hip-hop

Kendrick Lamar’s arresting new video: Alright

/ David James / 2 Comments

Watch this right now. Just do it. You don’t need to thank me.

If you want to see an artist at the peak of his powers absolutely nailing the zeitgeist, click play.

Kendrick Lamar dropped To Pimp A Butterfly just a couple months ago, and it’s already one of my favorite albums of all time.

The brazen mixture of politically, socially, and psychologically aware lyrics with an incredibly nuanced and evolved delivery; the dark and deeply funky production, shot through with an entire jazz band’s worth of all-star live players; the live-wire theatricality of the entire endeavor… all of these parts coalesce as Lamar’s ambition and talent meet in in the stratosphere.

It’s both incredibly audacious and earnest to a fault. The album feels embarrassingly personal at times, the rapper spilling his demons in a drunken crying jag. At the same time, everything’s wrapped in a sense of universal struggle, the intrinsic knowledge that we’re all in this together. There’s no wonder that it’s proven as divisive as it is beloved.

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A$AP Rocky – L$D

/ David James / 2 Comments

How many rappers drop bars about dropping acid?

This may not be the best tune on A$AP Rocky‘s new album, but it exemplifies the tripped out charm of the whole spacey affair. The video feels like a lighthearted take on Gaspar Noe’s swirling labyrinth of a death trip, Enter The Void, all pulsing lights and liquid camerawork. Check it.

L$D, funny enough, is one of the more conventional tracks on the album. It acts as soft, neon-glow connective tissue, sliding effortlessly into the kaleidoscopic heart of the hallucinatory album. In that way, the name suits it perfectly.

The full album, At.Long.Last.A$AP, is a full-bore journey through psychedelic underworlds both street-level and subliminal. It’s one of the most cohesive yet dreamy hip-hop full lengths I’ve heard in a while, and surprised the hell out of me. After only kind of enjoying his major label debut a couple years ago, this one feels like a revelation.

asap-rocky-lsd-video

If dropping acid really gave Rocky his own revelation, allowing for an expanded sense of his own art, I’ll admit to being a little jealous. It’s been over a decade since I’ve had a deeply psychedelic experience and I feel like my inner life is about due for another little journey. I’m thankful for the reminder.

Notorious B.I.G.’s best tune: Gimme The Loot

/ David James / 3 Comments

This is the song that made me realize Biggie was far more than just the guy behind a few great singles on MTV in my youth. It took years, but Gimme The Loot launched him from a dream to the pantheon of all-time great rappers, in my view.

The beat is monstrous and the lyrics hit hard and fast, dancing in a trick-move delivery that is still mostly unmatched in the world of hip-hop. Biggie could spit rapid fire with eloquence, twisting literary turns of phrase and gutter-blast shade in the same bar, all with a flow and voice so catching and endearing, it was inevitable he’d become a megastar.

Because of the time and place I grew up, my biggest association with hip-hop was via MTV, so my biggest impressions of Biggie were the Puff Daddy features that came right before and after his death. Great songs, no doubt, but oversaturation pushed me away. It wasn’t until the end of the decade, when cruising with friends, getting high, and listening to rap for hours on repeat, that his true genius revealed itself. I was tapped in and could no longer look back. This guy was as real and perfect as Nas on his debut, or 2pac on his last album, for that matter. The skill and artistry cut through the fog of ubiquitous Puffy videos and overabundance of so-so posthumous collections, and I realized what all my friends were loving years before.

As it is, he was cut down in his prime and we’ll never know what could have happened. But this song, and the album it’s found on, Ready To Die, will always stand as a testament to the heights of artistic power that major label rap achieved in the 1990s.

Kendrick Lamar’s weirdest tune: Cartoon and Cereal

/ David James / 2 Comments

kendric-cereal

With an alien flow, unnerving production, and stream-of-consciousness lyrics that ping pong from Looney Tunes to Fourier, this song owes as much to out-there jazz and experimental music as it does to Kendrick Lamar‘s more traditional hip-hop tunes.

Listen to Cartoon and Cereal right here:

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DJ Shadow and The Avalanches / Thoughts On Hip-Hop and Musical Growth

/ David James / 5 Comments

DJ SHADOW record stacks2

I’m a bad. ass. motherfuckin dee jay / this is why I walk and talk this way

There comes a point in certain young lives when music evolves from a form of social currency to something to be enjoyed on a deeper personal level. It’s a headlong dive into a world most people use as wallpaper, geeking out over the sounds, hardware, history, and meaning of it all.

I was always rather independent in my music choices, but growing up in the midwest before broadband internet meant that my horizons were limited. The advent of file sharing programs like Morpheus, Kazaa, and Soulseek was a supernova moment for teenagers like me, desperately seeking new sounds. On the rare midnight-show occasion when something on the radio piqued my interest, I’d get on the computer to look them up, downloading a song or two in 30 minutes.

Before the internet, certain genres never had a chance to touch my ears. Once I’d taken the plunge, I started devouring every fresh thing I could. One was my favorite radio discovery ever, an album I’ve called my “desert island” record. It harkened back to something I’d heard in my youngest days, The Beastie Boys sampling landmark Paul’s Boutique. It boldly recycled sounds and tropes from across the musical spectrum into something vibrant and dangerous. It was entirely new to me.

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Shabazz Palaces Live On KEXP 2014

/ David James / 1 Comment

Witness the most cosmic act in hip-hop, Shabazz Palaces, unleashing a hyperdrive tapestry live in the KEXP studio.

The whirlwind performance shuffles tracks from the best album of 2014, Lese Majesty, unfolding fresh aspects of their sound. There’s also a fine interview, discussing the recording process and what it feels to be making music that sounds like absolutely nothing else on earth.

These guys do not fuck around.

I dug this video from my drafts after listening to the groundbreaking album, Blowout Comb, from vocalist Ishmael Butler’s previous group, Digable Planets. In one of the most improbable second acts in music history, an early 90s underground rap hero emerged over a decade later with a new (at first mysteriously anonymous) project, breaking the few remaining rules of hip-hop like some young start up. With the group’s second album, they transcended all genre definitions, creating a sound as pure as it is unique.

shabazzlive

Shabazz Palaces have officially joined weird, pioneering heroes like Sun Ra, Captain Beefheart, Aphex Twin, and John Coltrane in truly rarefied space.

Digable Planets – Blowout Comb: Best hip-hop album of the 90s?

/ David James / 4 Comments

DIGABLE-PLANETS

Inspired by a friend’s reminder, I cued up one of my favorite albums of all time: Blowout Comb, the underrated second and final release from Digable Planets. For those who aren’t familiar, they are jazz-inspired contemporaries of monumental groups A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul… but they go way deeper.

This album is the real deal. Here’s the second to last song, a kind of manifesto:

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