If 2012 was the year that “Drill (music genre)” ran rampant, snatching up all eyes towards Chicago as the next “big thing” in rap, then 2014 feels like the hangover. The Chicago youths moved to Bop and it’s sonic and emotional innocence, where now most Drill stars have spent their chips devoid of ideas, if they ever had any to begin with. Curiously enough, however, only two Drill acts appear to have delivered official debut albums. One is obviously enough Chief Keef, the poster boy of Chicago rap for the mainstream world, and the other is the least likely act to follow: Lil Mouse.
Since his viral hit “Get Smoked,” Mouse has remained a key figure despite a comparatively limited output. Naturally the sight of prepubescent youth backed by goons discussing the same street shit of his older peers seemed like simple “shock factor.” Yet Lil Mouse continued to collaborate with figures both in and out the Chicago scene with the release of his debut Michael Mouse Myers to show this wasn’t all merely a trend hopping cash-in attempt.
Lil Mouse is no longer worth noticing for his actual baby-face, but now instead it’s his skill set. While “Get Smoked” at best is a noxious ear-worm, Mouse Myers’ intro is an absolute thunderstorm. Deploying dense flows and a technique that would leave your average Tech N9ne fan moderately impressed given the source, Mouse easily surpasses his idol Lil Durk’s detached cold Meek Mill impersonations. One has to marvel at intensity from a rapper, whose career could’ve easily been mistake for a cheap gimmick a year ago.
But after the remix of “My Team” from last year that featured Durk an especially jubilant Young Scooter, the album’s patchiness is revealed. Dull hooks, generic flows borrowed from Keef or Durk, gaudy singers take and beats that range from startlingly forward (“She Going”) to woefully generic (“Came Up”), unfortunately take up the rest of the album. It’s a highly professional effort, working hard to establish him as a serious rapper, but it’s incredibly undercooked and just plainly lacking in presence and quality.
One’s expectations for someone of Lil’ Mouse’s age and stature in his scene might be dreaming the impossible dream. But the more discouraging matter is the severity of the gaps between his highs and lows. Lil Mouse has the potential, if he truly dedicates himself, to make himself into his generation’s Lil Wayne (something Dewayne might’ve recognized himself, given the remix of “Get Smoked” served as a distant acknowledgment of the other’s significance). Unfortunately he also has the ability to prove skeptics right and remain a Worldstar-casualty. And with the clock starting to wind down on his niche, Lil Mouse has to decide how to evolve and age gracefully into a rapper to watch.
Despite its long rap history, Chicago has recently experienced a youthful surge of emcees that are still forming into their musical identities. Katie Got Bandz is the queen of drill with the ability to energize a party, Mikey Dollaz is the guy who sometimes sounds slightly disinterested but can really turn up the sinister on the most melodramatic of beats, Tink is the dual rapping and singing threat who is always negotiating the divide between tough and tender, and King Louie is rapper who happens have an ear for production that helps define a city’s sonic scene. While a number of other rappers are still carving out their space, this generation of Chicago rap have proved themselves to be worthwhile additions to the Chicago rap canon regardless of their age.
Dreezy’s Schizo makes the point that Dreezy is the rapper’s rapper, a MC with impeccable flow and dizzying bars. While the current preference for “femcees” seems to lean towards those good at both singing and rapping—Nicki Minaj, Angel Haze, Azealia Banks, even Tink—Dreezy’s moments of shine are when she’s focused on rapping.
This comes across very plainly in the up-and-down quality of the mixtape. Dreezy gives acceptable efforts on sung choruses, but her most memorable hooks remain the rap ones. “Break a Band,” her late 2012 collaboration with Mikey Dollaz shows up here towards the end of the tape, as the repetition of “I break a band” rockets off into space. Elsewhere, her emphatic “ain’t for none!” and the zooms of “zero” are ready-made for rocking back and fist-pumping forth. It’s much better than the listless, auto tune reliant fare of “Lonely,” “Bad Habit” and “Truth Hurts,” which truly drag in their sung bits. Her vocal limitations drag down the songwriting and lyricism during these parts, but there are popping moments in the rap bits before being dragged down to earth by their generic hooks.
On the other hand, Dreezy emerges as a full-blown artist when she’s rapping. From the impressive display on “Break A Band,” Dreezy’s taken time to try different flows with her voice, all at the same time improving the variety of subject material and thematic content. She snarls on “All the Time,” forcefully spitting out swagger, but can still slow up with “Mind Games,” a surprisingly tender track about an aloof boy that has Dreezy changing up her flow and delivery with total ease. “Heard It All” is generically silly during the sung hook, but the verses are great, with really fantastic moments including using the double meaning of “under cover” and a slew of ad-libs brimming with personality like “duh,” “nope,” and “yaaaaaa.”
The most successful attempt at branching out is “Dreamer Pt. 2,” which explores a different subject without feeling false to Dreezy as a whole. Turning inwards to explore herself, it’s the inspirational rap song that Angel Haze wishes she could have had on Dirty Gold, using her personal goals, aspirations, and details as a vehicle to tell a narrative about her macro environment. Dreezy rounds her story with vividly specific imagery of herself (“blue jeans, Jordans, kinda cute but can still spit mean”), plainly articulating the problems she faces as a female rapper without essentializing them (“they say women don’t make it unless they on their knees so I got down on my knees, started praying, god please”), while at the same time grounding herself at the place she’s called home (“I put my dad to sleep next to a Bible”).
Chicago, and no other city, is what gives these rappers such strong material to take with them into the recording booth. They understand the constant negotiation within the city’s textured hip hop scene much better than any web documentary about “Chiraq.” Dreezy drops specific local references to Lil Kemo and boppin’, Stack or Starve, and Harold’s Chicken on “Zero” showing that these kids might just be figuring out who they are, but they’re doing a hell of a better job than the adults
Chicago’s rap scene doesn’t have a dearth of voices. The black kid dealing with life on the street and trying to find themselves in the world before they can legally sip a beer isn’t underrepresented within this musical community. In a way this is a great thing to champion because hearing a black youth community, especially one that has its own fair share of female voices, given a chance to talk their own shit isn’t a novelty, it’s vital. But what seems so necessary one year can becomes uninteresting once the same kids, fail to know what to say once the spotlight remains on their eyes. Welcome to Fazoland from Lil Herb unfortunately wilts under this type of harsh scrutiny put on it.
The typical Drill tropes of guns, gang loyalty and expensive clothes aren’t uninteresting, see: Z Money, Sicko Mob and well entirety of Chief Keef’s discography. Lil Herb has seen praise for his rap ability despite his lack of dynamism from those other acts. And it certainly isn’t his rap ability that’s holding him back, because Chance the Rapper, a talented lyrist, portrayed a Chicago that hears Chief Keef on the radio and sees kids bopping on the same street. Herb’s lyricism though rings hollow, and he doesn’t has his partner Lil Bibby’s bellowing voice to help his Drill shit-talk more magnetic, if not at least more tolerable. So, when local stars like Lil Durk, King L and Lil Reese appear on the tape, their personas and style immediately trump Herb’s wordy gunplay.
Though Herb finds introspection on a track like “Mamma Im Sorry,” it doesn’t counter or even complicate the roteness that bogs down Fazoland. There are a few glimpses into Herb whether as a rapper or person; instead most of the tape is empty posturing that his Chicago bros have already done better. Even Lil Reese, whose rapping ability is well worth questioning, just saying “you a would’ve / could’ve / should’ve nigga” on “On My Soul” offers an aggravated taunt that trumps the rest of the song even when Herb is given more bars to perform. Lil Herb has a lot of words to say about his hometown of Chicago, but together they amount to so little.
North Carolina was in the 60s this weekend and to my joy I worked inside my school’s library during this unseasonably warm February weekend. But to make up for the lack of sun rays and afternoon OG bud lights—no lime-a-ritas over here—I kept listening to DJ Moondawg’s We Invented the Bop mixtape. For impressive Youtube diving ability check out Meaghan Garvey’s review of the tape on Pitchfork and for further reportage on the scene read this Chicago Reader piece by Leor Galil. Personally I just wanted to give a little listening advice for anyone whose already been enjoying the tape.
Throw the tape on “shuffle.” The mixtape opener of “Fiesta” by Sicko Mobb should remain the opening track, because, even though it might be old, looping about four different impossibly catchy melodies mixed with some auto-tuned singing is pretty much how all mixes should begin and especially for a style of music called “Bop.” The actual sequencing of the mixtape is fairly strong, but unsurprisingly familiarity forms on the 25th and 26th go through of the same set-list. And considering most of these tracks are either instruction dance songs or explicit party starting anthems keeping the order loose prevents that particular déjà-vu feeling; will the next song be the synchronized “Dlow Shuffle” or the overly joyful “Killin It” or chantable “One Night?”
Anyway the weather this week at least in North Carolina is mostly in the mid-50s, so maybe not exactly premature-spring party weather. But considering these songs come from the comparatively frozen-over tundra of Chicago. That shouldn’t be an excuse not to Bop to the Right, Bop to the Right, Bop to the Left, Bop to the Left, Kemo Step, Kemo Step and Kemo Step.
Written by Matthew Ramirez (taking a break from @theredbackpack)
It’s a long and winding road for art to endure: first it must withstand scrutiny, deflect the naysayers, stand strong when the fickle fall away, remain loyal to the apologists and those who stick with it through tumultuous times, quietly lurk when other things happen, and when it’s time for reflection, or when the mood hits, it should be there, sounding as great as the first time you heard it. It would seem these “___turns 10/15/20” anniversary opportunities are a time for this kind of reflection but to do this with an album as monumental as The College Dropout is redundant: the album never really went away did it? (And, uh, Kanye didn’t either.)
The time and emotional distance of an arbitrary date, February 2004, has no way of helping me think about or understand this album. It’s great, obviously: it was great then, great now, and most of the complaints about it when it first released seem so quaint and stupid. (WHAT? RAPPERS HIRE SONGWRITERS SOMETIMES?!)
But what’s the point of regurgitating that content? Every possible verifiable, objective fact on the album is lurking somewhere on either Wikipedia or AllMusic. And really, when young guys are writing “20TH ANNIVERSARY OF ENTER THE WU-TANG” pieces it’s not as if they’re drawing on personal history there, because I was four in 1993 and that’s probably older than most people now writing professionally. It places an album in a false context, re-parsing the past to adjust to our current framework, which is exactly the wrong thing to do when writing about any kind of history from music to sports to politics.
I did not know who Kanye West was before 2004. A thing that gets overlooked by a lot of people, especially those who are older than this generation, is rap was always there for us. Especially if you came of age at the turn of the century, when it was at its absolute commercial peak, from Puff Daddy to Jay-Z to Kanye to Lil Jon to Lil Wayne, those years of peak adolescent-through-teenager times. The idea of hip-hop as anything but a constant on the musical landscape is foreign and unknowable. Sometimes people pull that trump card of saying “But when did you really start listening to rap?” on the internet and the answer is uh, whenever the first time it was I turned on a radio. You’re not my age and ignorant of rap as a dominant cultural force unless it’s by choice or you didn’t grow up in America or weren’t allowed to listen to the radio by your parents.
So I didn’t know who Kanye was in 2004 because I took rap for granted in 2004 and taking it for granted entails a certain ignorance on the inner workings of something you assume is permanent. Even when I guess he broke through the mainstream via Jay-Z’s Blueprint in 2001, I cut my Jay-Z teeth on Hard Knock Life, so I didn’t internalize the one Jay-Z record everyone loves like that. Surely the influx of “chipmunk soul” songs on the radio in 2003-2004 were recognizable, but it’s not like I was checking for who produced them. I guess I heard or read his name at some point before then but in 2002 I made a conscious effort to “reject” pop music which meant Soulseek-ing and Kazaa-ing every album by the Replacements and attempting to get into “alternative” rap (Rhymesayers, Def Jux, Rawkus, a.k.a. the usual suspects) which usually just made my head hurt.
Thematically appropriately enough, I didn’t listen to The College Dropout until the first oldest cousin in the family graduated from college, May 2004: a good three whole months after the release date, which is telling of how people really thought about release dates in those prehistoric times. I was in my brother’s car and it’s a long drive from where we live to the University of Houston and I remember having this feeling about music you don’t get too often: “Music can do this?” The skits about the uselessness of higher education were catnip to a budding ninth-grader like myself. I have very few musical memories quite as vivid as this one: hearing a transmission from the other side, an older, wiser, but still brash and coarse side, a window into an experience unlike mine but seemed like something about which I wanted to know more. And in this way I had an epiphany that was certainly not new to anyone, say, 25 in 2004 as opposed to 15 in 2004, but still: music can have a message like this? Something so anarchic and rebellious and insightful and it sounds like music they play on the radio? From that moment in that Jetta on, nothing truly was the same.
Know how explaining a joke ruins the joke? It feels like interpreting a work’s message or theme ruins it fore. Analysis is fine; illuminating subtext or inferring things from context is fine too; but extended interpretations usually make my eyes glaze over and I forget what I read as soon as I’m done reading it. In a way that went beyond the easily-identifiable lines and songs that separated Kanye from traditionally “street” rappers or the conscious/underground/experimental rappers my brain objected to or the rappers I was mostly uninterested in on the radio/MTV at the time, Kanye was a relatable person on record.
I’m sure if you “were there, man” the line about having a Benz and a backpack was revelatory but when you’re young how I was young you just accept everything, like “a Benz and a backpack why is that weird” and since I was coming out of a punk phase where I internalized most of the music Ian Mackaye put to tape hearing socially-aware lines like “drug dealer buy Jordans/crackhead buy crack/and the white man get paid off of all that” made perfect sense. In contrast to what will probably be the main narrative of these “College Dropout Turns Ten” pieces, all the ways Kanye was new and revolutionary and a breath of fresh air and completely turned a new chapter on rap music, while not exactly lost on young listeners, was taken for granted by young listeners. Suddenly you didn’t have to choose only between the diminishing returns of Ja Rule or Puff Daddy, because now there was that stuff and then here was this new guy in a bear suit and all of it coexisted.
But still even when you grow up on rap there are palpable differences when certain artists/songs/albums hit. Hearing a rapper talk about working at The Gap felt (and still feels) weird, because this was when Gap commercials were still events (a comparable status now would be American Apparel controversies) and it’s like “can’t believe this rapper worked at that place” but at the same time he was saying he’d assault the manager and steal from the register so what young teenager doesn’t just automatically root for that kind of behavior? The small but striking ways Kanye played all over the field were right in front of you.
What about the album anyway? It hasn’t aged at all. To wit, though: “All Falls Down” is probably forever my favorite Kanye song, I have always thought “Jesus Walks” was overwrought, I think the skits are great and I don’t get in general why people hate rap skits because skits are as essential to rap album tropes as intros, outros, goofy minute-long jams and all that stuff, I can barely recall “Through the Wire” having a radio/MTV moment but I know “Slow Jamz” was everywhere, when I was feeling hopeless and horrible and depressed at the start of college the “School Spirit” line about “everything I want/I gotta wait a year” was “OOF” too real, etc, etc. The College Dropout is one of those albums that is universally loved but I find myself disagreeing with people over the weirdest things about it. Where did this narrative of “Last Call” and “Breathe In Breathe Out” being disliked come from? How can you call yourself a Kanye fan and not want to live through his eight-minute origin story that ends the album? That it allows itself such unique and personal readings is undeniably one of its greatest qualities. Surely someone somewhere didn’t even read this far because they X’ed this browser out with rage when I said “Jesus Walks” was overwrought. It is, though. It is a great beat and a great concept waiting to be a great song.
Kanye is so good at talking about himself and expressing his views through his music that to inflict, impose and project certain readings onto him is overkill, no matter how well-intentioned and more or less “accurate.” This is not to say analysis is beneath him, but rather when an artist spends so much of his time telling you about one thing the critic shouldn’t go then talk about that one thing forever. Go dig deeper, to really hear what an artist is saying.
Four years ago I heard the perfect rap song: fall 2010 was a low point, I didn’t have a car or a job or a girl to text and was struggling through my senior year and the only thing I had to look forward to that semester was the release of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (Twitter was nary a twinkle in my eye and I was so blessedly ignorant of the blogosphere). I forget how much of a bubble it is to be in college: I feel like I didn’t even know about the Runaway movie until the weekend it premiered on MTV. It floored me. So I went back to The College Dropout almost immediately after it ended. I’m doing rap hands in my dorm room and rapping at no one because I lived by myself and then the breakdown happens during “The New Workout Plan” and I screamed. Yelled. Screeched. I FORGOT THIS SONG DOES THIS. This is a loosely conceptual album about what can happen when you walk away from higher education (and good lord Yeezus almighty did I feel that emotion that year) and most of those songs were second nature to me but somehow Kanye found the time to throw in an interlude that is literally him guiding a workout routine.
The College Dropout is music that does things, and moves people, and “The New Workout Plan” is literally the most black-and-white example of this instructive music. This was music that could actively do, not show, tell, preach, pander, vibe, meander, linger, proselytize, get lost in itself, wallow, overreach, slump—it was doing music, it was active, alive, vital, reassuring, motivating, it put blood in the veins and got you to pay attention. It readjusted the narrative on pop music, how it’s always kind of trying to get you to do something: dance, sing, yell, move, make love, but it’s at its most sublime when it all feels natural, like the music a person creates comes from a real place inside them that wants you to do those things, the purest distillation of a shared desire that unites people trying to do better. Kanye is so relentlessly generous and giving through his music and that’s always overlooked. It wasn’t just he made great rap music, but he made music that empowered you, it made you feel like you could’ve made it, while at the same time operating at a level that was clearly out of an amateur’s reach. The most powerful form of generosity or charity is when the giver empowers their subject. The College Dropout does that wonderfully.
And I guess part of the point of these types of articles should be at least an attempt at grounding it in a real-world-influence analysis: what the album did was re-focus rap into an auteuristic genre, where people made names for themselves as producers, or rappers who emphatically produced their own music, or stressed their MySpace popularity, or ringtone hits, or other mid-of-the-decade phenomena—it encouraged them to be themselves, focusing less on the collaborative nature of the genre that made it so unique for so long. And while at the same time (the years 2003-2006 blur together for me) snap music and other regional waves were in many ways the complete opposite of the high-minded Album Oriented Rap aims of College Dropout, the philosophy was the same: they can’t stop me from rapping, can they?
Not even rap’s most recent messiah, Kendrick Lamar, who is a more serious, writerly, and introspective rapper while adamantly lacking the bone in his body that can make him write pop hits like “Slow Jamz,” gave what Kanye gave when Kendrick dropped his five-star album. After spending a lot of time with College Dropout in the weeks leading up to this anniversary, it dawned on me the most recent successor of this style is Chance the Rapper, another Chicago artist. This is a guy who takes Kanye for granted because he’s been that huge for that long. When Chance stops Acid Rap dead in the middle for a churchy, Gospel sing-along interlude, it’s the praise-song version of Kanye as an instructor of an exercise class with an Auto-Tuned megaphone. These are albums and artists that do, that give, not just through catchy songs but the motivation behind it: uniting listeners, making them aware this is a real-life person behind the other side of the speakers, one with flaws and contradictions that make them interesting from every angle.
The extent of Kanye’s reach goes way past The College Dropout era, and even the music itself and more the Kanye as a celebrity, personality, cultural figure. But it was still the music that got him there in the first place. Sometimes it feels like critics want to look at a person or an album as a neat, tidy little summation of influences, pressure, messages. But sometimes an artist does that work for you, the music does something intangible, where to talk about the influences and what the music means is redundant because it’s all there in the content. (Again: “Last Call!” And “Family Business!” Two songs about Kanye’s struggle, even if one is not about him at all, but through his storytelling his lens is as important as the narrative.) Undoubtedly these anniversary pieces contain good writing, but sometimes reading about what an album means or the mundane details of how it came together underwhelm and overlook the accomplishment of the thing in the first place. Don’t forget what happens when you drop Yeezy in a crowded room or listen to it all by yourself through headphones. With 20/20 hindsight we can say we saw it coming; his talent proved itself; this album changed everything; release dates are destiny; hype is king; here’s what this albums means to me; here’s what he did; here’s how and when and where and why he did it. And then we’ll overlook the irony of being self-conscious while he was the first to admit it.
Winter’s Diary 2 delves primarily into the R&B side of Tink’s rapper/R&B singer one-two punch. It simultaneously puts together the strongest, most cohesive statement on Tink while exploring a variety of R&B styles and sounds. As the title suggests, the project is all about reflection, a youthful rejection of the notion that the kids are only interested in living in the moment. At the same time, the album flits between quiet and minimal twinkly love songs (“Lullaby”), desperate, lonely yearning set over beats and a couple guitar chords (“Treat Me Like Somebody”), chiptune soul sampling (“Your Secrets”), a skip-hopping track that sounds like it could have been a Bruno Mars track at some point, but better (“Money Ova Everything”), and a weird echoing chamber beat that is definitely collaborators Future Brown rubbing off (“The Confession”).
“Dirty Slang” unlike other Chicago bop jams is a flirty but private party for Tink and her country boy. It’s funny that Rockie Diamonds (from Minnesota aka not a true country boy) is featured here, but he drawls on long enough to effectively play the country boy showing a mutual admiration for the city gal. Tink sounds absolutely giddy when thinking about him, letting the “you” in “put my hands on you” run off into day-dreamy eternity. Her fascination with his slang, his accent, his voice is sweet because she seems to lose the ability for language herself, with infinite runs and cooing during the bridge. All this is set over a twinkle. Of course; it’s appropriate for the starry eyes.
Ebone Hoodrich – Why U Lyin (Prod. by Chase Davis) (2012)
With MTV in town to shoot throughout the city and throw two separate shows, this week has been pretty crazy for Chicago rap; King Louie announced through a Source interview that he had signed 2 or 3 mo. ago to Sony/Epic, dropped the “Val Venis” track he’d threatened a few months back, and more than a few other artists dropped some must-downloads as well.
Since The Martorialist recently showed some love to somanyshrimp fav King Louie, I thought I’d mention that one of my favorite things about his posts — something I’ve only noticed J-Zone really talk about — has been his emphasis on one of the important & often-forgotten aspects of rap music’s appeal to me as a young one: frank talk about sex & other forbidden / confusing aspects of adulthood.
As a kid/teen, you’re always grasping at context, because the world often seems like a confusing place, so I think one of hip-hop’s most visceral and attractive features is its blatant honesty and disdain for decorum. In that spirit, I present to the world a song better than any released this past Monday — and yes, that includes ASAP Rocky, for fucks sake — with Bo Deal’s “Safe Sex.”
Produced by Don Lee Exlusivez, the beat makes 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.” seem soft as baby powder but retains its tropical flavor. This gives Bo Deal’s Chicago Code 2 tape a sense of needed diversity — always an issue on Brick Squad releases. The track is a next-level gender reversal of the cliche “I Luh Her“-type joints that find dudes ducking fatherhood.
we eat so many shrimp 
