Category Archives: Dipset

Selassie I I Know Some Deadly Rastas

12 Wednesday Jun 2019

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Jim Jones ft. Jadakiss, Philthy Rich – Don’t Know what They Took Him For 

This Heatmakerz beat is unbelievable. Almost makes me feel like I’m in the 80s watching some type of promotional video from one of those sketchy self-help gurus where the actors are talking about how good their lives are after they paid him to  walk over hot coals in his sketchy desert retreat and made his suggested life changes, or like a corporate training video from the same era telling you how to be a good employee. Or maybe even some sort of anti-drug PSA where the kids are talking about how great their lives are by not doing drugs. So many good Heatmakerz beats on Jim’s new album but this might be the best.

“On birthdays was the worst days, now I might pop $80 grand on a Thursday”. I love the over the top ‘Grrr’ ad lib after he mentions goons his goons purging which we’ve also seen previously in ‘Dipset Forever’ (the second coming of it). Ad lib game on point as always, and Jim does very well with the hook.

I’m never opposed to hearing what Jadakiss has to say and I obviously welcome the Phil feature. Jadakiss sounds like he’s in a very good place here (‘Count my blessings get my lessons out the Good Book’). Jim and Philthy have done some good work together before on ‘East Side‘ with Peezy. (Wish he would have gotten a Peezy feature for this album!) It’s kind of random that the Jim Jones album ends with a Philthy Rich verse but again I’m down with Philthy so I don’t really mind.

Harlem to Yonkers to Oakland

Side note: is Nef the Pharaoh locked up or is Philthy talking about a different Nef?

Still Going Cray on Em Like a Coloring Book

07 Friday Jun 2019

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Jim Jones ft. Fabolous, Marc Scibilia – Nothing Lasts 

Jones!

Yimmy is back with a new album El Capo to follow up on last year’s somewhat overlooked Wasted Talent. I can’t decide which I like better yet after a couple of listens but they’re both good. Jim is having a nice little Indian summer to his career with 2 straight solid albums in 2 years, and has evolved from probably the least checked for main member of Dipset (through no fault of his own) to arguably the most checked for and is going the strongest of all them with the most consistent output. After a couple of spins so far I’m really feeling this one, Mama I Made It, and Don’t Know What they Took Him For (which has a Philthy cameo!).

I can’t decide if ‘Still going cray on them like a coloring book is one of the best lines I’ve ever heard in a rap song or one of the worst lines I’ve ever heard in a rap song.

This production with the Lionel Richie sample is sounding downright godly. Heatmakerz have a lot of nice beats on this album. I’m not sure who the hell Marc Scibliani is or why he’s all over every song on this album but he doesn’t sound bad on the hook here so I can’t hate, and let’s be honest no one could ruin this sample. Imagine if Jim wanted to get a little wavy and got El Debarge on the hook? Or if he was hellbent on going down the white R&B singer route for whatever reason, if he sprung for like a Michael McDonald or the guy from Hall and Oates or something? Lol. Either way Jim definitley has a nice smooth summer jam on his hands here. In a perfect world this would be a summer hit on radio.

Life Gave me Lemons I Made Lemonade, All they see’s a Nigga Shining they don’t see the Pain

13 Sunday May 2018

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Peezy, Philthy Rich ft. Jim Jones – Eastside 

I posted this one a couple of months back in one of my top 10s; this one was on Peezy’s ‘Balling Ain’t a Crime’ mixtape from last year and then on ‘East Side’ the collaboration mixtape that him and Philthy Rich put out in February. But something about the Herb Alpert ‘Making Love in the Rain’ sample, the subject matter of them talking about growing up and their moms and grandmas, maybe the NBA playoffs being back, and today being Mother’s Day has me feeling super nostalgic and I wanted to put it up because it captures that feeling.

Jim Jones has been putting out some of his all-time finest work lately and I’m glad they tapped him for this one.

“I don’t use pens but let me write about it… I got niggas in the pen doing life about it, niggas that I won’t see again lost their life about it, shit runs deep so I don’t sleep plenty nights about it. All the cold nights that we had no heater, in the lobby pumping white with a cold heater.”

I love the interlude in the middle before Peezy’s verse; “Sometimes shit gets a little rough in life; but you know you gotta stand strong and fight through it all my baby. Shit get greater later.”

Peezy then lays down just a real, heartfelt moving verse…

“Knew I was special when they birthed me, I moved out my mama’s crib at 13. Roaches in the Fruity Pebbles when we go to the eat, you ain’t seen no shit like this in your worst dreams. Moved to my granny’s Crib on the West, she ain’t have a lot but she did her best. Going to school smelling like kerosene, fuck this there gotta be a better way for me. Only East Side nigga in the whole school, I was forced to share clothes with my old dude, hardest times of my life and they got harder too… Life gave me lemons I made lemonade, all they see’s a nigga shining but don’t see the pain.”

Obviously real life is more important than music as I’ve unfortunately had to say a couple of times on this site lately, so I’m just happy Peezy survived the recent shooting for his own well-being, but from a music perspective, I’m hyped he’s going to still be out here making music like this. The first couple of times I heard him he didn’t grab me as a fan right away but as I’ve went through his whole catalogue and listened to him more and more over time he’s become one of my favorites not just out of Detroit but out of current artists in general; he’s amongst the most prolific and productive out of Detroit in terms of sheer volume of releases, he brings that certain motivational sense of hustle and hunger, he has tons of great lines, and he puts a lot of heart and soul into his music. Now we just have to hope that his recent indictments he’s been hit with don’t jam him up and slow down his grind.

P.S. he also just put up this song last week the intro is a little long but he slams this one…

“Will I make it out the streets you will never know, I got court in the morning I don’t want to go. Got some niggas doing life and they on level 4, but they all rooting for me they just hope I blow.”

The album intro ‘Ain’t Fair’ also went hard AF as did the third track, Tied In, which featured an always-welcome verse from FMB DZ and a nice contribution from All Star Lee.

I Used to Look up at the Lenox Ave Sign, on my Heart and Pledge Allegiance

17 Friday Nov 2017

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Cam’ron – Lean

I don’t know if we even deserved Cam’ron lacing us with a new album, but I can’t think of anything America needs more right now. I wasn’t expecting this at all so I’m hyped.

Rather than an ode to the purple, slumber-inducing concoction, ‘Lean’ is literally a rap song over a beat sampling the 1972 classic ‘Lean on Me’ by Bill Withers. I guess this should come as no surprise since Cam’ron has mastered this type of song and rapping over these types of samples more than any other artist, whether it was Journey’s ‘Don’t Stop Believing’, ‘Oh What a Night‘ by the Four Seasons talking about the night he got shot in D.C. and drove himself to the hospital, or improbably rapping about IBS over the all-too-short ‘Any Way You Want It’, or one of my all time favorite Cam efforts, his take on Rose Royce’s ‘I Wanna Get Next to You’

Killa is rattling off lines like he’s in the midst of a lengthy, multi-decade prime here…

“I grew up with Big L, all I knew was ebonics; jealousy, crack, greed, homicide and chronic, where niggas catch a body change their name like the Sonics. It was hot like Phoenix, I used to look up at the Lenox Ave sign, on my heart, and pledge allegiance.”

“I share my wealth, humble beginnings, hunger strangled us, Pops had a choice, me or drugs, he chose angel dust.”

I’ve only listened to ‘The Program’ a couple of times so far but it certainly does not disappoint. A few early favorites aside from ‘Lean’ include Coleslaw, It’s Killa (the album opener, which brings back memories of the ‘Killa Cam’ intro from Killa Season), Chop it Up, and ‘Dime after Dime’ which features a welcome return from Sen City, which would also fit in with the examples above, as Cam’ron raps about serving fiends over Cindy Lauper’s prom classic ‘Time After Time’. Because of course Cam’ron would do that.

With this new album and a new song with both Cam and Jim Jones called ‘Once Upon a Time’ coming out a couple of days ago, hopefully this is just the beginning of a lot of new material from Dipset.

*Update: Didn’t realize there’s also already a video for Lean, see below. Dope video for this type of a song and I’m feeling Cam’s New York Lotto hat.

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Tell the White Boys Sniff it up like an Aardvark

17 Saturday Jun 2017

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Cam’ron – Lala 

After your humble blogger here met Cam’ron at a Zumiez in midtown Manhattan last week, I decided to act like a middle-aged classic rock snob and go down a wormhole of sifting through nonstop Cam’ron ‘deep cuts,’ so to speak, for all my listening last week. ‘Lala’ from one of his ‘First of the Month’ projects from a few years ago, was the crown jewel of the songs I’d never heard before and actually may rank up there with even my longtime favorites.  I feel like this bouncy, piano-infused jawn by Killa Cam is a spiritual ancestor of Kodak Black’s ‘Patty Cake’. Does anybody rap over these types of beats better than Cam? Whether it’s rapping “weighed 220, with 2 honeys I moved money’ over the beat from Journey’s ‘Any Way You Want It’ or ‘The animals I grew up with? They extinct nigga’ over that ‘in the jungle’/’the lion sleeps tonight’ song, no one else obliterates these types of beats like Cam. A lot of other rappers would sound silly over them but he makes them into classics. (And let’s not forget some of the others like his songs over Journey’s ‘Don’t Stop Believing, the Four Seasons’ ‘Oh What a Night’ or even songs over… the Golden Girls theme song and Facts of Life theme song?!)

A lot of good lines in this one but my favorite has to go “Cocaine, we ain’t even in the ballpark, tell the white boys to sniff it up like an aardvark”. I have a weirdly disturbing mental image of ‘Arthur’ partaking in the illicit pleasures of the white girl now but hey that’s a small price to pay to add ‘Lala’ into my playlist of Cam classics.

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Wild Life Right Here, No Safari – Cam’ron Crushes 10,000 Miles

31 Friday Mar 2017

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Who else besides Cameron Giles would have not only the boldness and audacity to not only rap over a sample from Vanessa Carlton’s ‘10,000 Miles,’ but also the skill and imagination to actually make it sound incredible? This just came out last night but I think I’ve already played it about 100 times after my boy BG thankfully alerted me about it; it’s just that infectious.

Cam takes on a different perspective here, narrating what is basically a story of a breakup and regretting not appreciating what you had until it’s too late, wishing things could have been different. It’s interesting perspective to hear because while Cam’ron has lived such a colorful lifestyle, this is a theme that pretty much every single person out there can relate to and has experienced to some extent. You can really feel what Cam is saying in the beginning, often the people that have loved us the most become the ones that can’t even stand to look at us after we wrong them. Unfortunately we all know what he means when he says he knows he was wrong but has too much pride to apologize. You get that classic Cam flow right after that, ‘iPhones and cameras, nights in Atlanta, tried to bring her gifts she said you ain’t Santa’ before he reflects that it’s ‘Hard to believe I messed trust up.’ That is a terrible feeling when you try to fix things by buying gifts etc. but the ship has already sailed and no effort on your part can fix things and you finally realize it’s too late. Since Cam is in his early 40s now, it’s cool to hear him rapping about a more ‘everyday’ type theme like this with a wise perspective .

Cam’ron absolutely slays this beat by casually rattling off quick and deft punch line after punch line in a way that works perfectly “Day to day life dealing with reality/lawyer got me off on a technicality/all I think about, we was Mickey and Mallory/nothing left but increase my salary/now money is the focus/hustling president POTUS/anything else right now is bogus/real estate opened up I gave notice/murder was the case Calvin Broadus/blue magic though hocus pocus/they forgot that my dope’s the dopest’.”  “Made a mil in one week yeah it’s poppin’/retail therapy I’m shopping/pulled off the lot, top dropping/no legs on the car but it’s bopping/speakers in the door so it’s knocking/I got all the keys so I’m locked in/felt above the law, Johnny Cochrane/and I’m off the rebound, Rodman.’ The way Cam just adeptly layers on reference after reference and paints such a picture with literally every single line/word is approaching a level of skill and mastery that you rarely ever hear. You could almost take any verse from this song (or almost any other Cam songs) and teach a class or write a textbook with it, from the pop culture references to how to set a scene and tell a story.

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In the Belly of the Beast there’s Shiest the Barbarian!

27 Monday Mar 2017

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I don’t think there was a song that was more summer in uptown NYC Bronx/Harlem in the mid-to late 2000s  than Purple City Byrd Gang, whether it was blasting from car speakers or being one of the main elements that started a fist fight at a house party I remember. The song is unmistakable from the moment the ominous and captivating beat hits in the beginning. Sheist Bubz’s opening verse is  absolutely savage and an all-time classic that perfectly capture of the gritty uptown imagery and swagger of the time; every line from it is a hard hitter from him saying to go ahead and let the fiends into the traphouse, to being a 10th grader going from varsity letterman to getting involved in interstate trafficking  and hopping on a bus to Maryland (presumably either Peter Pan or Grehyound). “Nah I ain’t worrying, send shots and they scurrying, transactions we hurried them, bastards we buried ’em, in the belly of the beast there’s Sheist the Barbarian,” he triumphantly declares at the end. Perhaps the only thing that can overshadow the sheer brutality and bravado of his verse is the 3XL purple Dickies work shirt that he’s sporting with purple Dickies workpants and a purple Yankees hat.

I wasn’t expecting to have two Jim-Jones related posts two days in a row here, but when I woke up this morning I was pleasantly surprised to see Purple City Byrd Gang was seemingly out of nowhere getting some buzz on Twitter from a variety of sources after a tweet from Andrew Barber of Fake Shore Drive, one of my all-time favorite blogs that has introduced me to a lot of music from Chicago I would have otherwise slept on, who boldly and correctly declared, ‘Purple City Byrd Gang video better than Thriller.’

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Jim Jones – More than Just a Hustla

25 Saturday Mar 2017

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This little minute and thirty second overlooked masterpiece that Jim Jones threw together is from after Dipset’s glory years were in the rear-view mirror and from about 7 years ago but it’s such a fun, real, captivating 1:30 song that I wanted to pay some quick homage to it this morning. For some reason sunbconsciously this song always reminds me of spring time and with the snow finally melting in NYC this weekend and me breaking out my Jordan slides for the first time in quite a while, it felt like the perfect time to take it out for a spin, and it still holds up really well 7 years later.

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