In the past week or so, four songs have leaked with incredible OJ verses, and it really seems to me like he's stepped his game up from even just last year. He sounds remarkably confident to me right now, like this little buzz he caught from Gucci and probably even Soulja Boy has really emboldened and solidified his style. He just seems like he belongs right now, and even when he's on a song with Fabolous and Juelz he doesn't seem out of place— in fact, guys like that seem lost in OJ's dust to me. And that's not to prop up OJ as more than he is, but I think he's gotten to the point where his style isn't a substitute for his rapping. Instead it's a totally unique and singular flow used by someone who is also a great rapper and who just so happens to be blowing everyone else on tracks out of the water.
So, I made this mix of the four verses. This is the first time I've ever blended tracks into each other and I did this in about 45 mins on GarageBand so the blending is truly horrible. These are the songs:
"Hustlers Anthem 09 (rmx)" -> "Hottest in the Hood (rmx)" -> "Superman High" -> "Gold Grill Shawty"
I don't know shit about Justyn Case, I only checked this song because it featured Clyde Carson from the Team who were making dope ass music back in 04 before hyphy music got killed off. Anyways I click this link and get slapped in the face with rave synths that build into an epic climax of guitar strumming and mediocre raps about picking up some girl to close her eyes and sip on patron. Then after that crapfest of rap you get broken off with some auto tunes about owning a condo and biting mangos, oh yeah and a little throwing money in air with a raincoat. Clyde comes in and drops a hot throwaway verse about nothing laced with dumbshit like escaping for the weekend and love peaking. It's really touching if you're a ten year old girl dreaming of becoming a coupe's wifey. The worst part for me though is the end, it ends with the sounds of the beach? Really? WTF, was this an idea they got from The Dating Game? Long walks on the beach fucking predictable bullshit that makes up the fantasy of a fucking prepubescent fuck who wants lose their virginity to candles and roses. Fuck that hallmark card bullshit, this song sucks.
Just banged out a real quick podcast this afternoon. This one is all metal, mostly thrash shit. Some old, some new just what has been running through my headphones for the last month or so. Yeah it doesn't fit with all the rap shit on here but I don't give a shit, it's what I've been listening to lately and decided to put it up so peep game because the shit bangs.
Tracklisting 1) The Misfits - Bullet 2) Violator - Thrash Maniacs 3) Bonded By Blood - Feed The Beast 4) Warbringer - Hell on Earth 5) Death Angel - Thrashers 6) Annihilator - Schizos (Are Never Alone) (Part I) 7) Evile - Burned Alive 8) Municipal Waste - Beer Pressure 9) Municipal Waste - Guilty Of Being Tight 10) Municipal Waste - Mind Eraser 11) SSS - Hammerhead 12) Sodom - Obsessed By Cruelty 13) Overkill - Kill At Command 14) Violator - United For Thrash 15) SSS - Thrash With A Small Moustache 16) Vio-Lence - Serial Killer 17) Micro Chip League - New York (Dancefloor Cut)
To subscribe to the podcast just use this url for the feed: http://beerandrap.com/atom.xml If you're not to smart just go in to itunes and under Advanced you have the option to subscribe to podcasts. Select that and add the feed url so that it will update on it's own.
I've long been a big fan of some old school hard-headed ignorant rap music. I think more rap fans need to be honest about where theyre coming from on this count. The new CNN album was some really solid ignorant shit, & no it's not War Report level, but it is a real solid echo of that LP. I even wrote about it kinda ignorantly -- real talk, it's not my best-written piece. "A lot of knocks"? Anyway I reviewed it for hiphop.com a few days ago.
I guess folks are kind of wary bcuz of the kind of condescending, racially suspect attitudes that make ppl have towards (supposedly) 'dumb' rappers, and there is a fine line here no doubt. I'm not feeling a lot of the ways folks talk about Gucci's music, for example; I think tracks like "time to eat" have a lot of nuance & style. But some rap is like heavy drinking; both the listener & the artist embrace the stupid & accept that its a part of the experience of it, what makes it *work*. On some level, you just have to call some dumb thuggish shit what it is. And if Alfamega, Noreaga & other archetypal thuggish hardheads arent out there making stubborn roughneck raps then I dont want to be listening to rap. Really this is some 'well duh' shit I suppose but I think it bears repeating.
If u were feeling that LP too then make sure to peep It's Him (The Black Hispanic)'s "Who You" with CNN. Video just leaked and the track is some real epic NY shit. "Let my dog doo doo on you."
Yo Gotti's always been a sort of nomadic soul amongst pseudo-underground Southern rappers. Despite being from Memphis he never really got entrenched with the major rap forces there (someone else could probably fill in the background better than I) and he never really felt right at TVT, where he released two albums this decade but never fell in with the crunk era there. In the past year or so he started showing up pretty frequently on songs alongside Gucci (most notably on "Bricks") and I started to wonder if he would see any boost in popularity while Gucci was away in jail. As far as I can tell that didn't happen— if anything that boost went to OJ, who had an actual promo push and a single and shit.
In any event I still have no idea what's going on with him because Cocaine Music is basically an album of songs that, based at least on the amount of "Free Gucci" chants, probably have been laying around for a bit, and in the first song he says that he isn't signed. It's a really good bunch of songs, too. I haven't seen production credits but everything sounds like Zaytoven or FATBOI.
"Shoot Off"
Sometimes I feel like Gotti can seem a little detached, like he's a little too comfortable playing the raspy stoner. "Shoot Off" has a really quick-moving beat so it forces Gotti to ratchet up his urgency and he raps for basically four minutes straight about deals he's done and whatever, but it stands out for two reasons. One, he's earned the cynical veteran role that he assumes here, and the indignant and simmering tone he raps in sets the tone for the tape as a whole. Secondly, it's a surprisingly detailed and varied track as far as these things go with Gotti rapping at Gucci about his incarceration (my interpretation, at least) and about why he didn't join a gang and about moving coke in Toshibas.
"Sold Out"
"Sold Out" is about selling all your drugs, and so Gotti tries his hand at Jeezy's kingpin swagger-rap, and it actually works really well in the same way "Welcome Back" did, with the caveat that no one can really replicate the way Jeezy turns into Godzilla on some tracks. But this is still impressive, from the way it makes an overdone ploy— "Showtime, mic check, 1, 2/ *girl screams "I love you Gotti"*/ I love you, too"— exciting to the way its chorus, like the one on "Make the Trap Say Aye", is almost like an original playground chant.
"Drum Play" (ft. All-Star)
This one flips the gun play conceit pretty coolly: "Gun play, gun play, you don't want no gun play/ hit em with that chopper, make it sound like a drum play". Then the first verse: "Drum play, drum play, bitch I got a hundred rounds/ shoot that bitch a hundred times I bet you make a hundred sounds/ Tommy Gun, Mac 11, we can make a drumline/ Hit his ass with one shot, I bet he pray a hundred times". It goes on pretty much like that, and never gets tiring.
Gorilla Zoe's disco AutoTune album
"I Got It" (ft. Big Block)
The one thing I'm taking away from the truly weird Don't Feed Da Animals is something that I kind of suspected ever since "Hood Nigga", and that's that Gorilla Zoe has a pretty good and pretty unexpected ear for a catchy melody. A lot of the songs, like "I Got It", have Zoe sing-rapping in this loopy lullaby cadence, and it's not exactly always a great look but it makes for an interesting quasi-pop album I think, especially when Zoe is singing all nonchalantly about you "leaking red plasma". Makes me wonder what his "inspiration" was, and if there's anything to it beyond trend-hopping, and if it was just him getting caught up in the AutoTune Era, I wonder if he just lucked into these often great tracks or what. There's a song called "Shit on Em" that's a pretty graphic song about shitting on dudes but it's pretty melodic. I guess lots of people hate the album but personally it leaves me with lots of interesting questions. Lots of them are about weed.
Superbad
"Sunshine" (ft. Webbie)
Mad late on this one I know but Boosie basically leaked his album right? I can't recall ever seeing anything about T-Pain or Bobby V collabos, and Superbad had been floating around for a while as the name of his album. I sort of talked about this in my last Boosie post, but there is basically no trace of "Wipe Me Down" in the guy's music anymore. Everything is either super-aggressive like the T-Pain joint that leads off the tape ("If you ain't down with Boosie Boo/ Fuck y'all") or the pensive, bluesy shit like on Da Beginning that's like the best rap music around. "Sunshine" is a song about clothes, watches etc. but it's still restrained, if not somber, and it gives the song a really earned feeling. Webbie, by the way, is an incredible rapper.
this album is already one of my most anticipated. not feeling the 'kurupt fell off' shit folks have been talking lately. feeling the lighthearted nonsense raps. and quik beats sound as good as ever -- im definitely with this new "Press Play"-style chopped up sample thing he's been working.
Man I had this big post to go about T-Rock's new one & then Serg had to go & post about it first. Oh well here's more thoughts on T-Rock.
I wanted to post this awhile ago, when Noz uploaded that great A-Town Rap & Bass comp awhile back. T-Rock is kind of another missing piece of the Atlanta rap puzzle, in that every person I've ever talked to about ATL rap has cited him as a kind of local legend, but he doesn't have the profile outside of the South of even a Pastor Troy, who seems to have risen around the same time.
I first posted about T-Rock back in '04 when I didn't know much about him, but I was kind of right I think -- Mr. Washington Story is supposed to be a kind of landmark record but I found the beats pretty rough (rough meaning bad not rough meaning good). His large profile debut record came out back when Three-6 was hoovering up every big rapper into the hypnotized camp & as such it doesn't really sound anything like the classic Atlanta sound from that era (thinkin So So Def Bass or on the flip, Organized Noize-type shit). It is, though, pretty great. It's amazing how fully-formed his rap style was even back then, but it is kind of a weird record for the debut of such a significant rapper. It's called Rock Solid / 4:20, and it has some serious joints on it, but it's sort of an anomaly in his catalog, never mind HCPs. If you're looking for what T-Rock does best, it's hard to think of a much better record than his latest one. It helps that he's got this guy Mossberg on the beats, because I still agree with my old criticism that his beats are kind of blandly gothic circa Washington. Mossberg's work is pretty much all the highlights; the marching band-style anthem "Let's Go," the simmering organs on "As a Youngsta," & my favorite song, the title track. It's a lot of similar themes to a rapper like Z-Ro -- same lone rider paranoia, a depressive personality, same double-time technical skill, and a tendency to wear his vulnerability & honesty on his sleeve -- albeit tinged w/ an edge of desperation, vocals distressed with urgent anxiety:
a lotta skeletons in my closet forgot to bury aint gotta friend alive, i ride solitary its like im livin off in a personal prison with no one given a fuck or a dollar to a niggas commissary but now i got my original right hand man back everybody should give me a handclap stand back, we gonna ransack and leave em bloody red just like a tampax
Z-Ro's started to get some recognition nationally & with rap cognoscenti, which is as it should be; a lot of times the Pac-derived emotive & expressive rappers don't get the same kind of national respect, like a failure to fit into the detached Illmatic-era Nas street narrator template or billboard-focused pop star. T-Rock certainly deserves the same kind of respect & burgeoning street rap legend rep that Ro's developed in the last couple years.
I'm doing some not-particularly-researched theorizing here when I suggest that maybe T-Rock's influence would have been pretty evident in T.I.'s classic double-time verses & the method of blending supreme craft & raw emotion; a lot of times in rap it seems like you have to sacrifice one for the other, that developing character comes at the expense of skill & technique (of course there is 'technique' in developing 'character,' & obviously 'rapping fast' is only one v. small side of technique, but im talking about technique as an intentional affect itself). There is a certain strain of artists nationally who might sell pretty big numbers but never make much of a pop music dent bcuz of this imbalance, that they are expressing a unique perspective & have a skilled, influential approach but still seem to struggle when trying to trouble the pop charts; think Tech N9ne, Trae & Z-Ro, Twista pre-Kanye, etc. And of course T-Rock.
It's easy to forget the period where Bone Thugs were the biggest rappers out, but while that tongue-twisting earnest vulnerability probably peaked in the popular mind around then, based purely on my own anecdotal experiences growing up in the midwest (I swear everyone had a tech n9ne cd in their case logic cd wallets) plus the solid sales, that this style of rap was, for a huge % of folks out there, what they thought of when it came to 'underground rap' in the late 1990s -- it wasn't as much about labels or whatever, but an uncompromising blend of post-Pac sincerity & honed-craft technique.
Picked up the latest T-rock joint when I was in Texas last month. Finally got around to upping some shit off of it. It's a dope album, only a few weed tracks which is nice. I really don't give a shit about rapping about getting high, that shit gets tired fast. Well unless it's Devin then I can deal. He's got some fast rap joints on here but also some slow tracks like Superthowed which he can't help but rapping about stuffing bongs and getting high while staring at city lights. Around his last verse though he changes it up for a little burst of fast rap which sounds sick over the slow guitars. U Ain't Heard goes hard, beat could be louder but they make up for with trigger raps. Double Up bangs too. He's got some sadfaced introspective shit going too like Love Changes and Heaven Cries which ain't bad even with that jesus bullshit. There is some weak shit too though, like the bullshit slow sex track with some girl singing about love. I guess if you enjoy fast raps about weed, patron, stroking balls and skeet skeetings then maybe it's not totally worthless. I got no use for it though.
The best track on the album though is Let's Go it's just got those victorious soulful horns that just make the whole song work so fucking well. The shit just takes you back to a time before rap music was made with horrible rave bullshit that every fucking piece of shit producer tries to shove out their ass these days. It's not hard to make songs with this beat, just kick some cool lyrics, say fuck the 50, lets get it, mention the trap, g's, taking over, getting fucked up and you're fucking good.
Having been invited to post on So Many Shrimp, I've made the tactless decision to post my newest mixtape: Swallowing Dust & Razzi's. We'll get to that in a minute. First, allow me to introduce myself, as I will be posting with some frequency from now on. My name is Adam, I am a DJ/Producer and a philosophy professor in Portland, OR. I perform under the name Doctor Adam and have a penchant for intellectualizing the shit out of everything. So be prepared. This is supposed to be the smart rap blog though, right?
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