As much as To Pimp A Butterfly didn’t really interest me that much — it’s not as complex or artistic as people think, if you listen to a lot of complex and artistic rap music — it’s great to see an ambitious and socially conscious rap record at the top of so many year-end lists instead of, you know, Drake. Also I know a lotta cats were feeling Vince Staples, but I rep Office Max so that one didn’t really do it for me either.
Ka & Preservation :: Days With Dr. Yen Lo
I been rocking with Ka since Grief, and this is the latest capstone on the temple. Bringing behind the boards the legendary Preservation instead of his own beats, it’s got a classic sound that again eschews drums for brushstrokes of jazz, bossa nova, Ali Farka Toure-sounding guitars. As great as the instrumentals on Grief and Gambit, the soundtrack here is lusher and works more directly in counterpoint to the words. “In these parts, get shot in your heart — it ain’t Cupid / One sacred loop, one naked truth, my lane’s suited.” Once again I’m fiending for the instrumental LP too. This is Sketches In Spain except not in Spain but Brownsville.
The record uses The Manchurian Candidate as its jumping off point. The days move in a haze from Day 0 to Day 1125 in no order. It’s a fever dream, a delirium. Yen Lo is the mad scientist of the book/movie, but while Ka alludes to indoctrination, brainwashing, cultural hypnosis, programmed violence, and state-sponsored terror, it’s a motif but not a concept album. Is he linking Dr. Yen Lo with Dr. Yacub or the Tuskegee experiment or MKULTRA? Is he saying young brothers are brainwashed killers, Manchurian Gangstas? I don’t really think so. It’s maybe a sideways allusion. When you’re raised around rage and vengeance / you can change, but in your veins remains major remnants.
“I usually don’t talk about my art,” Ka says, “I just give it to you and you eat it how you eat it.” So don’t look for literalism. On previous joints, Ka compressed and twisted whole epics into couplets. Here he’s reached a level of abstraction — no logos, no shootouts, bare bones of stories — that he’s painting with pointed syllables. Blood, blood, blood with the pen flow.
The voice is still there, the rasp and the pyramid-stacked syllables and compressed rhymes. His voice sounds kinda like LL’s actually. If LL had early on experienced some great tragedy. Like if LL had lost his arm and spent twenty years eating beans out the can. Ka’s often compared to Guru or Rakim, fair cop, but he doesn’t have their swagger. He’s the first ego-less MC; no name-checking Buddhist monks, this is true Zen.
Scorsese called the overhead shots in Taxi Driver ‘sacramental perspective.’ Ka moves from those down to virtuoso tracking shots through subways and past chainlink into elevators crazy wet with piss. It’s an epic of whispered forbearance and suffering. I need more prayer to stay out the crosshair.
Of all the elaborate rituals performed at ancient Egyptian funerals, the most important was the Opening of the Mouth. Symbolically cutting open the corpse’s mouth. It enabled the dead to pass into the afterlife seeing, hearing and breathing, and able to eat to sustain the Ka — the vital spark. That part of the soul that distinguishes the living from the dead. You here in the spirit? You only brung flesh / I keep it primal ’til it’s final, who wanna come test? / I use a mic device to give a slice of life…
Ratking :: 700 Fill
Like I said last year, Ratking is the freshest shit out there right now. Their music pulses with the pure vibrancy of youth, something unusual in rap’s sphere of street weariness and wary posturing. And somehow they create a bridge from hip-hop’s solidly NY past to its global future…you could poplock on cardboard to ‘Steep Tech’ or you could make it rain bitcoins in that Blade Runner club with the robot stripper with the robot snake. ‘Makeitwork’ would rock the Wild Style bandshell or a Panther Moderns oculus rave.
I don’t really get these cats saying Ratking is reviving the ’90s. Nobody made icy, translucent beats like this in the ’90s. Aside from the ethereal sense of a wider world from Hyderabad to Rio to Tokyo, there’s the compression and re-purposing of trap and grime elements that’s transformative and elevating. It can’t be like the ’90s when it so firmly sounds like the ’10s. It’s nostalgic for ’90s puffy coats only because global warming’s putting New Year’s in t-shirts.
The new Wiki solo record, Lil Me, is a pretty great record on some bodega coffee and late night stoop confessions shit. But it doesn’t reach the shimmering transcendence of Ratking-proper, the fractured concrete-and-fiber-optics verbal playgrounds.
SHIRT :: MUSEUM / NIKE ADIDAS RECORDS
Y’all really fucking sleeping on this cat. SHIRT is the best new rapper hands down in a while. You gotta dig into his Soundcloud, site, his old Bandcamp and YouTube to find the gems, but they’re diamonds as big as the Ritz. There’s something in the water in Queens that just springs forth the best goddamn rappers.
SHIRT brings hard-spitting sandpaper flow and a hunger for the mic that’s compelling — it’s heart, it’s raw ambition, it’s ego triumphant ripping through the speakers. He jacks beats with and without producer’s consent and he’s got a great ear — in fact I like those joints more than his RAP MONEY EP where he actually had producer and studio time. Struggle and underground suits his style.
Then there’s the art. He throws up his dot-Mickey in Brownsville. He jacks Philippe Petit. He quotes Brion Gysin: ‘Writing is 50 years behind painting.’ Gysin meant collage and abstraction. Burroughs flipped that in 1959 with cut-ups. But music was 20 years behind writing until ’79 when Herc stepped on the scene.
But SHIRT doesn’t actually rhyme hardly about art; there’s the odd reference to Guggenheim grants or ‘Top of the Whitney.’ He raps pretty much about…rap shit. Polo robes and fly whips, Timbs and herb. It’s all good.
I’ll wait for ‘the modern art rapper,’ who drops bars like ‘Coke so white, Robert Ryman’ or ‘Box in hand like my name was Cornell’ or ‘Dick hard as a Richard Serra / bitch reconsidered her perception of public space’ and finally lets me know what rhymes with Kandinsky. SHIRT is not that rapper, I don’t think. Maybe he will be. Maybe we don’t need that rapper though. SHIRT’s too real to get pretentious, too much doing his own thing.
Thing is, when he did drop “THEORY” — spitting Kenneth Goldsmith — it doesn’t quite work as well as, say “NY TAP WATER.” Maybe because it’s Goldsmith’s theories and not SHIRT’s. Maybe because I’m on the fence whether Goldsmith’s repurposing of texts as his own art is brilliant or bullshit. It’s interesting, but it’s not engaging, aesthetically crafted, honest, raw or heartfelt — all of which are exactly what I love about SHIRT’s shit. It’s got heart.
On the flipside, he’s bringing in the yacht-level swagger of Koons and the gangsta threats of Dada. He knows about art as repurposing, art as re-appropriation, art as statement — what the fuck you think rap music is? Jenny Holzer is just Chuck D on postcards and Richard Prince is just Puffy on Wooster Street.
So there’s those who say SHIRT is trolling with his Nike/Adidas shirts, $250 Soundcloud campaign, shirtfuckedrihanna and fake NY Times article. Word to COST Fucked Madonna. Word to Fluxus. Word to art concrete for the internet age. If you do it downtown it’s art and if you do it in Queens it’s the thirst of a struggle rapper? Fuck outta here son.
Look peoples, SHIRT is too hungry to fizz out. Pay attention and get with him before you gotta pay Sotheby’s prices. This king was raised to go for the crown. He’s standing on top of the Whitney watching for the blimp that says BE FEARFUL OF MEDIOCRITY. Get with the kid. I think it’s time, I think it’s time.
milo :: So The Flies Don’t Come
milo closed out last year with the fuck-around-in-the-studio, freestyle-and-bandcamp (Boyle) and Piles mixtape, then shot back again in May in his scallops hotel alter ego for Plain Speaking. To be honest that one had me go ruh-oh…the raps were pretty much on point as always, but the Casio clock radio beats made me worry milo was about to just keep hoeing the row he’s dug, slowly devolve into a jokey-profound, campus touring, Portlandia guest star, Rap Game Trader Joe’s Maple Syrup Popcorn.
Come September, he dropped the Kenny Segal laced Flies, and cue worldwide acclaim. Milo’s not gonna tread water. He pushed himself forward stylistically, lyrically and musically here, asking more questions than he can answer and creating another journal for the bibliography. The lyrics are still well-compressed and laced with references to Camus and the Hagakure and the Voynich Manuscript and Tekken and stuff like that. But there’s also a barely-suppressed anger and reconsideration of milo’s place in rap and maybe in Amerikkka in general.
He’s still doing his own thing like no one else’s thing. Splitting the difference between the Golden Rectangle and 3/5ths of a man and Schopenhauer’s maxim that we forfeit 3/4s of ourselves to be like other people. He’s still running the math.
Honorable Mention
Earl Sweatshirt :: I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside
The album was OK, but the title completely describes my life, so it gets props for that.
Nine Best Underground Albums of the Year
B. Dolan :: House of Bees Vol. 3 / Kill The Wolf
Dolan came back from a long hiatus with two records that stormed the bunkers, overthrew the moneychangers’ tables and generally knocked fools’ fucking heads together.
billy woods :: Today I Wrote Nothing
woods has been on my year-end lists every year since I started ’em in 2009, and good to see him getting some shine on a lotta others’ this time round. His output’s been prodigious lately with no let up in quality. With most songs clocking in well shy of three minutes, there’s a sense of notebook pages or short poems (the impressionistic ‘Woodhull’ sketch of Bed Stuy healthcare) instead of the novels of previous, but the references still dig deep.
Cornel West Theory :: Coming From The Bottom
Boasting guest-drop cosigns from Chuck D, Mumia, MOVE and others, CWT brings back the uncompromising bombastic political sound of P.E. and X-Clan with loud, gravy-thick beats.
C.S.X.T.C. :: C.S.X.T.C.
After a long hiatus, Raven from Solaris Earth Pipeline drops this solo dojo of hobo rap.
Jel :: Greenball 6
Another dope instrumental LP from the Anticon sphere. Fatter beats than you’d expect, for reals.
Killah Priest :: Planet of the Gods
My faith in the Priest is resolute and unquestionable, but since Heavy Mental he’s rarely able to find the beats to rock upon which to found that church. On this one though he brought down Godz Wrath to provide the right 70mm backdrop of flutes and chants and samples — finally befitting his epic of Mac 10s, sandals, eagles, pyramids, flying saucers, wise elders, Biblical computers, convicts, evil ancient scientists, galactic thrones and chakra points, and that’s just the intro track.
PremRock :: Who Art In Nada
Rap bohemian remixes and offcuts, straight from foggy bridges, greasy spoons and dive bars.
Uncommon Nasa :: Halfway
Nasa’s newest ruminates on what it means to be halfway through your life — what matters, where you come from and where you’re going. You gotta admire the man’s grind and how he pushes himself into new territory with every record.
Words Hurts :: ALKAST:REMIXES
Remix EP that was as good as the originals. On point heaters. Go grab that.
Honorable Mention in the Form of a Rhetorical Question Running Along the Bottom of the Album Cover
Public Enemy :: Man Plans God Laughs
Look peoples, I was born listening to P.E. and I’ll die listening to P.E. I always check their new shit, and their 13th is pretty good for late-epoch-Chuck et al., even if it has a Country & Western joint for no reason I can possibly think of.
The Six Best Rappitty-Rapping Records of the Year*
Guilty Simpson :: Detroit’s Son
Can’t get enough of the D’s sharpest hattori hanzo, and don’t understand why this record hasn’t been on anyone else’s lists this year. It’s his hardest, sharpest, meanest, illest, blessedest work to date, more on point than a box of needles.
Sean Price :: Songs In The Key of Price / About 85,000 Guest Verses
My favorite actors have always been character actors — the guys who come in as weird sidekicks, creep-ass villains, but always make their mark. P was one of the greats and most definitely gone too soon. He was a rapper’s rapper who never turned down a guest verse but always brought his A-game to it, endlessly quotable, with more punchlines than Nintendo’s Mike Tyson: Punch Factory. He got stoopid without ever being ignorant — he slips in more political lines than he gets credit for. P was the illest of the usual roughnecks.
Czarface :: Every Hero Needs A Villain
Inspectah Deck, 7L and Esoteric came back to body you on this one, bringing along Meth, DOOM, GZA, Large Pro and other thugs. Just a good, solid album for all your head-nodding, mad-face-making needs.
Action Bronson :: Mr. Wonderful
The second most notorious Albanian in the tri-state area comes through again. Like every Bronson record, it’s hit and miss on the beat choices, but also solid as his massive gut when he does hit it. Dude has cemented his career, and I now can’t see any haute cuisine reference like ‘scrape a ravioli envelope’ or ‘venison au jus reduction’ without thinking ‘I wonder how Action Bronson would rhyme that with a deviant sexual act?’
Jedi Mind Tricks :: The Thief & The Fallen
If you were ever down with JMT, this is their comeback from Stoupe forgetting how to make beats. Just forget the last 10 or so years happened. If you like that ‘Cypress Hill, but with more beheadings’ sound, this one’s for you.
Your Old Droog :: Kinison EP
Droog is definitely nice with the rhyming of the words, mostly picks good beats, but there’s something too…technical? Something missing, I don’t know if it’s a narrative or sense of character or charisma. I just don’t know who the droogie is somehow. I mean, content-wise Redman is not exactly Virginia Woolf,** but you feel like you know the guy: he’s that cat you got high with in the parking lot that one time or whatever. With Droog I don’t get that. I like the work but I’m not catching feels from it. OK not really selling this, but the EP is solid work — it’s very good, but I feel like I need to see the dude progress and open up next time.
*Fuck arbitrary round numbers and fuck long lists. Like I’m really gonna go peep out all 100 records you recommended. I have five jobs for fuck’s sake.
*If Redman is now inspired to do a three-CD Mr Dalloway concept album, come back and thank me.
Songs of the Year [Mixtapes]
Mouths of Madness :: Listen | Download
Dial In (Get Ya Own) — Black-Tokyo Musik / Iron Rose — Cannibal Ox (feat. DOOM) / Mutate — ialive (feat. Mr. Lif) / Danger — Mr. Moods / Hook Fish Sheep — C.S.X.T.C. / Vietnam Sports Coat — PremRock / Having Too Good of a Time — Uncommon Nasa (feat. Black-Tokyo Musik & Carl Kavorkian) / Chopa Sidi — Basmala / Sleep — billy woods / Steep Tech — Ratking (feat. Despot & Princess Nokia) / Galapaghost — Juan Deuce & Falside / Typecast — Cavanaugh (Open Mike Eagle & Serengeti) (feat. P.O.S., Hemlock Ernst & Busdriver) / Return of the Angst — Words Hurts (feat. Zilla Rocca) / Santeria — Kool A.D. / Arrows — Homeboy Sandman / An Encyclopedia — milo / Brooklyn Freestyle — Russ / Day 1125 — Dr. Yen Lo / Quantum Spirit of Creation — Killah Priest / No Records Sold — SHIRT
The Usual Roughnecks :: Listen | Download
Blacka — Blackalicious / World Premier — Czarface (feat. Large Professor) / Man Plans God Laughs — Public Enemy / Razor Blade Rhyme — A-F-R-O / The History of Atlantis — B. Dolan / Fractured — Guilty Simpson (feat. Fat Ray) / Organ Donor — SHIRT / Garbanzo Beans/4 No Reason — Sean Price / Rubble Kings (Dynamite On The Street) — Run The Jewels / Paris Texas — Jel & Odd Nosdam / Yesman Shit — Apollo Brown (feat. Sean Price & REKS) / Unlimited Metro Card — Your Old Droog & Statik Selektah / Falconry — Action Bronson (feat. Meyhem Lauren & Big Body Bes) / Bodega! — Bodega Bamz & Statik Selektah / Dooo It! (Remix) — R.A. The Rugged Man / Hell’s Messenger — Jedi Mind Tricks / I’ll Die For This Shit — The Cornel West Theory (feat. Queen Helene of Les Nubians) / Kirk Fuckin’ Douglas — The Alchemist
