Action Bronson – Mr. Wonderful

★★☆

Flushing, Queens native Action Bronson has had a steady rise built upon some really solid mixtapes – the Blue Chips series, SaaaB Stories, et al. – and so the hype for his debut was rather understandable. I hate being let down like this. I really wanted to like Mr. Wonderful, because I like Bronson and his wise-guy Ghostface-esque flow. There just isn’t enough of anything to like here, though. The beats are anemic, his flow is mostly missing in action, and the production is just off. The sudden stop on the opening track, “Brand New Car”, is meant to be endearing but just comes off as annoying. “Thug Love Story 2017: The Musical” is a fun enough skit but it goes on for far too long. The Party Supplies-produced tracks fall flat – “Only In America” has the makings of an epic track, but the sample is done in such an awful way that it ruins what could have been. The only really standout tracks here are the ones that were released pre-leak: “Baby Blue”, with a great verse from Chance The Rapper, and “Easy Rider”, which originally built my expectations for the album. “Easy Rider” is great and has earned a permanent place on several playlists, but the rest of the album fades into the background by comparison.

Kendrick Lamar – To Pimp A Butterfly

★★★★★

Sometime over the past few years, trap music has become the dominant form in hip hop. As a subgenre it owes everything to spare, menacing beats, MIDI-triggered snare rolls that resemble the chatter of assault rifle fire, and a sing-song flow of drug-game braggadocio and ignorance that is infinitely more Soulja Boy than Sista Souljah. It’s a cathartic form, to be sure, but in the wake of several high-profile killings of unarmed black men by the police (and police wannabes) in America, it has little to offer in the way of commentary besides more nihilism. It’s no wonder then, perhaps, that there has been a recent movement towards the past, a retreat that suggests that the inspiration for progress might be better mined from earlier forms of black music. Joey Bada$$ went back to the gritty streets of New York in the 1990s; D’Angelo enlisted The Vanguard and went back to the conscious movement days of the late 1960s and early 1970s, specifically Sly and the Family Stone, hard soul, and quiet storm; Flying Lotus turned back to a kaleidoscope of jazz forms, and even Kanye has reached back (slightly) in his apparent embrace of British grime.

Then there’s King Kendrick, the man who brought Compton back to the limelight with what was easily the best album of 2012, good kid m.A.A.d. city. That was an album of hard beats and hood politics, a grandiose concept album that summed up what was best about pre-trap hip hop. To Pimp A Butterfly is not that album – it’s an entirely different thing altogether.

Right from the beginning you can smell the p-funk – squelchy instruments, stomping basslines, ass-shaking grooves. Lamar isn’t even subtle about where he’s going – he’s got Parliament/Funkadelic madman George Clinton right there, guesting on it. Then there’s what can best be described as a spoken word poetry piece over squalling jazz improvisation. Then “King Kunta” comes on and conquers the world with one groove. This is Kendrick Lamar, 2015: willing to scribble madly outside the lines, not content to simply be a commercialized unit, making a name for himself as an honest-to-god artist.

That’s what the album seems to be about, incidentally: the constant conflict between Kendrick Lamar, the rapper who made it up out of the streets of Compton, shattered expectations, and became widely recognized as the leading light of hip hop, and Kendrick Lamar, the guy from the streets, still caught up in petty beefs and those hood politics from good kid m.A.A.d. city, a man who abandoned his friends and family to live and die in L.A. while he puffed himself up and toured the world. On one side, “u”, which features a second verse where he breaks down and raps while sobbing, screaming at himself in a hotel mirror about how he failed, he let down everyone he knew, how he wasn’t there when the people he cared about bled out and died. On the other side, “i”, which is much better on the album than it ever was as a single: the To Pimp A Butterfly version has a serious dance groove running through it, making the declarations of self-confidence, love, and the world being more than slow suicide all the more powerful. The conflict is given poetic roots at the very end, following the “interview” Kendrick conducts with Tupac Shakur for the last five minutes of “Mortal Man”. He identifies the caterpillar, the hard part of him that scrambles to survive in the “mad city” of L.A., the part that constantly looks for ways to survive. The butterfly, then, is the beautiful, artistic, human part inside of him, the talent that is only looking for an outlet. Being hardened by the struggles of life in the mad city, the caterpillar only looks for ways to pimp the butterfly out, to use it to continue the survival of the caterpillar. Trapped inside the cycle of thoughts that this produces, the only way out is for the caterpillar to use the butterfly to bring new ideas and ways back to the mad city, and to free itself from the stagnancy of the past.

It’s a heavy concept far removed from the surface-level nihilism that has infected hip hop for the past several years, and I think that’s kind of the point. Lamar conjures up the old ideals of race consciousness and unity, taking specific aim at the idea of dividing a people by arbitrary and useless lines: on “Mortal Man”, he says “While my loved ones was fighting the continuous war back in the city, I was entering a new one / A war that was based on apartheid and discrimination / Made me wanna go back to the cities and tell the homies what I’d learned / The word was respect / Just because you wore a different gang colour than mines / Doesn’t mean I can’t respect you as a black man”. On “Complexion” he discusses the ridiculousness inherent in discussing who’s “more black” than the next person, and segregating each other based on the darkness of skin. “Hood Politics” sets out the bigger picture beyond the constant infighting between street gangs: “From Compton to Congress it’s set trippin’ all around / Ain’t nothin’ new but a flow of new DemoCrips and ReBloodLicans / Red state vs. a blue state, which one you governin’? / They give us guns and drugs, call us thugs / Make it they promise to fuck with you / No condom they fuck with you / Obama say “What it do?”. On “The Blacker The Berry” Kendrick turns the finger on himself, calling himself a hypocrite for preaching black politics and mourning the death of those like Trayvon Martin when gangbanging caused him to kill another black man and set back unity just as much as any external enemy.

To Pimp A Butterfly is the most powerful album released in some time, an examination of the state of local and national race politics and an examination of the meaning of the conflict between art and money. Married to mutant funk, jazz, and soul, it uses old music to sound new again, in turn escaping the useless cycle of money and violence between rival sets to embrace a much wider scope of “us vs. them” – the struggle between the downtrodden and those that seek to keep them down. It’s much more than simply a worthy followup to good kid m.A.A.d city – it’s takes a gigantic leap forward to establish a much fuller circle with which to define Kendrick Lamar’s artistry as a whole.

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Nyoooo Myoooooosic: Kanye West

http://2dopeboyz.com/2015/03/02/kanye-west-all-day-allan-kingdom-theophilus-london-paul-mccartney/

Kanye rapping? Sir Paul whistling the outro? Those ending synths going out hot and heavy like the best parts of Yeezus? How long you gonna be listening to this one?

BADBADNOTGOOD & Ghostface Killah – Sour Soul

★★★★

For a long, long time now I’ve considered Dennis Coles to be the elder statesman and Godfather of Hip Hop. He was the first verse heard from the Wu, 22 years ago now, and he kicked open the door to a much more cinematic hip hop world than had been imagined before. Since then he’s been mostly on point, popping out classics like Supreme Clientele and Fishscale on the regular, and delving into some really solid concept work on Twelve Reasons To Die and 36 Seasons over the last couple of years. He’s first and foremost a storyteller, maybe the best in hip hop. Naming a Greatest Of All Time is a fool’s game, given the subjectivity of the medium, but if a gun was held to my head and I was forced to pick, GFK would be it.

BADBADNOTGOOD, meanwhile, has come roaring out of the Toronto music scene to make a global name for themselves. After staking their claim on jazzed-out covers of classic hip hop tracks, they toured behind Frank Ocean and released one of last year’s finest records, III. As an instrumental trio there are few that approach the consistent quality they put out, and as it turns out there’s only one band that makes better for better live hip hop, and they’re currently the Tonight Show band.

So, the two together. Collaborations are always a tricky business, because the egos involved make for complicated arrangements. While Sour Soul isn’t quite perfect, it more than makes the case for why collaborations can work out very well. The sound is a lot sparser than long-time BBNG fans might expect, and while it’s caused some consternation in certain circles I truly think it’s the right choice. They tone down the out-there jazz reaches in favour of a live action version of the kind of gritty, streetlight music that GFK has always sounded best over. They play a sort of hip hop prog-soul, like they’re interested primarily in recreating the moody, smoky soul-snippets that make GFK’s classics so iconic. GFK for his part sounds perfectly at home over it, spinning out his usual dense, on-the-edge-of-ridiculous wordplay; his style may have gone mostly out of favour in an age of trap and drill, but it’s like slipping on a favourite pair of shoes and going for a walk down blocks you know all too well.

Ghost never quite lets himself fully go, however, keeping back the kind of cinematic street stories that mark the tracks on his other albums. “Gunshowers” and “Mind Playing Tricks” are the closest he gets, and tellingly they’re the two best tracks. The usual off-the-wall “WTF are you even going on about” moments happen as well, although here they’re mostly confined to “Tone’s Rap”, a brief sketch of a hard-done-by pimp getting belligerent. Of the four guest verses, it’s surprisingly Danny Brown’s that makes the most impact. His hectoring, Cypress Hill-esque voice is an acquired taste, but his verse on “Six Degrees” makes the case for his greatness. The Tree verse is lyrically dense but flows by without really sticking, and Elzhi verse on “Gunshowers” is oddly indistinguishable from GFK. DOOM’s verse is inspired and would easily be the best on offer if I didn’t keep missing it in the midst of blinking.

Still, this is a winner by a clear and comfortable margin. BBNG might not be the right backing track for every rapper – Keef and Flocka would sound bizarre – but their moody, gritty twilight jazz-soul fits Ghostface perfectly.

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Lupe Fiasco – Tetsuo and Youth

★★★

The Chicago rapper’s fifth album finds him running a marathon on his music rather than his weighty lyrics. In the past he’s been an outspoken critic of power in all forms, whether he has community support behind him or not; this is, after all, the man who was thrown off the stage at Obama’s second inauguration after performing a thirty-minute version of the anti-Obama track “Words I Never Said”. When it’s worked – as on Lupe Fiasco’s The Cool or the classic Lupe Fiasco’s Food and Liquor – it’s been a strident, creative, mind-altering breath of fresh air for hip hop. When it hasn’t – Food and Liquor II, mostly – it drags badly, becoming the hip hop equivalent of that militant vegan who will just not shut up about Monsanto and makes dark allegations about GMOs and vaccines.

Tetsuo and Youth takes a different approach, which is a relief after the slog of Food and Liquor II. It focuses more on apolitical themes, taking a look instead at the experience of growing up poor and black in the bad parts of Chicago. The lyrical changeup gives him an opportunity to get more experimental with the musical side, and he takes that opportunity and runs straight ahead into near-ridiculousness. I thought Joey Bada$$’s album was long; Tetsuo and Youth redefines long hip hop songs in 2015. There’s a big emphasis on bars over hooks here, which means that when the tracks go over eight minutes – as three of them do – you run the risk of going numb before the finish line. Still, the beats hit hard and his flow’s on point, so it comes out as his best album since 2007. There’s a certain appeal to the non-commercial aspect of it, but man, do you feel the burn when you finally make it to the end.

At the very least, it’s better than Lasers.

Nyoooo Myoooooosic: Action Bronson

Another third track, this one from ginger GFK doppelganger Action Bronson’s upcoming major label debut Mr. Wonderful. More laid back than “Easy Rider”, it’s got a stoned party vibe that plays well in the February doldrums.

Drake – If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late

★★★★

Yesterday Drake premiered a new video called “Jungle”, which was a music video in the sense that he’s a musician and it was a video. There was no music, just a lot of sad and/or concerned Drake being driven from one place to another. While this was sort of odd, his people confirmed that he was dropping some new tracks – some went ahead and said “mixtape” – later on, so no one was too weirded out by the whole thing.

As midnight approached the hype train went into full gear. Mixtapes are a vital part of the modern hip hop release cycle and Drake had only released three before – the first of which, many were quick to point out, was So Far Gone, released six years ago to the day. So when it suddenly appeared on Soundcloud and iTunes, 17 songs long and bearing the cryptic title If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late, the explosions could be heard for miles. But wait! Was it a mixtape? Mixtapes are free, traditionally, and this one got pulled off of Soundcloud pretty quickly – many were in mid-listen – leaving only the $12.99 iTunes link. As it turns out, it’s both. It’s a mixtape, spiritually, but in a very real sense it’s Drake’s fourth album on Cash Money Records, an official release that was just Beyonced onto the internet last night in the guise of something else. The rationale for this may be more interesting than at first glace: Reddit user /u/jarobizamboni brought up an interesting point when he said “yo drake just fucked bird man by dropping this as an album under cash money his contract says he has to release 4 albums and can whenever he wants and the album art is a direct message to bird man lol and now he’s a free agent 6ix god”. Who knows – we’ll know a lot more when his much-hyped Views From The 6 drops theoretically later this year.

I have the strong feeling that a lot of what is on If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late is stuff that was cut from Views From The 6. It’s all much better quality stuff than you typically find on a free mixtape, and the significance of that number – The 6, which Drake is using as a reference to his hometown of Toronto – is inescapable. One of the early tracks (“Know Yourself”, one of the best singles all year) makes reference to running through the 6 with his woes, five of the tracks use the number in their title, and of course there’s the 6 that’s right smack on the cover of the album. The album finds Drake going hard, in the vein of last year’s “0-100/The Catch-Up”; it doesn’t always suit him, but he makes it work throughout the album to his advantage. There’s some real edge here that both references and outshines past braggadocio like “Worst Behaviour”. There is, of course, the usual Drake shenanigans: specifically “Madonna”, a weeper of a track that will make you call up all your exes and send flowers and stuff. So in a sense it’s a typical Drake album, only the balance is reversed: more hard stuff, less staying home and pining for your ex.

Is it just a collection of the less-commercial cast-offs from the hype beast that is Views From The 6? Time will tell, but I know this: if this is the quality of Drake’s cast-offs, then the actual album is going to be a juggernaut.

OH LOOK, it’s on Spotify – this shit’s no mixtape.

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Kendrick Lamar – The Blacker The Berry

This album is going to be easily in the top five this year, calling it now.

Joey Bada$$ – B4.DA.$$

★★★

B4.DA.$$ is sixty-four minutes long. Now, there are albums that can pull off the hour-plus run time; double and triple albums are a consistent theme in my overall list of favourite albums. Very few of them, however, have the, uh, single-minded sense of purpose that Joey Bada$$ brings to his debut. The Brooklyn rapper eschews the modern rap trend completely, giving the finger to short sing-song verses and meme rap hooks in favour of flow and wordplay that seems to come straight out of the Golden Age of the 1990s. More than seems to, actually; at times he lifts lines straight out of classic joints and you’ll find yourself saying “wait, cash rules every- dude.” This is East Coast hip hop like you remember it: grimey, dense, and cerebral, hip hop you listen to in dank back rooms with dim lighting. This is something that always piques my interest, but the big problem here is that over the course of an hour there’s not much to differentiate one track from the next. If the album were half the size it is it would be stellar, and I wouldn’t feel like I was getting mired in a swamp. “Every track is essential” he says on “O.C.B.”. Well, no, it’s not. I want this guy to succeed because I do like his flow and I do like his aesthetic, but damn does he need to learn the gentle art of editing himself.

Nyoo Myoosic: Rihanna, Kanye West, & Paul McCartney – ‘FourFiveSeconds’ | Rap-Up

New Music: Rihanna, Kanye West, & Paul McCartney – ‘FourFiveSeconds’ | Rap-Up.

This is honestly a great song. I’m watching the karaoke tape episode of Regular Show and thinking that in a couple of years I might be hearing it at some karaoke night I’ve been tricked into going to. Great vocal from Rihanna, whose voice actually seems pretty suited to an acoustic jam, and a tastefully understated, optimistic verse from ‘Ye.