january seventeen

1. bbno$ - “damn” (lzr)
the first time i heard this i was in a korean club and literally had a heart attack because i was trying to shazam it but my shazam app kept telling me i didn’t have wi-fi (even though i had wi-fi) but it’s all good cause i got it and played no songs other than this, “t-shirt” by migos and a k-pop song for a full week

2. Key! & Reese LaFlare - “Money Phone” feat. Offset (Bobby Kritical & Kc Da Beatmonster)
key! is probably the worst rapper on this song, which is telling

3. SwagHollywood - “I Can’t” feat. ThouxanBandFauni & Uno the Activist (K-naan)
i wish i got cheese like i work for digiornos

4. Kap G - “Freakin’ N Geekin’” (Go Grizzly)
wonderfully manic (1:25-1:31)

5. PnB Rock - “There She Go” feat. YFN Lucci (Bizzy Genius)
smoothest transitions in-out of hooks this side of 2017

6. Tory Lanez - “Bal Harbour” feat. A$AP Ferg (C-Sick)
every time tory lanez puts out a project i really don’t want to like it, and generally don’t like it, but there’s always one song that gets me. last year off the first installment of this tape it was “makaveli” and this time it’s this one. this is the first tory lanez song i’ve listened to in a very long time that wouldn’t be better if travis scott or quavo or rich homie quan rapped it.

7. Migos - “Deadz” feat. 2 Chainz (Cardo)
it took a long time for me to get through my first listen of culture because i kept running back the 2 chainz verse

8. ThouxanBanFauni - “Damned”
ominous af

9. Tunji Ige - “Why Don’t You?” (Heaven in Stereo & Tunji Ige)
i’ve been screaming this for two years plus but this dude is like the best musician on the planet man

10. Ethereal - “How’d It Happen” feat. Lil Yachty & Lord Narf
on the lowest of keys ethereal probably the best awful-associated act besides abra

11. LAMB$ - “Another Day” feat. Playboi Carti (Plugs)
when the carti tape drops and it’s inevitably horrifying i will always, always have this

12. SALEM - “Ur Feelings” feat. Nabi
this is amazing, probably

13. Kay P - “Blood Flow Down My Wrist” (Charlie Shuffler)
this song is devastating. “hedonism as a means of escaping pain” is a pretty common paradigm in hip-hop as it is, especially in the wake of 2014 future, but despite the sheer number of people who get sucked into it it’s still gripping for me – especially when you get songs like this, from rappers who push that dynamic to farther extremes against more bizarre backdrops. 

14. GrandeMarshall - “Stress” (GrandeMarshall)
where has this been

15. Wintertime & Felix Snow - “Louis V. Lover” (Felix Snow)
felix snow is my jesus

16. Sampha - “Plastic 100°C”
heartrending, like everything else he’s ever touched

17. Chris McClenney - “Headlines” (Chris McClenney)
WOOOOOOOO

18. The xx - “Replica” (The xx)
geniuses, all of them

19. Jonwayne - “Out of Sight” (Jonwayne)
bedtime raps 2017, a movement i have always been and will always be here for

20. Maxo Kream - “Grannies” (Beatplugg)
hide your flows maxo kream is coming

july sixteen

what i’m on.

why i care about kanye west

Firstly, I care about Kanye West because I think hero worship is funny in its weirdly excessive self-deprecation and apparently other people do too so I feed into that. Secondly and more pointedly, though, I care about Kanye West because he’s the one figure in all of hip-hop that’s been able to snag the elusive term of “genius” without letting it turn him (completely) into a joke or a caricature. Sure, 2Pac is a genius – a thug genius.  Jay-Z’s a genius too – but a business genius. Kanye’s managed to take that term and force the general public to come to terms with, if not the certainty, then at least the looming and very probable possibility that he’s a genius on a creative and musical level.  It doesn’t really matter if he is or not to anyone who isn’t invested in his music. It only matters that he’s defiantly shouldered his way into the center of that discussion (either in spite of or because of his antics).  

Kanye West is the type of rare artist that’s somehow managed to part humanity into two polarized sides on every aspect of his personality like Moses did the Red Sea: or, at least, everything but his music.  That, we’ve somewhat grudgingly conceded, he’s got covered (easy to forget in the wake of Drake and Kendrick Lamar’s ascendances and subsequent warring for the metaphorical throne of hip-hop that My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was one of the most unanimously and immediately praised hip-hop albums in the genre’s history, and that came after all of the amazing shit he did before it that I could write and have written about for thousands of words).  That’s also why Yeezus won’t ever be one of my favorite Kanye albums, because it finally permitted Kanye’s polarizing nature extend to his music in a way it hadn’t before (Watch the Throne and Cruel Summer were big steps in that direction, but breaking the string of universally praised Kanye solo albums is a big deal), in the process shattering Kanye’s final and most fundamental barrier from public ridicule.  

I’m doubtful that the recently strengthening tides against Kanye (71% unfavorable, according to Rasmussen) have the Kardashian clan to thank as the proverbial straws that broke the camel’s back.  In my mind, it’s because Kanye’s finally showing cracks in the unassailable helm of “creative genius” that he wore so proudly for a decade.  And thirdly, that’s why I care so much about Kanye – because if Kanye isn’t a genius anymore, whether because he’s actually making worse music or because the public has decided that Kim Kardashian and/or his consistent barrage of shockingly, incredibly, unbelievably dumb declarations in the media, that means that hip-hop is having to stake its reputation (and potentially its hopes of ever shedding its primary status as a shallow music form) on the likes of the afore-mentioned Kendrick and Drake.

Yeah, I know and you probably know that hip-hop is more than that, and I know and you probably know that Kendrick and Drake are both generational talents who are very potentially capable of transforming and shaping a genre like Kanye before them. But that’s beyond the point, because most of the public doesn’t. Drake is the guy who raps about girls who don’t love him back and calling them at 5AM, and Kendrick is the new guy who raps about swimming pools and really deep shit about the hood in some order.  Kanye had built up a reputation with critical and public acclaim – not one that Drake and Kendrick can’t build, but one that they haven’t just yet.

So that means that in the wake of Kanye meticulously self-destructing every facet of his public reputation, hip-hop has to hope that someone can step up and grab that “genius” mantle, because especially in the wake of this kind of over-generalizing, stereotyping, predetermined-narrative-searching bullshit, hip-hop needs a figure that can be taken seriously outside of its own bubble.  And it doesn’t look like Kanye can be that person anymore. 

Now go listen to the best Kanye song and remember why he’s one of the most singular talents hip-hop will ever have.

Yung Lean - “Yoshi City” (prod. Yung Gud)

It’s officially unfair to file Yung Lean under the Meme Rap folder, because between “Yoshi City” and “Kyoto,” the Swedish sensation’s got two very legitimate records under his belt.  Even when Lil B was making good music, he was largely doing it by dropping his shtick for a precious few minutes and sinking back into more recognizable zones of rap: in other words, he was showing he could shine by playing by the rules.  With these last two songs, though, Yung Lean is proving that he’s able to turn admittedly very strong production from his in-housers (Yung Gud and Yung Sherman) into legitimate hits. Call it the Autotune effect, call it the luck, call it whatever – but he’s making good music, and if his recent showings in New York are any indication, he’s not going away.

I don’t see how Kevin Gates can record his songs  in any other way than a-line-at-a-time, because the sheer pace at which he slides between growls and wails can’t possibly be human.  "Don’t Know" is some wildness, but “Paper Chasers” is still the best demonstration of everything Gates is capable of doing.  His hook is about eight dense bars but it doesn’t matter, because ears perk up no matter how long it is.  Gripping stuff.

While Blu hasn’t been quite as bad post-Below the Heavens as many might like to gleefully claim, it’s essentially a given that Blu doesn’t seem like he’s on the verge of dropping a working-class hip-hop classic on the level of his first brilliant work.  On Below the Heavens, Blu conducted a master class on capturing sorrow and spinning it into optimism, on grasping the most abstract of emotions and painting it with his words.  Since then, the majority of his career has been inexplicable.  Recording entire albums through what sounds like a cat litter box, drunkenly stumbling off stages mid-set after forgetting entire songs, discarding the sound that made him one of hip-hop’s brightest stars in favor of darting electronic instrumentals.  Not that it’s all been bad – his followup to Below the Heavens with Exile, Give Me My Flowers While I Can Smell Them, was brilliant – but Blu’s become a sad story of wasted talent.

But occasionally he’ll drop something like this.  The Knxledge-produced “DraginBreff” lives on Sweeney Kovar‘s Classic Drug References Vol. 1 compilation, wedged between Ras_G and Mike Chav.  While Knx lets a melancholic trumpet murmur its notes above piano riffs on the type of jazzy beat that Blu’s flashed his greatness on before (L'Orange’s “Alone”), the real show comes from the best lines Blu’s rapped in years.  I could go on how “technically brilliant” the Los Angeles rapper is, how he’ll accelerate and brake his delivery to reflect his words, how he’ll stagger rhymes and suspend words.  But that’s not why this song is so good.  Blu’s got a remarkable knack for framing universal emotions in small vignettes (“When I was six, I thought that I would be the president/Now I’m twenty-seven, staring at perception and present tense”), drawling out indelible quips (“Never tell never to a kid with a pigment problem”) and posing wry philosophical queries (“How can a rapper be demoted to preacher?”).  It’s been all too long since Blu has scrawled his lyrical paintings across a laid-back, jazzy soundscape as deftly (and audibly) as he does here. Maybe we’ll never get another classic from Blu.  But I guess I’d settle for more of these ninety-second illustrations.