The other night I listened to Bobby Brackins’ album, because sometimes people do weird shit while they’re walking their dog. Anyways, I actually found myself enjoying what’s ultimately a peppy, low-stakes rap-n-bullshit album that’s much stranger than it needs to be.. The intro features Ty Dolla $ign which should be enough to make you listen, G-Eazy’s half-assed verse on “Hot Box” is oddly comforting if only because it reveals him as the hot/generic Roach Gigz clone he was always meant to be, and “Fuck Boy” kinda sounds like a ratchet version of Roxy Music except not at all.
But I’m not going to sit here with a straight face and tell you to listen to a Bobby Brackins album all the way through—I’m a contrarian but I’m not THAT much of a contrarian. But I’m totally comfortable with sitting here and telling you to listen to Bobby Brackins’ “My Bride” all the way through. Between the wall of fuzzy, shoegaze-y guitars and Bobby’s first verse in which he gushes to his mom about how excited he is to get married, the song is less B-Legit and more Belle & Sebastian or Built to Spill or some shit like that. It’s completely fascinating, and besides you already clicked the link so you might as well listen to the damn song.
Sup y’all! I’m sitting in a chair, blogging. That chair is in North Carolina, which is sick because North Carolina is sick. I haven’t posted a lot on my cool blog lately because I’ve had other shit to do—namely, I’ve been working on this one long ass article and driving across the country with my college roommate and compulsively googling foods that my dog can/cannot eat on my phone—but now I’m stationary, and according to my Benghazi Twitter Acrostic of the Day calendar the year is half over, so I thought I would tell you about the music that I listened to and thought was good.
Before I start, a disclaimer: I spent approximately zero time this year listening to Chance the Rapper, Radiohead, Anohni, James Blake, Car Seat Headrest, or Zayn Malik. I will get around to them I promise, maybe. This list is by no means comprehensive and if you can think of some shit that I didn’t include on this that I might enjoy, please hmu up on Twitter and tell me what to listen to.
SINGLES:
Lil Yachty – “Minnesota”
When Yachty first dropped I didn’t like him, and this should have been my first sign that I am getting old as fuck. Now that I like this song, I am officially young again.
Buck – “Faces”
My college roommate Nolan showed me this song on our drive from Los Angeles to North Carolina, and we ended up listening to it about a billion times in the car. Buck is an openly gay bro-country singer, and as long as he keeps making songs as good as “Faces,” he is going to be famous as fuck.
Pinegrove – “Old Friends”
Yet another song my old college roommate Nolan showed me on our cross-country journey. Pinegrove is not more bro-country, but they capture the same small-town existential angst that Buck taps into. Instead, “Old Friends” lands at the intersection of pop-punk and alt-country, minus the annoying bits of each. Somewhere Ryan Adams is listening to this and trying to invent a time machine so he can go back and write this song instead of these guys kinda like a hipster version of Biff and the sports scores in Back to the Future II.
Kvelertak – “1985”
Imagen Holdsteady but kvlt.
Curren$y/Alchemist – “Vibrations”
The entirety of Curren$y and Alchemist’s Carrolton Heist is incredible, but this one really takes the cake for me. Curren$y makes unassailable rap music for adults. You cannot fuck with him, especially when he takes a New Orleans classic (Juvie’s “Ha”) and rewires it to embody smoky N.O. jazz.
Classixx f. T-Pain – “Whatever I Want”
I never stopped loving T-Pain.
Kevin Gates – “2 Phones”
Truly an anthem for our times.
Future – “Perkys Calling”
Not sure if this is ;( or :”) but we’re definitely dealing with mixed emojis here.
White Lung – “Kiss Me When I Bleed”
There’s something about this track captures the ineffable spirit of survival in the face of fuckshit.
Jackie Chain – “123 Points”
I wrote a bazillion word profile of Jackie Chain because he is an interesting person and makes really great country rap tunes and more people should listen to his music always.
Denzel Curry – “ULT”
Denzel’s Imperial is to Memphis-influenced militant Miami hell-rap as Fugazi’s Repeater is to hardcore, which makes “ULT” whatever song from Repeater is most like “ULT.” That metaphor realllllllly fell apart there, sorry. Let’s say “ULT” is like “Turnover,” if only so I can get the fuck out of this blurb and onto the next blurb.
Diarrhea Planet – “Headband”
Ambitious stoners who make rock turn in a slab of genuine stoner rock, as sublime as any nug Kyuss ever dropped.
Spark Master Tape – “Tenkkeys”
This song is good.
Lil Uzi Vert – “Money Longer”
This song is also good.
ALBUMS
Pictureplane – Technomancer I’ve always had a soft spot for Pictureplane, and his cyber-sexual technopunk makes more sense now than ever before.
Lil Ugly Mane – Oblivion Access
Anybody who raps, “Your third eye’s just a fuckin’ hole in your head” is A-OK in my book. Lil Ugly Mane has threatened that this is his last album, and if it’s true, at least dude went out on a high note.
Aesop Rock – The Impossible Kid
I didn’t put these albums in order but this might actually be my favorite album of the year. The underground-rap version of Jay’s The Black Album, minus the retirement talk, plus an issue of the LRB.
YFN Lucci – Wish Me Well 2
Probably my second-favorite album of the year? YFN Lucci man, fuckin’ a.
DJ Burn One and the Five Points Bakery – Thousandfold
The ATL country-rap stalwart made a yoga album with his band. This is basically everything I could ask an ambient record to be—challenging and full of texture when I want to tune in, unobtrusive when I don’t.
OK that’s five albums, that’s good enough, I have other shit to do bye.
OK, uh, well, look. Here’s what’s up. Swag Toof are a rap group that I am friendly with. Their members are named Ouija and Choirboy. They live in New York, they are really cool guys, and I happen to enjoy their music a lot. Ouija and I DM about random bullshit on Twitter a lot, and recently he sent me their new EP, which they’re calling Rainbrella. I really liked it, so I asked him if I could premiere it on my cool blog. Ouija said yes, and now that is what is happening right now.
Ouija noted via DM, “You can search for this bitch by emoji it’s fucking lit Drew!” And while I don’t understand emoji or general technology stuff enough to verify this, I did read a thing about how you can now search Pornhub by emoji, so I don’t doubt that if you searched for Rainbrella on Soundcloud by the purple umbrella emoji you’d probably find it.
ANYHOO, so Rainbrella is basically what you’d get if Smashing Pumpkins had listened to a bunch of Three 6 Mafia and also had access to AutoTune. It’s fucking dope and extremely strange, and if you don’t like it then you clearly have not done enough drugs in your life. Ouija told me they created the lyrics for this EP collage-style, layering stream-of-consciousness lyrics on top of each other until they had something extremely dense and expressionistic that makes me feel like I’m stoned even when I’m not stoned, it’s cool I promise. Xany, nobloodnotears, and That’s Creep produced, and Swag Toof recorded and mixed this in 24 hours.
Download it on Bandcamp here (they said just enter $0.00 as the price), download it via Mediafire here, and if you wanna buy some shit from them do that here.
One of the odder, more maddening elements of Prince’s life was how much disdain dude for people using the internet to listen to his music. He never uploaded his music to YouTube, and whenever anyone else tried to upload one of his music videos or even some live footage his lawyers hit them with a takedown notice. But now that he’s gone, his fans have started to upload footage from his live shows to YouTube, which is great because HOLY FUCKING SHIT PRINCE WAS THE SHIT BACK IN THE DAY. Like, not to discount his 2000s-era show centered around guitar pyrotechnics, but his shows in the 80s were some other other other other other other other other other other shit.
The best part of the above show, from 1987 at Paisley Park, happens a little over an hour in, when he starts playing “Housequake,” and OUT COMES MOTHERFUCKING MILES DAVIS IN A PURPLE SUIT AND HE AND PRINCE START JAMMING. Watching them go back and forth, Prince dancing and shooting off his shimmery energy in every single direction while Miles stoically paces the stage, is electric. There will never be a cooler moment than when Miles pauses his trumpet solo to give Prince a thumbs up, except for maybe a couple minutes afterwards, when Prince kisses Miles on the head.
Prince’s stage banter is also fucking amazing, too. Once he starts having his band jam towards the end of the set he starts yelling shit like “Y’all ain’t gone go home til you get your asses kicked, I can see that right now! Is that a fact? You want your asses kicked? LET’S KICK SOME ASS!!!!” and “I GOT OIL ON MY HANDSSSSS, BUT I’M A FUNKY MAN!!!!!” and “YOU BIG SEVEN EYED GROVER FROM SESAME STREET LOOKIN…”
Anyways, this show is the best and even though somebody already uploaded it to YouTube I decided to upload the audio of it so you can listen to it in your car without having to use YouTube on your phone because that shit’s a nightmare. (Download here.)
Couple housekeeping notes about the upload: I originally found this show on a tape trader site that the big homie Jeff Weiss linked out to, but you had to download the files one by one and they weren’t labeled properly, so I figured I’d slap a little metadata on ’em and zip the whole thing up to make things a little easier for everybody. The Miles Davis part is all on the last track, but if you just skip to the Miles Davis part then you have clearly missed the point of listening to Prince live.
So I’ve been going through a period of listening to lots and lots of Soulja Boy, for reasons that will become overwhelmingly clear later. But as I’ve been combing through his discography it really feels like a lot of the music Soulja was making five years ago inadvertently formed the backbone of how lots and lots of rap sounds right now. I don’t really want to tip my hand too much, but even if you don’t agree with my theory it’s hard to deny that from like 2009-2012 or so he had a ridiculously fruitful run of mixtapes. A lot of them have like 5 or so really ridiculously great songs on them, and it can be sort of a chore to separate the wheat from the chaff. So, since I don’t have a job and I really like Soulja Boy, I went ahead and assembled a pretty tight two-hour zip of extremely ridiculously good Soulja Boy songs. I included tracks from 1Up, Skate Boy, Pretty Boy Millionaires, The King, The Last Crown, 21, Juice, Plug Talk, Obey, plus a couple more that I’ve already forgotten, plus a couple features he did, plus a song I nicked from an old Martorialist compilation (long time lurker, first time admitting I read it no matter how many times he makes fun of me). I also included probably 3/4 of Mario and Domo vs. the World, which Soulja made with Young L of The Pack and is one of the best mixtapes of the 2000s. I did not include anything from The DeAndre Way, because you should just pay money for that.
ANYWAYS, download the comp here. I would say I apologize for leaving your favorite Soulja Boy mixtape cut out, but I won’t because I don’t actually care (unless you are Soulja Boy).
Even though he’s very much a known quantity, Snootie Wild is sort of a tough sell—he’s essentially a quasi-soul singer with a deep Memphis accent who’s at his best when he’s talking about all sorts of street shit and flyness over spacey beats, a la “Fashion” or “I Can’t Help It,” the track were having a fireside chat about right here. On the other hand, he’s had a couple of bona fide hits in “Yayo” and “Made Me”—the Boosie and Jeremiah-featuring remix of which is almost comically solid—and he’s signed with Yo “I Made ‘Down in the DMs’” Gotti, who after his decade or so of making regionally renowned quality street murrrrrzic is finally experiencing a genuine pop crossover moment, even if his pop crossover moment has come in the form of a novelty song about sexting.
But, yeah. Snootie Wild. “I Can’t Help It.” It’s good. You should listen to it, because it will enrich your life.
Look man, Dru Down would be one of my favorite rappers ever of all time even if he and I didn’t have the same name. Dude was dripping with pimpery and excellence (both sartorial and sonic), squeezed out two straight up perfect albums, and as a pure rapper has probably gotten… better… with… age? In rap I feel like this happens more than people tend to admit, or perhaps are fine with admitting it but they just don’t care because the internet is a cesspool that rewards youth and beauty. I guess I’m trying to say I’m 26 and have grey hair and therefore have a lot of career anxiety so I can’t imagine what it must be like for someone who is actually old. ANYWAYS, the point is no matter what job you have if you do it a bunch for like ten years you’re gonna get better at it, y’know?
Uh I kinda got off topic there. I guess just listen to this posse cut Dru Down was on off Cobra’s Playaz in Paradise from 1996.
Pretty good, right? BUT, below, listen to FaceTheStreets’ “G’z and Hustlaz,” a slap from a few months ago that Dru takes the last verse on. The track takes “This Is How We Do It” and basically turns it into a hyphy track, which, like, fine, sure. That was bound to happen at some point, maybe it has already happened multiple times. Point is it’s not the most original idea in the world, but the beat to this is slamming enough that you could fart on it and it’d still sound kinda hot. But Dru Down, who comes in around 2:35, just fucking parachutes down into the beat and starts DESTROYING everything in sight. He does the stop-start flow thing he’s great at doing, but it seems like he’s weaving through the beat with the short of casual intricacy that means you’ll probably notice his shrieks and general mastery of inflection before you realize he’s just riding circles around the whole affair.
Honest question for all you real blog heads: How the hell did 2$ Fabo’s We Amongst U not become a ubiquitous ass motherfucking mixtape? To me this tape should have been to Atlanta what Danny Brown’s XXX was to Detroit, except instead of adderall-addled desperation and grime idolatry Fabo rapped like he pissed mollywater and shitted moon rocks (both in the “drugs” sense and in the “Fabo was an alien who lived on the moon and ate and therefore also shitted moon rocks” sense). Fabo had been left for dead by the industry after his D4L days (which cannot be discounted, because D4L were the fucking shit), and We Amongst U should have been his comeback. He managed to meld absurdist party music with a couple “oh shit your actions have consequences” comedown songs that hit you right in the hangover, PLUS he rounded shit out with the honest-to-gosh funk song “Keep Your Mind On Dat,” the most amazing left turn straight into the old school on a rap record since Petey Pablo fucked around and made the final quarter of his second album all gospel. Point is, Fabo has never been a human being, but he was perhaps less of a human being than any rapper has ever been on We Amongst U.
And goddamn man, Fabo really rapped his ass off on this shit. He was melodic, hilarious, heartfelt, and menacing, usually all at once. One thing that really bums me out about rapping as a technical exercise is when dudes confuse the act of rapping well with, like, actually saying something. And the more words you jam into a verse, the greater chance that you’re going to end up embarrassing yourself by saying a corny line or espousing a dumb worldview. Which isn’t to say that Fabo is dropping knowledge or anything here, but he definitely shows a really impressive technical range without ever saying an embarrassing line. And when he does get serious on “How the Fuck Did I Get Here,” the gravitas feels earned, unlike way too many rappers for whom self-seriousness is their default demeanor. Topics broached on this tape include: Doing drugs, being from outer space, being a robot, doing so many drugs that you nearly die, doing so many drugs that you end up becoming a totally different person, being abducted by aliens, why you shouldn’t grow up too fast and the world is a harsh place, etc. Shouts out to Meaghan who wrote about why We Amongst U was the shit back when it dropped, WHERE WERE THE REST OF US WE FUCKED UP BRO WHY ISN’T FABO PLAYING THE RAP STAGE OF EVERY ELECTRIC ZOO OR WHICHEVER EDM FESTIVAL HAS A RAP STAGE I FORGOT
Anyways here are a bunch of good songs from the tape, if for some reason I am ever invited to DJ a Ham on Everything, I’m gonna play all Fabo until they knock me out with a Thrasher hoodie soaked in Chloroform.
Seriously “Share No Blunts” is like the most thunderous shit bro, like I think I might cry every time the hook hits, or at least really rhythmically roll a j while nodding my head lookin like the total jobless goofball I am.
Speaking of rolling stuff—the most narc I have ever felt is when me and a friend who shall remain nameless tried and failed to roll a blunt for Mike Jones while we were in the studio with him. As a result I decided to get really fucking good at rolling joints so I would never look like a narc again. EXCEPT, recently I was at a shoot and someone gave me a bag of weed to roll a joint with and I was so nervous that my hands were shaking and I ended up rolling the loosest most terrible joint of all time. This, along with liking Yung Lean, is my greatest shame. Now I will be able to write whatever my version of The Life of Pablo is. Which would be, oh, I don’t know, a really good Soulja Boy profile or something.
Soulja Boy told us he was the future way back in whenever the fuck this came out (2008?). The point is we are all still trying to catch up to Soulja Boy.
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