Generic list post: may 2015

Obligatory round-up post of the songs I've been feelin' during the month when Mad Max: Fury Road single-handedly saved a genre as creatively moribund as guitar music.

Latino Velvet ft. Don Cisco - Raza Park (1997)
AZ ft. Jermaine Dupri - Rock Me (Hey AZ So So Def Mix) (1998)
Pablo Skywalkin - All Facts (2013)
Nef The Pharaoh - Bitch I'm From Vallejo (2014)
Corn ft. Nef The Pharaoh - Old School Hyphy (2015)
22nd Letter - Blunt On Me (2015)
Dr. Yen Lo - Day 93 (2015)
Boosie - I'm Sorry (2015)
Ty Money ft. Twista - Come Again (2015)
Snoop Dogg & Pharrell Williams - R U A Freak (2015)
Mr.2-17 ft. The Ratchets - Why? (2015)
Honey Cocaine - Honeydick (2015)
$tarlito ft. Robin Raynelle - Introversion (2015)
The Novelist - Ignorant And Wot (2015)
Gage - Throat (Ghetto Vanessa Edit) (2015)
Becky G - Lovin' So Hard (2015)
Junkie XL - Spikey Cars (Extended Version) (2015)

What else? Lil' Mama's Sausage is more like an oral history of rap music than a song; saving RJ's If It Ain't Ace until the weather warms up; BeatKing's That Ain't My Thot is the greatest No Limit remake ever even if it doesn't bear repeated plays; someone needs to edit Migos out of DJ Clue & Meek Mill's Basic Bitch already; Good Thing might be billed as Sage The Gemini featuring Nick Jonas but it's blatantly the other way around; couldn't be arsed sifting through 100 songs by a rapper so hit-or-miss as Young Thug so I sat out The Great Rap Leak Of 2015.

Brief thoughts on Lil' Mama's Sausage

Lil' Mama - Sausage
(From YouTube; 2015)


Damn, ol' lass coulda had the meme-rap era Chicken Noodle Soup on her hands if only she'd chilled out with DMX/Pow Wow burlesque during the hook and gone for a pork-based Nicki Minaj homage instead. That didn't happen so what we're left with here is 2015's 2nd best rap song about jimmy hats after Rae Sremmurd's Safe Sex Pay Checks and another chance for Slick Rick & Vance Wright to clock some ASCAP cheques.

A 2015 Bay Area rap song about weed which bodies Berner's whole solo career

Looks like Nef The Pharaoh's first move with Sick Wid It Records is to team up with Cousin Fik & Willie Joe as the label's 2k15 version of The Mossie. Plz excuse the terrible weed analogy here but you'll light up Blunt On Me up expecting B-Legit's The Hemp Museum only to find uncle Earl has instructed his rugrats to lace the backwood with Celly Cel's Hot Sunny Day and Fik's own No Gravity:

"N*gga puffin' on some wood, yeah, we in this bitch
Money for breakfast, no eggs benedict, man, we been the shit"

22nd Letter - Blunt On Me
(From YouTube; 2015)

Nevertheless this one's hella fresh

We're at that point of the year when your main criteria for finding new music should be "will this song turn my mate's BBQ into the I Got 5 On It video when I get my turn with the AUX cord?" Had to spit a loogie like Yukmouth when I clicked play on this cut from RJ's latest 'tape because this one'll make a backyard go delirious like Eddie Murphy:

"You might find a bitch around me, but not in me
My last flight outta town hit the lottery"

RJ - If It Ain't Ace
(From OMMIO 2 mixtape; 2015)

Brief thoughts on your thinkpieces about instrumental hip hop

. <~~ This dot here represents a random old 45 King beat nobody ever spat over.

. <~~ And this dot here represents the genre of post-Donuts instrumental hip hop.

On this page they're separated by an inch or two, in the real world there's a gulf of a gazillion trillion bazillion miles in quality between the two.

The 45 King - Simply Dope Part 2
(From 45 King's The Red The Black The Green 12"; 1988)



Presumably Lakim Shabazz rejected the Simply Dope Part 2 beat for his first album because Night Of The Living Baseheads had everybody shook to rhyme over The Grunt back in '88?

Rap songs that aren't on YouTube but really should be #9

"You want benefits? Get with Uncle Sam
You want bougie nails? Get with the program
And dank weed's what I smoke, it makes me choke when I holla
See, God created pussy right after the dollar"

Jay Tee & Baby Beesh - You Should Neva Be Broke
(From Spread Yo' Hustle compilation; 1997)



File this under ‘Vallejo slumpers by Latino Velvet that Mac Dre really should have guested on’. Come for the entrepreneurial (wo)mannishness, stay for the G-Funk bass.

Old man yells at Soundcloud

Never that. Here's a couple of joints for the summer I came across on the 'cloud this past week.

"I should slap you with the muthaf**kin' strap, no bra
Leave you eatin' through a muthaf**kin' straw"

Honey Cocaine - Honeydick
(From The Gift Rap EP; 2015)


Canadian rapper makes hot song shockah! Not since Can't Sit With Us by Gangsta Boo & La Chat has there been such a stark juxtaposition between lyrics and production - when magma meets melody! Gonna interpret that "a buster/ya pops shoulda used a rubber" lyric as an ill-subliminal at Canada's preeminent wasteman Mindbender Futurama.

"Itsy-bitsy Spider went up the water spout
SKEET SKEET ON THAT HOE WHILE I CRANK DAT ROOSEVELT!"

Mr.2-17 ft. The Ratchets - Why?
(From Soundcloud; 2015)


As This And That hinted, the most fun Mr.2-17 songs seem to be the ones featuring The Ratchets. 2-17's evolution of Swag-Rap comes as a much-needed antithesis to Atlanta's current glut of Trapper dullards shitting out mixtape after mixtape after mixtape of songs about their kitchens over beats with about as much low-end as a Fievel fart.

No American na fi do Reggae

The great irony about Reggae is that, whilst Eddie Murphy and Shaggy helped save the genre from amounting to little more than a novelty parade of Marley family members and endless boring Lee Perry albums, Americans are otherwise inept at anything related to it. Thus, it's not entirely surprising that Ty Dolla $ign would hop on a remix of Kranium's Nobody Has To Know 2 full years after it first dropped and a good year & change after someone blended it with Bhris Brown's Show Me when he lives in a country where UB40's Red Red Wine is considered a Bashment tune.

Kranium ft. Ty Dolla $ign - Nobody Has To Know (remix)
(From the internet; 2015)


But if ever there was a Yank arist who could lace the remix of a Dancehall classic about shagging another bloke's girlfriend on the downlow with some saucy poetic flourishes of his own, then you'd think it would be the guy behind the "I got another n*gga's bitch in my bed right now" song. So what does Ty do now he's been given the perfect opportunity to retcon the R. Kelly track which begat his own whole persona? He trots out a minute's worth of rote signifiers about strippers that sound like they were too generic for Drop That Kitty, if such a feat is even possible.

Official rating on the Reggae scale: fat Ali Campbell.