rad battle cypher rappers.

Leave a comment

Filed under hip hop, music

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

October 11, 2013 · 2:30 am

Black Thought and other people freestyle

If you are a hip hop star and you get invited on the Combat Jack show . . . you know he’s going to ask for a freestyle.  Here is the collection of freestyles from a few guests.

Large Professor has a nice showing, but it’s Black Thought who wins.

Leave a comment

Filed under hip hop, music

Tagged as , , , , ,

October 5, 2013 · 3:46 am

Pusha T and Kendrick Lamar: Nosetalgia

Pusha T’s album comes out in a couple of days.  It was streaming on a few spots.  I listened and was pleased.  Nice video with wunderkind Kendrick Lamar and salty veteran Pusha.

1. Single-shot steady-cam shot is an excellent back drop for drug rap video.

2. A lot of Ivan Drago (Rocky IV) references these days.

3. At first Kendrick Lamar plays the counter to Pusha’s proud drug dealer persona with his L.A. tragedy rap.  Then comes the turn.  “Go figure motherfucker/every verses is a brick.” Zing.

Leave a comment

Filed under drugs, hip hop, music

Tagged as , , , , , ,

October 4, 2013 · 1:16 am

Waka and Gucci fall 2013

Waka Flocka Flame has a diss track for the currently-incarcerated Gucci Mane.  Having been friends and label-mates, this schism seems pretty interesting.   Nice beat and a particularly scathing criticism.   Drug use, question of authenticity (“I’ve been shooting pistols since seventh grade.”) number of goons willing to shoot for them, and attacking Gucci for causing strife solely for attention.

“P.S. Don’t get caught in that/Dissin’ for promotion/All in your feelings/all in your emotions/Just for attention/you cause all this commotion/Ni**a you just talking/you don’t really want all your business in the ocean. “

– Waka Flocka Flame “Ice Cream” Oct 2013.

I actually think Waka has some good points.

He also has the status to call out Gucci like no one else can.  Waka has taken the Snoop Dogg path to success.  Astounding tour concerts.  Relentless affection for his fans, and a consistent ability to stay out of gossip blogs.

Remember Waka volunteering to go naked for PETA?  Like Snoop, Waka seems “like a grown-ass rock star” as one of his buddies puts it in a video.  He is a taylor made celebrity — with toxic violent raps and a Fozzy Bear sized lovable personality.  Waka, like Snoop before him has chosen a particularly thin road to walk for fame.   Playing cute in morning shows and rapping about shooting people at the same time.

If Waka releases videos full of debauchery and destruction, he loses a significant portion of his buying public.  Something Gucci is now facing — perhaps the myriad offenses cease to be explainable.  Fans desert you and your albums are not purchased.

But Waka (and Gucci Mane and a million other roughneck emcees) still have to articulate an image of outlaw anti-social behavior.  In most cases, they choose to emphasize their wealth (suggesting that it was garnered through drug sales and not through regular work, music, savings or investing.)  In other cases, they mark their own perpetual return to the criminal life.

Of course telling a couple of hundred thousand fans (and increasingly interested cops) about your criminal behavior has potential consequences.  It seems like cops listened to Waka and Gucci when they raided Deb Antney — Waka Flocka Flame’s manager and mom.

Antney, who heads up Mizay Entertainment, was frustrated because her company is scheduled to host a toy drive Thursday. She said when she arrived on the scene, police called her “the Candy Lady” and suggested she was the ring leader of the prostitution operation.

“Of course I’m not gonna sit back and be called ‘the Candy Lady,’ ” she said. “There was no prostitution. And we’re not gang-affiliated.”

via Waka Flocka Flame’s Mom Denies That Prostitution Was Behind Raid – Music, Celebrity, Artist News | MTV.com.

(Pause for a minute to ask ANY of you how you would do with the cops raiding your mom’s house?)

I’m not blaming musicians for rhyming about criminality.  I’m interested in how Waka stayed famous, rich and out of jail, while Gucci is alienating everyone and in prison for the next six months (at least).

Part of it has to be Waka noting that those who commit crimes when trying to rhyme are “hustling backwards.”

“Why would I try to rap and then street gangbang?” he added. “That’s hustling backwards. I’m good. I dropped the album Flockaveli, and it’s doing numbers. I think ‘No Hands’ is platinum or on the road to be. I’m in the top three albums of the year…I’m going in, man.”

via Waka Flocka Flame Addresses Police Raid | Get The Latest Hip Hop News, Rap News & Hip Hop Album Sales | HipHop DX.

Leave a comment

Filed under hip hop, media, prisons, representation

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

October 1, 2013 · 1:25 am

Surveillance as fame: Chief Keef

Ben Austin in Wired:

We naturally associate criminal activity with secrecy, with conspiracies hatched in alleyways or back rooms. Today, though, foolish as it may be in practice, street gangs have adopted a level of transparency that might impress even the most fervent Silicon Valley futurist. Every day on Facebook and Twitter, on Instagram and YouTube, you can find unabashed teens flashing hand signs, brandishing guns, splaying out drugs and wads of cash. If we live in an era of openness, no segment of the population is more surprisingly open than 21st-century gang members, as they simultaneously document and roil the streets of America’s toughest neighborhoods.

via Public Enemies: Social Media Is Fueling Gang Wars in Chicago | Underwire | Wired.com.

Leave a comment

Filed under capitalism, communication, hip hop, media, music, representation, Surveillance

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

September 12, 2013 · 2:43 am

Mixtape media: DJ Drama

Thanks to Nah Right for the two part interview with mix tape innovator DJ Drama.  Here are my favorite snippets from the interview, starting with some DJ insights:

“And I was an East Coast type of guy with my taste. When you come to school, particularly in a place like Atlanta, you’ve got so many people from so many places. So I had to relearn how to DJ, and it made me much more of a worldly DJ than I might have been [if I stayed] in Philly. You had people from California, and people from D.C. that wanted hear go-go, and people from the islands. You got your people from Atlanta that want to hear A-Town shit. Then there’s people from New York. So you gotta learn how to please a bunch of people.

via Mixtape Memories with DJ Drama (Part 1)Nah Right.

I appreciate him noting that it was the absence of mixtape DJs working with southern artists that created his lane.

“There was a store called Tapemasters, my man Marco used to work in there. And I would try to sell my CDs in there, but I would get blown out, because I was making East Coast CDs trying to compete with Whoo Kid and Kay Slay and Clue, and no one was checking for me because I was getting beat to the punch [by them having the exclusives before me]. So my senior year of college, I realized that I needed to make a South tape. And that shit flew like hot cakes. The first song ever on the pre-Gangsta Grillz DJ Drama South tape was ‘Bling Bling.’ That was like ‘99. And Marco was like, ‘You need to focus on your neo-soul tapes, and your South tapes. That’s where you have niches at.’

via Mixtape Memories with DJ Drama (Part 1)Nah Right.

Part II here.

Leave a comment

Filed under capitalism, do-it-yourself, hip hop, media, music

Tagged as , , , , , ,

September 7, 2013 · 4:15 pm

Run the jewels: overdetermination and puppets

I wrote a little piece on El-P and Killer Mike’s Run the jewels album and rape culture.   I guess I was thinking about the socially conscious history of both of the artists.  You might describe El-P as a nihilist leftist and Killer Mike as an organic intellectual.

Of course Run the jewels is competitive over-the-top rap music.  In the effort to make the best art — artists attempt to outdo each other.  In the genre of hip hop this means bigger, harder, louder, and more outlandish.

The financial claims of most rappers have grown to ridiculous levels, with a number of artists simply shouting out expensive brand names to convey their own particular shopping allegiances.

It makes sense that the claims about violence, drugs and sex would also become more and more outlandish.

MF DOOM always seemed like a hip-hop critic.  His villainous characters (and in particular the masked versions of DOOM) always seemed pitiful — articulated as a mockery of other rappers whose representations of criminality seemed shallow in comparison to the lyrical work of the clever DOOM.

In the same way modern hip hop can be critiqued from the traditional morality perspective.  It might also be performed and overdetermined (made excessive and taken to the extreme) in order to achieve a very similar moral critique.

Which works as a basic introduction for “36” Chain,” a video which contains violence against old women, violence against young women, gun violence, violence against Andrew W.K, and a dual sense of mockery/sincerity that will probably excite some people and deeply offend others.

Noting the character Killums — the kidnapped puppet plays such an important role it might be worth including the El-P video for “Full retard” in this discussion.

Of course this video contains some drinking and driving, a lot of drug stuff, violence against moms, nudity, and of course, the lightly disturbing choice to have the puppet Killums lead in most of the debauchery. We can note that the expressive fiction of a puppet gives liberty . . . a kind of implicit defense.  At the same time thumbing the nose at the idea of childhood as an innocent time.

Killums seems to be El-P’s id. An expression of what he would like to do . . . the unfettered brain presented as a sex and drug obsessed squirrel.   Some artists make up Tyler Durdin . . . El-P chooses a one-eyed junkie squirrel.

Dave Chappelle’s sesame street mockery Kneehigh park runs through some of the same transgressions.   Pushing buttons with ever-increasingly crass discussions voiced by puppets that seems to be giving humorous versions of public service announcements.

You can say anything if you have a puppet voice the idea.  And as I’ve written about before — any moralistic critique sounds silly when lodged against a cute fuzzy animal with a human voice.  It is insulated against these kinds of arguments because you can always say “it’s just a puppet.”

Leave a comment

Filed under art, communication, drugs, hip hop, music, representation

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

July 7, 2013 · 1:08 am

Run the jewels and rape culture

It ain’t my fault.  I’m too critical.

If you like rap music, then El-P and Killer Mike’s Run the Jewels is the best thing of 2013.  Kanye?  Jay-Z?  J. Cole?  Naw.

If you like your rap head-nodding with great verses, then get this album.

***

One premise of life of refinement is that purity is foolish.  Understand that you can simultaneously enjoy something and wish it were different.  Watching that TV show and enjoying it 99% until the anti-gay joke?   Live in both places — that you like the show and you dislike the joke.

It seems easy, but a lot of people get it twisted.  The idea that if you don’t like one iota of a piece of media that you have to pick teams and persecute the makers is rampant.

***

So I LOVE this tape.  Love it like fried tofu.  Love it like summer days.  Love it like sleeping late.  Love it and played it a dozen times since it came out.

Then there is a “twin back hype,” laced with spoken word from ‘Chest Rockwell’ AKA Prince Paul.  The line that sticks in my craw is sleaze ball stereotype rape culture shit.

Prince Paul/Chest Rockwell:  “How you feeling now, sweetheart, a little more relaxed?  Maybe it’s the half a molly I put in your Mountain Dew.  Yeah, works like a charm.  Just chill out for a second.  Relax.  Relax!  I got it under control.  I got you a glass of Beefeater, I got a brand new deck of Uno Cards.  Oh yeah, baby, tonight’s just getting started.  Okay, how ’bout I come over tonight pick you up in my brand new Segue?  We can go over to Long John Silver’s and get a fish platter.  You can take me home and massage me with butter all on my neck.  I love you.”

What?  My interpretation of this little vignette is that Prince Paul is making fun of Rick Ross who recently was dropped by Reebok because of his lyrics suggesting that he drugged his sex partners.  (“Put molly all in her champagne, she ain’t even know it/ I took her home and I enjoyed that, she ain’t even know it” — U.N.E.O.)

I think the mockery is evident if you consider the Uno cards, Segue, Long John Silvers stuff etc.  Of course, Chest Rockwell seems to announce his drugging unlike Rick Ross.  And Chest Rockwell is the character from Boogie Nights suggested as a porno name, taken by a great rap producer for his Handsome Boy Modeling School character.  This is parody within parody.

But it doesn’t mean shit to people listening.  Intention and even humor are irrelevant to the choice of symbols presented.  I bet there is a kid listening to the El-P and Killer Mike song who not only get to model some great rhyming AND that drugging people for sex is funny or okay.

***

I don’t think the politics have to be perfect in rap music.  But you make fun of raping someone I’m going to call it out.  You might call it splitting hairs to say that I like the album, bump the album AND think people need to talk more about this skit in order to explain rape culture.

Frankly, given how much rape is part of our media saturated existence, then the explanation of why that line is messed up requires more thoughtfulness than to just suggest that you not listen to the album.  I think that everyone who is a conscious ethical being should be ready to bust up rape culture whenever they see it.  Even if it comes on the best album of 2013.

Get the album at Fools Gold.   Listen to it with your nephew or niece and talk about rape and why that skit isn’t funny.

1 Comment

Filed under communication, hip hop, music, representation, sexual assault

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , ,