I mean there was no way that two members of Screwed Up Click remaking a Screwed Up Click song was going to suck, but I’m still pleasantly surprised by how damn joyful Lil Keke and Big Pokey’s “Southside Groovin'” is. Big Pokey wins the “whose verse was best?” contest that S.U.C. rarely played when they freestyled, just because he uses the term “chillaxin’.” While listening to this I started doing the Southside, aka the dance Lil Keke talks about in “Southside” (no relation).

Throughout Glenn Danzig’s reign of darkness and doom over all things heavy and hard, he’s always been looked at as a pissed-off 16-year-old’s conception of what a Real Man From Hell ought to be, and that’s with good reason—duke does NOT fuck with shirts, even when he’s showing off his book collection, which includes a special edition of the bible where Jesus kills a kid. But I prefer Glenn’s softer, more sensitive side, the side that writes songs like “Sistinas” and “Life Fades Away” (for Roy Orbison) plus that other song from the Less than Zero soundtrack, and the first half of a handful of Danzig songs where he pretends they’re gonna be regular prom songs but then the guitars really kick in and they become prom songs from hell. Anyways, ol’ Glenn tacked on a real Adult Contemporary-ass cover of “Crying in the Rain” to the end of the Skeletons cover album last year, and he keeps threatening to do an entire Danzig Sings Elvis project, which I for one cannot wait for.

Anyways, listen to him sing “Always On My Mind,” which is the first hypothetical song from Danzig Sings Elvis. If this shit actually ever comes out it’ll be both mine and my dad’s favorite album of [insert year here, broh].

ANNOUNCEMENT TIME, I already tweeted this BUT, through the blessings of the WordPress gods I now own the drewscoolblog domain, which means this blog is slightly more of a thing than it was a couple days ago. So to celebrate, the staff here at Drew’s Cool Blog has unanimously decided to post “Ay Muthafucka,” one of my favorite—uh, our favorite, I’m speaking on behalf of the whole staff of Drew’s Cool Blog here—songs off There’s a Situation on the Homefront, one of the funniest rap albums ever. Bliggity bow blow, click “play” on the Bandcamp player below and you’ll reach the promised land. I’d try to get into the byzantine lore of Kenny Dennis aka KDz aka Killa Deacon aka Mista We Hoop Outside, but I don’t want to get some of it wrong and offend Kenny, plus it’s more fun to dive dick-first into it all yourself.

Trouble has been one of the best rappers in Atlanta since, like, ever, but it feels like for whatever reason he hasn’t quite gotten over nationally the same way his peers have. Which is a shame; dude can fucking rap, and he’s been dropping gems consistently for years. But hey, not all’s fair in love and hip-hop, but lately Trouble-Trouble has garnered a little momentum from his guest appearance on Young Thug’s “Thief in the Night,” which is notable for both being an excellentely excellent song as well as Trouble’s amazing acting in its music video—he uses money to cover up his face to show he’s shocked, he wears a blazer with no shirt in the strip club, and his and Thugger’s high five at 3:47 is one of my favorite rap video moments of the year. He really carries the song despite it being on Slime Season 2, and it gives me hope that one day he’ll be as big as a Thug or a Rich Homie Quan or whoever.

To that end, he’s recently released a new track with Fetty Wap, and while it’s not as urgent as “Thief in the Night” or as unconventional as his turn on Lucci’s “Key to the Streets,” it’s further proof that Trouble has as much personality, pizzaz, and flair as anybody else in the crowded field of Atlanta talent. Fetty and Trouble match perfectly here, maybe they can get together with Alley Boy and Monty and do a DuckZoo tape or something.

N.O.R.E.’s Drunk Uncle tape was going to be a confirmed must-listen wild ride just off the strength of the Uncle Buck-referencing cover and the fact that there’s a skit of N.O.R.E. taking a piss that’s somehow “produced by Charlamagne the God”????? Like, does that mean Charlamagne was recording the sound of N.O.R.E. peeing? Or is that actually Charlamagne peeing and they just pretended it was N.O.R.E.? I dunno, but it’s a totally pleasant surprise that there are actually a few jams on this thing, basically whenever N.O.R.E. just gets to go crazy with beats that sound like late 90s Neptunes beats. “Want Me Dead” = good; “Want Me Dead” + what might be a years-old hyperactive T-Pain hook = even better. N.O.R.E. on “Giving It Up” = good, especially when he raps “This is that music you shouldn’t listen to!”; all the other dudes on “Giving It Up” = wait, why didn’t he and Vince Staples do a reggaeton song for this? And then it’s hard to fuck up N.O.R.E., Nature, Royal Flush, and Kool G. Rap on “Queens.”

But probably my favorite track on the tape is “Get Money,” which is produced by Swizzy and finds N.O.R.E. threatening to shoot someone off their hoverboard (see the title of this post). While that line will age about as well as an open bottle of Boone’s Farm, it is funny as fuck right now.

Last night Lina, Nora Ephron, and I finished the OJ Simpson FX show. I really liked it, except for whenever the show tried to be meta (i.e., the Kardashian kids chanting their last name while watching TV, that guy yelling the phrase “PLOT TWIST” after that one plot twist involving the judge’s wife, etc.), but that’s just my personal preference.

The casting was amazing when it was spot-on, and even better when it wasn’t. Which is to say, literally what the fuck was going on with John Travolta the entire season were the makeup people just caking his face in silly putty before he went on set why didn’t his eyebrows move the scene where he listened to muzak in his car the Hawaiian shirt the Hawaiian shirt THE HAWAIIAN SHIRTTTTTT.

Travolta aside, I very heavily fucked with how the show managed to argue—and this is perhaps just how I read it—that OJ more than probably did it, or at least had something to do with it, yet the only logical course of action was to declare him not guilty. The final speeches by Chris Darden and Johnny Cochran really lay this out fairly plainly. As Darden points out, there really was a shit-ton of evidence linking OJ to the murder of his ex-wife and her lover, just straight-the-fuck-up, hammering the point home by cutting to the look of horror on the face of David Schwinner’s Robert Kardashian, who now fully understands he’s been aiding and abetting a murderer. But beneath the if-it-doesn’t-fit-you-must-acquits and loquacious razzle-dazzle of Johnnie Cochran lies a damn good argument that because of the institutional racism of the L.A.P.D., as well as the virulently racist attitudes of Mark Fuhrman who found key evidence in the case, there was reasonable doubt that the L.A.P.D. might have decided to skip a few steps and pin it on OJ because of his race.

To celebrate OJ getting off (AGAIN!), I spent this morning listening to a shit-ton of OJ da Juiceman, because he’s the fucking shit and the past few weeks of watching the OJ show reminded me he probably didn’t just take his name because he really likes Tropicana. History has certainly absolved Texaco Shawty in a way it didn’t the actual Juice—one went down in history as murderer and a sideshow, while the other is the pioneer of a the trap-Animaniac rap style that’s become a template for many an Atlanta rapper and ATL rap imitators the world over.

I wouldn’t begin to pretend to be some sort of great OJ scholar, but I can definitely say that his track “I Got Work,” off Alaska in Atlanta 2, is an incredibly fun rap song. OJ’s always plentiful energy seems boundless here, and the Metro Boomin’-produced beat is one of the better flips on Bangladesh’s “A Milli” template.

But hey—enough of my yakkin’. Listen to some freakin rap music.

The first famous, like actually famous, person I ever interviewed was David Banner. He’d been one of my favorite rappers all throughout college, and I was so nervous to talk to him that I actually smoked a cigarette while I was on the phone with him to keep myself from freaking out. He was great—notably, he told me that he and T.I. recorded “Rubber Band Man” in the back of a barber shop—and was generally super gracious despite my fanning out all over the place.

What’s interesting about Banner is that a few years back, he developed this insane guilt complex about having made songs like “Play,” which while extremely catchy is pretty brutally misogynistic. In 2010 he released an album called Death of a Pop Star with 9th Wonder, which unlike everything he’d done for the past decade didn’t have anything remotely resembling a hit single on it, but was actually pretty interesting if you gave it a chance. He just put out a new mixtape, titled Before the Box, and it’s really good. It definitely rides the same woke-ass wave as B.o.B.’s new music (which I am pretty sure I am the only person who enjoys), in that it definitely comes off like Banner’s been reading some InfoWars and is pretty sure there’s a secret world government and shit like that.

Anyhoo, these are the things I think about David Banner, and now that you’ve read this far you should listen to “Get Crunk,” which is from Banner’s Crooked Lettaz days and features Pimp C and is like the best song ever.

I don’t know what’s gotten into me man, but lately I can’t stop listening to Kyuss’s Welcome to Sky Valley. I was walking my dog earlier tonight and started skanking like Axl Rose askin’ for some reggae down an abandoned Melrose as me and Nora Ephron (pictured above) were bumping “100 Degrees.” But there’s something about “Gardenia,” maybe the way it just sort of chugs along or the fact that it sort of seems like the lyrics are about having sex with a truck that really does it for me. Anyways, this is a slapper.

I feel like someone could sample and/or rap over a loop from the middle part of this. Or maybe that’s a terrible idea, I don’t know. Either way I’m out, peace bro.