klezmer electro-thug beats
klezmer electro-thug beats
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Article: the message; why should hip-hop have to teach us anything?
I went through phases since I was a kid of being more and less backpack. Weirdly the first album I owned as a young kid was 3rd Bass's second album, which definitely had some hints of "conscious"ness, if only for the fact that it was two white rappers (and a Black DJ). There were times the jansport stuff was what I wanted out of rap and times when I want silly or reckless shit - what that Guardian writer calls "reckless, rather than responsible; dreamlike, rather than logical; suggestive, rather than conclusive". I don't think it was ever the lyrical content that attracted me to one or the other end of the spectrum, just an overall aesthetic - flow and production I guess.
There's a lot to agree with in this article, I think, but it's kind of overwritten. You can boil it down: a genre of music can be anything, and that includes rap. It can be a "culture" or at least a subculture, or just filtered mass produced pop, it can be politically radical or politically reactionary or totally ignorant or deeply personal or funny or serious. I think that's true of anything you can call a musical genre.
"Conscious" rap (or "hip-hop"?) positioned itself in opposition to the stuff getting more popular (or "rap"), but I don't think there was a real schism at all. The guys making millions weren't like "raaah, fucking Rhymesayers, what the fuck", they were getting paid and partying. I think it was easy, from the position of an indie rapper doing something different from the top 40, to position yourself in opposition to the top 40, but that wasn't a necessary or interesting part of what indie rappers did and do. It's kind of an unfortunate habit.
So I think it's always been more of an outside structure imposed on rap by its consumers and cultural critics. Where do you put J-Zone, whose every fucking word was as caveman misogynist as hell but whose dense samples sounded backpack? Where do you put the Coup, who made some of the funniest and most serious songs in rap on the same album, who were political but didn't lecture other rappers or their listeners, but whose storytelling was probably aimed more at suburban whites than at their own milieu? Where do you put, I dunno, fucking MC Paul Barman? It's necessarily reductive.
Recklessness is FUN. Ignorant-sounding pure id is FUN (see my RXK Nephew posts for a recent example). But writing a verse in acrostic or palindromes like Paul Barman is kinda fun too. Jazz samples and guys rapping about how good they are at rapping can be fun too, like jazz guys doing standards or something.
But I think "substance and personality", Duder, is what everybody's after, even Gucci Mane diehards or HarveyCanal claiming "Slow Motion" was the greatest rap song of the 2000s. If you're a heavier or more hobbyist or nerdier music consumer than most you're less likely to be satisfied by top 40, and that's true in every genre.
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what r u listen'n 2
been on a youtube african tracks trawl
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Rap You're Liking
staying on theme of unlikely sampled beats here's RXK Nephew on a boom-bap beat. "what the fuck is a boom bap beat?" and he spends the last minute of the song clowning on the beat in like a hundred different ways but it's also still kind of great... "old dirty ass neck braid meek mill beat" "who the fuck sent me this beat? they dead wrong"
this motherfucker charges 65 dollars a beat placement and does 200+ a month, if his social posts and lyrics are to be believed. unbelievable hustle and somehow every track I stumble across is entertaining
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Rap You're Liking
tyler and lil wayne on a madlib/edan etc style back pack beat. I don't always like wayne but he's doing good features recently apparently
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The Soul Strut "Raer" Live Stream
enjoying revisiting this mix mang, I'm glad to hear you're gonna do more. with that foundation-tipping monolith of cabinetry and vinyl behind you it'd be a shame not to
