SONG OF THE DAY: Rolling Stoner

I didn’t know until I just looked up Yaya Bey to write about this song that she was the daughter of Grand Daddy I.U. of The Juice Crew. I am so old that boom bap figures have grown ass children making songs I listen to now. Also, what the fuck, he died in December? The internet is great for helping me find out some music I was listening to is related to a guy I kinda remember from back in the day, who also just passed. Life is precious; the internet is a distraction.

SONG OF THE DAY: Double Trouble

Got some boom bap era dancehall mix downloaded from some random ass blog because I’m an old fool from the old school who still manually downloads mp3s and refuses to stream. Anyways, the whole thing slams so wonderfully, but especially shit like Mad Lion coming on just makes me want to put on unworked in work boots with the laces untied and walk to the country store 4 miles away and buy 3 blunts, a tall can of something, and think about the chicken thighs they got there. Then when you have all the everything you ended up getting, you gotta sit at the picnic table sort of by the store but also not exactly part of it, just there under a tree, half warped but all the way perfect, and drink your tall can and watch the world pretend to matter for a few minutes.

SONG OF THE DAY: Execution of A Chump

I miss long-term hip hop tag teams, whether it was a pair of MCs, or a producer DJ/MC pairing, or whatever. Guru and DJ Premier were serious boom bap tag team champs, but everybody seems to be solo now, and the only tag teams we get are singles stars special projects. That ain’t the same… not enough one on one fermentation of ideas and synchronization of auras. Anyways, here’s a Gang Starr song that I still play the fuck out of.

SONG OF THE DAY: Don Dada (Hip Hop Remix)

I went to sleep playing this 100% Dynamite! NYC dancehall meets rap compilation the other night, and when I woke up, I had transformed into wearing a light blue and white tracksuit with Polo sneakers on. It was crazy. I guess I got a fairy godfather I didn’t know about.

SONG OF THE DAY: Streets of New York

Kool G Rap is highly underrated as an MC, popping up in that transition from old school storyteller MCs to new school boom bap era cunning linguists, somehow being able to do that tongue twister repetitive linguistical sound that eventually got played out by the end of the ‘90s, but still keeping the storytelling aspect to it, which when you listen to how so many of the “lyrical miracle” rappers went straight linguistics and helped kill that style, it’s amazing how much of a storyteller Kool G Rap remained. If everybody had done it like that, the style might not’ve got burned out. But there’s always gonna be 20 people doing an exciting style competently but boringly for every person doing it with 100% skill and talent. Sadly, boring motherfuckers get streamed the most and sold the most records, but that’s always been the case.

SONG OF THE DAY: Slow Flow

 

the newness of nostalgia

a decade beyond my own cultural relevance

reminiscing over you (old shit)

cursing the unrecognizable ways of now

praise being that old shit

one more time

old as fuck

my nicest sunday afternoon fit

for the back yard is straight

off the goodwill racks

my metaphysical pockets

are flat

not fat

fuck it

there’s still majesty

in a grey beard

because it

signifies

survival

SONG OF THE DAY: Drug Dealer

Used to be a sworn boom baptist, but in recent years I've definitely loosened my rigid hip hop morality to expand worldwide. Sadly, there's no real good source of worldwide hip hop exposure; it's all geared to specific scenes based on geography or corporate ties. Definitely when the early wave of what's derogatorily called mumble rap started to raise up, I found myself loving British grime music way more, because it had that gritty feel that I love, and is very tied to a feeling in the American landscape when boom baptistry was prominent. The foggy autotuned vocals of mumble rap make sense though, because we live in this highly developed era of forced order, many of us pharmaceutically manipulated into accepting it all without suicide, so there's a very literal fogginess to our existence that makes the sad autotune wails of mumble rap very relevant. Gotta admit though, through my oldest kid's studies in South Asia, I've tended to find autotuned hip hop from other places more enjoyable than American autotune, with some exceptions. It all goes to further prove how our media, even corporate music media, is all tied to the environment of where we are. Can somebody point me to a cultural anthropological compendium of ongoing hip hop expressionism globally? Anyways, here's slowthai, who is fucking great.

SONG OF THE DAY: Telemo

At some point I fell into a Ghanaian Hip Life website, and grabbed a bunch of tracks. Without a doubt this particular song has been my most played song through the winter while riding around in the Corolla. It’s weird to me how nationalized our consumption of music is. There is no real global coverage for hip hop and hip hop tangential releases. My oldest has spent a couple trips in recent years in Malaysia specifically but throughout Southeast Asia, and the hip hop scene over there is vast, and actually pretty amazing. And man, they got their content and marketing attitudes down. She forwarded me a screenshot from the Malaysian Hustler the other day, using M.E.C.C.A. as an acronym for Mindset, Ethics, Character, Communication, and Attitude. The secular but highly Muslim culture of Malaysia has its effect on all that, and fuck if M.E.C.C.A. isn’t just emblazoned in my mind now, to where I’m contemplating that shit, like any good mantra.

Anyways, jam the fuck out to Gasmilla’s biggest hit, “Telemo”. His nickname is the International Fisherman, which would make a great iron-on letter t-shirt. As would MECCA. Fuck it, I might dig out my box of iron-on letters and do both tonight.

SONG OF THE DAY: Anti

We had a War Games rap battle event this past weekend, our third, and it went down pretty well. Solid DJs plus solid direction plan helped. We’ve got a Brass Knuck title for the illest MC who controls the stage, everybody else get the fuck off, and that battle had both people do two songs (challenger first/champion second) then perform a third knockout song. The challenge was a female MC, Shamika Shard’e, and she absolutely fucked up the third song, like there was no doubt she was gonna win that shit. The way we run these is with a homemade cage, like MMA or wrestling, and three judges who score the competitors. Shamika won on unanimous decision.

The main event was a battle rap, featuring hometown hood battle rap legend Versity Rell vs. our champion Fellowman. Crowd was in Rell’s corner, but he did slip up in second round a little, and still got off some of the hottest lines. Fellowman won on judges scorecards, split decision, and there was a couple folks in the crowd heated about that. I mean Rell had his mama at the show to watch.

BlackLiq was one of our judges, and the thing I love about this dude is he’s always straight up, even if what he’s got to say ain’t what you was hoping to hear. Our host (my brother Remy St. Clair) had the judges speak on why they scored it the way they did, and BlackLiq was straight up with the crowd, no sugar coating. Then he hung out for a while, rode back to Richmond and hosted his radio hip hop show later that night. The dude is putting in work constantly. He’s put out a freestyle mixtape every month this year from his vast radio show archives, in anticipation of dropping a new album project in 2020. “Anti” comes off his last album project, which is slamming as fuck. I appreciate people who don’t necessarily slap that “creative” noun on their own ass, as an identity, and instead are just out here doing the work every damn day, building worlds. The rest of civilization notices little by little, and might not notice at all sometimes, but you’re still putting in that constant grinding work to build those worlds you need to see, need to express, want to make bigger. I respect artists like that so much more than self-identified creatives or people gaming the system with the same shit some other dude two neighborhoods over is doing.

Bonus footage of our 9 Pillars War Games heavyweight title battle rap below...

SONG OF THE DAY: Canary Rhombus

The sign of a great producer is people know their instrumentals more than the actual recorded song. I got zero desire to listen to more trash ass cocaine salesman name-dropping expensive brands for the three millionth time. But I'll play the shit out of this version of Canary Rhombus.

SONG OF THE DAY: Dirt Boys

My eldest offspring has been in South Asia all summer, getting involved with the hip hop scenes over there, and has been feeding me music suggestions since they were old enough to do so. It’s interesting when your kid becomes grown and then you see them posting IG pics wearing fucking Nikes on a roof somewhere in Singapore or Malaysia or idek. Anyways, I’ve always been interested in hip hop’s global spread, and the twin roots of that – both as organic artistic outlet at localized level, as well as larger entrepreneurial dream for those local artists who transcend being local. I mean fuck man, my actual local people social media feed is full of Charlottesville rappers still chasing dreams, making videos and posts and hoping to blow up to an economically abundant life none of us have ever known. Same thing with Richmond. Same thing everywhere. We all want to escape the struggle, it is a universal human desire. I think they even wrote something about that shit in the Declaration of Independence, essentially founding father old white dude semantics for “WE TIRED OF STRUGGLING, FUCK Y’ALL”. I’ve always wanted to have a website that had more international hip hop coverage, not from consumer perspective but from an artistic perspective, hyping up the good shit from all these various corners of the Earth where those tendrils of what blossomed in the cracks of 1970s South Bronx depression has spread. It’s amazing actually.

Anyways, KOHH’s “Dirt Boys” is a fuckin’ anthem. This shit has gotten stuck in my head at least 69 times over the past year.

SONG OF THE DAY: Think About It

hard ass track from Sean P. (RIP) utilizing classic Special Ed sample

gives me multiple layers of hyped up

ready to quit my job and drive to Uruguay 

SONG OF THE DAY: Skinz

"skinz" is such a weird slang word in retrospect 

I am not a fan of ghostwriting in general when it comes to rap 

you should be your own words anything less is not alpha enough 

for my toxically trained ass 

however 

I will say 

any time Pete Rock was on the mic 

I enjoyed the fuck out of it 

even though I know he ain't write it 

ST4R1NG 4T TH3 SKY W1TH 4...

staring at the sky with a

frustrated heart feeling like

"Brooklyn Zoo" instrumental

SONG OF THE DAY: Funky Dividends

[as our scene begins, I am staring at the statue of liberty, 

who is sitting on the secondhand ikea futon in my living room... 

I have a look of frustration on my face; she speaks] 

AMERICA: "why you lookin' at me like that Raven?" 

ME: "cause man, American capitalist system built on meritocracy myth, if I had known you were going to do me like this, I would have never stepped to you from the giddy up." 

AMERICA: "well if I had known you weren't going to provide for me, I wouldn't have talked to you anyways. Straight up. I thought you was the Greatest Artist Alive. But I guess I was wrong." 

ME: "hmm. I wonder if my grandpops and pops went through things like this back in the day. Cause man, this ain't worth it." 

[boom bap beat fades as I disappear into the mountains, never to be heard from again, after hopefully creating a semi-autonomous zone, rather than just being eaten by the mountain demons born from the bat monster/mothman] 

SONG OF THE DAY: Santeria

Most of Virginia’s most notable contributions to hip hop have come from the Hampton Roads area, and have been pop-based. Neptunes, Pharrell, Missy Elliott, Timbaland… that whole slew, which to be honest doesn’t feel much like the Virginia I know, so has never been something I’ve been hyped about. Virginia itself is kinda fucked up and like five different states – Northern Virginia (all suburbs of DC, almost a separate state tbh), Blue Ridge/southwest Virginia (beautiful, but fucked, kind of like a less doomed West Virginia), Southside Virginia (forgotten, my homeland, like squashed flat Appalachia), Tidewater Hampton Roads (which itself is sort of segregated into a military industrial/affluent white pseudo-NoVa and then non-white Hampton/Norfolk/etc), and central Virginia/Richmond (which likely just contains southside VA as well but I am overglorifying my homeland’s importance). The entirety of Virginia’s hip hop influence on the larger world has come from one portion of the state, and a portion that’s highly segregated culturally as well.

This is why almost every head from Virginia still has some level of love for Pusha. He’s remained in the middle of shit, and remained with an edge, despite being all wrapped up with the aforementioned pop shit, and being implicated in Kanye’s existence, and all sorts of other fake world shit. When his tape dropped, I bumped the fuck out of it, and still do to be honest, some tracks like this one. Also I took the Drake diss to try and lobby my children to stop giving Drake a pass.

The music industry is so fucked up. A guy like Pusha somehow is pulled through by Pharrell, and passed onto Kanye. A guy like Drake, buttersoft pop as they come, somehow got filtered through Rap-a-Lot Records and Baby. I’m sure each executive entity takes their percentage, and fuck, when you think about the fact Drake is a manufactured sound with team of ghostwriters, I wonder what the overhead is on a Drake album? I wonder how much it has to sell to break even? What a sketchy ass industry? Anyways, despite my recent trip causing me to want to disappear to Salinas, California, or Montevideo, Uruguay, I’m still from Virginia, where ain’t shit to do but cook. I’m making saffron rice and red beans tonight actually, maybe sautee up some baby bok choy too.

SONG OF THE DAY: Good Lobster

I've never eaten lobster in my entire life. I might've had some crappy lobster rolls or something but never for real bonafide lobster. Always seemed like too much work, and also expensive. One time I worked in Maine raking blueberries and I made about $9 and they had some sort of lobster sandwich even at the McDonalds, but I still didn't eat lobster. Did eat moose burgers though.

Ahh, being human... thinking about all the other animals you fucking ate with your gluttonous ass.

SONG OF THE DAY: Murder She Wrote

-->

Back when Richmond was not gentrified so badly, and VCU cut off at Broad and Belvidere almost entirely except for that one office where you went to pick up your refund check if you were broke ass first generation college student from shitty southside VA, and you could walk down Broad, or ride your bike if you had one that wasn’t stolen yet, or you were the thief, which meant you had a bike, and go to bright ass Willie’s downtown, to check out whatever new singles were out. Warm days meant the boom of Jeeps, this was prime Jeep boom baptistry days, and thus that was the beauty of dancehall during this era, because it was reggae but cross-pollinated with that boom bap, and a Jeep would roll by just absolutely rattling windows, and the air would be humid but it was still chill out and lots of foot traffic and though the murder rate was crazy high back then, you knew where that was likely to happen and where not, and the rare outbursts beyond murderous norms tended to happen long after Willie’s was closed, usually when Ivory’s was letting out, or at the neighborhood smack and/or crack den, but you learned to be aware of do’s and don’ts and operate accordingly.

Whenever some of these classic riddims hit, my adrenaline and memory serotonins start flowing, and it’s impossible not to want to just turn that shit up until the side view mirrors fall off your old ass Civic with the clutch about to go out and you’re not sure how you’re gonna afford to fix it when that happens so you’re gonna be another one of those dudes with a brokedown Honda Civic out front of the rental you living in, with the missing sideview mirrors because you turned the bass up too high. But fuck it man, you only got one life. Can’t be sitting around worrying about when your clutch gonna go out. Gotta keep moving.

SONG OF THE DAY: Whip You With a Strap

Hard to feel good about odes to child abuse, but also this is Dennis Coles aka Ghostface Killah aka America’s Street Laureate. I’ve been a part-time practicing MC for 30 years now, and my all-time favorite MCs have shifted and morphed over the years. Back in the day almost got into a fistfight with my friend Sterling over who was better, Big Daddy Kane or Rakim. Sadly, I will admit I was wrong (I back Kane), but it took time to realize that. In college, on the strength of “Eye Examination” alone, I thought Del was the most brilliant dude ever. Of course, loved Biggie for his ability to take MC turn it into Mic Control and really exercise that control part. There’s been so many. But honestly, for lifetime body of work, I might put Ghostface at the top of that list now, as crazy as that sounds. Just an amazing poet who can mix the cryptic with the scriptural so easily, add real life flavor even more easily, and make a track about talking shit to women at the bus stop that’s the fuckin’ best ever, and then follow that up with some post-Apocalyptic Illuminati survival shit. Plus, he’s not just a wordsmith, but if you ever saw him perform you know, he’s as masterful of ceremonies as anybody on stage.

This song of course has the added depth of coming off a J Dilla beat, which adds one of the greatest ever production minds. Producer/MC combos and how they work together is often a lost art in making music today, people just jumping on instrumentals from anywhere, not developing a relationship with the people they’re making music with. You can tell a lot of times too. I’m old school in that I love to have someone who is doing the music while I do the words and we’re building an idea together, rather than separate from each other entirely, back and forth weaving different layers after both parts’ input to give shit more depth. That’s not me acting like I’m better than anybody else – I’m a pretty shitty MC, tbh, but I have my moments when operating in a steady creative zone with the same folks. Give me concept projects with a single production force and single MC force working together any day. And fuck it, while y’all doing that, give me a motherfuckin’ DJ on the track too.

JJ Krupert Feb 2018 number two "parkside 5-2"

[timely track, with psychic props to Philly]

Biggie’s voice echoing with “it was all a dream...” 
Deck laying out "Earth no different from a cell..." 
Method Man explicating capitalized "C.R.E.A.M."... 
"it's like a jungle sometimes" booms gruff Melle Mel, 
"makes me wonder how I keep from going under"; 
grounded by my early boom baptism, pounding 
forties and blunts, 'til my upright was asunder, 
from '73 'til infinity, sounding 
furiously; "Signifying Rapper" Schoolly schooled young 
mack to other mythologies, moralizing 
me beyond white western propaganda well-hung 
but easily made impotent since disguising 
old masters' plans; small town mind gone by world premiere... 
Raven Mack refraining from living life with fear.