Hip-Hop 2012

D

DannyL

Wild Horses
This is a month or two old, but a really decent piece of journalism. Puts the whole drill thing in a wider context that is both depressing (unprecedented levels of homicide,uneducated ADHD lunacy) and kinda heartening (lost kid making money and sticking two fingers up at everyone). I kept on thinking of a young John Lydon when I was reading about Chief Keef.

http://www.thefader.com/2012/08/21/chief-keef-lost-boys/
 
C

CrowleyHead

Well-known member
... *cough* Sooooo

Kendrick LP?

Brilliant? Not so much? I heard it once and fucking loved it, but I'm willing to hear challengers too.
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I think it's brilliant. I wonder if this is because I've been struggling to find things to write about for The Wire which really inspire me and this album is like manna from heaven... But honestly I listen to this album from start to finish and I'm just bowled over by it. It does have its weak points (what doesn't?) - the track with Drake doesn't seem to fit the concept (but OTOH its been going around in my head all day), I think the Pharrell beat (the Roy Ayers sample) is fairly boring... and so on. I think on a track-by-track basis its easy to pick holes in it, but as a complete album it just works extraordinarily well (like ''XXX'' last year). A lot of people have said this but there are tracks on there which sound so much more average out of context.

The standout track for me is ''Sing About Me'', I just find it so compelling and moving. Like ''Opposites Attract'' off O.D. I love the sort of subliminal 90's rap feel to it, the jazzy sample and the lyricism of it...

I need to hear ''Reloaded'' by Marciano cos I've recently got into ''Marcberg'' quite a bit but ''good Kid'' is probably my favourite rap album of the year.
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
p.s. I respect his decision to exclude tracks that didn't fit his vision but I wish ''Cartoons and Cereal'' had made it on there, would have been the crowning glory and Gunplay is such an amazing rapper he deserves to be commemorated on what will possibly be looked back on as a classic (not saying it deserves this but it must be a possibility).

Who would have thought a crew like Black Hippy would come out of Compton? Its funny to me that this album has come out on Aftermath, since it basically deconstructs the whole gangsta-rap myth that Dre has been trading on since time immemorial. Not to attack the classic status of ''The Chronic'', ''2001'', ''Doggystyle'' etc. I think its just very ironic for this to be on Dre's label, with Dre on it, sounding a bit like a dinosaur.

I wouldn't be surprised if Dre had a hand in mixing this down, though, it sounds so crisp. Listening to 'mad city' got me wondering how 808 Mafia's beats might sound if Dre waved his sonic wand over them.
 
C

CrowleyHead

Well-known member
On the subject of Reese, what D. Drake never seems to talk about, when discussing GBE, is the weird influence of Soulja over this stuff. Call me crazy, but "Savage" fits perfectly in the SODMG style.

On Kendrick, I wanna discuss a lot, but I'm about to sleep. Corpsey... I gotta ask, is your favorite part of "Sing" the part where Kendrick 'dies'?
 
R

rubberdingyrapids

Well-known member
Corpsey said:
I wouldn't be surprised if Dre had a hand in mixing this down, though, it sounds so crisp. Listening to 'mad city' got me wondering how 808 Mafia's beats might sound if Dre waved his sonic wand over them.
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dre should just quit producing at this point (rapping too) and become an engineer/mixer for hire.
 
C

CrowleyHead

Well-known member
e/y said:
http://www.complex.com/music/2012/1...rl-at-a-house-party-in-newly-revealed-footage
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Congratulations, a drug dealer who may/may not have murdered a teenager is also able to beat on a woman. Your ability to point out the moral conundrums of Lil Reese is duly noted. You have saved this thread from throwing praise on an OBVIOUSLY GHOSTWRITTEN BY KEEF record.

@rubberdingyrapids; He's actually been doing this for a while now. Dre basically takes 'ghost productions' from people like Hi-Tek, Quik, Focus, and additional people, and recrafts them to sound sonically better. Like, Cool & Dre once said how he took their beat for The Game's "Hate It Or Love It" and made it x100 better.

I also love Dre as a rap voice. Obviously he gets written for people by others, but his voice is perfect. Just less of Eminem doing that stuff for him, I think his best in a while has been this "Compton" verse.

I also already abstractly ranted about the brilliance of an anti-Liquor Radio Single to Corpsey, but I'm a miserable straight-edge white teen in America, so go figure that.
 
e/y

e/y

Well-known member
What the fuck Crowly?

I've been enjoying the Lil Reese tape for a while, but then I saw that video yesterday and I can't anymore. I thought it was important enough to mention it in this thread, because you know, it's kind of a big deal. And YES, I know that I derived enjoyment from his music which is grounded in the violence that surrounds him IRL and I feel conflicted about that too, but I think there's a difference between gun and drug talk (that may be embellished) and a video of a rapper whose music I enjoy beating the shit out of a woman. I wasn't chiding mistresloan for liking the track.

Sorry if it annoyed you.
 
C

CrowleyHead

Well-known member
Honestly, I'd appreciate it more if you'd made more of a stance like saying "I can't fuck w/ the GBE kids anymore, thanks to this Reese video". I'll be quite honest, I had a real personal crisis where I've been turning so many kids onto Keef and praising him, and then when the suspected murder occurred, and I realized that blogs were single-handedly giving EVIDENCE FOR MOTIVE for possible police investigations of Keef, Reese and those kids as SUSPECTS, I was in an utter panic of morality. Both out of guilt for praising these kids, and helping in the hype machine that made the rap world SO INTENSELY FOCUSED on them.

I'm not saying you're wrong for doing that, but, be a little more verbose than "Oh, you like Reese? Here's a video of him committing physical abuse on a woman."
 
M

mistersloane

heavy heavy monster sound
S'ok. I knew about that when I posted the track.

Being really honest, and without irony, it turns me on listening to murderers. Same goes for Gucci. I'm getting a visceral thrill from it that's, I think, unparalleled in my long and varied listening history.

Watching that video didn't change my opinion of "him" at all. I got the intended response to watching the video.

Then I went back and listened to his tape again. Knowing that didn't change how I heard the music, and didn't alter what I thought about, specifically, that track, which I think is fucking mindblowing.

My personal problem/thoughts on it was how I thought murder was somehow cooler, more morally OK, than beating women, and I'm still thinking about that.
 
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E

Esp

Well-known member
CrowleyHead said:
@rubberdingyrapids; He's actually been doing this for a while now. Dre basically takes 'ghost productions' from people like Hi-Tek, Quik, Focus, and additional people, and recrafts them to sound sonically better. Like, Cool & Dre once said how he took their beat for The Game's "Hate It Or Love It" and made it x100 better.

I also love Dre as a rap voice. Obviously he gets written for people by others, but his voice is perfect. Just less of Eminem doing that stuff for him, I think his best in a while has been this "Compton" verse.
Click to expand...

I get the impression that Dre's status plays a part though - he probably made 'Hate it or Love It' sound that bit cleaner so it punched through better on radio. Im sure if he'd been a no-name engineer then Cool and Dre wouldnt have been like 'damn this mix has transformed the song, we need to give this guy a credit'.

He is an exceptional producer primarily (although possibly creatively exhausted at this point). Its become a bit of a theme to concentrate on Dre's mixing ability but he's clearly more of a Quincy Jones than a Bob Power. Hip Hop lexicon doesnt demarcate studio roles very well - Dre tends to get called a 'super producer' which kind of gets at what he does but not fully.

Im surprised Dre hasnt tried to go 'beyond' Hip Hop and score a big-budget Hollywood film or something like that. I never really think of Dre as being a purist but I cant really see a point in his discography where he's gone 'now Im gonna get that pop money'.
 
C

CrowleyHead

Well-known member
I think the big deal is that Dre is... And I can't stress this enough, he lives off of his reputation. We forget, but for a long time after The Chronic, he was already considered washed-up. The Firm had proven to be a colossal failure, he didn't want to produce whole albums for anyone else, and was drifting into R&B to not as interesting results... If it wasn't for "2001" and being tied in with the Eminem-hype machine (Because that was Iovine's brainchild, not Dre's as so often described lovingly), Dre would've been considered a Brian Wilson of rap; a man who's reach exceeded his grasp.

Since then, he's made perfectly... competent, music. Nothing too exciting, but as we all knew, Alex da Kid did "I Need A Doctor", Timbaland did "Kush", and any other new songs, is SOMEONE else. Dre is caught between trying to live up to his legacy, and then still managing to improve on the old model. It's an issue when there's so much... behind the scenes, efforts.

Take this for example, this demo? PERFECT. And then later, they gave Dre a shitty Eminem verse to replace T.I's perfectly crafted ghost-verse (which comes in after halfway through so just errr, cut that off quick.) I LOVE when rappers pretend to be Dre, btw. It's an interesting task, to pretend to be someone else who pretends to be someone..

<iframe width="480" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/gmDe6Cu1nJo" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
 
e/y

e/y

Well-known member
CrowleyHead said:
I'm not saying you're wrong for doing that, but, be a little more verbose than "Oh, you like Reese? Here's a video of him committing physical abuse on a woman."
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You're right, I shouldn't have just posted the link. I honestly didn't mean it in that way, but I can definitely see how it comes across like that.
 
S

sgn

Well-known member
Corpsey said:
p.s. I respect his decision to exclude tracks that didn't fit his vision but I wish ''Cartoons and Cereal'' had made it on there, would have been the crowning glory and Gunplay is such an amazing rapper he deserves to be commemorated on what will possibly be looked back on as a classic (not saying it deserves this but it must be a possibility).
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Read an interview somewhere where Kendrick mentions he couldn't put that track on the album due to some issues with clearing a sample. (edit: here - http://www.complex.com/music/2012/10/the-making-of-kendrick-lamars-good-kid-maad-city/cartoonscereal)

Also, I'm firmly in the "album is brilliant" camp.
 
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