Kendrick Lamar

In case you haven't heard, Kendrick Lamar can rap like there's no tomorrow. In the span of one year he's gone from a blip on my personal musical radar to a staple of my existence. And what has earned him this unbelievably esteemed position is really two things. First, he perfectly paints broad societal and generational critiques with seemingly minimal detail. Secondly, I think if I were talented enough to be a rapper, I would be like Kendrick Lamar. Broadly scoped songs with a persona that appears detached and calm.

Anyways check out 'Ignorance Is Bliss' which is a phenomenal video portraying Kendrick's going from the grave of his friend to exact revenge with perfect Malcolm X sample at the end. And 'A.D.H.D.' is possibly my favorite song of this year with Section80 being one of my favorite albums of the year.

Drake's 'Take Care' and the Hype Machine

Drake's sophomore album Take Care has been released and overall the reviews have been pretty positive from all sorts of publications. Pitchfork included in it's completely meaningless 'Best New Music' album category, Rolling Stone gave it 4 out of 5 stars, XXL Magazine gave it an XL (also known as 4 out of 5 stars, get a real rating system XXL). Overall, but particularly from publications that are not exclusively about hip-hop, the reviews have been real solid. But I'm not sold.

Hip-hop has long been a genre focused on boasting, a form of lyrical competition. With its foundation rooted in taking old records and cutting them up to create a backdrop for that lyrical virtuosity, it has been a unique genre that has been famous for its lack of musicality in the traditional sense. To this day, you will find a large population that believes that hip-hop is not music because it lacks the traditional markers of the art form; there often is no melody, no instruments, just lyrics and countless variations of lyrical styling. Of course the beat played an important role, but it is usually supplementary to the lyrics where the artist's expression created the listeners impression.

However, this has started to change and it began in earnest with Kanye West's 808's and Heartbreak. It was one of the first albums where lyricism took a backstage to musicality and was able to pull it off to some degree. I distinctly remember upon first listening to the album thinking that I hadn't heard an album where the lyrics in itself weren't so much descriptive but instead were simply a part of the overall mood that was set up by the production. The overall mood, of course, was one that was not boastful and exuberant but sentimental and introspective. Of course, the single on Drake's new album is none of these things and Drake crooning about how someone talking trash about him will make him 'catch a body like that' is something that might not ring very resonantly and perhaps why it's mainly left out of any discussion of the album overall.

Drake ~ Headlines (Official Video) from OctobersVeryOwn on Vimeo.

In many ways, hip-hop needs some degree of sentiment and could be more introspective. But what many review heralding Take Care have failed to realize is traditional hip-hop albums have accomplished this feat without compromising lyrical content. The perfect example is Nas' Illmatic and it has been held in such high-regard because of its ability to be introspective without being over-dramatized and self-involved. Further, Nas was able to encapsulate mood on songs like 'N.Y. State of Mind' without ever making his lyrics secondary. Instead, he uses his lyrics not for punchlines so much as a way to create a portrait of the world he is attempting to convey. This is something that is and has always been a halmark of a great rapper but it is also something that has become very rare as it is both hard to do as an artist and had to market as a record label.

Lucky for the modern day rapper, they have been given another avenue to greatness. Rappers have been infatuated with indie rock (and rock in general) for some time now. Jay-Z claims to love every indie-rock band of the moment, Big Boi said he can't get enough of Mumford and Sons (the banjo, specifically) and wants to collaborate with them, and Kanye West featured Bon Iver prevalently on what was perhaps the greatest rap album of the past few years. When Kanye collaborated with Jon Brion for for the production of Late Registration, it was groundbreaking and the influence has only spread from there.

But there is a reason 808's and Heartbreak is pretty much unanimously considered Kanye's worst album. It's just not as interesting as his other work. The problem in making hip-hop a sonically centered genre is that it is trying to shove a square peg into a round hole; it just wasn't meant to be.

And this is the overall problem with Take Care. It's incredibly shallow. There isn't the joy that you get with other great hip-hop albums where you discover new things about it weeks, months, even years after it was first released. It is what it is, and what it is more often than not is over-sensitized drivel and no where is this more apparent than in the most overrated song on the album, 'Marvin's Room'. Never has a song where a forlorn twenty something male croons about a lost love while drunk been so over-hyped.

And herein lies the problem. No one ever questioned that a drunk dial to an ex-girlfriend couldn't be, on some level, entertainingly visceral. But this isn't a genre where such an act can carry an album on its own and being viscerally self-exposing only gets you so far in hip-hop unless you have some lyrical talent behind it to provide the backbone. Take Care is sorely lacking in this regard. It should be noted that the greatest lines on the album are the lines in which Drake pays homage to other great rappers by using some of their famous quotables.

This isn't even to say I don't like the album really because on the first listen or too it sounds great. I think it has it's time and place, albeit that time and place is very limited. But to pretend this is something that is forward-looking that will remain interesting even weeks from now is erroneous. Pitchfork even took the monumental step of comparing the current Drake album to Marvin Gaye's Here, My Dear which is beyond hyperbolic.

In the end its not that Drake doesn't come off as genuine, because he does, and it's not that the album is completely terrible because it's not. It simply lacks substance. Other artists have done what Drake attempts to do in Take Care in making a brooding, introspective album focused on the insecurities of the album's creator. The only problem is many others have done it much better.

Wale, The Iraq War, and the Art of Deception

The Iraq War is so old even its protests are dated.

A lot of jokes were made when President Obama announced that all U.S. troops would leave Iraq by the end of the year. The game goes like this. Think of one of your favorite things from the year 2003 and revel in the manic depression that arises when you realize how dated everything else from 2003 has become. The Ipod was fresh and new (without a click wheel) and the Detroit Tigers were busy attempting to avoid being immortalized for baseball ineptitude, Jay-Z released The Black Album as his walk-out music, and T.I. was still rapping about the trap with his album Trap Muzik before he became a mega-star, stopped rapping about the trap, and THEN got locked up twice for guns and drugs. Needless to say, times have changed since 2003 and it's depressing to think one of the more constant presences of my life has been the Iraq War.

While plenty of things have come, gone, and been completely forgotten in the time it took America to fight the Iraq War, some things have just changed shape, and one of the perfect examples of this in hip-hop is the transformation of Wale from a hyped member of XXL's Freshman Class in 2009 to a disappointing debut album to a member of the Maybach Music Group.

In 2007, Wale released The Mixtape About Nothing and to this day it's one of my favorite mixtapes. Everything about it made Wale stand out. It was lyrical while avoiding the pitfall of appearing to try to hard and it was conscious but in a way that was truly genuine and creative. I still believe 'The Kramer' is a masterpiece that many rappers would be hard pressed to match. In essence, I thought Wale was J. Cole before J. Cole.

Wale "Nike Boots" video (Directed by Chris Robinson) from Elitaste on Vimeo.

On 'The Roc Boys Freestyle' Wale showed off all of his capabilities and rapped about everything under the sun, but for the purposes of this topic one line always stood out.

And they never going to leave like the troops in Iraq.

Burying a line speaking out against the Iraq War is nothing particularly special in hip-hop for this time period. Even Jay-Z was questioning it as early as 2003 in 'Beware of the Boys'. But the stretch of tracks on Mixtape About Nothing that spans from 'The Freestyle' to 'The Kramer' perfectly encapsulated why I was sure Wale was destined to be one of my favorite rappers of the next decade.

But when you're wrong you're wrong. Attention Deficit, all label missteps aside, was a disappointment. It wasn't 28,000 sold in the first week terrible, but let's just say I hadn't given it much of a listen outside of the week it was released until I wrote this.

Many, myself included, thought Wale would drift into obscurity. More About Nothing failed to recapture the exuberance and freshness of its predecessor, and Wale sounded more intent on telling everyone they were failing to recognize his talent than actually displaying that talent that everyone knew was there. And in comes Rick Ross.

If there is anyone who knows something about fabrication, it's Rick Ross. When Wale signed to Maybach Music, it signaled the end of the Wale that many of his early fans were interested in and ushered in a Bawse'd version. This version has become more focused on telling everyone how great he is rather than creating evidence to back that claim.

The title of Wale's new album and it's subsequent content is a perfect description of what kind of rapper he has become. Wale certainly thinks he's fantastic. I know this because he keeps telling me. Like I told George Bush and Dick Cheney, you can't just keep telling me something and expect me to believe it. At some point you have to actually prove what you claim. You're either good at rapping, or you're not. Iraq either has weapons of mass destruction or they don't. Same thing, right?

As is par with course of Wale in the past few years since he joined the self-aggrandizing universe that is the Maybach Music Group, Wale keeps telling everyone how great he is and at times he's right. 'DC Or Nothing' is actually one of my current favorite songs. The line: 'Seen it over a dollar/Got him under a flower' is a gem. And its no coincidence that the strongest song on the album is a song where Wale turns the lens away from himself and points it outward. What was great about Wale was that his personality was strong enough that he didn't need to be the focus of his music to give it a stamp that was unquestionably his. This certainly isn't the rapper I saw in 2007 at The Shelter in Detroit who made a joke about how all the light-skinned girls were at another venue for a Drake performance nearby.

It's clear that Wale still has the potential to be great and to be fair on Mixtape About Nothing, he was cocky. But he was also bent on proving why he was cocky. Today, Wale seems more bitter that with Attention Deficit he took a shot and missed. In many ways he's still trying to escape that failure and his attempt to completely reinvent himself with Ambition proves just that.

But at least now we know a hip-hop career can rise, fall, reinvent itself, and rise again in the course of half the time it takes to fight an unpopular war with false justification.

A$AP, The Three Million Dollar Man

Remember when Drake released So Far Gone? If you don't what are you reading for? Whether you do or don't it was considered groundbreaking at the time because here comes this guy from Toronto who used to be on Degrassi (DEGRASSI!), who released So Far Gone as his third official mixtape which managed 2,000 downloads in 2 hours and two legitimate hit singles while somehow managing to be something sonically unique in a hip-hop scene that has been decried for becoming far too formulaic. Not to mention this was free. What resulted was what Billboard called 'a massive bidding war' that resulted in Drake getting a $2 Million advance. No one had seen anything like it in a long time, if ever.

Enter A$AP Rocky, who has become one of the most discussed figures in hip-hop in the matter of two weeks thanks to this revelation. A Three Million Dollar Record Deal and unlike Drake, he hadn't released a mixtape (although he has now, which I'll get to soon) and he isn't exactly groomed for success as Drake was, who is listed as an 'entertainer' (because let's be honest he's not truly a rapper) on his wikipedia page. Three Million with no mixtape and videos like the one below? Now THAT'S unheard of.

People have tried comparing A$AP Rocky to Tyler the Creator and I can see the comparison. Both are very young, seem very outrageous, and have a tight knit clique that provides fantastic production. But I think the comparisons stop there. Tyler the Creator seems to live in the vacuum of his own world, where as A$AP Rocky wears his many influences on his sleeve. At times, its easy to think you're listening to a Houston rapper with the ubiquitous to syrup and slow, drawn out beats. But then the next verse he raps with the sped up flow trademarked by Cleveland's Bone Thugs N Harmony. And you can't forget the omnipresent Harlem cockiness that pervades every syllable.

But right now, it's that last influence that's going to be the most important. To take on the expectations of a $3 Million record deal and deliver isn't easy (although it may be one of those good problems) and with his mixtape released this week, LiveLoveA$AP, he's off to a good start.

The Life And Death Of 'Lasers'

If you've been any sort of a self-respecting hip-hop fan, you couldn't help but follow the drama that was Lupe Fiasco versus Atlantic. For three years Lupe Fiasco and his fans waited for his third release, Lasers, with numerous reports of Atlantic shelving the album leading to dedicated Lupe fans (of which there are many) to protest outside of Atlantic. Drama indeed.

And all that drama ended when Atlantic finally released Lasers. There was just one problem, and that was maybe Atlantic was right. The album has been widely panned and rightly so. Aside from a few decent efforts, most of the album is incredibly frustrating. 'Out Of My Head' and 'State Run Radio' are songs I waited three years for? Even the better songs, such as 'Coming Up', leave something to be desired. Specifically with 'Coming Up', think of Tupac's 'Keep Ya Head Up' with a club-centric focus. Bummer.

But all is not lost! Since the release of this abomination of an album, Lupe has bemoaned the process of this album himself, claiming all the squabbling with Atlantic (he was told to not rap too deep on the album's single) left him less than fully invested in the project. For most hip-hop fans, this album was dead upon first listen.

And while Lupe and many of his fans may be less than satisfied with his project, there are clearly others that this album is reaching. The album has officially became Lupe's more commercially successful, blowing away his previous two efforts, both critically acclaimed. And it's fairly easy to see how this came about. Lupe has often been criticized for being inaccessible, a hip-hop intellectual of sorts. But this album is more characterized by pop beats and vapid rhymes. I guess Lupe followed his own advice.

But we all knew complex rhyming didn't sell. Atlantic knew it too. And while the fact remains that major record labels continue to mess up great hip-hop, Atlantic may have managed to expand Lupe's audience after all and turned out a successful hit of an album.

But that still leaves the rest of us asking what about that other Lupe? What about the the one that released this song or this song or this song? Or even what about the Lupe that released the rather awesome 'I'm Beaming' and 'Shining Down'? All of these songs would have been the best track on Lasers!

Oh wait, here he is.

Lupe Fiasco, Pharrell Williams, Travis Barker - If You Want To

It turns out, Lupe fans should have no fear. He's been releasing music and a pretty steady pace and is even rumored to have already finished his next album, Food and Liquor 2, which may even see a 2011 release. Just hope Atlantic doesn't get their hands on it first.

Goin' In For The Kill

Every once in a while, a song comes along that seems to be created to be sampled to death by hip-hop artists. I'm not talking about a drum sample that has been cut out of James Brown's 'Funky Drummer' or The Honeydripper's 'Impeach the President' as those are part of an era of hip-hop in which the samples were free. But now, samples cost money, and no one is going to pay for a James Brown drum beat that could instead be duplicated.

Instead, samples are often used as a way to replace a chorus (Nas' 'Get Down') or to make the song recognizable to a sought after demographic (Lupe Fiasco 'Show Goes On'). The latest sample to be passed around is from La Roux's 'In For The Kill'.




It's pretty easy to see how the chorus of this song is easily translatable to hip-hop. One could take it literally and use it as a chorus for a gangster rap anthem or one could use it to set the tone for a song focused on lyrical braggadocio. And it has been used in all of these ways. The Game used it as a potential single for his upcoming album, Swollen Members made a video, even Jim Jones got in on it. The list goes on and on. But by far my favorite has been the gangster rap rendition from Chicago's L.E.P. Bogus Boyz, and it has this awesome video to match.

Old English D

Detroit has been getting all kinds of shine in different ways these days. It makes sense after all, America loves the underdog, and there is no city that more represents the underdog (not exactly by choice) than Detroit. Home of American organized labor, Motown, the greatest baseball team known to human kind. The arsenal of democracy! What's not to love! Of course, there are the underlying racial tensions that continue to dominate an outsiders perception of the Motor City, not to mention the politics of the city itself, but to say that's not typical of modern America as well would be erroneous.

The most ubiquitous view of Detroit recently has been the recent Chrysler ad that debuted during that Super Bowl that I didn't watch. Without a doubt, the commercial is awesome. Nothing says grizzled like a commercial filmed in the Detroit winter (ask anyone). Sadly, it doesn't address many of the issues facing the industrial metropolis in the 21st century, most notably outsourcing, which Chrysler is no stranger to. Post-industrial life is rough in the Motor City, but at least this commercial is awesome (sarcasm unintended).



But Detroit's shine does not stop there! After all, a big commercial spot during the Super Bowl can hardly represent a city as unglamorous as Detroit. A more accurate representative is the up and coming rapper Danny Brown whose penchant for out of control rhyming and widely varying subject matter have made him one of the top young rappers to watch in the upcoming young year.

And he represents Detroit almost too well, often rapping about the ugliest parts of urban decay. In fact, it's hard to listen to his critically-acclaimed The Hybrid and not get a little depressed. But so is life in the D, and he represents it well when he raps on the song 'White Stripes' :

Roll deep like the roaches in my kitchen
Dawg I ain't trippin'
But they never gone
They don't even run when I cut the lights on

While much of The Hybrid shines light on Detroit, what has bee on constant rotation lately as a start to get ready for my return to Motor City is Danny Brown's 'New Era'. Assuredly, 'Black and Yellow' this is not. And in the many Detroit anthems that have come out of the most 'underestimated plus underrated city in this hip-hop game', none are as catchy as Wiz Khalifa's smash. But they shouldn't be. Undoubtedly, this is a song that can only be truly enjoyed by Detroiters. And this is Detroit's charm, and why Chrysler's ad claims 'Imported from Detroit'. Detroit, whether it's for better or worse, has become one of the most unique cities this country has ever seen. And while it would certainly be nice to revel in the big city feel of a more traditional metropolis, artists like Danny Brown makes one revel in that uniqueness, even if that uniqueness is slightly depressing.

Danny Brown - New Era