I dunno if you noticed, but Step AKA Jack The Snipper came up on a No DJ version of Black Rob's Permanent Scars/Live From The Eastside via DJ Mike Nice and dropped a post about it over on his turf. A post that just so happens to be written by me since I was the first person to upload the song to the 'net back in 2004.
Whaddaya know, this post presents another chance to link my fairly extensive Black Rob compilation of rarities, album cuts and various other odds 'n' sods. Fancy that.
The Clipse ft. Rosco P. Coldchain - Chinese New Year (From that overrated album which isn't as good as Lord Willin'; 2006)
Knew there was a really obvious omission in my unpopular opinions post : Skrung Out and Money Makin' Trick by Fam-Lay are better than any official song the Thornton brothers have been involved in since What Happened To That Boy.
Basically, Memphis this year >>>> ATLanta this year (apart from Brick Squad and the annual 2 great songs per annum by Soulja Boy) and Single needs to be as big in 2012 as Soul Survivor was in 2005, or, at the very least, bigger than Spend It, Tony Montana and Bussin' were in 2011 :
Yo Gotti ft. Stuey Rock - Single (From Live From The Kitchen; 2012)
If this place were a serious blog I'd have to say say something like ‘Yo Gotti makes sure we're all gonna have a white Christmas with Single’ at this point, but since I take not taking Rap seriously very seriously indeed I have nothing to offer you for the morrow except this screencap and the thought that Youtube comment sections have thankfully rendered the career of Weird Al Yankovic and other such zany peckerwoods making parody-Rap songs near-obsolete :
Bah humbug - we don't bother with an Xmas tree here at Martorialist H.Q and we're way too stingy to send cards & presents to anyone other than our most immediate of family & friends, but, foe tha love of Eazy-E, here's a Christmas cracka for all y'all :
Don't believe everything you hear in Rap lyrics, kiddies, or Santa Claus might take a reindeer check on paying you a visit this year. For example, Boosie would have us believe that Baton Rogue is all about them Clips And Choppers, but reality paints an entirely different picture :
Merry XXXmas to one and all from the UK chapter of the No Limit Soldier famalam! Here's hoping a dope fiend brings you exactly what you want and a bitch from up the street this Christmas morning.
Master P & C-Murder - 'Hood Carols (From High Fo' Xmas EP; 1994)
I suppose that means David is Paul Young and Done is Bono. HL, Mister Jay and Nyquil can fight over who ends up as Boy George and George Michael, but I'm staking a claim on being Phil Collins, aiight?
Young Bleed ft. C-Loc & Maxminelli - Better Than The Last Time
(From My Balls And My Word; 1998)
All Maxminelli wanted for Christmas on Better Than The Last Time was "12 gold teeth, a fresh candy blue jeep and a 4.4 heat", but what I'm gagging to find in my Xmas stocking this year is a remixed version of that song which has the ascending synth-waves which stimulate dog whistle-like alpha waves in the human brain that producer Happy Perez only uses during the first chorus appearing throughout the rest of the song. This makes it all the more frustrating that he didn't rectify the problem when he and Max recorded a sequel to it a year later for the Lay-Lo album :
Lay-Lo - Better Than The Last Time Part 2
(From Simple & Plain; 1999)
So, basically, today's topic is : those orgasmic little moments in Rap songs that you wish were longer. Go!
To make ammends for all the Suga Free songs I've posted this year, here's the trailer for 1988 Z-movie Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers where a bunch of Johns live up to their billing when they end up getting John Favara-ed by an Egyptian cult of chainsaw-wielding prostitutes led by that Gunnar Nelson bloke who played Leatherface in the O.G Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie :
While the scene where private detective Jack Chandler headbutts one of the 'tutes deserves to be mentioned alongside Jimmy Cagney kicking Virginia Mayo off the stool in White Heat and Lee Marvin throwing coffee in Gloria Grahame's face in The Big Heat as far as heinous acts towards women in the movies go, Hollywood Teenage Hookers probably won't be troubling Sight & Sound's upcoming 2012 poll of the greatest films of all time; though, lord knows, it's a better movie than 2001 : A Space Odyssey since it features such apparent trivialities to Stanley Kubrick as memorable characters and a coherent narrative, and it does have a better tagline than Citizen Kane, Tokyo Story, The Godfather 1 + 2, The Rules Of The Game and any of the other movies which made the last poll in 2002 :
The end credits promised a sequel called Student Chainsaw Nurses, which, according to Wikipedia, was never made. I wanna call it the Detox of late 80s horror-comedies but that shit would've been worth watching for the T&A alone, whereas I can't imagine Detox will have any redeeming qualities whatsoever.
Hey Rappers - if you really must insist on using your government name as your Rap moniker then you better have a really cool sounding one like Craig Mack or you're just going to sound like you're an accountant. Alternatively, if you can't be dissuaded to not use your government name or an approximation thereof of as your Rap handle and you're hellbent on going by the pseudonym of Steven Jo, then you can nullify all the nan-kidishness of the nom-de-plume by enlisting Waka and Riff Raff and making the 2011 I Smoke, I Drank :
Thanks to my man Chemical Alan for just linking me to this. Gunplay might've been a better fit for the track than Riff Raff, I suppose, but it works as it stands if we're thinking of it as this year's I Smoke, I Drank with the Rice Emperor playing the position of Young Bleed. Dude had me at "iced out my pet poodle, cool like a cooler/playin out in Pluto, playin' pool with the planets/right hand extended, diamonds on my granite/blew up on 20s understood/trunk sound like Van Damme it" and then he went and said "Rap game trampoline, transparent model in the avocado tahoe".
"W-w-when we hit the scene, better jump the line or we gonna turn the parking lot into Columbine *BBBBBRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR - BOW BOW!!!!!*"
I'm not tryna suggest that Noz was directly responsible for Slim Dunkin's death here, but nothing from the Twin Towers 2 mixtape or Scream My Adlibs made his best of 2011 list on thursday and then Slim dies on friday? C'mon - that's gotta be more than mere coincidence.
Pourin' out a lil' Dr. Stuarts Triple Ginseng tea for my fav' Brick Squad weed carrier right now, and I'm not just saying that because he was the only Squad member without a beer belly; his cameo on Fuck The Club Up was one of the highlights of Flockavelli, his verse and mannerisms in the Twin Towers 2 Intro video were the very pinnacle of my Rap listening experiences in 2011 and I Gotta Eat is a minor classic which needs to become a posthumous global hit a la Hypnotize or Changes :
Slim Dunkin - I Gotta Eat (From Menace II Society mixtape; 2010)
The Rap blogger guidebook I inherited from 504Nolalive informs me thou must knock out one of these posts at least once before retiring your blog, so what better time than the day after I've finally finished J-Zone's Root For The Villain book for the first obligatory Unpopular Opinions post on The Martorialist?
Lil B's late 2009 - fall 2010 run of creativity and E-40's 4 Revunue Retrievin' albums have yielded more great songs than Big Daddy Kane made in his entire career.
I'd sooner be waterboarded to the sounds of Das Racist before I'll ever listen to anything by Jeru The Damaja, bar his Speak Ya Clout verse.
Song-for-song, Harlem World by Ma$e is a much stronger debut album than Big L's Lifestylez ov da Poor & Dangerous. As an outsider, there isn't a better Rap album about the American Dream than Ma$on's magnum opus, and that ethos is ever more relatable in 2011 with Rap bloggers going from talking about smacking "Terry Richardson opticals" off faces to being photographed by Captain Molest-A-Model himself in just over 6 months.
Maybe I'm just a racist peckerwood who flocks to his own at heart like your average Beastie Boys or Mac Miller fan, but you can keep the catalogues of Lord Infamous, Gangsta Boo and T-Rock as long as I can have by By 2 Da Bad Guy by Lil' Wyte on my MP3 player if I'm ever marooned on a desert island.
Vagina Diner is Large Professor's production masterpiece, and Breaking Atoms is a tad overrated, especially when it came out in the same year that gave us such masterpieces as Death Certificate, A Wolf In Sheep's Clothing, De La Soul ..Is Dead and O.G Original Gangster.
Pharrell has the best verses on Mr. Me Too, Slim Thug had the greatest vocal performance on Hell Hath No Fury, and HHNF isn't touching Lord Willin' or either of the Boosie & Webbie albums as far as '00s duo albums go.
Black Rob has a better catalogue of actual songs than The Lox, and, We Gonna Make It aside, no solo album by a Lox member contains a song as good as G-Dep's Head Over Wheelz, Child Of The Ghetto or the Everyday remix.
Suga Free's Street Gospel is the Ulysses of melodic Mack-Rap, which basically means he elevates the art of pimpology to poetic heights that Life Is... Too $hort and Doggy Style could barely comprehend, let alone rival.
Everything Meek Mill does has already been done with far more aplomb and gusto by Silkk The Shocker in the late 90s and Meek is making a major nuisance of himself by taking up beats which would be much better served by Gunplay.
Killer Mike has made, at the very most, 5 good songs since 2008, and the further away from Adidas he gets, the more he veers closer to becoming ATLanta's post-1993 Krs One.
There are seldom few NYC songs from the last 4 years better than Role Model by Maino, since it manages to combine 2 of the best debut singles of the 90s - Devil's Son and Broken Language - over the sort of jagged bombastic shit I wish Primo still had in him.
If, as I suggested, the bit in the day in the life of V-Nasty video where she and Kreashawyn run up on the kids listening to Lil B and start Rapping along with them in the street is the modern equivalent of the Double Trouble stoop scene from Wild Style, then the video of Treal Lee and Mr Hit Dat Hoe dancing to Get Off Me Now on Prince Rick's patchy lawn was the 2009 version of the Rock Steady Crew versus Dynamic Rockers breakdance battle in Style Wars. Stacks-on-stacks-on-stacks with the knees of Mr Hit Dat Hoe's jeans :
He may have lost out on the Tony Montana beat to King Louie, but $tarlito has been on his MF DOOM shit in 2011, adding to his collection of the skulls and spines like Predator with the beats from Ellen Degeneras, Tupac Back and the Alley Boy/Jeezy/Yo Gotti posse track Four for his latest video clip :
This is all over DGB and Traps N Trunks already, so, other than 'lito being my current favourite gangly Rapper, my main reason for adding to the labyrinth pile-up is that the video features the best use of a parking garage since Slim Dunkin's Blindsided and its milieu has reminded me that this place still gets at least 2 hits a day via people searching the term "did Slim Dunkin's get his kid back after he was kidnapped?"
The pre-Life Is Like A Dice Game Nas demo with Eric B has just been usurped from its # 1 spot in the pantheon of unreleased Rap shit I need to hear before departing this mortal coil. I'm gonna hit up Rob Breezy and see if he can persuade the Block Beattaz to give up the goods.
Du-du-du-du-dah-dah-dah - man, this bassline's stubby! Du-du-du-du-dah-dah-dah - this the shit like Huggies! Du-du-du-du-dah-dah-dah - it's more Mic Terror Raps! Du-du-du-du-dah-dah-dah - and I much prefer this to his other most recent track!
Habibi : In which our raconteur Mic Terror visits his local liquor store and shoots the shit about race-relations, religious dietary plans and racey broads with its Islamic owner over a bassline I swear is inspired by some cartoon theme that I currently can't place. Outside of The Simpsons, Rap is probably the only form of entertainment where a non-Pakistani gentleman can put on a Pakistani voice and not be ostracised for it in 2011. Take note, Anton Du Beke.
Contrary to the Soderberg-prism, there are other worthwhile practioners of non-thugged-out, quasi-everyman Rap beyond G-Side, Curren$y and Stalley; Stalley is far too earnest and dreary for my taste, I've reached a tipping point with Curren$y where I simply don't need any more music by him, and while I like G-Side, there isn't much fun to be found in their oeuvre, so I'll take Mic Terror as my official go-to non-threatening black ppl Rapper du jour, thank you very much.
(I dunno why, but you may have to forward this a few seconds after pressing play for it to work)
Inexplicably forgot to include Fuck 'Em in my favourite non-single joints of 2011 list after discovering it on one of the first Stay Hatin' podcasts earlier this year, so I just took a trip a trip to Youtube to hyperlink it whereupon I discovered there's a video for the song. It's bookended by a tedious extended intro and a third verse not featured on the MP3 by some dude in a Polish painter & decorator's cap whose Rapping is so forgettable he doesn't even warrant a credit in the opening title, but I'm glad a video exists for this cut all the same because Trick-Trick delivers some of 2011's best mean-muggin' and gesticulating this side of Slim Dunkin in the Twin Towers 2 Intro clip :
You may want to skip foward to the 2:30 mark if your tolerance for Rappers indulging in their The Wire fantasies begins and ends with the Dem Boyz video and stop it at 5:28 before the superfluous 3rd chap in the cap starts Rapping, but the 3 minutes between are a whirlwind of belligerent ig'nance that'll do just nicely now M.O.P have been relegated to shilling for their supper over the Stoupe-bamboozling beats of German Horrorcore producers.
"Dope strip and dirty soda, plasma screens and big racks Big gats, no kickback Make a n*gga flip back You eatin'? Break me off a piece, treat him like a Kit Kat These fuck n*ggas sendin' shots, but really that's a mismatch"
Other than that portion of lyrics, you know what my 2nd favourite thing about Still Arrogant is? That I've now got another joint with that same O Fortuna operatic sample as Byrd Gang's Ya Dig for when I'm feelin' like the Roman emperor Trajan as he defeated the Dacian army at the 2nd battle of Tapae, and that's an experience I'm just never gonna get from listening to The Roots, innit?
Obviously my 3rd favourite thing about Still Arrogant is that it also gives me the opportunity to link to my King Louie and Byrd Gang compilations again.
Another reason why I'm never listening to French Montana as a solo artist :
Yeah, yeah, yeah - I get that there are cultural differences between Europe and America and that the foreign always seems more exotic blah blah blah, but SMH @ Rappers wearing G-Star Raw. If I ever spot Mack Mustard wearing Jack Wills or Superdry then I'm officially done with this Rap shit.
Can this be done without lazily resorting to listing a caboodle of Drake and Watch The Throne songs? You better believe it can, because I'd prefer to be awoken by Marvin's Room or Otis every morning at 4:37 AM for the entirety of 2012 than ever hear any of these curdled cowpats again. I'm sure there are also numerous equally odious songs by Big Sean, Joe Budden and Lupe Fiasco, but I'm thankfully unfamilar with them.
The day before this song dropped Jay Electronica AKA ‘the most important Rapper to debut since Wu-Tang’ was spouting off about how it'd "shut down NYC". Evidently "shut down NYC" is slang for "kill off what remains of my 2009 buzz with a song so sluggish and unlistenable that even a tone-deaf rhythm-less hack like Mindbender Futurama couldn't Rap over it" in the Electronica household.
The 2nd single from The Chronic was Let Me Ride, while 2001's sophomore single was Forget About Dre. Go and play both back-to-back, and then marinate on the horrifying thought that, after a decade's tinkering, I Need A Doctor is what Dre's deemed acceptable to release as the 2nd official from Detox.
Say what you want about Prince Be getting thrown off stage by Krs One, but P.M. Dawn never recorded anything as bad as this. For the past 6 or 7 years I've had a recurring nightmare where I'm sitting on the john straining to move my bowels, and after a tiny Rabbit dropping finally plops out I look down into the toilet bowl to find the infamous Krs GIF starring back at me.
Mr. Muthafuckin' eXquire ft. El P, Das Racist etc - Huzzah remix
2011 : the year where Twitter was finally proven to be an instrument of great evil; not because feral teenagers from the UK used it organise their looting rampages this summer, but because it was the impetus for Grace Dent's most detestable book yet and the tool which allowed a disparate ragtag of Rappers to assemble for the Huzzah remix. This song was so utterly bereft of chemistry that it makes all those terribly stilted G.O.O.D Friday posse tracks from last year sound as organic as New Rap Language.
Crueller bloggers might suggest that Saigon lost his initial promise of being an intriguing mix of F.T and Tragedy circa the Intelligent Hoodlum years when he developed his ludicrously unfounded martyr-complex around 2005-ish. Not me, though, because who could argue against such earnestly delivered cast-iron methods to save the black community as "do away with all the Chinese restaurants/do away with all the fake Gloria Estefans" on Clap here? It's unlikely he'll ever gain acceptance into the Slaughterhouse fold, but there's always gonna be a place in the Lost Children Of Babylon for Sai' Giddy.
It's a pity Tyler doesn't share the same aversion to drums as Andre 3000 because he's pretty great without them, but invariably cacophonous once he's let loose with percussion, as evidenced by Radicals here. More so than Bastard, Goblin was a long-feared personal nightmare of mine finally come to fruition - Suicidal Failure by Cage X El-P's Fantastic Damage LP as performed by a whiney, self-conscious, middle-class black kid.
Elzhi ft. Royce Da 5'9 & Stokey Williams - Life's A Bitch
Deep by Elzhi is my shit and Royce has at least 7 great songs in his catalogue, so I'm not going to hold it against either of them for failing to replicate the greatest debut cameo in Rap history and an amazing Nas verse, but Will Sessions deserves to get his wallet and green card ganked for his tepid replay of that wonderous Gap Band sample and the godawful Stokey Williams outro. Dude turned the sublime into a 1994 Jamiroquai album track.
Lighters, on the other hand, I will hold against Royce. If it transpires that Hell is a re-run of all the most embarrassing moments from my life played to an audience of millions for the rest of eternity, then Lighters will surely be the soundtrack to the time I searched Hayden Panettiere on xHamster after watching Scream 4 only to find myself clicking on videos where uncircumsized urchins jerked off over photocopies over her face.
A$AP Rocky - Purple Swag/anything by Spaceghostpurrp
Picture me rollin' as the most dangerous whigga in town with my collection of Compton/L.A Raiders hats and shelves full of N.W.A/Eazy/Cube/Dre/Ren records only for a buddy of mine to come along and leave me green with envy like Patrick Bateman in the scene where he compares business cards with his fellow brokers when she revealed that she's the proud owner of this rather incredible vintage t-shirt :
Sometimes a man's just gotta accept defeat like a G and doff his Raiders cap to the girl with the t-shirt & bandana game that's so frosty it's about to snow out in this mothafucka. Muchas gracias to GTA San Andrea for the killer snaps of her pride 'n' joy, and thank God for all white girls who listen to N.W.A, even the previously irredeemable Gwyneth Paltrow.
Courtesy of RNT, although I prefer this solo version to the remix Stevie posted since the beat is marginally different and Vado's verse sullies the whole ambiance. This is what happpens when a Harlem battle-Rapper-turnt-Young Money baggage-handler embraces the Wave and harkens back to the harmonizing on ye olde Uptown Rap records like Standing On The Top and We Are Known As Emcees:
Jae Millz - Sober
(From the internet; 2009/Zone Out Season 2 mixtape; 2010)
Sober is prime standing under a champagne waterfall getting your dick sucked by an angel who looks like Angel from Home & Away-Rap. But does that description really do the song justice? Fed the audio into a special computer we have at Martorialist H.Q which translates sound into image and it spat this out as its closest match:
You know what, let's just get this post out of the way so I can get back to posting about Rappers who've sampled Big Time by Peter Gabriel, and expressing my horror at the suggestion in the latest issue of Sight & Sound that The Tree Of Life received so many votes this year that it might plausibly bumrush S&S's poll of the Best Films of All Time in 2012; SAY IT AIN'T SO!
There was simply far too much Rap this year, but I tempered the problem by reaching saturation points with Curren$y, Lil B and Jacka, and having little-to-no interest in such critical darlings as Kendrick Lamar, Main Attrakionz, Big K.R.I.T and Roach Gigz. Factor in that N.Y had an annus horribilis, that I'd rather watch Chad Hugo singing scat to scat-porn than listen to Pusha-T as a solo artist, that I loathe Freddie Gibbs, Spaceghostpurrp, French Montana and all of those nu-ATRappers like 2 Chainz, Future, Trouble and Alley Boy, that I couldn't even bring myself to listen to the Trae and Yelawolf albums, and that I had to give up on Livewire because I couldn't keep track of them, and what remained was just about digestible.
There are other songs I like, but these are the joints that I'll ride for, collide for, and won't even write snide comments for. There isn't any order of preference in the lists and they're broken down into 3 categories but there's rules, got codes and lines we obey : singles are signified by the song receiving a video, which means there are a handful of 2010 tracks included, and it's one-song-per-artist, unless the artist formed a duo with somebody else. O let's get to it :
This post is sure to be subject to rigorous editing over the next 26 days, so I'll be happy to accept a new solo track by AZ, a freestyle over Tik Hoe by Gunplay, and a song apiece from the upcoming touted collaborations between Suga Free & DJ Quik and Mystikal & Mannie Fresh before the year ends. I also wouldn't say no to one good Jacka song, but it has to be either Murder Somebody-levels of good or the Slap Tremendo from the Husalah & Paul Wall studio session video.
Oh shit, it's Foxx, Boosie and Webbie doing the Wipe Me Down remix live at some outdoor 106 & Park summer soiree:
Moments to watch for: Boosie doing the Crank Dat dance at 0:08, Boosie & Webbie over-enthusiastically embracing each other at 1:07 like Rocky and Apollo Creed on the beach in Rocky III and Webbie making it rain on the chil'ren at 2:25 - call him Max Hardcore!
FYI, to all you fuckin' therm Rap bloggaz: if your forthcoming 2011 retrospective doesn't include at least one Foxx song then your list is a no fly zone.
Yo money grip, money grip, now this ain't no Ego Trip, but I'm so blatantly on their tip with this list that I can't even No Homo it. 11 great Rap songs which aren't from 2011, but which I've only discovered in 2011 :
What are some non-2011 songs you've had EUREKA! moments with this year then? Which one of you fucken' noobz only got up on the 7" edit of Let's Get Nice by Glory this year? Oh wait, that was me....
Laroo & Turf Talk ft. E-40 - Money To Blow (From Sic Wid It Bloc Ops; 2012)
Well, well, well, if it isn't a video for the first legitimately great Turf Talk song which isn't just a freestyle since 2008. We've known Turf could hold a tune ever since Money On Ya Head, but who knew he was Sick Wid It's Sleepy Brown in hiding? Mike Marshall and Stressmatic must be shitting bricks right now.
