[HH3os] The Atrocity of Brazy Pablo Still Life Exhibition trio

(2nd round match-up 9 of 9)

Limping along to the finish line…

Kanye West – The Life of Pablo

(released February 14, 2016; #5 on 2016 Pitchfork Albums of the Year list)

FROM BITCHFORK!:

Kanye's second child Saint was born in early December, and there's something distinctly preoccupied about this whole project—it feels wry, hurried, mostly good-natured, and somewhat sloppy. Like a lot of new parents, Kanye feels laser-focused on big stuff—love, serenity, forgiveness, karma—and a little frazzled on the details. "Ultralight Beam" opens with the sound of a 4-year-old preaching gospel, some organ, and a church choir: "This is a God dream," goes the refrain. But everything about the album's presentation—the churning tracklist, the broken promises to premiere it here or there, the scribbled guest list—feels like Kanye ran across town to deliver a half-wrapped gift to a group birthday party to which he was 10 minutes late.

Yeah, that sounds entirely right, except then Pitchfork went on to clarify this and be like “AT LEAST IF WE GOT A RUSHED ALBUM IT WAS A KANYE ALBUM OMG KANYE IS AMAZING EVEN WHEN STUPID” because they were afraid to go all-in on the truth, and actually made this their #5 album of the year last year. (This was released *officially* on my birthday, which makes me feel sad for some reason.) I think the rushing off to kid’s birthday party present is one of the more apt descriptions I ever read at a Pitchfork review, because The Life of Pablo is exactly as they described.

In my previous music listening ways of ipod playlists, I separated out tracks, and by far the only song off this album that gained traction with me was the opener, “Ultralight Dream”. Hearing the album in prepared order was weird though because it meant Kanye came out the gate with his strongest song, and then almost immediately negated the Kirk Franklin preaching to the broken end moment by rapping about bleached anuses on super models in the very next song. But the saddest most immediately hodge-podged moment to me is the Max B call. Max B is a cult hero MC who’s likely spending the majority of his days in prison moving forward, due to some shit. As Kanye was building up to releasing this fucking album, he made a single tweet about waves (or something like that) which of course triggered immediate Twitter backlash calling him out (Twitter is great for calling people out over dumb shit) for stealing Max B’s style. So obviously Kanye sets up a call to Max B getting his endorsement for Kanye’s album. I imagine Kanye had to reach out to mutual peeps, who then gave Max advance notice in jail, who of course – being a guy in prison with his freshest days with his fattest gold ring well in the rear view – jumped at the chance to stroke his own ego by being featured in a prison phone call vignette on a major hip hop album in 2016. And all this done so that Kanye could sooth his own ego for getting called out by anonymous motherfuckers he doesn’t even know on Twitter. Every time that track came on, it just made me sad, for Max B, for Kanye, for Twitter, for all of us. We have become entirely fucked, in superficial ways woven so deeply in our day-to-day, that we can’t possibly realize it well enough to entirely undo it. We are fucked. And through the sadness of that collective doom, second round through, The Life of Pablo was a sad THREE STARS (***) for me, the idiot with a website.

YG- Still Brazy

(released June 17, 2016; #22 on 2016 Pitchfork Albums of the Year list)

From Pitchfork:

The album is mostly a status update, examining how the collision between YG the gangster and YG the semi-famous millionaire disrupts his life in Compton.

I don’t know, he acted like he had money but he was still pretty amped on petty crimes, which is refreshing. Too often young criminal elements become flush with cash through other endeavors and lose their taste for petty crime, but crime is as often about the adrenaline as it is the pay-off. In fact, a lot of petty crime (even many larcenies, including low level drug distribution) is not really worth it financially. And there’s nothing shittier than committing crime to do some simple shit like pay your electric bill cut-off notice tomorrow, realizing you are right where you started almost immediately afterwards. There’s this myth that crime somehow has big pay-offs and you’re free from the worry, but no, a lot of hustling is constant hustling which never stops and actually becomes mundane hustling if you can believe it. Thus, it’s nice to hear a young man stay dedicated to his work with an ethic that goes beyond the dollars. THREE STARS (***).

Danny Brown – Atrocity Exhibition

(released September 27, 2016; #11 on 2016 Pitchfork Albums of the Year list)

From ya boy Pitchfork:

But Brown sometimes lapses into his Old flows, that idiosyncratic style where he falls off beat, gets in front of it, or simply yells above it. He avoids the frat-baiting EDM songs like “Dip” and “Smokin & Drinkin” that pocked Old here, even though singles like “When It Rain” (more vintage Brown than anything from the past five years) and “Pneumonia” flirt with that sound. But fortunately they’re too rough around the edges, too jumpy, too dark to soundtrack a scene like this. 

Yeah, I’m not sure Danny Brown has completely strayed from his trademark (as supported by degenerates) style in a while. He seems to be conflicted with it a lot, but at the same time why change? Seriously, if people are going to give him drugs and sex and also he can make enough money to subsist on, why would he be motivated to do anything more? Does it get repetitive? Sure. But there’s also nothing like him, for better or worse, so fuck it. I think sometimes, we (and I am horrible about this, for what it’s worth) expect too much from artists, and think they have some grand artistic drive. A lot of times they’re just wandering through life like we are, getting stuck in roles they maybe like maybe don’t, and just keep doing the shit because nothing else has stumbled into their way yet. THREE STARS (***)!

THE WINNER: I made everything three stars totally arbitrarily. No way I pick YG over these other two albums, because YG’s shit could be replicated by plenty of gangsta ass datpiff mixtapes, whereas there’s nothing like Danny Brown or Kanye West. And to separate those two, I give the nod to Kanye, because there’s no real separation of Danny Brown’s last three albums really. Like you could lump them together and pick out your favorite 10 tracks for a playlist and have it covered. And Kanye, despite his pretentiousness, at least has a different (usually co-opted) style to each album. So fuck it, The Life of Pablo advances in this stupid meaningless process. Somebody tweet Kanye and let him know. I got him blocked on Twitter.

[HH3os] The Jeffery Exhibition got it from Here trio

(1st round match-up 27 of 27)

We them experts behind the computer screen manufacturing hot takes about other people’s shit. Internet opinions is the opiates of the masses…

Young Thug – Jeffery

(released August 26, 2016; #21 on 2016 Pitchfork Albums of the Year list)

Remember when this came out and everybody was meme’ing the cover art? Them memes more long-lasting than the album itself. That’s not anti-Thugger trifle on my aging part either, because I can handle the fact this is genre that may not speak to me. But even in that realm I am able to recognize some of the pharm-fog genre works better than others. This feels like shock trickery as album package with mailed in derivativery as actual songs. But I don’t know, I don’t go to iHeartRadio for my hip hop, so maybe this shit blew up within the fake realm of corporate algorithms. That’s not my world, and I will never recognize it as real, no matter how real it claims to have kept it. Of course this marks me as a hater, because hater can now be applied to any form of criticism whatsoever. We have pre-emptively paralyzed ourselves from any accountability, which is why the Young Thug dark warble genre makes so much sense, because we’re all screaming through the fog the unending fog which keeps growing and growing or so it feels since you can’t see fog growing just get lost deeper into the manufactured clouds ugghhhhhhhh. TWO STARS (**) because why not?

Danny Brown – Atrocity Exhibition

(released September 27, 2016; #11 on 2016 Pitchfork Albums of the Year list)

I’ve recently seen Danny Brown’s style described as nails on a chalkboard, and he’s definitely gone eyeball deep into that gacked-voice hyperman style. Though he seemed to be claiming a break from his perhaps old and slightly stale styles on his previous album, he seemed to have reverted right back to them here, which is understandable, because how do we not be who we are? The “artist” in terms of capitalism is forced to recreate and rebrand themselves constantly, but if Danny Brown is still deeply mired in the mundane psychic rut of pills and low self-esteem art school models, why would we expect him to bust out a six-star masterpiece on geopolitics? I too am getting tired of the party style Danny Brown, which is a weird style because it’s just observational – like he doesn’t even attempt to create party anthems as he’s immersed in party style, so he’s the nihilistic dude doing the hardest shit in the backest room.

And yet, boring ass sounds-the-same Danny Brown is still different than most all the other shit out there. I still mark out when he gets introspective as fuck, attempting to untangle the interior clusterfucks of collective post-traumatic stress new world disorders, but that’s not a style everybody gets down with. Most of us like to remain lost in the tall weeds of the fog of the numbness. Ideally, maybe a Danny Brown (or some shit like that) becomes the American Basboosa of rap and ushers in Arab Spring-like era of disobedient spiritualism, but haha yeah right man, they got the fog machines in overdrive, and there’s so many people on painkillers now that they got Super Bowl commercials for secondary pills that help you shit while addicted to painkillers (by doctor’s prescription, which makes it okay to be a junkie, because the medical industry is your friend and the ultimate source for good health). We fucked, so who can blame Ol’ D.B. for staying lost in his own familiar weeds where the buzz is high, the feature paypal payments are constant, and he can keep his dick sucked whenever he’s actually able to get it hard. THREE STARS (***)!

A Tribe Called Quest – We got it from Here… Thank You 4 Your Service

(released November 11, 2016; #7 on 2016 Pitchfork Albums of the Year list)

Nostalgia rap, nothing more. People got geeked over this when it dropped, but guess what? Michael Rapaport is old and embarrassing, and Phife Dawg is already resting in peace. Like, if I just talked about how Danny Brown was sounding redundant at this point, why would I get hyped for someone to decide to purposefully sound redundant back to a time they abandoned twenty years ago? Q-Tip specifically bolted from the group because he felt it was stifling, or trifling, or I don’t really fuckin’ know. That’s fine if you want to reunite and go at it again, but the album sounds like lost tracks from that era, not something new. Just throwing in references to post-Trump world is just like doing a remix of old shit with new references. I don’t know. The internet went nuts over it because the internet has a large aging demographic of self-hip people who lack the discretionary income due to declining American empire to purchase vintage convertibles as mid-life crisis, so listening to a brand new ATCQ while skateboarding way past a reasonable age to do so I guess has supplanted that act. Fallin’ on a budget.

To be clear, there was nothing offensive about this album, nothing horrible, but also nothing impressive. It just was exactly what it was – a throwback rap album, just by the actual people who were way older (and sounded it at times… damn Busta) rather than some young kids fetishizing the past, as is apt to happen during constant commercial bombardment of consumer capitalism. Some folks can only afford to pimp thrift store styles. Ballin’ on a budget. Anyways, I guess THREE STARS (***) in honor of Phife’s memory, because he was always my favorite from them, and honestly their main redeeming value at the time. (I still hate whisper rap.)

THE WINNER: According to my dork metrics, which is just me giving stars, ATCQ reboot and Danny Brown both at the triple stars level, so if one (me) was forced to differentiate between the two, I’m gonna go with being repetitively what you already are, not repetitively what you were a while back. There’s a certain pathetic level to attempting to go back to where you were 20 years ago. I’ve never understood that, and as we firmly do sit at the last dying gasps of the American Empire, it’s frustrating to still see so many references to Boomer ethos bullshit, when those fuckers did a lot of damage to this shared continental plate. So fuck retro-throwback artistic shit going on tour at the suburban concert venue where well-employed people sterilized of all soul drink $6 beers in clear plastic cups standing on gravel watching A Tribe Called Quest roll through one verse of every familiar song they have. That’s a world I can do without. Atrocity Exhibitions will always advance over that perverse display of lack of self-awareness at complicity in Earth destruction. Nihilism over denial, every day. 

[HH3os] The Brazy Blank Telefone trio

(1st round match-up 26 of 27)

I listened to all these albums like a month ago, finished the listening process, so am having to revisit to write about, which is entirely unnecessary, but the digital spotlight we self-publish allows us to pretend our words are preserved like ancient Alexandrian library (which was burned, for the record). Complete curation of data including opinions, self-snitches, and every regrettable decision in its entirety, to be compressed and analyzed by programs since it’s too time-consuming (IRL) to review it closely. Thus I continue down this wasted road, for no other reason than I began to listen to Screw tapes to do a similar project, and if I don’t wrap this one up first, I will make myself feel bad, because creative self-guilt is my biggest motivator (or obstacle, depending on the brain chemistries) in life…

YG- Still Brazy

(released June 17, 2016; #22 on 2016 Pitchfork Albums of the Year list)

YG is somewhat sociopathic, but that enjoyable low stakes sociopath. He’s not Rick Rossing up his metaphors, still content to break and enter houses for jewelry or shoot dudes on the corner a few blocks over. I can respect that. Not everybody wants to become King; many of us are content to be foot soldiers. There’s great honor (even in criminality) in being a good solid foot soldier. Civilization was perhaps designed by architects, but it was a bunch of simple fucks (often enslaved, physically or psychologically like now) who moved all the stones into place. Because of all this I enjoy YG more than I should (despite an exuberant abundance of n-wording, which causes ya boy the dirtgod as an expert whiteboy to have to check the volume at the stoplight sometimes, if I give a fuck, which unfortunately sometimes I do probably because I wear too many shirts with buttons nowadays), because I ain’t expecting shit but pure sensual vice. And though I prefer YG’s other earlier CD to this one (“Bool, Balm & Bollective” not as bool after you already heard “Bicken Back Bein’ Bool”), his entire aura feels more like Eazy Duz It than any other Compton rapper has ever felt, back to that pre-gangsta rap exposed to the world innocence of being content to commit small felonies instead of trying to take over the world and then get shot in Las Vegas in a luxury vehicle after a high profile fight. YG still seems content to get shot at the Greyhound Station in Las Vegas, and no shit I really fucking respect that. THREE STARS (***)!

ScHoolboy Q – Blank Face

(released July 8, 2016; #38 on 2016 Pitchfork Albums of the Year list)

When Schoolboy Q hits his top stride, and cuts through the opioid fog with dark reflections on immediate life as well as larger universe, that shit is great. He does it so well that I’ve always held out hope for him to drop the straight classic, a full-on banger to sit alongside the critical shelves holding his TDE podna Kendrick Lamar’s discography. And Q is always good at teasing at this, but for whatever reason never delivers. The tease has been enough to trick gullible motherfucks into giving him critical positivity (aka Pitchfork), but he hasn’t delivered like you’d want. Those gentrifying ass bitches are hydrocodone newbies who think they’re blasted beyond belief momentarily because their tolerance is too low to be authentic. Q hasn’t delivered that full-on banger yet (closest he came was Habits & Contradictions), and he knows it. He’s got all the ingredients, all the potential, but has missed a couple times now, and eventually gonna run out of opportunities. He probably would’ve already if he wasn’t labelmates with Lamar, getting lines of credit extended by proxy. Then again, Q hasn’t gotten nearly as atrocious as Ab-Soul, and that motherfucker still making records too, so I don’t know, maybe it doesn’t even matter any more. THREE STARS (***)!

Noname – Telefone

(released July 31, 2016; #27 on 2016 Pitchfork Albums of the Year list)

The entirety of my familiarity with Noname was assuming she was the feature I dug on Chance the Rapper’s Acid Rap mixtape, which the cover of Telefone seemed to confirm. So I expected that I’d like this, but maybe not ever bump it again. I guess that ended up being true, but I got bored before I was done listening to it the two times required by internal protocols, although there was nothing obvious to make me dislike it. So I did this thing I do where I think “Oh my kids will like this, so I’ll refer them to it,” as if music gives a fuck if somebody in my house cares about it or not. I don’t know, maybe it does, maybe every object or creation has spirit and wants to spread its psychic seed as far and wide as possible. I’m kinda stuck in this material realm, and one that humanity has narrowly defined by science, so I don’t feel comfortable speculating beyond what I pretend to know. But the suggestion to the kids didn’t take, so the Noname digital files of music are being neglected. I guess the damage is not as bad as it would’ve been with an actual physical album, but again I don’t know for sure. But Noname found no home in our little rural compound of chaos. TWO STARS (**).

THE WINNER: My whole star self-limitation creates a fallacy here, as YG is definitely way better than Schoolboy Q on these albums, but the star system makes them appear to be equal. And I guess from the long view, they’re pretty close – L.A. gangsterism in 21st century fog world. But YG still appears to be having upward trajectory as artist, while Schoolboy Q seems to have levelled off, and maybe not going no higher as artist. None of this really matters though because likely the biggest issue for both is paying their bills, so hopefully they both are. Fuck capitalism.

[HH3os] The I Don’t Like Butterflies, I Don’t Pimp Compton trio

(2nd round match-up 8 of 9)

Too dumb to quit, the dirtgod story…

Kendrick Lamar – To Pimp a Butterfly

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

Feels pointless to include a Pitchfork quote still, but that has been the method thus far for second round match-ups in this, so I will stick to protocol:

Despite all this, he’s still toying with a narrative on the sly: Just beneath the surface lies a messianic yarn about avoiding the wiles of a sultry girl named Lucy who’s secretly a physical manifestation of the devil. Kendrick refuses to dole out blame without accepting any, however, and on the chaotic free jazz excursion "u" he turns a mirror on himself, screaming "Loving you is complicated!" and suggesting his fame hasn’t helped his loved ones back home.

Pitchfork reviews are funny to me because it’s similar to a respectable business attempting to recreate street art with a mural on the side of their building – it sort of appears to be truly liberating and free form (in Pitchfork reviews or even any official music review place) prose, but in actuality it’s mostly just trying to give that effect while working towards selling shit. I’m not really sure the point even of music reviews, because nobody is ever truly critical if they’ve achieved an official capacity as music reviewer, because they don’t want to burn their inlets to inside bullshit. So you never have real hard criticism, since everything is attached to the immediacy of consumption, not the timelessness of true criticism. But you get wonderful crap like explaining the very obvious metaphor of Lucy as Lucifer with a phrase like “messianic yarn”. That is simultaneously wonderful and ridiculous, which I guess is late capitalism itself in a nutshell (either “wonderful and ridiculous” or a “messianic yarn”).

If one is in the official capacity of music reviewer, I don’t think it’s possible to give Kendrick Lamar a negative review. He is critically accepted Illuminati, and early on into his attempted establishment as industry force. An interesting snippet of this is the Wesley Snipes references in the beginning track, but also Dre phone call talking about how it’s easy to get the big house, but can you do what you got to keep it? I imagine that’s where the sketchiness and soul-compromising comes into play, where you go from being an “artist” to being an industry heavyweight. There’s not so much art involved at that level as there is exploitation of others. And as Kendrick Lamar stands at that door, I perhaps project the sense that he struggles with accepting that change, because to do so is to become a pure capitalist, and accept there is something about you that makes you deserving of wealth than all those you grew up with and around who are left behind and fell through the abundance of cracks along the way.

As for the album itself, I enjoy it, but it’s also very much about that transition from artist to entity, as this is the most obvious example of mass consumer slam poet album you’ll probably find from the past decade. The artistic concept behind the album is essentially drilling down between the lines of a poem he’s ostensibly reading to resurrected spirit of Tupac (or time traveling, it’s hard to tell nowadays if we are utilizing cyborgian technologies to bring back to life the dead, or nuts and bolts time machine technologies to move through the fourth dimension). I read a lot of old poetry, which truly is timeless, well beyond the immediacy of a BEST NEW ALBUM OF THE WEEK music review on a digital website driven by advertising dollars (generally from the same sources you are critically reviewing, which seems… complicated), so perhaps I am too hard on artistic creations. I know I am with myself. This is not an amazing album in context of actually amazing, but compared to most things that are released now, it certainly has all the trademarks of something artistic. Kendrick is not (yet as) heavy-handed about his artistry as someone like, say, Kanye is, and he’s also not into that formulaic robot artist stage of Eminem, where everything sounds “amazing” but mailed in on the way to Whole Foods (or one of those local ultra-rich people Whole Foods type markets). Because of that, and because of the grading curve on artistic creations manufactured by music reviewing in general, as well as this project specific to my purposes here, I am forced to give this FOUR STARS (****).

Earl Sweatshirt – I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside

(released March 23, 2015; #25 on 2015 Pitchfork Albums of the Year list)

A Pitchforkian yarn:

From the first bars of the swaggering organ-driven opener "Huey", it feels like the realization of a voice that, in some sense, he's had an APB out on since his first record: one that is both fluid and all angles, vacillating between naked introspection and pushing us as far away as possible. He sounds deadly serious and self-effacing at the same time, and his rocky, withdrawn psychology is more visible, and easier to trace, than ever.

That’s a lot of words which kind of say something but I don’t know if I agree with any of it, even though to be honest I’m not sure I understand what they’re going for. I will say this though – two things cause me to expect a lot from Earl Sweatshirt: a) his early shit before his mom sent him off to Samoa or wherever the fuck, and b) his dad is a fucking West African poet. Poetic semen is powerful stuff, and not only impregnates the next generation with the beauty of language (all languages… it recognizes no linguistic walls with barbed wire in its truest form) but those around as well. So why the fuck doesn’t Earl Sweatshirt have a better crew by now than ragged ass Odd Future remnants? Earl got to step his game up. This is not to say he sucks, because far from it – he’s one of the few young dudes coming out that I would want to scope out any new project without a single doubt about doing so. But he had that out of left field but with unlimited potential hype back in the day, like Steph Curry coming out of Davidson. But Earl’s still on Chris Paul level. That’s great and all, but it’s not what it could be. Or something. THREE STARS (***)!

Dr. Dre – Compton: A Soundtrack

(released August 7, 2015; #32 on 2015 Pitchfork Albums of the Year list)

From Pitchfork:

If there's a surprise here, it's that Dre, a 50-year-old near-billionaire long suspected of drifting out of touch, sounds charged-up, nimble, and relevant. Dre has always relied on other rappers and producers for inspiration and his own legacy is tied up in showcasing talent, lifting and rearranging it for his own cause. On Compton he's taken the approach and doubled down, and while the album is frequently personal, it's also communal, pushing his own voice towards the margins in favor of other vocalists.

Aging billionaires in entertainment industry remain relevant by always discovering new talent, aka exploiting young naives. To some extent, it becomes a Ponzi scheme (as detailed in that intro phone call to Kendrick Lamar mentioned above) where once you exploit someone else, promising to establish them, if they become established, they then become more successful by repeating the process. This is how Aftermath becomes Shady/Aftermath. So Dre went through his first self-supporting cycle of exploitation (after two previous cycles of this where he didn’t get paid, first for Eazy-E, then Suge Knight, which is pretty amazing actually if one was to study capitalist pigs in great detail, to be able to successfully remain hungry enough to do that three times over because you got ripped off the first two times, that’s wild), and then had to take the background role as those dudes started exploiting a fresh crop of naives, with Dre still getting his points on the artistic package kickback.

But at some point you become bored I guess. Or you want to make people stop saying you’re not an artist when that’s a pretty big part of your manufactured image. So you have to step out the kickback shadows back into the spotlight and do it again. I don’t think it’s any coincidence this happened for Dre around the same time the Straight Outta Compton movie got made, as it likely reminded him of good exploitable naïve kid behaviors, as well as how he himself was exploited the first time. So he got fired up to do it again.

The album itself works like a soundtrack, as designed, but could just as easily work as a really expensively produced (where you pay for beats) datpiff mixtape if you removed the couple of famous people verses (like Snoop and Eminem). Or maybe the mixtape is so expensive they bought high dollar features. (Also, why is there no internet dork Fantasy Feature thing where you pick different rappers at different dollar levels to make your own mixtape? I imagine Rap Genius dorks would waste hours arguing over that type of shit.) TWO STARS (**).

THE WINNER: An interesting trio in the context of the artist to entity path, because we have the young artist full of potential unreached (Earl), the artist who appears to have reached potential but wonders what is next (Kendrick), and the entity who (according to capitalist metrics) can’t really achieve anything more other than adding on to what’s already accomplished (Dre). It seems obvious if you didn’t consider the actual albums that the Kendrick one would be tops because it is the bridge between the sides of the spectrum. Real life listening agrees with this (for me at least). But it’s also sad, because a reality of systemic corporate capitalism (which the music industry has always been), if you are a good worker who enjoys your work and does good work, there is no profit in that alone. The only way you increase your value is to become a manager of others, and find good workers or motivate less-than-good workers to work better. The problem is you move away from doing the work you enjoy by taking this promotion in order to increase value. It means that ultimately the industry does not actually encourage greater art necessarily, which likely we’ll see play out in Kendrick just as we’ve seen in so many before him (though he has fought this off better than most.) Let’s say there are 30 rappers hoping for a deal, and only one will be of good enough potential to be Earl Sweatshirt. Then out of those 30 with the good enough potential, only one will actually establish themselves as a “recording artist” like Kendrick Lamar. But even then, out of 30 established recording artists, only one of them will move into an industry titan role, an entity like Dre. This is the pyramid scam, the Ponzi scheme, the shitty side to the structure of capitalism as we know it. Take solace in the fact that for those 29 who have the potential like Earl, who fail, and to a lesser extent the 29 who establish themselves like Kendrick who go off the rails into their own worlds, there are people making music just because they fucking want to make music. I guarantee you the best rapper alive probably doesn’t even have a record out right now. But within the constraints of this stupid project of mine, Kendrick advances out of this trio of albums.

[HH3os] The Pablo Coloring Book unmastered trio

(1st round match-up 25 of 27)

The slow meandering ancient train of website stupid project motivation wanes hard, but then it waxed poetic this past weekend because I thunk up what other stupid project of semi-related bent to ram in behind it, thus the clog of unmotivation was flushed with excitement to allow myself something new, but only after forcing an end to this issue, of which nobody cares. I mean who the fuck cares what somebody thinks about some old ass albums? We are trained to only hype the new, only use our non-paid internet voices to help sell the new, even if the sale is just illegal stream which only feeds malware or whatever. This is a convoluted deeply perverted late capitalism system we have, and I am just another idiot cog in the industrialization of creative spirit. I cannot wait for this abomination against fractal geometries to finish falling apart, and I can go back to plugging my inner-kindle into red oaks and not false outlets.

Kanye West – The Life of Pablo

(released February 14, 2016; #5 on 2016 Pitchfork Albums of the Year list)

This is a weird trio, which starts off with a weird album, which was released on my birthday (I did not realize that at the time, because it felt like it got released like four times over, then unreleased once or twice, and I probably saw leaks before releases, so official release dates become somewhat obsolete information), and of course was highly internetted as any Kanye release will be, because despite his burgeoning mental illness of delusion, he remains highly returned on the algorithms. (He will continue to be so returned until Big Internet has drained every page view they can from him.) I will say up front – as is the case with most every Kanye release – this is not as great as it was made out to be by some. In fact, the bulk of Kanye’s work the past few albums has been Art School Kid stuff 100%. I’m not against Art School Kid stuff, not at all, in fact Art School Kid stuff makes for great contributions to grass roots arts at starter level. But Art School Kid stuff should not be passing itself off as Masterpiece Genius shit, which is essentially what Kanye pre-emptively does every time he drops some new Art School Kid project (and is what he did with this, declaring it Must Win A Grammy, submitting it for Grammy consideration, then melodramatically deciding not to attend the Grammy’s).

Now, my honest heartfelt expert old head opinions on this – it is interesting in a car wreck kind of way. Also, it’s always fun to imagine what other music somebody in the studio exposed Kanye to so he could Christopher Columbus discover a new sound. With this album, very obviously Chance the Rapper played Kanye a bunch of Kirk Franklin. This, in fact, is the most obvious act of Kanye being “inspired by” (aka biting) someone else heavily since he got ahold of some Daft Punk CDs before recording Graduation. And as we wrestle with the long-term effects of artificial intelligence, it’s great that Kanye did pre-emptively make the perfect robot gospel album, for when artificial intelligence runs amok and destroys large chunks of organic humanity, but still desires human creations. This album will be a mainstay on artificial intelligence pata-modern spiritual channels. FOUR STARS (****)!

Kendrick Lamar – untitled unmastered

(released March 4, 2016; #16 on 2016 Pitchfork Albums of the Year list)

As an old head who used to walk down Broad Street in Richmond from the then-still-grimy VCU campus most Tuesday afternoons and many Friday afternoons to scope out the new batches of 12-inch singles (which were an actual 12-inches back then, no Craigslist NSA math involved), I can say with some fond pride that getting the unreleased tracks as B-sides extras used to be a thing of beauty. I mean, you were already stoked to get solid instrumentals to repetitively play while you got high as fuck with your crew and rattled off endless wack ass freestyles that in pure moments of high aesthetics transcended your own abilities and entered the Realms of Unanticipated Perfection, but to get bonus tracks was, well, a bonus. My most favored slab of vinyl for years and years was an otherwise shitty Del the Funky Homosapien single off his first album that had the epic (and life altering, as an MC) track “Eye Examination”.

Internet changed all that though, and full curation was much easier, and eventually expected. There were no bonus tracks to be discovered or released now, as they were tagged on to the full itunes or best buy versions, or just released as part of the album, which included everything, because for some reason making an album became “let’s release 42 tracks even all the shitty ones” instead of “let’s cull this shit down to sharp, poignant, on point 13 tracks”. Anyways, because there is full curation in digital age, and not only is there full (fool?) curation, there is also feeble attempt by corporate overlords to capitalize on this easy functionality, a bunch of extra shit from Kendrick was packaged as this untitled unmastered thing, with simple dates as titles, and no pretensions made as to high artistic quality of the collection. Guess what? It kind of sucks. I mean, other than being like “oh, this isn’t a normal Kendrick song, wow this is neat” angle which is really no different than being excited to see a football team play in an alternate and thus not recognizable jersey, there’s not much going for this. Even in terms of full curation, I don’t know, you could kind of go without this. That’s not to speak ill of Kendrick Lamar’s artistic abilities, so much as to say, do I really need this? (Ultimately do we need any of this? Is there some sort of pop culture test to gain access to the afterlife club where we have to have consumed the most important pieces of pop culture to get in? Likely no.) And actually this being part of this trio gave me larger respect for Kanye’s shitty ass album because at least he shaped it, albeit haphazardly with cheap artistic thought, into an actual album. TWO STARS (**)!

Chance the Rapper – Coloring Book

(released May 13, 2016; #6 on 2016 Pitchfork Albums of the Year list)

I really loved Acid Rap, but did not really love this. Chance is a likeable guy, no doubt about that, but there are too many times here where I feel he’s trying to trick me into liking Jesus. I am very firm in my desire to not be tricked into Christianity, and due to my cultural surroundings I’m also very familiar with how Christians think it’s okay to trick people into liking Jesus. My own children (the youngest two) attended a Christian homeschoolers group the past year or two, because it was by far the best local homeschoolers collective, and I fear there’s been a little bit of trickery involved with then, which I guess is my own fault for exposing them to it, but I thought we’d made them stronger than that. They’re still young though. But they had some magazine we got, and there was a Chance feature one time with full page pin-up of him along with quote that said “I’m a rapper who is Christian, but not a Christian rapper” and my one kid had torn that out and tacked it up on her wall. I made her listen to the first three Metallica albums and write a three-page report on how sick that shit is for homeschool lesson though. (She’s a pretty sensitive kid, and not quite ready for Slayer just yet.)

As for music, taking the whole fuck Jesus shit part out of the equation, this is not very hip-hoppy album, lots of sangin’ going on, and I don’t know, I’m all for fun and games but if the fun and games start choking out any actual remnants of boom baptistery, then ya boy Raven Mack gonna get pretty blah-zay about it. And though I want to like Chance the Rapper’s album as much as I like Chance the Rapper the guy, I’m about 95% blah-zay about it. Then again, my kid’s are probably the target demo, not me (although I will eat the fuck out a Kit Kat still, just put in the freezer first for a little while). THREE STARS (***) because he’s such a nice guy (until super model poison cultured estrogen eventually contaminates him, like his mentor Kanye).

THE WINNER: By process of elimination, and for being an actual project which doesn’t encourage me to be into Jesus, the man most blasphemous against creative genius Mr. Kanye West wins this round. Despite him utilizing Art School Kid adult juvenile tactics (including co-opting classic Art School Kid literary hero Kathy Acker cover style from her Demonology book), it’s still better than a zip file of Kendrick performances off-the-record and Chance’s album. In fact, I feel almost bad for Chance because his mentor stole some of his audio thunder by dropping the pseudo-Kirk Franklin gospel a couple months before Chance, so to the uninitiated bystander, they’d think, “Wow, Chance really sounds like Kanye on this,” when in all likelihood it was Chance that got Kanye into Kirk Franklin (I am guessing, from an educated expert metaphysical perspective). But that’s how corporate structures work, and despite his artistic ambitions, Kanye is a corporatist more than anything else, in that underlings feed their brilliance upwards, and it gets filtered into the mediocre brilliance of those towards the top of the pyramid. God bless the meritocracy myth.

[HH3os] The DS2 Drown: A Soundtrack trio

(1st round match-up 24 of 27)

Let this slip to the wayside for a week or so because, well, been doing shit (new job) which infringes upon discretionary fuck-off time. Oh well. Cockroaches like me have a light shown on them, and we freeze or scurry for a minute to avoid the stomping foot, and eventually fairly quickly we adapt and find a new place to be discreet as fuck, all day every day. You can’t stop cockroach people.

Future – DS2

(released July 17, 2015; #19 on 2015 Pitchfork Albums of the Year list)

Though I acquired a better appreciation for Future through this project, I also still hate him, because his image is one of pretending to do drugs. What’s the point of that? At this later stage in my life, due to physical inability to be indestructible, I no longer personally endorse drugs. But I do not unendorsed them either, for the right types of humans. But to pretend to do drugs, to become a marketable musician? That shit’s weird. It’s like corporate snitching, to be honest, so I can’t fuck with it. If you’re gonna make half your songs about drugs, you better be doing drugs galore, not just making cool sounds like you’re mixing up codeine in Sprite in the beginning for effect.

I also find all this shit an abomination against DJ Screw, which for whatever reason I take personally, probably because I feel like Screw was more of a savant genius than anybody has ever given him credit for. So much shit going on in music now he created, almost accidentally, like all great artists. So somebody pretending to be on codeine to make half shitty music with a corporate emblem emblazoned upon it, I don’t know, that shit bothers me, although it’s a symptom of capitalism itself, not really Future. (It also should be noted that capitalism has no future.) TWO STARS (**) because I am sitting outside right now so I feel extra positive.

Dr. Dre – Compton: A Soundtrack

(released August 7, 2015; #32 on 2015 Pitchfork Albums of the Year list)

It is funny Dre called this “A Soundtrack” because at this point in his career (outsourcing, i.e. stealing beats from undiscovered producers; utilizing studio tricks only he has ever learned) all Dre makes are soundtrack albums. Literally every album that he has heavy fingerprints all over sounds like a soundtrack made for a movie nobody ever bothered to actually make, or else you get it in one of those “50 Action Movies” packs at the box store.

This Compton soundtrack is not all that wonderful because it bounces all over the place, which I guess is what producer albums are supposed to do at this point, but there’s a lot I hate. Snoop Dogg trying to sound relevant – I hate. Eminem doing his at this point robotic jibberjibberjibberjabber jibberjabberjibberjabber style – I hate. But the production is tight as fuck, if uninspired, which is due to fact Dre has access to penthouse recording technology other people don’t even know exist. Normal people making beats in pawn shop MacBooks but Dre is using Google servers for shit. THREE STARS (***) but again, probably not that good but I’m feeling positive.

Archy Marshall – A New Place 2 Drown

(released December 10, 2015; #33 on 2015 Pitchfork Albums of the Year list)

I had no idea what this was, nor why it was listed on a Pitchfork list, but then I listened and it was some British ass poetry rap type shit, all sappy and painful to listen to, and I understood. It was horrible, and I looked it up, and I guess they are two brothers, and I hope somebody breaks both their legs and takes the red card with pride because it had to be done. ONE STAR (*) because that is the minimum and even in positivity mode that is all I can give this shit.

THE WINNER: Dre wins, almost by complete default. Maybe I didn’t take a break because of new job but because this trio was so goddamned wretched. Oh well, we cleared this painful hurdle.

[HH3os] The Les OLD Jewels Majesty 2 trio

(2nd round match-up 7 of 9)

Hey, summertime got here quick. It is a thousand degrees outside, tank top season is in full effect, all those earned income credit tax return shoulder and upper breast tattoos should be healed, cookout season up on us. Bust out the pop-up tents and the yard speakers y’all, time to hide in the shade outside like our ancestors (and post global warming grandchildren) did (gonna do). Today’s trio is a second round match-up in this convoluted project (which actually has a format, and I should probably type that up somewhere, but fuck it, why bother, just follow along loosely as we go nowhere as this is the way of us men)…

Danny Brown – OLD

(released October 8, 2013; #5 on 2013 Pitchfork Albums of the Year list)

From the mouths of freelance babes come this Pitchfork quote:

The album is divided into a "Side A" and a "Side B," an act of aesthetic devotion that signals Danny Brown's unusual investment in the arcana of music fandom. Last year, he famously told a bewildered A$AP Rocky that one of his heroes was Arthur Lee before lecturing him on the merits of Forever Changes. The structure here suggests two LP sides, neatly divided, but one of the best things about Old is how mixed up it is—Brown's past, his present, his deranged side, his reflective side, his party songs and his nightmares.

The thing I love about pieces like this are it is referring to a fairly large portion of American recorded music history as this arcane anomaly, even though actual album sales currently make more money for musicians than downloads do (for the most part; me personally I made about $27 in downloads past two years, but zero in vinyl sales but only because there is no vinyl of me). Secondly, as an avid crate digger (who hates the term “crate digging” to be honest), I would imagine this aside about Brown lecturing A$AP Rocky was relevant to one phase of his love of album creators, and I’m gonna guess Brown’s had like 19 other Arthur Lee’s since then, probably more. Just as stupid as old people telling young people that the only thing standing in the way of their vast success is avocado toast are young writers assuming they understand a whole goddamn human mind and spirit because of an anecdote. Now motherfuckers gonna be thinking Danny Brown’s the biggest Arthur Lee fan ever.

But it’s also very weird to note how the notion of a full creation in terms of album, which used to be standard concept to tell a story through the course of an album, is now so fucking oddball that it’s used to illustrate how brilliant Danny Brown is. And look, I’m not saying he’s not, because I love Danny Brown, and love this album maybe more than all this others (after reviewing all this shit through this project), but it’s not like he’s cracked some hacker matrix from space in calling shit Side A and Side B. Anybody who’s gotten high listening to records in the past 50 years has had that idea. Fuck man, there’s even outsider artists who create entire fake albums by fake artists with cover art and everything. (Scope out my man Mingering Mike, fyi.) But I think the conflict heard on this joint is not really Danny Brown maturing, as this reviewer suggested, as it is him feeling like he’s supposed to change somehow. He’s supposed to leave behind the selling drugs on the stoop shit because that’s not his life no more. Or he’s supposed to realize he’s a hypocrite for buying Dolce Gabana shit while his nephew is hungry. But he’s not; he’s still fucking up, even if he knows he’s fucking up.

That – to me – is the actual beauty of DB… he’s normal as fuck. Understand my normal means broken people who tend to fuck up and be fucked up and also get fucked up, which is almost everybody where I’m from. And we all know we’re fucked (because mainstream normal makes sure to rub our fucking faces in it as often as possible), yet everybody always pretends everything’s okay. We’re not crazy. Your uncle’s not molesting your cousin. You grandma doesn’t have stab wounds on her rib cage from 25 years ago. Your sister didn’t OD three times. People pretend. But DB’s not pretending. And with hip hop overrun with “real as fuck” pretend shit manufacturing a false reality, goddamn if I don’t appreciate the fuck out of Danny Brown. EIGHT STARS (********)!

Shabazz Palaces – Lese Majesty

(released July 29, 2014; #35 on 2014 Pitchfork Albums of the Year list)

Here, from the Pitchforkers:

The “Touch & Agree” suite is a good primer for what to expect from Lese Majesty. “Solemn Swears” builds on a bed of synth pulses and a playful riff from Ish before collapsing into “Harem Aria”, a disorienting romp whose upbeat never hits where it’s supposed to. “Harem” becomes “Noetic Noiromantics”, which peels a few layers back to tease a hook out of the maelstrom only to dissipate as quickly as it congealed. Lese’s individual tracks aren’t so much songs as ramshackle ideas subject to crumble or explode into something unfamiliar at a moment’s notice. The passage through these movements feels like an itinerant drift, a conscious rejection of the methodical drive of its predecessor.

Western cultural approach to all things – scientific or medical or artistic – is to break apart into pieces and analyze each part in as sterilized a way as possible, bleaching out whatever bacterial microflora might’ve been the spark behind the sum total. Or pasteurizing away all the various bacterial sparks that together create the big bang symphony of whatever holistic entity we’re speaking upon. This review does that exactly, and misses the entire fucking point, by breaking the entire fucking point into too many micro-shards, because western cultural approach is figure out how a machine works by taking apart all the individual screws and nuts and devising a theory as to how all those things work together when you have them laid out on a stainless steel table. Except it’s not a machine, it’s organic creation, and worldwide man is a stupid fucking monkey, but for whatever reason he’s let his stupid fucking monkey brain really run roughshod in western culture.

As that type of creation, yeah, this Shabazz Palaces is hard to really explain to a stupid fucking monkey brain, or with one (as above quote – Pitchfork or me – proves). But in holistic sense, this album is the shit, as in The Shit (positive, not negative, though both positive and negative are included, as in all atomic matter). THE ULTIMATE RATING OF UNEXPLAINABLE WONDER – SIXTY-NINE STARS (*********************************************************************)!

Run the Jewels – Run the Jewels 2

(released October 24, 2014; #1 on 2014 Pitchfork Albums of the Year list)

Here is Pitchfork, fellating their favorite tag team again:

Trigger warning: If you or someone you love is a fuckboy, do yourself a favor and steer clear of Run the Jewels 2. You will not like what you hear.

Though I heartily enjoy Run the Jewels, I fear at this point it may be an inadvertently backfiring mechanism which flushes out fuckboys by drawing those quick to condemn fuckboys. Most people who would non-ironically use the term “fuckboy” in your vicinity are, in all likelihood, fuckboys themselves (or the female derivate of that human genre). And perhaps I am a fuckboy for saying that, or even bothering to notice. But in our attempt to prove we are not fuckboys, we perhaps out ourselves as fuckboys. Also, it should always be noted, as my esteemed digital colleague @badtracking has pointed out many times, fuckboy itself is a derogatory term for men sexually assaulted within prison system as means of control. When you realize how shit like that is linguistically layered underneath what we consume as progressive culture, then perhaps all of us are the fuckboys. Western civilization – The Epoch of Fuckboy Thinking, Scourging the Earth.

Still though, great job Run the Jewels the second! FOUR STARS (****)!

THE WINNER: Shabazz Palaces wins, and I am reading more Ibn al-Arabi while listening to them, attempting to unify myself with my self, making dirtgod hotep doodles in creeks by casting quartz in skipping patterns. Zig-Zag-Zig, motherfucker, Zig-Zag-Zig.

[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.