Sunday 1 May 2011

I got 5 on it

Here's 5 songs that every self-respecting rap fan should have in their arsenal of musik.

G-Unit - True Loyalty (2003)



Thug lovin' indeed. Essentially, a 2pac-inspired homoerotic bromance between 50 & Banks in the vein of Jay & Bleek on Coming Of Age or AZ & Nas on The Essence which gives way to one of the main reasons why some of us have been cheerleading for T.O.N.Y ever since the Best Of Tony Yayo mixtape was released during his incarceration that I'm posting because the internet is now finally starting to become stricken with Yayo fever. I still occassionally wake up in a cold sweat cursing myself that I didn't get a picture of the fat white-trash dude I saw with a full Get Rich Or Die Trying back-tattoo a couple of summers back for a Martorial Elegance post.

Yelawolf - Beer Buzz (2008)



The whole concept of musical guilty pleasures is pretty silly unless you're a member of the Aryan Brotherhood risking ostracization for having Buck Tha Devil by Da Lench Mob on your iPod, but I should probably feel a few twinges of embarrassment at liking pre-Trunk Muzik Yelawolf in frat-rap mode over All I Wanna Do by Sheryl Crow on his Beer Buzz cut as much as I do. This is, after all, a song I prefer to the quintessential Yelawolf joints from the same period like Boyz In The Woodz and Brown Sugar; a song I always end up listening at least 4 or 5 times in a row; and a song which once caused me to slip down an escalator when I was shimmying to the "we are drinkin' beer at noon on tueday" refrain at the end and misjudged my footing. Upon further reflection, that Sheryl Crow joint is clearly better than the entire career of Bruce Springsteen as far as the blue-collar Americana singer-songwriter shtick goes and Beer Buzz is precisely 87% better than 85% of what will consist of Yelawolf's Interscope debut.

Casual - Classic Material (2003)



Man, I always foolishly ran hand-in-hand with the narrative that after Fear Itself Casual became an artist we could only think about in terms of singles because his He Think He Raw and Truck Driver long players lacked any kind of knock factor other than the cuts taken from his 12"s on Stimulated Records until Boothe pointed out that the former does indeed have a few other joints, particularly Studio D. This then lead to a re-investigation of the latter which revealed that Classic Material is precisely what it says on the tin and almost as good as Turkey And Dressing since Cas' spits that "technique magnifique" of his and, with an arpeggio of sinewy G-Funk synths, a robotic cartoon bassline and all manners of other dramatic electronic stabs, it sounds closer to something you'd have heard on E-40's Breakin' News album than some boring retro noughties record by a past-it Hiero member.

Soulja Boy ft. Gucci Mane & Yo Gotti - Shopping Spree (2008)



This first and - still - best of Soulja Boy's forays into PG13 ATL trap-rap where, unlike his other handful of songs with Gucci Mane and/or Yo Gotti, he's the song's main attraction. Because rap is currently bogged down with rappers who make their success sound like a chore (Eminem, Wayne, KanYe, Drake, B.o.B etc) and the still lingering Jay-Z somehow making bragging about his immense wealth and jet-setting lifestyle sound as mundane and irritating as a co-worker's recount of their weekend's drinking in a provincial pub on a bleary-eyed monday morning, we should be thankful to Soulja for the wide-eyed delight in his voice when he raps about copping Lamborghinis and items of home furnishing which cost over half a million dollars. It's also worth mentioning that the kid is quietly morphing into one of this blog's most beloved rapitalists : he's a ridiculously wealthy self-made entrepreneur with a penchant for grunting, chanted choruses, and blatantly pilfering the nuances of his contemporaries who's now also making in-roads into the realm of movies, so all we need now is the revelation that he he has 2 rapping brothers and his transformation into the new Percy Miller is complete.

M.O.P - What The Fuck? (2004)



The year, 2004 when M.O.P were around 20 months deep into their tenure at Roc-A-Fella; the album, the bonus disc of rare & unreleased odds 'n' sods on the Marxmen Cinema indie album they'd tossed out via Koch as The Marxmen to express their displeasure at not receiving a release date writ large; the mission statement, "let's try and top Code Of The Streets and AZ's I Don't Give A Fuck as far as flagrant pitch-perfect Primo facsimiles go"; the song, a total success because this shit went harder than everything on the first disc including the actual Primo joint and squared up toe-to-toe with such 10/10 Mash Out classics as Downtown Swinga and Half And Half that it found itself amongst on the bonus disc. Anybody fancy helping me sacrifice Termanology and the Nick Javas cracker (Ayo Intuition - dude has totally swagger-jacked your image, son) that Primo did a song for last year to the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl in a trade off for one last M.O.P & Primo banger in the vein of this or Stick To Ya Gunz?

19 comments:

H.L. said...

Casual - Classic Material (2003)

^^^^^

Loved the lyrics, hated the beat. Casual is that dude though.

H.L. said...

GET YO' BITCH ASS OUTTA' MY FACE! - Billy Danze

^^^^^

Someone should really sample this.

Kelvin Mack10zie said...

In-fucking-deed.

done said...

Jay-Z somehow making bragging about his immense wealth and jet-setting lifestyle sound as mundane and irritating as a co-worker's recount of their weekend's drinking in a provincial pub on a bleary-eyed monday morning should be shouted from mountaintops. These posts are the greatest.

Id happily settle for the NYGz album instead - am i the only person not really feeling MOP's delivery the last few years? I can understand people not caring bout Rae's switch up but they stopped shouting for fucks sake, kind of a big deal imo. Suppose your voice probably gives out eventually ala James Hetfield though.

Thun said...

I long suspected that the Sheryl Crow song would me mined for its wierd dream segue-like intro for some workmanlike backpacker pretend it's 1995 joint, but Yelawolf's take is much better than that could ever be.

Kelvin Mack10zie said...

There's still time for the CunninLynguists to rap over it.

T.R.O.Y. said...

Really doubt they can afford a sample spot blow-up of that magnitude. I'm thinking that Dilla has already flipped it and it's only a matter of time before some Belgian tru-skoolas rock awkward bork bars over it.

Kelvin Mack10zie said...

A Snow Goons & Hustle Crowe joint over it is inevitable too at some point.

Asher said...

Shopping Spree's one of my favorite songs the last 5 years. So I got the first two Silkk albums... and they're not that fun! All the insanity of his work on Tru albums, or his features, just isn't there on his solos, with the exception of a few songs. By the second album he normalized his flow to some extent, but even on the first album, where he's off-beat all the time, he just sounds like a bad rapper, not a complete lunatic. You don't get all the constant slowing down/speeding up/whispering/talking to himself/randomly shouting he does on his features. And here I was expecting whole LP's of Silkk madness. Huge disappointment.

Kelvin Mack10zie said...

I've only ever heard Charge It 2 Da Game which has 2 No Limit classics in It Ain't My Fault and the incredible posse cut I'm A Soldier (one of the essential Soldier scriptures), but, yeah, it really sucks for the reasons you mentioned and even on the few occassions when he does lapse into the staccato flow it just sounds like a goofy ass version of Mystikal rather than spazz-out mode Silkk.

I quite fancy hearing the first album now.

Asher said...

The first album's quite unremarkable, except for 'No Limit Party,' where Silkk, Mia and P rap over 'The Bridge Is Over,' 'Mista,' which seems to be Silkk's demented take on 'Broken Language' (sample lyric: "you might see me here, you might see me there, but I be in like two places/I be mugging, I be smiling, Mr. Like Two Faces"), 'If My 9 Could Talk,' a major production highlight, and the creepy lead single, 'The Shocker,' which has a legitimately good and unusually subdued verse from P, tons of echo, and this classic non sequitur, complete with an I'm-even-confusing-myself adlib: "quick to leave a nigga lookin like a Cotex, nigga cocked like I ain't had no sex, but still be on time just like a Rolex (whaaaa?)."

David said...

unrelated but i decided i like lil b now if only for this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-HdUZsWpHQ&feature=player_embedded

Kelvin Mack10zie said...

I would've preferred dude had shouted "like her dad, like I'm rad, like I'm Brad, like I'm Chad" instead, personally.

Tray, so, I dled it last night and I've been stuck on Mista ever since and trying to think of other southern takes on Broken Language; obviously there's Juve's Pimpinabitch, but I'm sure there must be others.

Asher said...

You like Mista? I expect much more from Silkk. Maybe he was only inspired when rapping alongside his virtuosic brothers.

Kelvin Mack10zie said...

Yeah, I can't help but like these weird little regional curiosity concept-jacks, and the way he shouts "MISTA!" so hard his voice almost breaks is great; he should've adopted that as his own "UGGGHHHH!".

I'm listening to Why My Homie now. P delivering the "it was sad, my homie look a damn fall/sorta like the TLC video Waterfall" in his best rendition of the Brad Jordan Seen A Man Die cadence is a pretty amazing moment.

Asher said...

I just hate the Seen a Man Die cadence, and given that a pretty large chunk of Scarface's work is done in some variation of it, I have a tough time getting into Scarface. I think I actually enjoy P's imitation of it (and he imitated it a hell of a lot) more, on the basis of its sheer kitschiness. And yeah, the Waterfall line is the line of the album, as far as I could detect on my cursory skim, anyway. Maybe the only really good thing on it is the tail end of No Limit Party, where P does an awesomely misogynistic verse over the 'No More Chance (Remix)' sample. Featuring the unexpectedly Gossip Girl line, 'I'm spreading rumors on you hoes like I'm in social club.'

Kelvin Mack10zie said...

I keep hoes in the chicken coup!

The concept of a No Limit Party alone blows my mind.

Asher said...

Google reveals two more No Limit parties, one on P's '94 album, The Ghettos Tryin To Kill Me (yes, plural ghettos are trying to kill Master P), and one on Soulja Slim's debut album. The latter features about a dozen No Limit members. There also seem to be remixes of 'No Limit Party' on the '97 release of GTTKM, and, best of all, on P's little-known 1994 Christmas-themed EP, High Fo Xmas.

Kelvin Mack10zie said...

I need to hear that High Fo Xmas version. I've only ever heard the title track from that EP.