[HH3os] The To Pimp a Too LateLife trio

(1st round match-up 22 of 27)

Life is depressing. Congratulations if you are still alive with less than 33% of your organic cellular structures not yet compromised by poison culture and cyborgian hijacks. If you are able to do it without self-medication, double congrats, but I am going to assume you are not using the internet thus can’t see this. The revolution will not be digitized; don’t let self-hack know-it-alls try to convince you otherwise; they are agents of snitchery.

Rae Sremmurd – SremmLife

(released January 6, 2015; #29 on 2015 Pitchfork Albums of the Year list)

This album was very unsettling because I wasn’t sure at first if it was legitimate hip hop music or the haunted wailings of not fully formed ghosts. I was starting to come to the stubborn conclusion it was Bohemian Grove conspiracies to manufacture what sounds like the haunted wailings of not fully formed ghosts, so as to pre-emptively strike at the respectability of minority youth, but then as I rolled up on my young’uns with all the possible windows down in my shitty minivan, my eldest started shimmying and was like, “Oh, I love this song!” and reached it and turned up the volume, and to be honest this was confusing.

Look, I am old, and thus am not going to completely understand shit, because honestly unless you’ve grown up your entire life under the metaphysical spectrum of wireless internet, you cannot possibly imagine how to think with that type of brain. This is not to say it is lesser, or morer, but just to point out it’s different. But it is what is real now, so rather than curse at the skies and their invisible poison rays, one might as well accept the fact brains that have been bombarded with electromagnetic power grid their entire development are now making art. Thus is how the idiot Dirtgod eased back on his initial Rae Sremmurd hatred. I still don’t fully get it, and if I get stuck at a light while playing it, I feel self-conscious as fuck, which has timed unfortunately with my recent refusal to ride on the interstate at all, but fuck it, I am an idiot Dirtgod decreed by vast array of bizarre and hard-to-explain rules. But I am always open to those rules changing without scientific reason, because I trust the metaphysics of life (such as my kid being like “Oh, I love this song!” and forcing me to listen without my own prejudices). This is how the haunted wailings of not fully formed ghosts who are brothers claiming to be actual humans got THREE STARS (***) instead of the bare minimum one.

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

(released February 13, 2015; #17 on 2015 Pitchfork Albums of the Year list)

My younger kids like Drake too but lolol I’m not giving that any benefit of the doubt. Drake is pure manufactured garbage, marketed through incessant radio play to tweens who want to pretend they are hard as fuck and their sheltered existence has grime to it. Drake is trash, and ultimately a new Drake album is more a question of where it lands on the Drake trash scale than any argument about artistic merit. Honestly, I think Drake might actually be a kid with leukemia whose make a wish foundation request was to be a famous rapper, but then clinical trials lucked out and Drake’s leukemia was cured and we accidentally got stuck with the fucker not actually dying. ONE STAR (*) because that is the minimum, though at this point I’m contemplating abandoning that rule for Drake.

Kendrick Lamar – To Pimp a Butterfly

(released March 15, 2015; #1 on 2015 Pitchfork Albums of the Year list)

People may accuse me of being “a hater” of To Pimp a Butterfly because I was hesitant to fashion it into a giant penis when it was released and fellate it online for all to see in the first two weeks of it being publicly available. (Similar things are happening with Kendrick’s latest release.) Thus, I did not give To Pimp a Butterfly a deep listen, because it wasn’t as life-altering great as people were thinkpiecing it out to be, and I probably got mad at society (again). (Speaking of which, you know what’s great? When people say “for the culture” for the stupidest shit, like bra sales or having brunch. FYI, fuck y’all fake motherfuckers.)

So as I listened to this again, beginning to end, I came upon two conclusions… One, it is way better than I remember it being; but two, it is not nearly as great as y’all fuckers act like it is. I guess maybe “the culture” is so poisoned and pre-fabbed, anything even close to feeling like it’s not painfully that type of way is gonna get crowned. Nonetheless, it’s solid, and that interview shit with Tupac at the end is the first time in my life I’ve ever enjoyed a podcast (not counting Terence McKenna). FIVE STARS (*****) not so much because actual five stars but because I fucked up and already typed three stars for that Rae Sremmurd crap, and it wouldn’t be right to only give this one star more. Star inflation, plus lack of editing, because that is how I resist in real life… that’s dirtgod styles.

THE WINNER: Not really a competition, meaning you can’t compare the other two to Kendrick Lamar. It’s weird to me that you’ll see twitter twits that have pictures of Kendrick Lamar, Drake, J. Cole, and like Big Sean, saying “YOU CAN ONLY HAVE ONE ACTUALLY EXIST” and people actually debate that shit. Like, come the fuck on man, you can’t be seriously thinking Big Sean or Drake are comparable to Kendrick Lamar, like for real? And even J. Cole is some mysterious illuminati algorithm popularity shit going on. Which is not to say Kendrick does not have access to the great corporate Dr. Dre algorithm yakubian sciences (as taught to him by Jimmy Iovine, but only after Eminem’s soul was sacrificed to Moloch the Owl God), but at least I can see Kendrick actually being able to sell CD burns of his mixtape at the flea market were he never discovered.