from SPIN’s hip-hop issue…
Archive for the ‘Spin’ Category
The Changing Face Of Hip-Hop: SPIN’s Rap Issue
I had a big part in putting the hip-hop issue of SPIN together and I’m really proud of it. It’s online now and in stores starting 11/22. My essay is an attempt to explain what the hell is going on in rap in 2011 thanks to the Internet. Cast of characters: Danny Brown, A$AP Rocky, Big K.R.I.T., Curren$y, Lil B, Yelawolf, Odd Future, Kendrick Lamar, Cities Aviv, Main Attrakionz, Stalley, Clams Casino, AraabMuzik, and DJ Burn One. There’s also David Peisner on G-Side, and Julianne Escobedo Shepherd on Odd Future. Read it and maybe even buy it!
Spin: Drake – Take Care
Reviewed that new Drizzy for Spin. He’s still a smarmy creepo but he totally makes it work here. There are some sequencing issues on this one (here is my redux version) but it’s nearly 80 minutes and doesn’t really feel like it, which is impressive. Because I didn’t get to fit it in the review: The title track! “Take Care” is like a B-Side to Rihanna’s “We Found Love,” like the e-pill comedown after that song kicked you all around. Jamie xx’s late-song breakdown of Heron’s vocals from We’re New Here’s “I’ll Take Care Of You,” in this context, sound like some depressed version of “The Ha Dance” or something. Then again, everything on this record sounds like a depressed version of something else, doesn’t it?
Perhaps “Headlines” had you thinking Take Care would be Drake’s humble moment. On that relatively upbeat single, he raps, “I might be too strung out on compliments, overdosed on confidence,” and, later, expresses appreciation for the fans who told him he “fell off” between his hit 2009 mixtape So Far Gone and his star-packed 2010 debut Thank Me Later. And even though “Headlines” is pretty much a rewrite of a previous hit — the “6 Foot 7 Foot” to “Over” ’s “A Milli” — that hardly matters because Drake is consciously lapping himself, returning to the same topic and style with another year of experience, making his conflicted approach to being richer than you just a little more lived-in.
An appropriately absurd cover depicting a despondent Drizzy, five o’clock shadow-sad, looking like a decadent Baba Booey, also foreshadowed a hard, if melodramatic, look in the mirror. Plus, he titled this new one Take Care — so much sweeter than Thank Me Later, right? But on “Over My Dead Body,” Take Care’s first track, our favorite confused Canadian calculates last year’s earnings plus how much he paid in taxes, and chalks the latter up to “you lose some, you win some.” All right, look, man, the cash lopped off the end of my paycheck blows too, but the whole idea behind taxes is that by paying them, we all, in the long run, “win some”!
Spin: Don Trip, Victim and Villain on “Letter to My Son”
This week’s Spin column: Don Trip’s “Letter To My Son” and how it went from YouTube to rap radio relatively unscathed. I haven’t gotten to say much about Trip but he’s quickly becoming one of my favorite rappers around. Go get Step Brothers if you haven’t already.
Though interest is still growing in Don Trip’s “Letter to My Son,” the song dates all the way back to September 2009, when a YouTube video surfaced of the Memphis rapper in a home studio. The description read, “i use music as an outlet so i say whateva i feel like sayin no matter who or what it involve”; and the video showed Trip, shirtless and gaunt, with a chain dangling from his neck, unloading a three-minute rant about how he’s not allowed to see his son for more than an hour a week, over a soulfully manipulative beat
Don Trip is a rapper out of time. Although his imminent hit did begin as a quasi-viral video, and he’s ridiculously prolific in a way that caters to the blogs, he can’t be bothered with rap’s prevailing trends. He wears basketball shorts and, like, button-downs from Target, not streetwear. His approach to rapping is that of a work-a-day hustler, and his in-studio videos often show him gripping a notepad (and more recently an iPad), or staring off-camera at a piece of paper taped to the wall with lyrics scrawled on it. It’s a subtle way of rejecting the noxious, post-Jay-Z myth that “good” MCs don’t need to write their raps down…
Spin: DJ Drama, The Art of Yelling on a Mixtape
My column’s back after a short break that happened for reasons that I’ll explain in a little while. So yeah, this one’s based on a pretty awesome conversation I had with DJ Drama about the aesthetics of mixtape hosting and his new album, Third Power.
DJ Drama, boisterous on record but relaxed, almost samurai-like over the phone, intones his rules for mixtape hosting: “I only talk at the beginning of the song…I never talk on top of the rapping…I give it a concept…” This shit should be obvious, his calm seems to connote.
But it isn’t. Just listen to others like DJ Holiday, who puts together great Gucci Mane tapes despite his total disinterest in mastering, OCD rewinding of totally whatever verses, and a whiny, grating “hooollliiddddaaayyyy ssssseeeeeeeasssonnnnnnnn” drop. Then there’s DJ Khaled, who can’t even scream like he actually cares all that much and endlessly mines a posse-cut formula that rotates a small clump of rappers to diminishing returns. Even “I’m on One,” as near to a perfect a rap song as we’re going to get this year, is almost derailed by a grunting appearance from Khaled’s omnipresent buddy Rick Ross.
Spin: J. Cole’s Starry Eyes vs. Phonte’s Long View
J. Cole’s album: Not that bad! I know, I know, that’s pretty low stakes and all, but we’re getting back to this point now where there’s a big cognitive dissonance between what rap nerds—even so-called “populist” rap nerds—are willing to big-up or shit man, at least accept, and what regular ass fans are fucking with. Also see: Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter IV. There’s a reason people like these albums and there’s a reason they like this Cole character. Nobody’s been hoodwinked here! That said, I don’t see where Cole’s career goes after this and he’s gonna have to get a little cynical and real and take some tips from someone like Phonte if he’s going to be kicking around in a decade or even like, two years from now. Also that Phonte album: Really fucking good. Better than it needs to be.
Phonte Coleman, one half of electronic R&B duo the Foreign Exchange, and formerly of defunct Durham, North Carolina, rap group Little Brother, declares at the start of his solo debut Charity Starts At Home: “I do this all for hip-hop.” Then he pauses and laughs, “I’m lying like shit, I do this for my goddamn mortgage.”
The album title makes clear that lofty goals like changing the world, one conscious rhyme at a time, have been replaced with something more practical. Phonte’s excellent, poignant album is paradoxically focused on decidedly un-hip-hop things: Getting older, realizing rap doesn’t move him too much anymore, the fuck-ups of family and friends, having a wife and kids and lots of bills…
Spin: Blowfly, Hip-Hop’s Dirty, Weird Uncle.
This week’s column is on the dicey issue of who “invented” rap, the great Blowfly, and the not-so-great documentary on the dude, The Weird World Of Blowfly.
According to the costumed, foul-mouthed parodist Blowfly, he “invented” rap music almost 50 years ago. He reminds viewers of this fact throughout Jonathan Furmanski’s documentary The Weird World Of Blowfly (in select theaters, and streaming on Amazon and iTunes), even dissing some early rappers (he refers to Kurtis Blow as “Kurtis Blow Job”) while receiving co-signs from a couple of legendary MCs. Ice-T calls Blowfly a “master” and Public Enemy’s Chuck D praises the filthy Miami soulster’s trangressive comedy as “futuristic,” even citing it as partial inspiration for “Fight The Power…”
Spin: Drake, Hip-Hop’s Unlikely New Conscience
In which I begin wrestling with the fact that Drake’s been making some incredible shit lately. Probably too harsh to Future in this one, but “Tony Montana” is retarded and the Lex Luger sound really needs to end.
“Tony Montana” seemed even goofier after Drake deigned to make an appearance on the remix. In his characteristic nasally flow, Drake weaved around Lex Luger’s sonic histrionics, asserting his Tony Montana-ness while avoiding big, dumb proclamations about impossible success. He simply claims that he has indeed made it, observing that “young women are lost these days,” like a bored, aged lothario even though he’s only in his twenties. Drake’s verse isn’t brilliant or anything, but it feels so much more lived-in than Future’s, which is full of artifice and exaggeration, tools that were once effective and maybe even necessary for rappers, but now just feel pathetically delusional and out of touch.
There’s even a strange, very unofficial-looking video for the “Tony Montana” remix, furthering the sense that Future, a clueless guy chasing an earlier era of funny-money rap, is ironically named. Jammed between cheapo shots of Future partying like he wants you to buy into his hype, there are shots of Drake in a blunted, Weeknd-esque scene, wandering, dream-like, around the club. The sequence is lifted from the video for his own single, “Marvin’s Room,” and it’s quite telling that this dejected version of clubbing is so closely associated with Drake. Dropped into the middle of this middling song that’s so desperate to be a hit, with a video intent to convince viewers of Future’s importance and street-level success, there’s Drake wandering right through that desired success like a ghost…
Spin: Danny Brown’s Geeked-Up, Freaky Tales
Danny Brown, shot for SPIN’s October 2011 issue by J.R. Mankoff
“That’s Danny Brown?” a friend of mine asked as a skinny dude with an asymmetrical haircut — one side shaved, the other side, impossibly, awesomely voluminous — stalked the front of the stage at the Fool’s Gold Day Off party Monday evening. Throughout the Detroit rapper’s manic performance, he struggled with a sound system that threatened to overpower his vocals, but Brown’s sheer presence sold the songs even when you couldn’t hear what the hell he was saying. He threw around pointy elbows and emphasized goofy punch lines (“Rep my set / Sorta like Squidward and his clarinet”), his eyes falling back into his head when he dredged up some ugly detail from his life (“Mommy gave me food stamps to buy Wonder Bread / On the way, these niggas jumped, left me with a knot on my head”)…
Spin: Hip-Hop and the Man of a Thousand Scarfaces
Scarface has had a massive influence on hip-hop, but the way that the movie has wormed its way into the culture is far more complex than a simple, aspirational narrative. Namely, a huge part of the movie’s appeal lies in the final act, wherein Montana, coked-up and paranoid, alienates everyone until he’s ultimately killed. That twisted, deathwish intensity is common in hip-hop, even weirdly desired (or at least and understood as the logical next step when you’re successful). It is as pointed and real as rock’s baffling concept that it’s “better to burn out than to fade away,” authored by Neil Young and quoted by Kurt Cobain in his suicide note.
See, rappers haven’t only kept the movie alive, they’ve vastly improved it and retrofitted various aspects to keep it vital. Nas’ “The World Is Yours” takes its mantra from Tony’s Goodyear blimp epiphany, but the song, which begins with the Queens rapper boasting that he’s “sippin’ Dom P” and watching, not Scarface, but Ghandi(!) is a far more complex vision of ruthless success, tempered by friends’ deaths and a palpable sense of loss…
Are You A Serious Comic Book Reader?