this is brother reade. i stole this picture from some dumb kid. brother reade is the truth. you can recognize that without being a moron about it.

Busta Rhymes – Touch It — Or, the Swizz Beats remix of Daft Punk’s “Technologic” featuring Busta. It’s gooood like Purnell’s Old Folks.

Also, Brother Reade has a new-ish video up on their myspace. I’ve been meaning to post this for a while but Jimmy Jael never sent me a non-myspaced version of the video. It’s worth a look. It’s stylish, all in one shot, and it looks higher budget than it probably is.

I Got It 4 Cheap Volume 2 – Entire Mixtape

Buy the high quality, full version
Skateboard P can actually rap(!?)

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Green Lantern “Mary Jane” Remix

Lemon-Red hates it, but I rather like it.

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Freeway “Come Again”

-e

Posing for an Italian sculptur

And now for something completely different: Shrimper-favorite Joe Buddens is back with a track telling the story of a not-so-typical “typical ‘hood story.” As Icarus has previously pointed out, Buddens’ claim at the end of the track that “this shit happens on a regular basis” is a bit of hyperbole, but the song is still really dope. Jersey City Joe makes classics.

Joe Buddens “3 Sides 2 A Story”

-e

P.S. This was a part of my last post with Kim, but I made it into a separate one to bump that fucking metal video off the screen so it would stop loading up every god damn time I came here… and it didn’t even fucking work. Serg, kill that link, dude!

Sorry, for the lull, but prepare yourself for a busy few weeks. I’ve got a lot of shit I’ve been meaning to post and WILL post over the next few weeks. The Shrimp ain’t finna fall off!

So the rumors were true and Lil Kim’s album “The Naked Truth” did indeed get 5 mics. Well, it’s not like anyone takes The Source too seriously anymore, but the least I can say is “good for her.” After all, rap is still a male dominated art-form and while I think there are certain stylistic reasons why that is (rap is still primarily based on stereotypically masculine traits while, conversely, r&b is primarily based on stereotypically feminine traits), it’s nice to see a female getting some degree of praise. That being said, given the stylistic constituents of rap music, I really don’t see equal representation of the sexes in the game as something that rap should have any interest in striving for, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t some females who aren’t capable of working within the stereotypically masculine expectations of rap music and performing in an effective and interesting manner. I’d be lying if I said I’ve paid a lot of attention to Kim’s career and can’t say I’ve ever bothered to listen to any of her previous albums front-to-back, but her single “Lighters Up” lit a fire underneath my ass that convinced me I needed to sit down with this album and at least give it a gander. So, I did.

First things first: it’s not 5 mics quality. The production is really solid throughout the whole thing and Kim proves herself to be pretty stylistically versatile, doing Jafakin’ with the best of ‘em on the aforementioned “Lighters Up” but also on one of my favorite tracks on the album“Durty,” a song that finds Kim in her familiar (and by now requisite) “I’m a dirty b*tch and proud of it” track. Her lyrics aren’t always of the highest-caliber, but she certainly isn’t unlistenable. And, of course, there are moments of stark honesty that will at least remind you that, yeah, Kim did introduce the complicated po-mo-feminist character to rap music, making vocal her feminist-inversion that found power in being objectified: “Why you frontin’? You know who the best be. I’m the reason why the game so sexy./ The originator./ The trend creator. /Bitch, you dun know, you haffa respeck me.” The vocal samples on the shit are hilarious (in a good way), but Kim steals the show with her slightly off key patois hooks. There’s a solidly “real” and down-home quality to the imperfect inflexions in her voice, and it sounds oh-so-lovely on the track. Truth be told, I’m just a sucker for these lil’ cross-over jafaikin’ joints when they’re done well.

Another stand-out track on the album is the B.I.G. sampling “All Good.” Kim has always had the benefit of being signed, sealed, and delivered by one Christopher Wallace to the world and she’s never been one to hide this fact. Kim seems to see herself as a living extension of the B.I.G. ethos and you ultimately get the sense that almost everything Kim makes is an attempt to stay true to the B.I.G. spirit. So, she spends most of the album distancing herself from her ex-associates-turned-“snitchers” Junior MAFIA and establishing herself as the “in the streets bitch” that B.I.G. knew and loved. There some funny shit on here (“I touch more green than Tiger’s putty“) and some fairly typical “I’m street shit (“At age 14, I was puttin’ in work. At age 16, I was movin’ that work./ Getting’ paid to drive state to state/ smugglin’ wait/ prayin’ I don’t bump into Jake”), but Kim seems to be at her best when she’s not working outside of her boundaries, and this track is no exception. The beat sounds corny on paper with the echoing Biggie vocal sample “It’s all good” opening each bar as that age-old gangsta whistle makes up much of the two note melody, but I think the shit knocks. The drums have a “Criminal Minded” swagger to them as Kim gets loose, dissin’ 50 cent, them Junior MAFIA snitches, and paying respect to her biggest influence and friend. Shit is solid.

Lil’ Kim “All Good”

Lil’ Kim “Durty”

-e

vs

My producer-extraordinaire dude (and soon-to-be-roommate) Scott Matelic has a remix of Radiohead’s “I Will” on Coke Machine Glow for download. Like everything Scott does, it’s great: calculated, somewhat brooding and melancholy, powerful with it’s understated simplicity. Scott also doesn’t push the issue and force the song to be some epic that it’s not (he lets it clock in at under 3 minutes). Great stuff.

Direct link here.

Skull Duggery – Where You From (feat. Silkk and Master P) – Skull Duggery might have only been like the eleventh best rapper in the post-Richmond No Limit camp, but he was the only one to be named after a Steppenwolf album. That has to count for something. Seriously though, Noz at Cocaine Blunts has been killin it with the early-to-mid No Limit for the past week. I was waiting out to see if he’d post this one, my favorite non-Mystikal, non-Mia X, non-”Bout It, Bout It” No Limit track. There’s hardly anything exemplary about this song, aside from its uncharacteristic crunk-ness, just everybody doing what they do best: KLC bringing heat on the boards, Skull bringing that fat-man terroristic tone, Silkk being unobtrusive, and P bringing his familiar, welcome platitudes (the bout it/rowdy “rhyme,”for instance). And the hook, or rather, hooks. Each of the song’s three hooks, all handled by Percy, could have (and probably have) been the driving force for a lesser, if otherwise good, track. Javon, one of my high school friends, used to bark, alternatingly, “I’m a (fill in Louisville neighborhood) nigga so fuck y’all niggas” and “Bitch get awwfmeh, Bitch get awwfmeh” every day in Ms. Hall’s Chemistry class. That was actually kinda annoying. But it was testament to the infectiousness of this combination of hooks.

This song is off Skull’s second album, These Wicked Streets, which is pretty horrible. But, as I recall, his first one had its moments.

Robyn – Konichiwa Bitches – Not much to say about this. I just felt that I needed something to balance out the ferociousness of the last track. You’ll appreciate a Swedish pop star with a Neneh Cherry/JJ FAD/L’Trimm flow doing brag/sex raps over a thumping electro beat. Or maybe you won’t. My opinion: this shit bangs!

To me, the brazenness is endearing, not off-putting

Kanye West – We Major w/ Nas & Really Doe (full version) (mp3) – Yo! This shit bangs! At least for the first four minutes. The last three were more fit for a seperate track called “We Major (Reprise)” but then nobody would hear the “egomaniac” sharing the spotlight with Jon Brion and the other studio musicians. I’ve always suspected that Brion was brought into the fold, not so much to craft music, but to do Diddy to Kanye’s schmaltz, bombast, and understatement knobs, EQ them just right to produce something wholly fresh and signifying in a way that “the soul” and chipmunk voices couldn’t. They won! This one’s all layer upon dissonant layer. The lyrics are all “triumph” but the melody is all “regrets.” The drums are powerful and you feel you’ve heard them before… but never mixed this nearly this low. Funny how a loop can somehow meander. Kanye starts off ostensibly celebrating a litany of intoxications then sobers up real quick talking about the scrippers (again), the hoods all fucked up, and young black nouveau riche ain’t got no direction. Nas admits that he had no idea how to write to this beat. Should it be about the hos or the ice? [...] Rap about big paper or the black man plight? See, these guys are two of the most successful around. But the hook needs reassurance that they are, in fact, major. And if they’re not, is anyone? Wow.

I’m sure everybody else will post about the Paul Wall track (it’s dope!) and the Common track (it’s dope too but isn’t an extensive Gil Scott sample on a Common song like wearing your own band’s shirt to the show?). And the Cam’ron song too (dope but how long will Consequence eat off the genuinely talented’s good will?). But I’m going to listen to “We Major” a few more times before I listen to the rest of Late Registration.

Download like every Wu-Tang-affiliated video ever. My favorite might be the original “Brooklyn Zoo” video that aired like twice before someone realized that the ambitious clip was too hot for Rap City. That scene where Dirt’s Garth Knight burns alive an Asian fireworks vendor — calling him a “fortune cookie mother&%$*$()” while the poor guy pleads, “please no! we are all brothers!” — probably wasn’t a good look to the censors. The replacement video, obviously constructed from scraps, is also available for your compare and contrast pleasure. Check out for the GP Wu “Black On Black Crime” video and the Shabazz the Disciple clips.

It’s always been curious to me how similar Lil’ Kim and Foxy Brown are as rappers. They don’t really sound alike, but their basic understanding of what it means to be a female MC in rap music is remarkably similar and is basically built on the fact that they both overtly use their sexuality as a sense of pride and power. The characters they portray are characters that are strong, sexually experienced, sexually active, sexually comfortable, independent, rich, and—quite often—like giving head as much as they like getting head given to them. I’m not really hear to comment on the political nature of this strain of uber-sexual postmodern feminism and I really can’t say I’m familiar enough with either Foxy or Lil’ Kim’s work to say anything really interesting about the similarities and differences (surely there are some?) between them. I just find it interesting that yet again, these two women find themselves doing something extremely similar in two of their new songs: appropriating a reggae/dancehall aesthetic… and doing it rather well.

In “Come Fly With Me,” Foxy Brown recruits Sizzla to sing a rather uncouth hook, but the results are anything but so. Sizzla is without a doubt one of the most versatile dancehall dj’s today: he can sing a ballad as heartbreakingly beautiful as anything Sanchez has ever done; he can belt out strong, provocative, political roots tunes; or he can spit that raw, chi-chi man, gun-talk shit that still dominates the dancehall clubs stateside (his “Kopa” version is still my favorite from the rhythm LP). Foxy Brown does her typical Foxy thing, kicking sexual lyrics that are anything but subtle (“the na na na taste like rum punch”) in her Brooklyn Jafakin’-flow/Jamaican-flaux ripe with “Pull Ups!” and Patios. The beat is a slow burner that teeters along, feeling more like a slow 86 bpm trudger than the 96 bpm stomper that it actually is (and there’s something really energetic about beats that feel slower than they actually are–it builds a tension that transcribes itself into energy in a way that only music can perform). But, oddly enough, this song doesn’t feel like one of the failed mid-90’s (year, not bpm) attempts at dancehall/hip-hop crossover (i.e Bounty Killer and Mobb Deep, or Bounty Killer and NORE, or Bounty Killer and Jeru). It simply exists as a powerful Caribbean-influenced hip-hop song. Of course, this makes perfect sense given the huge Caribbean population in Brooklyn and given the ever-increasing popularity of Caribbean music amongst all black folk (whether Caribbean or not), but this might be one of the first really successful dancehall/hip-hop tracks of recent memory that feels like a natural marriage as opposed to simply a brief cross-over marketing venture attempting to appeal to more than one audience. And, got damn it, Lil’ Kim has gone ahead and done the same god damn thing… and is just as successful at it.

O-Dub posted Lil’ Kim’s “Lighters Up” earlier this week and wondered whether Lil’ Kim was attempting to take Lauryn’s place with this song. While I can certainly hear the Lauryn Hill similarities, I found myself thinking the same thing that somebody in his comments section was thinking: that this song is more “Welcome to Jamrock” than it is L-Boogie… and I ain’t mad at it AT ALL. Scott Storch comes through with a barreling beat that bumps with it’s heavy percussion and stabbing pianos that don’t really sound too Caribbean, but as soon as Lil’ Kim does her best Damian Marley impression, the song immediately beckons for a “More fiya! More fiya!” chant. Part of what makes this song successful is its unabashed reliance on the summer anthem “Welcome to Jamrock.” The rhythmic pattern that Kim spits is pretty much identical to the flow on “Jamrock” and Kim’s “Welcome to Brooklyn!” wail at the end of the second and third verses makes the connection anything but slight. But while the appropriation sounds somewhat dubious on paper, in performance, it works. Kim sounds comfortable and confident with her Patios inflections, and even the few bars in Spanish that she drops–something that would never have been done if reggaeton wasn’t the genre-of-the-moment–feel natural and effective.

So, what the fuck inspired these two artists to appropriate a very similar style at the same time? To be fair, Foxy Brown has a history of doing Dancehall influenced hip-hop (“Oh Yeah” with Spragga Benz, and the jawn with Shyne that samples Barrington Levy whose name is escaping me) so perhaps it’s not so surprising that she recruited Sizzla and put out this banger. But Lil’ Kim’s experimentation is slightly more surprising, isn’t it? I don’t mean to suggest that either artist is biting the other. In fact, I’m more inclined to think that both Kim and Foxy simply noticed the similarities between rap and dancehall, and didn’t find it uncomfortable to perform these similarities.

I tend to think that we’re simply at a point in hip-hop where black musics are colliding and finding more similarities with each other than they outwardly admit. A few days ago I posted about the unstated similarities between rap and R&B that are performing themselves more and more obviously these days. And, it seems that at least in part, that the success of these two songs (and of the increasing number of hip-hop/dancehall blends and party tracks) is based on the fact that black music(s) are toppling over themselves finding a great deal more in common with each other than differences. This of course isn’t a new realization per ce. Anyone who knows anything about black music knows that there are certain strains and stylistic traditions that can be traced back all the way to Africa. But the seamless combination of these black musics has never been so apparent. The seamlessness is making the connections obvious.

But, I can’t help but wonder if that will somehow preserve these black musics, or whether it will simply allow it to be consumed more easily…and irresponsibly.

Whatever the case, the music is fucking good and I’ll never be mad at that.

– Foxy Brown feat Sizzla Come Fly With Me

– Lil’ Kim Lighters Up

-e

Yummy.

Remember when R&B sucked and to have an R&B singer on your hook was considered “selling out”? I think we can safely say those days have been dead for quite some time… and rightfully so! Hip-hop and R&B have always had much more of an intimate relationship than the true-schoolers of the early 90’s were willing to admit. In retrospect, I think we have to admit that the true-school rejection of the preponderance of tracks that married hip-hop and R&B in the early 90’s was simply a misguided attempt at criticizing the increasing popularity of the genre. These true-school heads were basically frightened by hip-hop’s ever increasing popularity because that strain of hip-hop that was becoming increasingly popular was one that was markedly different from their own brand of hip-hop and—since girls buy a hell of a lot of rap CDs—markedly more marketable. Feeling threatened by the rather obvious lack of mainstream marketability, a lot of these true-school rap folk decided to rail against the more obvious stylistic differences between their true-school, “keep it real” rap and what they considered to be “watered down” commercial shit. And so, one of the most obvious differences between the “true” and the “weak” was that a lot of the stuff that was blowing up had R&B singers on the hooks. So, R&B singers on hooks became “wack” and implied that you were trying to sell out.

Of course, that was just silly scapegoating. After all, people who were lauding supposedly “true” rappers like Smif N Wessun casually ignored that Smif N Wessun recorded the “I Love You” remix with Mary J. Blige (a song that is anything but “wack”). Skip forward a decade or so and you find R&B singers getting some of the hardest beats out. Just to mention a few, there’s last year’s “Only U” by Ashanti with its obese, distorted guitar; Mashonda’s new track “Blackout” with Snoop Dogg and solid production by Swizz Beatz; Amerie’s frantic, rolling and stabbing “One Thing”; Faith Evan’s break-heavy soul ballad “Again”; and so on and so on.

Which brings us to the new princess of the Roc: Teairra Mari. After albums by Bleek and the Young Gunz flopped (albums everyone knew would flop except for Jay-Z), this might be Hov’s only early round Roc success… or at least it should be because this shit is hot. Here I’ve linked two songs that are basically the same formulaic make-up, but they are both knocking tracks that illustrate the familial nature of hip-hop and R&B. The first is Mari’s current single “Make Her Feel Good” that jacks Eric B and Rakim’s classic synth line from “My Melody” and adds a sparse drum line on. The track doesn’t even bother with a bass line; the kicks are all the low end that are needed as Mari belts her little heart out and Hov shows up for a silly little verse(NO HOV ON THE VERSION I’VE LINKED). The second track is “La La” another drum-heavy banger that works because of its rugged miminalism: simple melody, loud drums, clean and full vocals… Oh, and no bass line again. Raw.

Anyway, lemme know what you think of this shit.

– Teairra Mari Make Her Feel Good

– Teairra Mari La La

– Extra: Here’s a link to a low quality version of “No Daddy,” another track from Mari’s album from the Roc website.

-e