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Category Archives: Uncategorized

Tay K – Dat Way

15 Tuesday Aug 2017

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After ‘The Race’ mania from the last few weeks I decided to check out Tay K’s “Santana World” mixtape (which admittedly wasn’t any huge commitment on my end since I’d be surprised if the 8 tracks clock in at more than 20 minutes) and there were definitely some more slaps on there.

My favorite of these was ‘Dat Way’. While sunnier and more cheerful sounding than ‘The Race’ it’s similar in the way that Tay K takes an extremely simple, lo-fi kind of catchy beat and just kills it. It almost reminds me of vintage Chief Keef from when he would crush fuzzy, simple, happy-sounding beats like on ‘Citgo’ and the cheerfulness or haziness of the beat would belie the menacing flow and subject matter. Tay K seems to be another master of this art, between this song, ‘The Race’ and also check out his latest ‘Lay Low’ for another good example. This is definitely one of those short, 2-minute type songs that you’ll play 20 times a day the first few days after you hear it.

Tay K’s future output is obviously uncertain given the extensive legal troubles facing him, but it seems like new songs are coming out post-incarceration, so hopefully he has a stockpile of material in the safe somewhere that can be released periodically going forward.

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Young Scooter ft. Future – Can’t Play Around

11 Friday Aug 2017

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Young Scooter goes hard AF on the Future-assisted ‘Can’t Play Around’ off his new album ‘Jugg King’. The piano-laced beat is so harsh and foreboding, I feel like I’m ready to scale the castle walls and go to battle with this Black Migo Gang/Freebandz horde. This is one of the best songs I’ve heard out of ATL’s legion of trap rappers in a while and it feels great to blast it out of the car.

Future sounds great on the chorus; “I stay working through a hard rain and thunderstorm, I’m gonna stack this paper up again like I’ve never done. I’ve got these rose gold jewels I feel better now, I put the city on my back and I can’t let ’em down.” There’s just an unmistakable heaviness to this track, with the way Future extols hustling whether it rains or shines, and how Future and Scooter both reflect on losing everything and getting it back.

I love Young Scooter’s first line, “They like Scooter where you been, bitch I’m in Saint Laurent. My nigga VL keep that stick like he play lacrosse.”

This is more my fault than any reflection on Scooter himself but I guess I had overlooked him a bit, with so many rappers coming out of Atlanta during that sort of first ‘post-Gucci Mane’ era/wave and sort of all being part of that same scene and aesthetic. I had always more thought of him as Gucci’s old cellmate/a guy being featured on songs with Gucci, Future, Chief Keef, etc. but he certainly seems to be rounding into form as his own artist and making his own name for himself; Jugg King was a really strong project top to bottom so I’m interested in checking out some of his previous output now.  Also even with all of the work we’ve gotten from Future this year, by year end I think that Can’t Play Around is going to be amongst his top few tracks of 2017.

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Tay K – The Race

08 Tuesday Aug 2017

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A lot of ink has already been spilled over this barely over a minute and a half long video by this teenage Texas rapper Tay K so I’m not going to go too far into the backstory. ‘The Race’ has already racked up over 12 million views in a mere 3 weeks since being posted on Youtube and is currently the #2 song on all of Soundcloud (behind only the seemingly insurmountable ‘Bodak Yellow’), thanks to the infectiousness of the song combined with the dark back story surrounding it.  Tay K is almost like a rap game Icarus, with a meteoric rise to fame quickly followed by a shockingly fast fall from grace. (I’m aware that he had somewhat of a following before ‘The Race’ but let’s be honest this song took his fame to a whole different level and put him into the mainstream consciousness). At the risk of sounding like I’m trying to make some kind of bold statement, the whole thing kind of reminds me of an XXXtentacion, in that they’re both rappers who were finding some baseline of fanbase via their output but then whose notoriety from their criminal exploits propelled them to previously unforeseen levels of infamy.

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A Mea Culpa on Berner

13 Thursday Jul 2017

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Berner – Float 

I certainly didn’t think that 2017 would feature a post about Berner on this blog, but that’s where we find ourselves today. Inspired by The Martorialist’s recent earnest decision to give it the old college try and delve into Berner’s voluminous back catalogue, on a recent long drive upstate and back I decided to make the perhaps reckless decision to do the same and jump head first into listening to multiple Berner albums in a row since I had many an hour to kill. I was fairly skeptical, and to be sure, there were certainly some forgettable songs, but I have to admit, I was pleasantly surprised by the overall quality of the Cookies purveyor’s portfolio. And with so many projects out over the last couple of years, Berner is nothing if not prolific. I can kind of get into his luxorious yet relaxing vibe that he promotes in much of his material, and as a fanboy of mid-2000s New York rap I can definitely get behind a dude that reaches out to Styles P to collaborate on an entire album with him and also does an EP with Killa Cam. What’s not to like about that? So let’s do a mea culpa and give this affable weed and clothing entrepenuer  some much-deserved and belated credit.

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Smokin’ Cookie Nigga, Chips Ahoy

12 Wednesday Jul 2017

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21 Savage – Baby Girl 

Given the uhhh let’s just say risque lyrics of the chorus I unfortunately think it’s safe to say I won’t be playing ‘Baby Girl’ off 21 Savage’s new album at the middle school birthday party I’m DJing next week but it’s definitely one of the bangers off of 21 Savage’s new ‘Issa’ album.

Admittedly, it was fickle of me but I had gotten a bit bored of 21 Savage after the initial wave of hype when he first came out, but I gave Issa an earnest listen and it definitely has some jams on it, like ‘Baby Girl’ and ‘Bank Account’. Menacing, cold-hearted jams to be sure, but jams nonetheless.

21’s ad lib game and flow are both on point in this one; for example when he rattles off perhaps my favorite 21 Savage couplet of all time – ‘Smoking on cookie nigga Chips Ahoy, had to block her number ’cause that bitch annoying’. We’ve all been there, 21 I feel you homes.

I also love the wierd voice he raps ‘Got an island girl and she comes from St. Vincent’ in (perhaps a faux Caribbean accent?), and how geographically specific he gets. He unleashes quite a few colorful and imaginative lines and references like that in this song, perhaps more than I’ve ever heard from him in one song before, from ‘Bitch I’m John Gotti I stay round a lot of henchmen’ to unexpectedly delving into U.S. history with ‘I pull up with the stick and let that bitch spark, I swear I would have shot that cracker if I was Rosa Parks’. I feel like Rosa Parks was pretty pacifist so I’m not sure how down with this line she would be but I’m not opposed to 21 Savage exploring some revisionist history with himself as the focal point.

21 21 21!

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Vince Staples – Homage

01 Saturday Jul 2017

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When I saw a track called homage on Vince Staples’ new ‘Big Fish Theory’ album I was assuming it would be a homage to some sort of West Coast legend or whatever so your boy was surprised to say the least when the ‘homage’ was to none other than Rick Ross and his ‘Hold Me Back’ song that became a surprising hit 5 years ago. Yup, the one with the video where he just refuses to wear a shirt (see below for your reference – I also love the look on his face they captured of it in the picture of it for Youtube).

Staples sort of updates Ross’ riff and speeds it up and adds some wierd haunted house sounding techno into it and changes it from more of an aggressive vibe to a more dance/party vibe. I feel like Staples has a knack for these types of things; I actually don’t know much about him and I think for whatever reason I missed the period a couple of years ago when he had was getting a lot of hype but I remember on his last project on one of the tracks (Loco) he had a brief hook where a girl sang ‘Party at McDonald’s for our birthday’ as part of it and it was so infectious and fun to sing that it’s stuck with me ever since.

I decided to give the full album a listen and it wasn’t bad, I’ve noticed that ‘BagBak’ and especially ‘Big Fish’ seem to be getting some radio play and Big Fish is pretty solid but Homage is definitely my favorite track on the album hands down.

In any case, I like the message of the hook and it still rings true today (although let’s be honest, it’s from 5 years ago so it’s not exactly like we’re talking about a James Joyce novel still being relevant in modern times). Some might say 5 years is too soon to pay homage to a Rick Ross song that wasn’t even one of his biggest hits, but with how fast rap moves nowadays and changes and how quickly the hype cycle eats up and spits out new artists before we ever even really get to know them, I say why not. I kind of like the idea of going back to this late 2000s/early 2010s era of rap to pay some homage and mine for ideas; I still think that there’s going to be a big wave of Chief Keef nostalgia coming at some point soon.

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Gettin Thuggish and Ruggy, I Love Me

18 Sunday Jun 2017

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Young Thug – Do U Love Me 

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I think it’s a bit too uhhhh let’s just say ‘risque’ to garner mainstream radio play and truly become the ubiquitous ‘Song of the Summer’ for 2017 I think Thugga’s ‘Do U Love Me’ is a pretty worth usurper of the crown (‘I’m the One’ is safe for now, if only because Thug is making art at a level so advanced it’s beyond the realm of some philistines to comprehend). Does it get any more luxoriously summery than this amazing London on the Track, dancehall-infused beat with Jeffrey pushing rap to it’s outermost limits and crooning over it to his heart’s content?

The chorus is so epic I wish they founded a way to add into the song a couple of more times, like in the middle where we go for quite a while without it – ‘L-O-V-E, do you love me? Poppin’ bubbly, in the tubby, smokin’ musty, I love me’. I love the message too, because despite Thug’s well-known voracious appetite for all kinds of polyamorous encounters, he reminds us that at the end of the day, no matter how many romantic admirers you may have lusting after you,  what’s most important is that you love yourself.

There’s a lot more that I want to write about ‘Do U Love Me’ and Beautiful Thugger Girls in general but I feel like this album is so ridiculous (in a good way) that I need to fully immerse myself into it more before I can even feel qualified to talk about it at length. There are a lot of mysteries here to unfurl, many of which we may never find the answer to, for example, like Miguelito from DJ Booth mused, “I’m real curious what getting “thuggish and ruggy” means specifically in this context.”

P.S., just wanted to add in, I never thought I’d live to see the day where Thug, Snoop Dogg, Lil Durk, and Young Chop all appear on the same track.

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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Black Beatles of a Different Nature

07 Wednesday Jun 2017

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Rae Sremmurd – Black Beatles (Madsonik Remix)

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You know that weird, slightly disorienting feeling you get when you’re listening to a live version of an old favorite song, where it’s basically familiar but with a few tweaks here and there? Like perhaps you’re listening to some bar band covering ‘No Woman No Cry’ and they change ‘I remember when we used to sit, in a government yard, in Trenchtown’ to a government yard in whatever town you happen to be in? I experienced that in a most disorienting and extreme manner the other night while scavenging the vast Spofity soundscape jungle. After hearing a pretty epic and dark remix of Black Beatles by Eric Dingus on one of his mixes on Soundcloud, I had a hankering to hear the original again. Now let’s be honest, Black Beatles was an awesome song but by the end of last year it had started to get a little played out, through no fault of Rae Sremmurd’s own, but because of its ubiquity on radio and well basically every type of media.

To my somewhat pleasant surprise, I saw that there was a new remix of it from February called the ‘Madsonik’ remix. Now not being very well-versed in the world of electronic music your humble writer had no idea what to expect. At first blush I was pretty hyped up to be listening to basically a ‘rock’ remake of Black Beatles with some hard rock guitars and pounding percussion added in. My andrenaline was on max. I quickly hit the replay button and turned the volume up. As I listened to it again, I was still equally andrenalized by it, but something seemed a bit off or different to me. “Wait weren’t they rapping about ‘cream seats in the Regal’ in the original, why are they saying ‘camo seats in the Regal’ now? And why did he just change spread eagle to desert eagle?” Something was amiss. By the time I was rocking out to it for a third time I was saying to myself “Alright, I was pretty sure he never said anything about looking through the scope and not blinking but questioning why he’s here in the original, but there’s no way in HELL that he said ‘Gold Tiger’s near, there’s no retreating.’ What the hell is a Gold Tiger anyway? This final catalyst finally caused me to do some googling and I finally stumbled across the answer here  … 

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Adamn Killa – Turtle Feet

06 Tuesday Jun 2017

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I’m not sure which I love more, the way he exhaustedly proclaims ‘ahh-damn’ as his trademark ad-lib before every song, or the fact that he’s proudly rocking pink dreads, but Adamn Killa is quickly rising up in our power rankings. The Roseland Baby has been getting gloriously wierd on us for a while now; the first time I ever saw/heard of him it was in his ‘Saddler’ video from a couple of years ago where he’s nonchalantly riding around on a horse, but his wierd trippiness has reached a new zenith here on his excellent new album “I Am Adamn”. I went into this one with moderately high expectations but it definitely exceeded them and it’s surprisingly become one of my favorites of 2017 thus far. Adamn hails from the Windy City, but you really can’t compare him to any of his fellow Chi-raqis.  “Turtle Feet” has a crazy beat that really draws you in and stays in your head afterwards, I like how each note is split into two separate sounds. Adamn almost reminds me of a more fun/less world-weary Future on ‘Turtle Feet’ and throughout the album. With the rise of guys ranging from Famous Dex to Lil Uzi Vert to Lil Peep, it seems like wierd is the new cool these days and every up and coming artist wants to be wierd, but Adamn can genuinely pull it off.

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