[diorpaint]

[wierdough]

Peewee longway, Jose Guapo, Young Thug

[geezyremembers]

tetsuo n youff induced

loved it when lupe said “i prefer my pictures in word form” amidst ~8 minutes’ worth of word-pictures because that’s the antithesis of what words were doing for him at the nadir of his career around 2011: i refuse to go back and listen to words i never said again to confirm but i recall his performance on that song sounding like he was just reading from a checklist of grievances (rhetorical performance is a finer art than that s/o demosthenes). lupe’s detached delivery lends itself so much better to symbolic strings of abstractions and visions than it does to polemics, so hopefully more like mural and little death now that atlantic’s fangs are out of his neck

speaking of atlantic i’m really intrigued as to how hands-on their approach was with t&y in general - i’d like to think lupe linked up with ty$ for a really solid string of releases entirely out of his own volition but if that, or lupe’s work here w/ dahi, was the label’s doing then they’ve gotten a lot better at aligning their interests with lupe’s (lasers is rightfully remembered as a turd although 2 ways is underrated: “you really like summer, you really like reading, love...”) altho if so this would come all too late anyway. also wonder how much of a fight lupe had to put up to keep songs like mural or prisoner 1&2, both of which i’d expect from an auteur, as opposed to the label which gave us bobby ray, and therefore the kind of stuff i expect from his upcoming indie work. this is both good and bad because a lot of the longer songs on t&y don’t entirely justify themselves as opposed to the very tight, slightly trendier run which ends the album: there’s such a difference between mural and tron that it almost seems like the album’s a product of a “one for me, one for them” mentality, not that this would be inherently bad

lupe has an extraordinarily focused (or narrow, depending on how charitable one is) view of what he wants to achieve as a rapper and t&y + a few of the loose songs&features he did leading up to its release is the closest he’s been to perfecting that vision in almost a decade. said vision’s specificity means many people will justifiably turn away but it also means there’s all sorts of hidden meanings and narratives to be mulled over, which i’ve yet to do much of because reading lyric sheets defeats the purpose and these verses are dense as hell: i keep reading theories about the album being meant to be played in reverse and/or being related to the cool saga, but developing interpretations of any of those possible overarching themes wouldn’t make me like the album more more (plus it’s more interesting to think about why there’s no suite of songs accompanying the final spring interlude): t&y is generally a success on the micro-level, which is much more important

[geezyremembers]

yep ep

i assume og maco and rome fortune are pals irl or something cause they don’t have much chemistry in the booth or any compelling reason to make a project together. the most telling moment: start of rome’s verse on tm88-produced title track, where he says that he’s rapping like maco and sounds incredulous, like he’s secretly thinking wait but why am i rapping like this guy? make it stop

ideally collaborations bring both artists’ strengths to the fore or hide their weaknesses, but here rome and maco seem to muffle each other, by which i mean that most of the songs feel like they’re compromises, both in terms of style and of substance. the two have nothing interesting to say when they’re on the same track - i’m 100% ok with rapping about drugs/money/sex/tax returns (latter sadly not present, might’ve improved a track or 2) but there has to be some creative and/or entertaining element in how one discusses them and there’s not a single bar i can remember here after 3 consecutive listens. good production can ameliorate such failures to a degree but the beats here are pretty much all forgettable. guess it’s a testament to how stuffed the atl scene is that beats which i’d describe as beamed in from space still bore me. the aforementioned tm88 provides the best sounds, but his beat’s still essentially a banger-by-numbers and by now he has plenty of songs with so many better rappers so why care? 

the two exceptions to everything i just wrote are the final two tracks, which, w/o bludgeoning the point, are solo performances: riot is from an earlier maco ep but it’s still one of the standouts here thanks to maco at least sounding like he gives a shit, while moving on is rome getting personal about his family, ex-girl, etc. like big sean would’ve back in 09. neither track knocked my socks off or anything (rome’s response to his shitty father telling him to quit rap and get a job: “how ignorant?”) but each artist simply puts more of themselves into the work here. the best i could possibly say about the 7 preceding collabs is that they might work as decent background noise, and even average rap has better uses

[geezyremembers]

clean feet

the coolest moment on the preacher’s son tape is @ the beginning of the track sheba, where tut offers to wash a stripper’s feet. in a universe where houstatlantavegas exists this lyrical gesture can be read as both corny and unoriginal but in the context of tut’s nascent project - being caught between the world and the kingdom, between no limit and native tongues - washing feet gets to be a bit holier. those two pairs of horns i just mentioned are far from being unique to tut, but i think foot-washing is a particularly evocative way to imagine his personal answer to the existential problem of how to be a generally moral person/artist in a world/genre full of immoral stuff (not that i always have a problem with this, but tut seems to). it’s basically a nice image suggesting that one shouldn’t just speak the righteous word, but instead be quietly righteous. my personal bias is probably bleeding into this since i’m a dostoevsky fanboy and foot-washing is christ-like in my brain, though.

the rest of the tape isn’t anything super special, outside of the moment where tut gives the best response ever to a hypothetical hater who mocks him for being unable to read music: “read these nuts.” tut can rap and sing moderately well, and has a solid team of local chattanooga producers (altho i suspect the primary aspiration with some of these songs was to make some “chill” stuff and everyone involved could set their sights higher), but there’s nothing that really stands out about him yet. maybe this is precisely because tut is a product of all these disparate ideas and styles - “versace flows,” nyc 90s rappers, preachers, dope boys, live musicians - but regardless of genealogy he’s yet to transcend his influences to any meaningful extent. his lyrical penchant for lame punchlines (”n----s like urine, they’ll never be shit,” etc.) doesn’t do him any favors either. still, at the very least i hope dude makes a few great songs in the next couple years

[geezyremembers]

after before the money

college meant that for the first time i lived in a city where rappers sometimes showed up and performed live -> i hoarded cash and went to basically every rap show i could get tickets for, regardless of who was actually performing. so it came about that i found myself at a beastcoast show (underachievers, flatbush zombies, joey badass + pro era headlining) back when the movement was getting blog shine in early 2013. the only thing that’s still in my brain w/r/t joey’s performance is that he was assuredly normal i.e. he didn’t seem awkward or unsure what to do, and he also didn’t get particularly exciting/charismatic (he just shouted that most classic of rap show shouts, “put your hands up”). he seemed content to stand there with his pals and perform songs he’d made, which when i think about it makes sense cause he was at most 18 years old.

i remember this post noz made back when keef dropped finally rich, worrying that keef would never grow or progress as an artist cause he’d gotten so much attention while he was such a young man. same thing could’ve been said of joey, and in joey’s case even more of the initial focus the internet gave him was based on his age (”WOW!!! Listen to 17 Year Old Rapper Emulate His Heroes” was somehow never a buzzfeed title though). the gift of hindsight 3 yrs later tells me that keef, who’s evolved a lot as an artist rather than making a career of back from the dead over and over again, dodged immediate stagnation better than joseph. 1999 was cool (waves is the only song i’d ever revisit and never do) as a love letter to a past era, but its hype stemmed from its novelty. joey didn’t really do anything new afterwards (summer knights was pretty bad) and i stopped caring till his album earlier this year.

the single choices are both good and bad since they’re the songs (big dusty, christ conscious, no. 99) most likely to interest people who are interested in joey as a contemporary avatar for 90s boom bap, but for the same reason they’re derivative and boring. joey can rap but he’s still trapped in a mentality which demands that he make songs solely to prove he can rap and those don’t really interest me. aforementioned songs are nothing but lyrical flexes which means it’s all superficial wordplay like “rushin in like vladimir putin” and “cleverness” like that is the antithesis of heartfelt lyricism. these days i like hearing lyrics that are humorous, beautiful, or emotional (or all of the above) and joey’s super-serious approach to lyrics which are none of the above sucks to hear. beats are so dated, right down to the record scratches, that they signify a certain mentality as well as a group of earlier artists, which is just offputting. at the same time the real stinker on the album is the one which strays furthest from pure boom bap, escape 120, altho this is mostly due to a real bad raury verse where he tries to emulate andre 3000′s inflections and flow but 1) misses the crucial aspect where andre had something to say and 2) straight up eschews any kind of rhyming for talking quickly.

aforementioned abysmal cleverness infects some of the songs with more potential on the lp too, like on paper trails where he writes something like “my visions is macrocosmic pass the chronic, the mastered sonics is light years above your conscious:” these unnecessarily wordy explications of simple and often uninteresting ideas (i am enlightened because i smoke weed, altho i’m not going to say anything to actually imply enlightement) always feel so cold and premeditated, like a performance that is too obviously a rehearsed performance, and it’s not even that impressive of a linguistic construction since letting internal rhymes direct where the pen goes actually makes it pretty easy to think up coherent, flashy-sounding phrases. this is especially true when, as is often the case here, there is no strict lyrical theme joey’s sticking to -> any cluster of similar sounds will fit in a verse. doesn’t help that paper trails - which is the one where he ostensibly talks about how money changed everything - doesn’t offer any new twists on that old trope within the lyrics. obvious conjecture here but it seems like joey privileges wordy junk over honesty, specific details and stuff like that which naturally lends itself to more interesting insights than shitty wordplay.

it’s actually those songs which stick to a stricter theme that end up being the best ones on here, and they all fall toward the end of the album: curry chicken is the outro and personal favorite, not so much for what he says as for how straightforwardly he says it and for the slightest tender affect in his voice when he’s talking about his parents that makes it feel realer (i might totally be imagining it but it doesn’t matter that much). there’s also black beetles and on and on, which i like a lot because it features joey not only rapping pretty well but also playing with the rhythm of his words on the hook to fun effect. the end of the phrase “take a plane to the astral zones” coincides with melodic progression in the beat in a neat way and it’s little moments like that which are missing from the 90s-by-numbers tracks where he imitates lyrical ideas from illmatic or method man’s flow. overall it’s a decidedly mediocre project since the majority of the work here skews so close to that of earlier, superior rappers, but a few songs on here represent artistic growth and that’s a pretty cool thing to see. hopefully he keeps improving.

[thegrandarchives]

never forget

[geezyremembers]

shrimp: a retrospective review (isn’t that redundant i love english)

Sremmlife is probably the most calculated rap album of 2015, and also the one that feels least like an “album.” By the latter statement I just mean that there’s no theme, overarching sound, or apparent interest in track sequencing; I could tell someone who’d never heard of Rae Sremmurd that this was a greatest hits album, or more accurately a playlist I’d made of their singles, and it wouldn’t be a hard sell. It’s the most calculated in that everything about the album, from the producer list to the subject matter to the way that the two Shrimp brothers' styles have evolved, seems carefully designed to sell records.

Neither of these are inherently bad things: cohesion is vastly overrated as a criterion for a good rap album, and rap music which sells can often be pretty great (I think my two favorite albums of this year are also the highest selling ones, although this isn’t often the case). The specific problem I still have with Sremmlife is that the style the two most often use doesn’t suit them very well. Take Slim Jimmi’s growl, which, as far as I can tell, is the only thing he does better than Swae Lee and is therefore the only unique trick he brings to the group dynamic: he practically deforms his voice on multiple songs here (No Flex Zone, Come Get Her, Lit Like Bic), but the end result almost always lands somewhere between comical and awkward to hear, instead of exciting. Swae Lee doesn’t do anything as actively bad as Jimmi’s delivery of “4-5-6-7 chains on, just stay in your lane ho,” and to his credit, he’s doing a lot more on this album since he’s in charge of almost every single hook, but he doesn’t do anything that keeps me interested, either. 

It’s not that the Shrimps can’t rap, because there are places where their flow and words line up well enough to sound good (“beating on my chest, like Megilla n--a, I am the gorilla of the village” comes to mind); I think they just don’t care about their rap technique because they can make catchy songs without it. The verdict is still out on whether or not they’re completely unable to write decent lyrics, since there are basically none on here, but again that’s not necessarily something a good rap song really needs. What I think is offputting about Sremmlife most of the time is the tension between the polish the songs get in order to make them radio-friendly and the grittiness + weirdness that so many other rappers ostensibly in Sremmurd’s lane have brought to the same kind of beats + song concepts. 

It’s hard for me to avoid comparing them to Future since Rae Sremmurd got signed by Mike Will, who served as executive producer on Sremmlife and also has a long and productive working relationship with the Wizard - I suspect that he 1) coached the brothers and 2) pushed them to adopt some of his friend and collaborator’s proven hit-making methods. Whether or not this actually happened (not that it particularly matters), there’s still some obvious similarities between parts of Future’s style and the Sremms’: look at Jimmi’s aforementioned growl, the way Swae will launch into a high squeak while rapping, or the Up Like Trump hook (staccato delivery, repeating phrases + words, etc.). The difference is that when Future does stuff like this, it never feels exaggerated or extra: the Sremms have turned these vocal tics up to 11 in a way that seems too intentional and therefore offputting. They also lack the emotion (be it pain, anger or otherwise) that often manifests itself in Future’s performances, which makes Sremmlife’s songs seem almost soulless.

There’s also a deficit in creativity which brings it down a bit, too. When Young Thug shows up on Throw Sum Mo he completely steals the show, if not the entire album, and it’s interesting that he does so with a verse that’s pretty average in the grander scheme of his catalog. Even an average verse from Thug has him easily switching flows in a way the Shrimps never do, and also lines about how his girl can’t cook anything on his plates cause they’re covered in cocaine, except he specifically says that if she uses his plates she’ll “cook up a brrr,” where the italicized = bird call = bird = kilo. He, like multiple talents working within the same boundaries as Rae Sremmurd, still manage to display great technique and creative shit like the above line while at the same time making songs that, like everything on Sremmlife, sounds fantastic with good equipment and will go at parties/in cars. There’s not much wrong with any of these songs - the production is fantastic, especially when Sonny Digital laces Up Like Trump, and there’s not much to straight up hate about the two rappers, but there are a plethora of better options. 

The only time the duo really shines is when they move away from the dark, minor-keys sound of No Type and move toward something that’s straight pop. This Could Be Us and Safe Sex Pay Checks are bright songs about nothing besides having fun - on the latter, an unironic “Shots! Shots!” chant breaks out and I don’t mind at all - and they feel like a much more natural fit for Shrimps 1 + 2. More of that on the next album, hopefully.

[geezyremembers]

Dumb as bricks .

they call me bricc baby shitro bieber for a reason my son

[tumblinerb]

Listen to Starlito, he’s smart.

[diorpaint]

[geezyremembers]

This is HOV

Jay-Z isn’t great at making truly emotional songs. This is even true of his prime: whether then or now, Jay’s strong suit is flexing on the universe. There were tracks like Where Have You Been, sure, but those were exceptions (and exceptional, zing). A more typical track is Song Cry, which doesn’t move me at all because of Jay’s delivery and how vague the lyrics are. He’s sad cause his girl didn’t do him the favor of staying faithful while he cheated (I guess the premise falls flat), but he sounds just as disaffected as he does on Big Pimpin, and that doesn’t help. It’s also lyrically impersonal. Maybe the intent was to make a universally relatable song about lost love but I don’t buy it at all because everything is so vague: even judging by the most basic rubric of who, what, when, where, how, the only relevant answers are a vague “she” and money. You care, but you forgot all the details? Shit, Nas made up a story about getting cheated on and it was 10x more powerful cause it’s got details like sneaking back from Vegas and finding his girlfriend’s bra hanging from the ceiling fan. That’s vivid! Pictures show up in my head when I play that song. Song Cry makes me feel and see nothing: the goal’s to “make the song cry,” but he does a really piss-poor job of it. 

Miles sadder and more intense than Song Cry is Can I Live (I listened to Reasonable Doubt for the first time in about a year today). In fact, a bunch of songs on Reasonable Doubt are some of the most affecting Jay’s ever made. This shouldn’t be, right? Based on how it’s been mythologized, Reasonable Doubt might as well be the archetypal “cool mafioso” rap album. He’s rich, he shows no emotions, he breaks all the laws, etc. The thing is that contextually it makes way more sense for Jay to sound disaffected in ‘96, because his hustle up to that point has been dealing drugs and rapping on the side, rather than being a rapper. Here’s something that sets Jay apart from Biggie: Ready to Die has songs about not wanting to live + not giving a fuck about dying and ends with a suicide note on record. I think Jay didn’t trust the world enough to completely bare his soul like that, at least not on Doubt. Confessing to the world that he sold his mother crack on Vol. 1 was Biggie-esque in this sense, I guess, but also atypical for Jay. I like ‘96 Jay’s detached style though, cause his own mythology justifies this distrust. It’s the crack game that puts him off of on-record catharsis:

I don’t sleep, I’m tired, I feel wired like codeine/these days, a brother gotta admire me from four fiends away/my pain, wish it was quick to see/from selling caine til brains was fried to a fricassee/can’t lie, at the time it never bothered me

Half-founded idea: maybe this is why Jay later had to start making absurd claims about how he wasn’t a rapper. A lot of great rappers (Cube, Pac, Big, Scarface, Andre, Kanye, Wayne, Future, Kendrick, Lil B) regularly let out demons in the booth, and Jay did that very rarely. Maybe he was scared to, maybe he thought that shit was weak, maybe he felt like he couldn’t; whatever the reason, as he moved further away w/r/t time from being in the streets, maybe Jay invented a new category for himself, the guy who raps but isn’t a rapper, so that he wouldn’t have to stand next to those guys. This paragraph is bullshit. 

[mrcunterblast-deactivated201606]

Oh wow I found this great article: Artists Chris Brown, Kanye West, and Beyonce show that accessible language makes pop music more widely enjoyable for people of all education levels while still staying profitable and artistically innovative! Just goes to show you there are many ways to create art that changes the world! :)

[jenny-dreadful]

catch me over here listening exclusively to remixes of homer

[we-are-made-of-starstuff-deacti]

U don’t even have to read for classical music but that’s supposedlythe music of snobby smart people so…..

[dredsina]

debussy: below even a kindergarten reading level

[sleepy-z]

I literally cannot understand why the study was conducted and why it’s newsworthy??? What are they trying to convey here, what’s the purpose???

[cewekjudes-deactivated20200227]

okay but check out this quote from the article: 

“In hip-hop, Eminem is leading the way with the most advanced lyrics that mark just under a fourth grade level, while the likes of Beyoncé,Kanye West, and Chris Brown’s lyrics are all found to be below that of a third grade reading level.”

EMINEM???  really don’t think so. also, the study looks at four genres n groups r&b n hip hop as one….really fucking lazy tbh. it puts MACKLEMORE at a “higher intelligence” when he literally had a lyric about thinking he was gay b/c he could draw like?? this whole study is a fraud, why would u want certain music to sound like an academic paper like??? 

[geezyremembers]

“A recent study by SeatSmart proves the lyrics in hip-hop today really aren't that advanced...” based on six artists?

Even putting aside the obvious objections that pop music isn’t equivalent to poetry and that neither art form’s merit is based on how closely the writer read a fucking thesaurus, who on earth would write that sentence based on that data? Everything is awful.

[lazenby]

what do you think of the possibility of your writings here and on twitter being quoted, alluded to and even plagiarized?

This is really a question about pride of ownership.

Pride is one of several ways we give ourselves definition in order to see ourselves more clearly against the background of the world. In effect, prideful people draw their seeming accomplishments around them like a grand suit of clothes. In reality it’s more like a shawl, because the worry at the heart of pride causes chills. Prideful people (who, today, are mainly the falsely modest) always make me think of delicate old women, drawing an inadequate shawl around their shoulders as they hunch against the wind. The critical point is that pride is an obscene waste of energy. Which you spend on yourself because you think you deserve it. But in reality there is no you, and this is just an attempt to hide the ineradicable void at the heart of any self.

We all have a nothingness inside of us that is completely immune to introspection. This nothingness is why you frequently feel like existence is a transcendentally stupid joke. Why every belief can never be held as deeply as you feel it should. Why your understanding of yourself always seems to hit bedrock, even though you know there’s an ocean of magma beneath it. This nothingness is the blue out of which all ideas come to us. And pride of ownership is the selfish—ludicrously selfish—attempt to claim credit in the face of this, on behalf of a fictitious identity.

I would very much like to abandon the agonizingly human way of producing things for something more insect-like. Even if I say I don’t have pride of ownership and couldn’t care less if someone steals what I do, this statement was still made possible by a certain amount of self-murder. And so the indifference to someone stealing your productions becomes studied, and the result of discipline. But no termite queen has to suppress her self image in order to make what she makes. She just broods for a while and then the things emerge. At an incredible rate.

Once you decline to fear the vacuity that gives rise to your productions, you tend to stop hiding it behind bad wallpaper. And consequently start seeing people who would use what you’ve made to paper over their own emptiness as more deserving your humble sympathy than your prideful contempt.

[geezyremembers]

He’s Kendrick, so he didn’t just get drunk and freestyle about gang violence, but he raps like that’s what happened and it’s cool. Not mad at Gaga’s hook at all, either - it’s interesting to think that there could’ve been (probably) good albums full of this stuff if Kendrick hadn’t consciously opted out of a slapfight with Drake and Ye for the top of mainstream rap.

Speaking of Drake, I’m already tired of that “My Side” flow after this new leak. He could do better.

[diorpaint]

People sound so funny and when they try and sound cool saying “ o lil b follows back everyone over Twitter ” no silly I hand picked 1million plus people to follow excuse myself and excuse u - Lil B

(via diorpaint)

[geezyremembers]