New songs I'm feelin' in the '010

4 days in and things are already comin' thick and fast.

Doja Clik ft. Turf Talk & E-40 - Talkin' 'Bout Me





Holy shit, this tune knocks. Apparently this one has been out for a while, but it went almost completely unnoticed until the Southern Hospitality boys recently plucked it out of mixtape obscurity and rode for it. I've been worrying that Turf Talk is gonna follow E-40's lead for his next full length and include a bunch of contrived cross-region tracks with, like, Jae Millz, or use boring sub-2001 Dre type beats instead of Rick Rock and Droop-E bangers, or even end up with his album being half full of autotune jams with Trey Songz for da ladeez, but if it has at least 6 tunes which sound like this on it then it's gonna be a top 3 album of the year and the benchmark all Bay gangsta-rap songs with quick Mac Dre impersonations should aspire to.

Count Bass D & DJ Pocket - Palease



Good bugged-out rap is thin on the ground these days besides DOOM and Lil B when he isn't doing stuff which sounds like a pre-pubescent Killah Priest rhyming over the instrumental of Orinico Flow by Enya, so it's good to see that Count Bass D has reappeared. Did he really have to drop 2 mixtapes in the space of a week, though? Jesus, I've got at least 6 books I'm tryna read at the moment and we've got rappers releasing 2 mixtapes a week? Anyway, I dunno who DJ Pocket is but he seems like the perfect partner for the Count if the In The Loop tape is anything to go by. Is Palease the first rap song to mention Heather Mills, or did Joe Budden have a conceptual 300 bar freestyle about her which he uploaded to Youtube mere seconds after Macca and Mucca left divorce court?

Lil' Phat ft. Foxx & Webbie - Cuttin' Up



I have a thing for weed carriers so I've been feelin' Lil' Phat popping up on every 3rd Boosie tune for the past year or two. Finding out he's managed to get on all those Boosie songs because he's the son of the owner of Trill Entertainment only makes me love him even more. Levi's, which was Phat's joint first before Boosie put it on SuperBad, was great, but it's pretty hard to go wrong making a rap song about America's most iconic manufacturer of denim, so the real test is can he knock out the odd good track of his own which aren't themed around such obviously pleasing subject matter too now Boosie is doin' porridge? The answer appears to be yes, as long as Webbie is also present.

Mickey Factz - Amnesia



Factz is a weird one, isn't he? When he gets it right - tunes like Incredible, Automatic, Robot Rock and Pumpkin - he sorta has this modern day Grand Puba type steez going on, but when he gets it wrong...oh man. 6 of the 8 tracks on his new Dark Phoenix ALPHA EP make the songs he did over This Ain't A Scene.. by Fall Out Boy and Stop Me by Mark Ronson & Nathaniel Merriweather sound like something off Efil4zaggin, but this is exactly the sort of thing I want from him. Nice to see NY rappers finally making peace with the concept of BASS! in their shit again too, as the great tragedy of NY rap from the early 90s onwards is that most of it just isn't particularly car friendly.

Curtains - Genesis





He'll probably never make another tune as good as That's What It Is, but I don't really give a shit as this'll do just fine as a substitute. Check out Curtains gettin' his meta-blog-rap referencing on too, especially when he ends that section with the "I'm the pill - I got the internet goin' ham" line. Can we get Jay Electronica mentioning my Frank Vs. Immortal Technique post in a song next?

Yelawolf ft. Juelz Santana - Mixin' Up The Medicine remix



White-on-white crime caused me to initially dismiss this guy as some sort of Miami Ink-ized white trash gimmick hybrid of Bubba and Paul, but after digesting his recent Burn One tape I'll concede that he's alright. Of course he'll never be able to top the achievement of offending Bob Dylan fans with the Juelz original (the Hell Rell phone freestyles on Diplomatic Immunity Volume 1 > Highway 61 Revisited and Blood On The Tracks), but he was pretty much born to rap over this tune to the point where I wish Juelz would've gone and made some crap single with Ron Browz instead.