love and economic plans

root beer thoughts

[loveandeconomicplans]

Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.

James Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel.” 1949.

[loveandeconomicplans]

Brief History of Fat Joe vs. Masta Ace

In June of 1993 The Source published a fictional story called “Sleeping Snakes” about a novice graffiti writer getting into some shit on his first bombing escapade. It was written by Masta Ace.

In an accompanying interview to promote his Slaughtahouse album, Ace told the magazine he had “started out doing graffiti way back in 1982″ on L, Q, and M trains between Flatbush and Brownsville. But within two years he was headed to college, where he was “separated from the graffiti world,” as he put it. In 1992 he started writing again after hanging out with artists Ruel and Louie 167. When asked what pieces he’d done, Ace answered with one on Boston Road in the Bronx. 

In addition, Ace addressed criticism he’d received over a line from Slaughtahouse: “See this Puerto Rican, Latin chico, Rico Suave.” “In that song, I’m referring to a particular type of kid,” he explained. “Everybody knows who Rico Suave is. And I’ve always felt that he didn’t represent the true flavor of the Latino community. So, I was kind of extending a little dis to him and those that are like him that don’t want to reflect the true culture.”

Fat Joe wasn’t a fan of the story. In 1993 he claimed Ace might have bit a promo ad that Joe had done for his first album Represent with a chainsaw. “We keep it real,” added Joe. “We only make music about what we can relate to. It’s all reality.” The following year he told Ego Trip, “I don’t care too much for Masta Ace.” They asked him why:

That led to Ace recording “Top Ten List,” a diss record directed at Fat Joe that went unreleased, but can be found on the Hits U Missed series. 

Fat Joe is known for his heritage in graffiti, originally going by CRACK TS and bombing with KRS-One (making the sample on “Top Ten List” that much more biting). In 1995 he continued to call out Masta Ace during an interview with Stress Mag: “I’m not Masta Ace, who started writing after he was muthafuckin’ rhyming. Hungout with some graffiti writers and started to write - none of that shit.”

Some claim Fat Joe eventually ran up on Masta Ace during a concert for the Puerto Rican stuff, but that’s never been confirmed. When Ace was asked about it in 2008, he said, “I believe in settling things like men. I don’t believe in talkin’ stuff in magazines and radio stations – I go to the person and talk to them to their face. I knew that eventually we was gonna see each other, and we saw each other. We were face-to-face, he said how he felt, I said how I felt and that was pretty much the end. We shook hands afterwards! It could got heated and turned into something else, but it didn’t.”

[loveandeconomicplans]

Download: Rosco P. Coldchain - Hazardous Life: The Mixtape (2006)

Rosco is one of my favorite unheralded rappers of all time. Months ago I interviewed his former manager and I’ve been sitting on that story because I’m a lazy fuck, but this weekend I felt a Star Trak kick and went looking for his Hazardous Life mixtape - the one that apparently was passed out on Clipse’s tour with 50 Cent circa ‘06. The Hazardous Life album was supposed to come out in ‘03 but when Arista folded the album got shelved. 

Anyway I found this one blog who had the tape but only did trades. I don’t have one of these inventories at the ready so I just said I’d want to buy it and offered him $5. He countered with $30. I offered $20 and now it’s in my iTunes. Below is the cover, tracklist, and link (320 kbps). Off a quick glance I only see 3 exclusives - that first freestyle, the Glaciers of Ice freestyle (track 6) and the Sun Will Shine snippet. If you go to his MySpace you can hear another exclusive, a song he did with Denaun Porter called “My Own Way.”

Download: Rosco P. Coldchain - Hazardous Life: The Mixtape

1. Rosco Intro

2. Delinquent

3. Cot Damn (Feat. Clipse)

4. Freestyle

5. I Can’t Help

6. Freestyle

7. This Beat Is Hot

8. Rosco Interlude

9. One More time

10. Freestyle

11. I’m Not You (Feat. Jadakiss & Pusha T)

12. Son Will Shine

13. Rosco Outro

[loveandeconomicplans]

When our attachment to a lover can be readily compared to our attachment to a jeep, what can it signify but a belief in the capitalist idea that you are what you own?

Greg Tate, Vibe Nov. 1996.

[loveandeconomicplans]

I never write. I usually just look at the artist’s face and when I’m saying certain things, I see what moves them, so [there’s] never no paper in the studio,

Future on working with Miley Cyrus, 2013

[loveandeconomicplans]

my Vince Staples anxiety

i don’t know how I feel about Vince Staples’ recent music, or any of his music since Shyne Coldchain Vol. 1, honestly. Nothing really stacks up to that project, though Winter In Prague got better with time and his Hell Can Wait EP might end up being the best compromise between his raw sound and a major record label. On paper, I should have liked Shyne Coldchain Vol. 2, but the only one I still play is “Earth Science.” That song is simple, muted, grey, a bit severe, and not-overproduced. Even “Senorita,” which is a cool song, just doesn’t do what his earlier music did for me. That sound feels forced coming from him, though he does well with it. 

What do I want out of the kid? He consistently raps well and picks pretty good beats, but ever since the EP with Mac Miller disappointed me, I’ve had my suspicions about the kids ceiling. Ever since he signed to Def Jam, I’ve noticed traces of change, and though they’re subtle, they still rub me the wrong way. Like “Limos” or this new song “Get Paid,” or having that dude Daley on the album. (Random sidenote: I kind of like the boldness of dropping a double disc as your major label debut LP, but I hope it doesn’t backfire on him. What’s the most he’ll sell - 35K?) 

Some of my favorite rappers sound like they found rapping by accident. They don’t like buying in to being A Rapper and building up the corny image that comes with that, and you can hear the dismissiveness in their music. But there comes a point when they reach a certain level of success where they have to become what they sell in order to keep other people happy. The tricky thing about a record deal is that it’s not really for the artist. It’s for the label. Every artist is an investment and the return needs to be greater than what was put in, so as part of the machine, rappers must sell themselves. Vince Staples doesn’t seem like one to sell himself. I hope he doesn’t on Summertime ‘06.

[loveandeconomicplans]

Future Loosies

put together a bunch of my favorite Future loosies. 

Download

Tracklist:  

[loveandeconomicplans]

On “Picasso: Creator And Destroyer”

I’ve just finished reading Ariana Huffington’s biography on Picasso, which is now out of print. I can’t say why I even picked it up, except for the fact that I was in my parents’ apartment about to go on vacation with them when the book stuck out to me. 

I’ve had a deep respect for Picasso’s work since high school, especially because I saw in it the same repugnance for much of mankind that I feel in my heart. He was perhaps best known for his depiction of women - jagged, brutally ugly, and menacing. Throughout his life, he declared women to be either goddesses or doormats. He himself proved, in his life, to be a complete and utter scumbag.

And yet I identify with him. His younger sister died when he was just a child, and from then on, at the age of 14, he lost all faith in things outside of his own control. Maybe that’s why he so tyrannically strove to assert his dominance over every single person he encountered in his lifetime. They would usually let him trample them, too. Many people in the book are simply happy to be in his presence, or hear him speak. No matter that he seemed to have a heart the size of a shriveled grape. 

His aura seemed irresistible. In the book, he often reminded me of Steve Jobs, a reference so cliché now I’m loath to use it. But Picasso was the ultimate creator, a defiant artist since his university days, and that brave, singular spirit was what made him one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. The whole world seemed to bend to his will, and though it broke many innocent people along the way, those sacrifices feel necessary, as if those not strong enough to withstand his madness were meant to fall by the wayside of his genius. Perhaps it took the suffering of a select few to gift the multitudes of people across the world with Pablo’s work.

I won’t prattle on. But one thing that really stuck with me from the book, besides Huffington’s unbelievable knack for writing fluid prose, was what Picasso said about friends. I hope my own friends won’t take it personally, but at this time in my life, it speaks to the hollowness I find in so many facets of human existence:

“In life, you throw a ball. You hope it will reach a wall and bounce back so you can throw it again. You hope your friends will provide that wall. Well, they’re almost never a wall. They’re like old wet bed sheets, and that ball you throw, when it strikes those wet sheets, just falls. It almost never comes back.”

[loveandeconomicplans]

Years ago, when I worked at a top-ranked university, I was stunned that students who had been given every academic opportunity - like entrance-exam preparatory workshops, private high school educations, and extra coaches and tutors for every subject under the sun - lacked the emotional skills needed to guide them through developmental life transitions, like beginning college, working through roommate conflicts and navigating relationship heartaches. This may have something to do with the research results you reported. I am a psychologist; my clinical experience with these young adults is that while they may come from affluent backgrounds, their emotional lives are impoverished. Their parents have resources and they are not afraid to use them. Their children's life problems are often outsourced to "experts" for solving. As a result, they never strengthen their own problem-solving abilities to find their own way. Many of these young adults are shocked when they confront their own limitations for the first time in their lives. This disappointment often leads to behavior like excessive drinking and substance abuse. Often, as a result, depression and anxiety soon follow. As it turns out, there are some things that money simply cannot buy.

Juli Fraga, to the New York Times editor Re: "Growing Up On Easy Street Has Its Own Dangers." Jan. 11, 2015

This, especially the first paragraph, sounds exactly like Holden, and what may be the cause of his malaise.

[loveandeconomicplans]

Acting like a crazy man to make something happen is motivated by an intellectual sense that we've got to do it now and an emotional sense that this is a way of repentance.

- Lawrence Lessig

[loveandeconomicplans]

RZA: In 1997, I personally tore Wu Tang Clan up. I won't forget this day, we were on the Rage Against The Machine tour bus. Everybody was becoming lazy, niggas even started not showin' up. I said "Yo! I did my shit! From this point on, do what the fuck you want. The Wu Mansion? Y'all turned that shit to a club house! From now on, The Wu Mansion is MY house. You wanna come and rock? I'll be there”, and niggas respected it. To me, it's like Mike Tyson: he got to the top of the world and shit, and he stopped trainin'. Fuck that, you must never stop trainin'. Well you can stop if you want, if you're happy, but if you wanna go further. All I did was promise to get'em to there, from this point, it's up to each of them. For that, Method Man's a good example: he took it to the movies and he went to the moon. So brothers had no success after that, nahmean? Cappadonna, see, he's drivin' a cab. HHC: Oh he still drives a cab? RZA: Well, he's aight, we take him on tour, he makes a couple hundred grands, so… He's my man, he's hustlin'…

- from this interview

[loveandeconomicplans]

They scared to let it flow. They scared to see how people might look at 'em. They hiding things. I try my best to let it all out. The feelings that you let out, those are the best ones. It's like crying and shit. When you drop that tear, after you finish, you feel a lot better from holding all that shit in. But a lot of people feel ashamed, worried about how other people might think. But I learned to just go ahead. I don't give a fuck what nobody says. If it's real and that's what it is, then that's what it is.

Ghostface Killah, Vibe, 2000. 

I cried to music more than I often do at the end of 2014/start of 2015, so this is personally relevant. 

[loveandeconomicplans]

It's amazing. How could we lose Biggie, Pac, Dilla, Steve Jobs, Michael Jackson? It almost makes you feel like the devil's winning. We gotta make music and we think like, if Dilla was alive, would he like this? Like I have to work on behalf of Dilla. When I put a weird ass fuckin'...this Jamaican sample, it's like it works at first but it's not until I put the [sound effect] that it sounds like art or it sounds slightly wrong, and now we go to the radio now that it's wrong, motherfucker. Now play this, play this five minute song that completely fucks up your programming. Play this. It's the best respect that we can pay to great artists that have inspired us so much. It's to never have to sell out.

- Kanye West, from this

[loveandeconomicplans]

I heard a little bit of criticism [about the album] from magazines that don't understand our type of music, but all the magazines that do understand our type of music - like yo' book [OZONE] and the XXLs and The Sources and people like that, I ain't hear nobody complaining about how long the record was. I heard people complain about how long the record was in books like Rolling Stone and Spin Magazine, muthafuckers that don't know too much about our music in the first place, but hey, man, fuck them. We ain't makin' it for them. We're making it for our fans and people out there who love our records.

- Pimp C

[loveandeconomicplans]

If a man quotes me a price and he feels like that's what he's worth and me and that man ain't had no prior commitments with each other, I'm not gonna try to jew him down and make him come down off his price.

- Pimp C

[loveandeconomicplans]

Unlike the pre-(and over-)analyzed go-go and house movements which were midwifed by trade and consumer journalists embarrassed to have been asleep on disco and rap, the commercial arrival of rap preceded any overground notice. This made all the difference in the world - preserving rap's free expression.

Brian Chin, "Billboard." Dec. 27, 1986

[loveandeconomicplans]

Rich The Kid, "Rich Than Famous"

Rich The Kid set the bar kinda high for himself on “Goin Crazy,” one of my favorite songs of the year (and that cover too). The synth is auto-bounce, and K.E.'s beat is unlike anything I've heard from him. He's lowkey had a strong year.

But that song sounds like very little of Rich The Kid’s past material, nor the stuff on his new tape Rich Than Famous, which has an odd title. His new shit is cool, there’s just no “Goin Crazy.” I hope QC is gonna push the YG remix now, since a Migos feature, while slightly better, doesn’t give more exposure to the track across the country like a YG remix might. Also notable that Rich The Kid’s pronunciation of “crazy” on the hook is better than any pronunciation of “crazy” found on My Krazy Life. 

It’s also strange, to me at least, that Jahlil Beats has two beats on Rich Than Famous, which is two more than they’ve ever released together. The Shmurda gang seemed to be kicking it with the QC centerpiece that is the Migos hitmaking machine (which seems to be dry as of right now, by the way) a lot in recent months before an official collab mixtape was announced. The skeptic in me wonders if some higher-ups thought it was a good idea to unite the brands or some shit. Thinking about it now, it was almost too much of a coincidence that GS9 got knocked weeks later. Now Bobby’s buzz is as big as ever. My parents asked me about “Shmendrick?” at Hanukkah. He’s a household name.

Where the connection between Migos and GS9 will go in the shadow of Bobby’s unfortunate situation remains to be seen, but it looks like someone thought it was a good idea to give Rich The Kid two beats from that guy that produced that song where the kid throws his hat*. Rich even says, “Ain’t seen that boy Bobby, he just caught a body” on one of the two Jahlil-produced cuts, “Wrist Gone Crazy,” and Bobby himself shows up with Rowdy Rebel on the better than average “On My Way,” thanks in part to Bobby’s hook. It’s weird.

It wasn’t Jahlil’s beat that made “Hot N*gga” pop, clearly. It was Bobby’s energy. K.E.’s beat on “Goin Crazy” is one of the freshest out of the QC camp right now, and K.E. On The Track doesn’t even have another beat on Rich Than Famous. He does have three dope beats on Law 3, though, by Shy Glizzy, another 300 artist. Why people might force Rich and Jahlil together confuses me, though it’s just a theory. They even made an official cover for his “Hot N*gga” freestyle. Who does that for a freestyle?

Rich’s latest tape could use some of the flavor on “Goin Crazy.” “From The Streets” is cool, but overall the tape doesn’t make me feel anything as dynamic as what “Goin Crazy” immediately does to me. That song pops out at you like nothing on Rich Than Famous. Johnny Cinco remains an ATL beacon on the last track, and PeeWee lost me a bit on Blue M&M, but I have faith he’ll return. In terms of Rich, someone just get “Goin Crazy” on the radio. YG’s remix, also with it’s own cover, should be an indication that the song is heating up.

*I just looked at Bobby’s Spotify numbers randomly, and “Bobby Bitch” has 3.2 million plays, which is frankly better than I expected. It’s his #2 most popular song behind “Hot N*gga” (32 mil), followed by “Hot Boy” (2 mil) and “Living Life” (487k). I haven’t been in the club (what a terrible phrase) when "Bobby Bitch" drops, so I’m still luke warm on it, but I can see it kinda going off.