May 2013
1 post
Acid Rap
Rap has never needed nor will it ever need saving, but Chance the Rapper got the type of hype that casted Acid Rap in the light that says the genre needed some kind of savior. Was Chance going to be the next Kendrick Lamar, Kanye West or let’s just jump to the point is Acid Rap the new Illmatic?
Chance used a school suspension last year to inspired his first mixtape, 10 Days, which was well...
April 2013
12 posts
Pitchfork: Wiz Khalifa & Curren$y: Live in Concert →
I reviewed the latest Wiz Khalifa & Curren$y project Live in Concert.
I really really like the last paragraph. So read this and click a liquor ad or something. And go listen to the Savages album. Its good!!!
“The truth is that without this album, rap is in an entirely different place...”
– Sean Fennessey, from Pitchfork’s Top 200 albums of the 2000s list on Kanye West’s The College Dropout.
We don’t say this enough.
Red Bull Music Academy: DJ Spinz: The New Sound of... →
This is a feature I did on Augusta’s own DJ Spinz and Childish Major. I know Mike Will and DJ Mustard have taken over the collective minds of rap critics, but DJ Spinz should really be in that conversation. He produces beats, hosts mixtapes, has created a production super group and is even on tour with Flosstradamus right now. That is far too much stuff to overlook considering many hot for a...
“Trap: a noun (a place where drugs are sold), a verb (to sell drugs), and...”
– Kelefa Sanneh, from his book with Michael Schmelling Atlanta.
“They Just Call That ‘Hip-Hop’”
1 tag
“The works of highly successful artists raise a closely related point regarding...”
– Sidney L. Kasfir, from “One Tribe, One Style? Paradigms in the Historiography of African Art”.
“Masterpiece Syndrome”
Moms and Stars
A few years ago, my mother mentioned that she enjoyed the Tyler Perry film “Diary of a Mad Black Woman”. This got under my skin. Not because I disliked the movie—I hadn’t seen it. I just assumed that the movie was bad, based on the reputation among cultural critics that Perry had built. Despite her reservations before seeing the film, she enjoyed it. But, her appreciation was not...
1 tag
Peer Across The State
Earlier this week, Ian Cohen interviewed the young musician Jackson Scott for Pitchfork. Reading the interview I could not get out of my mind that we were a stone’s throw away. Well a really long stone’s throw, considering I am a few hours from Asheville, North Carolina on the other side of the state. But no matter the actual distance between us, I wanted to reach out to this somehow younger...
2 tags
Noisey: Mac Miller's Reality Show is Secretly... →
Probably my favorite Noisey headline on a something I’ve written yet. This piece actually made me laugh, then again I wrote it, but hopefully it’ll makes you laugh too!
Complex: Every Number 1 Rap Song in Hot 100... →
I worked on this! I might say more later, but if this exists just to remind people about “Like A G6”, I’ll be happy.
March 2013
11 posts
katherinestasaph:
jamiesoncox:
A Shot of...
21
I was originally going to post some dumb personal essay, but I wasn’t able to finish it. Instead here are some facts about today: I am on Spring Break; I ‘m supposed to conduct my first interview today as a music writer dude; I am recording a podcast with some great people tonight; and hopefully my day ends with a phone call to my girlfriend. What more can I say. I might even try to...
4 tags
All Camo Everything
The last few years there has been a fixation in men’s fashion around the camo print. This has manifested itself in: shorts, pants, snapbacks, canvas shoes, sneakers and even for the bold, full camo suits. On the last look of my closet I have not found anything of this particular print, but maybe it was too well hidden. The trend, while a bit ridiculous in certain examples, seemed overall...
Noisey: The Spring Breakers Soundtrack is the Best... →
The comments here are kind of cool to me. The piece is about how the Spring Breakers OST kind of perfectly contextualizes Trap music. I might have made a too big of a jump equating Skrillex with “Trap”. Even, though structurally they share the same DNA and the move from Dubstep to Trap is really not that hard to hear to me…I think Meaghan Garvey said this (or maybe Brandon...
I'm New in the City
I have no qualms with white males writing about rap— or any black/non-white music— but here’s something they should keep in mind. Critics are typically assumed to be white males, meaning anyone writing about music who isn’t a white male is automatically challenging this basic assumption. At the very least, white male critics focusing on rap should consider that whites have...
4 tags
3 tags
“You always hear stories about the early hardcore days, when bands like Black...”
– Tom Breihan, from Pitchfork’s 15 Writer/15 Songs anniversary feature talking about The Dismemberment Plan’s “Ellen and Ben”.
I don’t even think I’ve heard this song. Yet this piece comes up in my mind far too often for me not to have put this on my blog. I am not...
3 tags
4 tags
5 tags
February 2013
10 posts
Anonymous asked: Do/should music writers give musicians (and I'm thinking here of Ab-Soul and Killer Mike primarily, am sure there are others) passes on conspiracy theories, like that 9/11 was an inside job or that Obama helped overthrow Kaddafi for oil?
7 tags
7 tags
Noisey: Lil Jon's "Get Low" Is Ten Years Old This... →
I wrote this breakdown of the musical/cultural importance of Lil Jon and “Get Low”. Sorry for those expecting stuff about grinding and college drunken. Vice is slipping! Also, “Crunk” only appears once in the piece and it is for the album title and not as a noun, verb, adjective, etc, which makes me happy.
5 tags
onemanbandstand asked: What's your favorite documentary?
5 tags
Coat & Shirt
I have loathed wearing long sleeve shirts for most of my life. I am not exactly sure why, I guess when younger and forced to wear shirts with sleeves to my wrist I’d always roll up them up so my arms could breath. And maybe because of parents instructed or more likely though sheer laziness whenever it was cold outside, I would just wear a short-sleeve shirt and a coat. The answer to that previous...
6 tags
Blurred into Oblivion
I’m tired of people telling me I’m ignorant for liking pop and hip hop, because I’m not. I know whats up with music. I have thoroughly investigated both mainstream and experimental music. in fact, i was so dedicated to experimental music that I didn’t even bother to learn about pop and R&B until i was 21. I put out multiple records on a label that was run by my friends and released my...
6 tags
Mike Will Slayed It and Mike Will Made It
In 2012, Lex Luger did not have a hit song. Nothing he did last year deserved even a slight mention in the grand narrative of rap music in 2012. The dark synth sound that he established in 2009 with Waka Flocka Flame had all but left the rap consciousness by last summer. I wrote about this fact last year when it seemed Luger was ready to move beyond his synth overload style back in 2011 as he...
4 tags
Noisey: Everything Should Be Soundtracked by Rap... →
This went up yesterday afternoon. Some fun ideas about my dream of Araabmuzik soundtracking NBA games and DJ Mustard doing a video game soundtrack. Might have included one too many personal tangents, but what you gonna do.
3 tags
January 2013
16 posts
6 tags
A Story of Music Sharing and Macklemore
Last fall bored on a Friday night, I texted a friend to see if she wanted to hangout. She was available, so I went to her apartment to watch a few Youtube videos—young people life. Her fatigue—over-committed college student life—seemed to disappear once she started talking about a new rapper she had discovered.
She typed the name Macklemore into Youtube and found the video for “Thrift...
“I don’t really get caught up in the whole media thing with controversial...”
– Mike Will, from this amazing interview on Hip-Hop DX. The truth about Chief Keef that no one really want to admit, because it doesn’t create site hits.
5 tags
4 tags
Pitchfork: Young Scooter - "Made It Through the... →
Juuuuuuggggg Season
I like this song a lot and Street Lottery is a great early 2013 mixtape that was for some dumb reason released on New Years Day. Mase’s verse on this is actually kind of good (“White friends!”), but thematically sooo out of place as this is a pretty callous song.
6 tags
Pitchfork: Antwon - "Automatic" →
1. Go download Antwon’s last mixtape End of Earth. It’s great. Happy that Brandon mentioned it last week when I spoke to him as I dismissed it way too quickly last year.
2. Pitchfork had like a dozen songs go up yesterday, but as always read whatever is written by Grayson Currin.
3. And I posting this morning, because the sudden attack of a stomach bug kept me from pressing...
6 tags
4 tags
Noisey: Kanye West's Cruel Winter - A... →
A lot of dumb jokes about Kanye West and G.O.O.D. music from me and Jamieson Cox with some lovely edits and gifs from our editor Drew Millard. I’m sure Jamieson will mention a couple other original ideas we had. But, I’m sad to lose the joke about the 5 Olympic rings representing the five continents of the earth being used as podiums to premier Kanye’s new single in 2016*. *A...
4 tags
“But then I got the privilege to be on the other side of things, and from the...”
– Lindsay Zoladz, from her interview for the L Magazine’s feature “Women Who Rock! (On the Still Male-Dominated Business Side of Indie Rock)”.
That last sentence. That last sentence.
6 tags
“The other day a friend was talking about a development unique to this era—...”
– Mark Pytlik, from his review of Lily Allen’s Alright, Still.
At first I was gonna quote the opening line of the review: “At some point soon, the internet-fueled superstar thing will no longer constitute a valid story angle.” Then I thought “Can’t fault him for...
5 tags
Pitchfork: Just Blaze - "Behold (Exhibit J)" →
I need more House in my life. I also need more dancing in my life. This Just Blaze song fulfills one of those goals. Also wanted to point out that Brandon Soderberg wrote about this weird track (“Exhibit GFP”) Blaze did a couple years back around of the time Blaze played a party for Fool’s Gold in late 2009 that I regret only now hearing. The mix features Just Blaze yelling along...
5 tags
6 tags
7 tags
4 tags
4 tags
WatchOff On Your Own (Girl) - Al B. Sure
BET Video Soul 1988: #20
Donnie Simpson introduced the video of Al B. Sure!’s “Off On Your Own” by calling him “one of the top sex symbols to emerge in the last few years”. Madness.
This new comer to the late 80s R&B world looked like a slightly more likeable Suge Knight, which personally—as a straight black male—I wouldn’t call a sex symbol. Bobby Brown:...
5 tags
