T.I. Us or Else: Letter to the SystemI'm not sure what I want from T.I. at this point. In theory, this album is a good thing. A rapper of T.I.'s stature and career making a point to craft an entire album to protest systemic racism and police brutality seems like it isn't a bad idea. This album is not it. Maybe T.I. is better off making the music he used to make and just making a charitable donation or something, creating an all-black Atlanta based credit union.
Justine Skye 8 Ounces
I still don't understand who Justine Skye is. She's signed to a major, has had official music released, but does not ring a bell for whatever reason. That's technically the curse of the music business. You can make the right moves and still be susceptible to a label that's confused or a musical climate that's not quite flexible. There's not even that many young, black female pop/R&B singers on the scene at the moment (Tinashe and Sevyn are the only ones I can think of), but Skye is just sort of there. She's friends with the Jenners, makes her way around the trendy NY scene but has no hit. This EP is entirely produced by The-Dream and Tricky Stewart probably for the purpose of getting that hit, but that's probably not going to happen. The EP is good though, and some of it is great, easily Tricky and Terius' best work in years – somewhere between the Eletrik Red and Mariah albums but nowhere near as good as either. It's nice to see them start to get their groove back together.
Yo Gotti White Friday (CM9)
I understand Yo Gotti's history as an independent musician in theory, but I'm not actually familiar with much of it. Given how long he's been around, it's great to see the recent success he's seen. His albums with Epic seem to be a little too 2010s major label formulaic but he finds a way to breathe excitement into at least a portion of it. "What Happened" a dedication to his manager that just passed is great.
J. Cole For Your Eyez Only
It doesn't make sense that J. Cole is as successful as he is. Not because I don't like him, but because his music shouldn't be popular. The way it sounds with its weak snares and low quality sample reconstruction like an album you'd find in the Tower records dollar bin in 1996 and its content, erections in math class and all, should not be appealing to a national audience. People for whatever reason seem to be attached to him. This album isn't that bad. There's multiple songs from the point of view of someone who thinks he'll die soon and needs to impart wisdom to his family before that happens, but it's hard to tell if that's autobiographical or entirely fictional.
Ab-Soul Do What Thou Wilt.
I don't know what the hell this shit is.
Wednesday, December 28, 2016
Monday, October 17, 2016
Press Play: A Retrospective
In the fall of 2006, I had just turned 15 and was a sophomore in high school. The kids I went to school with would all freely admit to listening to hip-hop but none of them outside literally one or two people whom I wouldn't befriend until much later actively paid attention to anything going on within the genre. As a result, the albums that I grew attached to at the time – Hell Hath No Fury, King, Doctor's Advocate, Blue Carpet Treatment, Like Father, Like Son, and obviously Press Play – were all ignored by my peers. That wasn't a bad thing. I nerded out in my own way. Press Play though wasn't exactly acknowledged by the culture, maybe because the hits weren't hits or because it was too experimental. What I'm trying to get at is even at the time it felt a little cult classic-y. That sentiment was never confirmed to me until I joined Twitter years later.
By 2006 the early 2000s Bad Boy roster had more or less dissolved. Press Play was a reintroduction for Diddy. The weird thing is the more I listen to it, the more I feel like there's nothing I could really fix. At least not at that time. This was before Lil Wayne got hot, so his verse didn't even make the album (but did stream on Diddy's MySpace page). But look at the lineup: Havoc, Just Blaze, Sean C & LV, Kanye West, Timbaland, Will.i.am, Rich Harrison. The man was trying to make a classic. I think the first misstep was the first two singles. "Come To Me" was pretty ehh. "Tell Me" was better but didn't really connect. We were just transitioning from that kind of sound working at all in the club. In retrospect, the features didn't jump off the page at the time but man: Big Boi, Ciara, Shawnna, Twista, Nas, Brandy, Mary J. Blige, Keyshia Cole! There was something there. There was magic there. The timing and the output just didn't quite match.
The purely rap songs are admirable, but I don't want to hear Puff rap words written by Pharoahe Monch and Nas. You have your uptempo section featuring some of Danja's first solo production credits. Then you have the truly experimental section, which was hit and miss both then and now. I think then part of the critique was that music did not allow for this due to general conservatism and maybe even some slight homophobia and masculine issues. If there's one clear miss, it's "Special Feeling." Will.i.am was on a roll but he also religiously underproduces and this one feels like it's at 40% of what it could have been.
The highlight in my opinion is the "Through the Pain (She Told Me)" - "Thought You Said" - "Last Night" arc. All produced by Diddy and Mario Winans, a team that is so under appreciated. Production-wise, melodically, the transitions between them, the gall to have Diddy sing on "Last Night," which peaked at #8 on the Hot 100. They were incredible. Like literal genius. That should have been in the album and in 2016 could be. People front like 808s invented singing when "Last Night" came three years prior.
The sad thing is that Diddy's later albums seem to hit right before they're meant to. Was this as good or at least as progressive as Last Train To Paris? Probably not. But if it came later it would have been a different album, an arguably better album and a much more appreciated work of art.
Tuesday, July 19, 2016
Book Club: Before The Fall
Before The Fall explores the pasts and present of a private plane crash's passengers and survivors. It's told mostly from the point of view of the one adult survivor except when it explains life occurrences and backstories for the other passengers on the plane. We, as the reader, along with the survivors and the general public in the story don't know how or why the plane crashed, and I liked that. I thought it was a story of these seven passengers, their pasts, their flaws, what made them unique, what led them to this flight, how they knew each other (not in a Lost coincidence way, just how they'd met, etc.). It does a fine job of doing that. They are interesting enough characters, and you obviously feel for the child who survived and lost his family. I couldn't help but roll my eyes at some of the descriptions of the women characters' thoughts and behaviors, but what are you gonna do?
About 70% of the way through, you see the storylines converging, the FBI investigation, the Bill O'Reilly-type news host getting more and more screen-time (the book equivalent?). And then in the final pages you find what caused the crash. The reason is so dumb, so insensible that while you're given 300-something pages of this world that was constructed, you kind of regret reading it in the first place. To only explain the flight attendant and the co-pilot's chapters at the very end and then to show that the crash was caused by a SPOILER crazy co-pilot mad that a woman dissed him SPOILER is one of the dumber things I've read. Whether that's a comment on how random and ridiculous these events can sometimes be or on how crazy men can be doesn't matter because the book just ends with it. If it continued, I imagine that the same Bill O'Reilly-type would (after retracting his terrorism assumptions) sympathize for the still-drunk co-pilot who was sad that the woman he used to date didn't want to see him anymore.
Thursday, May 19, 2016
Top 25: Bink
Young Guru was a guest on the Juan Epstein podcast last month and as he was going through the history of the Dynasty and Blueprint and how Kanye West and Just Blaze got their starts, Cipha Sounds asked why Bink is never brought up in that discussion. Guru admitted that he should be part of that discussion and then danced around why that isn't the case. There were a couple theories. Bink chose not to sign to the same management that grabbed up Kanye and Just right after The Blueprint. Based on twitter scuffles from a few years back, Bink and Just had some issues. Regardless, Bink wasn't on any Jay-Z album after The Blueprint and as a result his career went in an entirely different direction.
Today Bink showed up on Juan Epstein. It unfortunately is a pretty short interview but he addresses this issue directly. According to him, he didn't get anymore placements after 2001 because he didn't sign with the same management team. But he says he didn't sign because he felt like he and Just Blaze had too similar a sound, and that is where his real problem lies. He feels that the Just Blaze sound is really just the Bink sound, specifically that you don't get "U Don't Know" without "1-900-Hustler." And if the narrative tells that Rocafella's sound was architected by Kanye and Just only, you can see why he would be bitter. I actually don't agree that they're that similar. On the surface, sure. But I think Just's stuff is generally much more grandiose and their drum patterns are distinct. And it's probably not fair for him to assume that Just ripped him off specifically, although Kanye's stuff sounded nothing like Bink's. It's also very possible that this is only his side of the story, and he was not offered any work because how difficult he was being, both with Just and otherwise.
His sound throughout his career has been pretty consistent. He leans towards the uptempo, organs and horn stab "1-900-Hustler" type beats, but there's ones that he's done that are smoother than any Just or Kanye soul beat. His drums are definitely his signature. He has maybe the most crisp drums by any rap producer ever.
He is an essential part of Rocafella's history based on his contributions to the Dynasty and Blueprint alone. His songs on The Blueprint might be the best on the album. He deserves his props as a producer generally but also, especially given the above story, for his longevity. He started with Teddy Riley in the 90s, worked with The Lost Boyz, was signed to Stevie J and later partnered on production with Missy Elliott all before the Rocafella stuff happened. The placements after that are with pretty random major label mid-level artists until about 2010 when he finds his way into both Kanye West and Dr. Dre's camps. I'd like to hear him with so many artists today – imagine Vince Stapes over a Bink beat – because the music is still top notch. Here are Bink's 25 best beats.
Listen on Spotify.
Bink Top 25:
1. Jay-Z, Beanie Sigel, Memphis Bleek & Freeway - 1-900-Hustler
2. Jay-Z - All I Need^
3. Jay-Z - The Ruler's Back^
4. Jay-Z - Blueprint (Momma Loves Me)^
5. Jay-Z, Beanie Sigel, Memphis Bleek & Amil - You, Me, Him And Her
6. Freeway - When They Remember
7. Pusha T - I Am Forgiven^
8. Kanye West - Devil In A New Dress (feat. Rick Ross)
9. Rick Ross - We Shinin'
10. GZA - Animal Planet
11. Young Gunz - Future Of The Roc
12. Method Man & Redman - Four Minutes To Lock Down (feat. Raekwon & Ghostface Killah)
13. Amerie - Paint Me Over^
14. Beanie Sigel - Raw & Uncut (feat. Jay-Z)
15. Tamia - Can't Go For That
16. Blackstreet - Don't Leave Me
17. P. Diddy & The Bad Boy Family - The Last Song
18. Freeway - Victim of the Ghetto
19. Currensy - What It Look Like (feat. Wale)
20. John Legend – Who Do We Think We Are (feat. Rick Ross)
21. Cassidy - Damn I Miss The Game
22. Memphis Bleek - The One (feat. Rihanna)
23. Skillz - (for Real) He Don't Own Me
24. Mr. Cheeks - I Apologize
25. Dr. Dre - It's All On Me (feat. Justus & BJ The Chicago Kid)^
^Not on Spotify
Previous Top 25 Lists:
Cool & Dre
Hi-Tek
Tuesday, May 3, 2016
Drake – Views
We're officially eight years into Drake as a thing. That's pretty amazing to think about. Views is Drake's fourth album, fifth if you count So Far Gone, seventh if you count If You're Reading This It's Too Late and What A Time To Be Alive. With those first four projects (up until NWTS), everything seemed to go as planned. By Take Care, he was a legit superstar and with NWTS he didn't stumble. The Drake train kept on going and I was mostly there for the ride. I can't say the same for IYRTITL. It was way too long. It had a bunch of missteps and that doesn't even include the gun talk. Culturally though, nothing seemed to change. When Meek spoke up about the ghostwriting, the world took Drake's side. (We don't have to acknowledge WATTBA.)
Views is the first time the general consensus for a Drake album is as mixed as it is. It's hard for me to reconcile if Drake has regressed or if my taste has dramatically changed. It's probably both, but I listen to So Far Gone and sometimes it's hard for me to take any of those lines seriously. Maybe this is what Drake was all along? Or at least, you know, partially.
It's possible that Views is as long and sprawling of an album as it is because of the RIAA streaming rules and sales equivalents. The album's long but songs are also long. Vocals end and then the track doesn't end for another 18 seconds. This seems very much on purpose especially if streaming services pay out more if you listen to 4+ minutes. But jesus man, it's like he wasn't even trying with this one. Or this is the result when he writes rhymes by himself again. There's no Quentin Miller. There's no Hush. Maybe there should have been?
I find it very annoying how aware he is of his memeability. He's also aware of his demographic and their listening tendencies. Views is an incredible passive listen – while you're reading an article or studying for midterms. It's a pretty not-so-good active listen. And while I love "Find No Ways" and the dancehall tracks, this is not an album that someone who implies he's more significant than successful conventional rappers like Kendrick and Jay should be able to drop. This is a very pivotal point in Drake's career because the sales are still in his favor, but does he off and decide to become Flo-Rida or does he take his next chance seriously?
Saturday, April 9, 2016
Film School: Art of Organized Noize & Iversion
I can't say that I've seen countless documentaries, but with streaming and digital rentals I've gotten the chance to watch more than I typically would otherwise. I still can't quite put my finger on what makes a great documentary, but I can definitely tell when the subject of a documentary is more interesting than the quality of the documentary. The two docs I saw recently, The Art of Organized Noize and Iverson, covered people I wasn't quite old enough to follow properly but whose stories and careers are practically legend.
The Art of Organized Noize
My experience with OutKast started when I was eleven with Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, and while I still discovered the singles from the previous three albums on my own at a younger age, Organized Noize were not on my radar. I didn't know who they were or that they were responsible for those OutKast albums, but unfortunately they weren't largely celebrated by the media that covered and documented that era as they probably should have been.
It seemed like they were pretty closely involved with the making of this documentary. Don't get me wrong. I'm glad the story was told. I'm glad it's out and accessible. If they can get a resurgence from it, that's wonderful. I still wish it was directed by someone else. The right people are interviewed and the general story is told. It would have been cool there was more video footage. I'm sure there were tons of photos from the time. There was no focus on Aquemini or Stankonia. What I liked about Michael Rappaport's Tribe doc was that it told a story while presenting a narrative of the present day's tour. The Organized Noize doc had Rico, Sleepy and Ray tell the story from memory, in what looked like only one or two sittings. The music nerd in me wishes there was a bit more detail to it all.
Iverson
My dad never watched basketball or baseball, only football. The NBA wasn't something I even acknowledged until the 6th grade when I went to a school of basketball fans. That was 2002-2003, so I already missed the Lakers - Sixers finals. And I didn't really watch much basketball then anyway. I knew of Iverson from different pop culture references, Sportscenter mentions and NBA Live 2003, which is unfortunate because realizing an athlete's greatness in retrospect is never the same as watching it happen. There was a lot I learned about his life from this doc. I didn't know about the high school arrest or that the Sixers almost traded him the summer before they went to the finals. I feel like the Reebok deal was a bit too overlooked. Those were a huge deal at the time. And I wish there was something about the stories of the crazy money he spent, buying clothes when he reached a city and leaving them at the hotel. Overall, I enjoyed it.
Sunday, April 3, 2016
Book Club: Ready Player One
The basic premise of Ernest Cline's Ready Player One is that of a great modern sci-fi story. In a post not quite apocalyptic but somehow affected by climate change world, the most popular pastime is a virtual reality video game accessible to all people. The game's creator, billionaire James Halliday, dies and leaves his fortune hidden somewhere within the game. Whoever finds the treasure gets the money. As an elevator pitch, it's tremendously effective. It makes all the sense in the world that Steven Spielberg is directing the film adaptation. Typically this type of treatment happens with worthwhile stories. Ready Player One stops being one worth reading after the tenth page.
There's plenty to be frustrated about in the novel. The dialogue, the character interactions, the lack of character development, the unimaginative story arc, the insensitivity to race. Let's start with the 80s references. Before Halliday passes, he publishes an almanac of all his interests, potentially with clues to the location of the keys that lead to the treasure. What is supposed to be a collection of personal interests is actually a summary of anything and everything culturally relevant during the 1980s. Here's what Cline gets completely wrong about how pop culture works. While it's not uncommon for a person to have interests across several mediums, it's close to impossible for someone to profess a love for an array of video games as accessible as Pac-Man and Donkey Kong and as obscure as text-based adventure games, coupled with obsessions with Ferris Bueller's Day Off and The Breakfast Club and then a craze for the band Rush. There are people that admit to liking everything, but someone, let alone a video game designer egotistical enough to publish a book of all the shit he likes, would never like everything. All the name drops of 80s phenomenon are cheap pulls for nostalgia for, one would assume, 40+ year olds looking for young adult science fiction? If anything, it makes the film production that much more difficult and expensive, given all the clearances.
The obsession with the hunt and as a result the almanac results in the modern world becoming entirely obsessed specifically with 80s movies, music and TV. Again, that's not how pop culture works. There's a point in which Wade, the protagonist, bemoans the modern era corny sitcom that's constantly on TV and then chooses to binge Family Ties, a real television show. But how can you expect the writer to understand any of this when an actual sentence in this book describing Halliday's favorite directors goes, "Spielberg, Lucas, Tarantino...and, of course, Kevin Smith." Cline also wrote the movie Fanboys. Do with that information what you will.
There are three keys that lead to three gates, the last of which guards the treasure. It's a pretty standard storytelling structure. Whenever the players are stuck solving answers to clues that lead to the next key, however, there's no callback to something previously established or reference to lore established within the universe. Every single time, Wade simply remembers some video game that had never been mentioned previously or some other random trivia from the almanac and that's it, he solves the riddle. Every time.
If you're trying to do a Hunger Games and put together a story that doesn't really make that much sense but has characters you can root for simply based on the fact that they're trying to win a contest and beat a villain – a corporation that wants to monetize the (currently free) video game, then fine I get it. It gets the job done. I don't totally fault you for ignoring some of the more interesting possible themes given the premises: the future of technology and virtual reality, consequences of lack of human contact, love in a virtual world, racism in virtual reality, class issues in the real world. Why bother with those topics when the dialogue reads like it was written by a child, or someone that never attended a school, or spoke to a member of the opposite sex as a teenager, or participated in any sort of competition? Why even touch on how pop culture permeates in a world in which so many choose to exist in a virtual setting when a scene describes Wade downloading a how-to-dance tutorial for his avatar so the avatar can appear to be moving to the music correctly and this is viewed by others as something that is cool to do. Fuck this book.
Monday, February 15, 2016
Kanye West - The Life of Pablo
We're far enough in Kanye West's discography at this point that the comparisons and the rankings conversations become more complex. And while they're all great and necessary and impactful in their own way, the conversation is important because Kanye is one of the few artists today and probably the only rapper to literally disregard everything that he had done before, revamp and find a way to push music and the culture forward with each new album. We're also two albums into a time period where music may not be 100% his sole focus. There's the clothing lines, the ambitions to run established clothing empires, Donda, attempts to fund Donda. It took over a year to get this album from the release of the first single. Part of that was probably figuring out a direction, but you don't have a year's worth (2 songs, but still) of false starts without some distractions.
And yet this album sounds nothing like "Only One" or "All Day," to the point where you have to imagine it may have mostly been created in the last month or so. We essentially saw the album be finalized from the sidelines based on Kanye's tweets. And now that the album is out, it's a weird thing to think about. The album is good and there are songs that are great, but it's also much more disjoint and almost random than any other Kanye album. Personally I think an album being "cohesive" is totally overrated, but "Ultralight Beam" into a rap about bleached asshole into a solo song by Fake Future?
In the past, it was safe to assume every decision on every Kanye album was intentional and vetted by a committee. With Yeezus, Rick Rubin said that many songs were recorded in the final week before deadline, but in retrospect that album seems much more focused than it did on the initial listen. So I've learned to trust Kanye, and again, the product is solid. But in its current form – it was literally in flux until the final hour – I can't tell if this is the way it is by chance or because of the deadline or entirely randomly. Or maybe it still is entirely intentional and Kanye has the ability to see the bigger picture at all parts of the process. Even the title. To go from Swish to Waves to The Life of Pablo. Does he see the album as symbolically similar to Picasso's works as a whole, to a specific Picasso piece? Does he just really like Pablo Picasso? Is he even talking about Picasso? Every Kanye album is very representative of how Kanye felt at that moment of time, but this album is representative of this literal two week span.
I love "Ultralight Beam." I love "FML" and "Fade." "Father Stretch My Hands Pt. 1" is fire right up until the verse. You've got to appreciate "I Love Kanye." I can't be the only one confused by the presence of Desiigner. "Wolves" is still not that interesting. "30 Hours" and "No More Parties in LA" sound great but feel weird here even as bonus tracks. Every Ye verse being about sex and sex with women that may or may not be his wife in language that is ridiculous and so totally misogynist is weird and strange but so Kanye. Everything he does is honest and honestly flawed.
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