Loose Joints 2

I'm breaking that one big post into 3 smaller posts.



Big K.R.I.T- Children of the World

K.R.I.T and Creative Control continue their winning partnership with this video, which is a bit more ~metaphorical~ than the last couple, but which still fills the screen with all the deep soulfulness that the K.R.I.T. track is imbued with. K.R.I.T. Wuz Here was supposed to be released April 5th, but apparently it's been pushed back to May 3rd, which kinda sucks.

DJ Ayres feat. GLC- Got Me Gone

This is kind of a weird partnership, with hipster DJ extraordinaire Ayres teaming up with Kanye-associated rapper GLC (remember him from "Spaceship") for a single on Ayres' T&A label. The beat is sampled from Omni Trio's mid-90s hit "Renegade Snares", which is far and away the best drum and bass track ever made, and GLC's raps are basically really nice pimp talk, which sorta positions this track pretty close to Jackie Chain's deathless anthem "Rollin". I'm diggin' it.

DJ Eleven- Eleven and the Dude (right click to download)

Speaking of DJs, one of Ayres' partners in the mobile party unit The Rub, Eleven, has just released this AMAZING mix of some of Devin the Dude's career highlights, framed in a concept parelleling Devin with another famous Dude, Jeffrey Lebowski from The Big Lebowski. Don't sleep. This mix has me real excited for Devin's upcoming concert in Boston.

Nate B feat. 6 Tre G, M.A., Kristmas, Play Cousans, Bentley, Swagg Buddies, DJ Cunta, Slash, Jackie Chain, ST 2 Lettaz, J. Griff- Huntsville StarZ Anthem

So, yeah, this is Huntsville's Massive Mixtape Posse Cut, and it's pretty good. Interestingly, the script gets sort of flip in that a run-of-the-mill mixtape beat is used here instead of a gleaming Blockbeattaz style production in order to show off the skills of the MCs. S.L.A.S.H. is really starting to get notice from me, she's got the best verse on this track. That whole "no answer/same answer" couplet is kinda retardedly great.

Untamed- Country

Another new one from the Huntsville camp. It's cool to hear Blockbeattaz take on country rap tunes so effortlessly when they want to. Everyone obsesses a bit too much over their trance-rap sound, I think.

Das Racist- Shut Up, Dude

This really should be terrible on paper, and maybe it is, but shit, this mixtape sounds so loose and fun that I can't help to vibe to it. I feel like I will be bumpin this shit a lot during the summer. The dudes are witty and funny and sometimes overly clever in the way that you might expect Brooklyn-based hipsters from Wesleyan would be, but at the core of it all this horribly-named mixtape is driven by an authentic love for rap music. The final product is something pretty unique and engaging. Also, I'm glad someone finally realized the onomatopoeic glory that the word "telenovela" is, and that they made a song saluting the greatness of Arizona Iced Tea ("One Dollar Can").

Here's "Nutmeg" from it.

Trae feat. Rick Ross and Lil Wayne- Inkredible



I'm not really sure how I missed this the first time around when it was released in January, but the video was released a couple days ago and just, holy shit. This probably wins for the hardest beat to come out in the last 6 months. Shit is just so schizophrenic, with an utterly massive bass drop. Trae, Wayne, and even Ross all come strong here too, each playing to their strengths (nimble double-time monotone rap, super-blunted free association raps, and corporate thuggin', respectively). Check this shit.

Loose Joints

Here's some new-ish shit I've been enjoying recently.

Mr. 706 feat. Lil Bruh- Da Hell Wid Ch'yall

Heard this track earlier this week and finally got the mp3 last night (big ups to the homie J Dirrt at Baller's Eve). Track's pretty sick, it's got a mid 00's ATL rap vibe with a real nice hook on it. I really can't stop listening to this.

Big K.R.I.T. & L.E.$- Grippin' Grain

Here's another one that just dropped the other day, another new one from rap's last King, Big K.R.I.T., feat. Houston up and comer L.E.$. L.E.$ is pretty inoffensive on it, K.R.I.T. comes hard as usual, and the beat was produced by pre-Block Beataz Huntsville producer Arkitek under the alias Kash Kartel, and it go hard.

Curren$y feat. Stalley- Address

I haven't really gotten into Curren$y's superblunted hipster rap style since his Cash Money days. Some dudes tried to turn me on to How Fly, his mixtape from last year with Wiz Khalifa, but outside of a couple songs it just didn't do it for me. However, he really finds a nice groove on this luxurious beat. It's a really nice laid back, summery track. Nothing on this track is different from what Curren$y's been doing since he broke with CM, but it's the best example of his style so far I think. It's got a pretty cool video too. Stalley remains notable only for his beard.

Z-Ro & Lil C- Barre Kelly

My dude MAYNHOLUP! hooked me up with this joint last night, and it's amazing. While 7 of the 9 minutes features Lil C, who rhymes solidly over the "Rapper's Delight" beat, the first two minutes belong solely to Z-Ro, who murders this. Between this and the epic "Mo City Don" freestyle, I think we need a mixtape of Z-Ro freestyling over 80s NY rap beats.

Wochee feat. Lil Boosie- Rear View

This track's been out for a while I think but was just brought to my attention by Noz a few weeks ago. I can't quit jammin this one either. Wochee's from Carenco, LA, population 6,120. The beat's a bit reminiscent of Plies' "Plenty Money", but Wochee throws a nice hook on it, and Boosie comes through with some pretty ridiculous lines like "Breakin records like that Jamaican when I'm racin' for money". Recommended for sure.

Freddie Gibbs- Slammin'

Str8 Killa No Filla coming soon.

All Star & DJ Burn One- Renaissance Gangster

I haven't listened to this yet but I expect great things. Apparently it's just Starlito and Burn One on this street album. We need to hear more of that. 11 songs, that's it. Quality > Quantity, or as I like to call it, the Illmatic model. Go buy it off iTunes for $7.99. It's the least you could do to support two of the best doing it in the rap game right now.

Davey Boy Smith Presents Era of the Six

Davey Boy Smith from over at Southern Hospitality put together an amazing mix of early Three 6/Memphis rap shit. Definitely worth checking out, as is Southern Hospitality's recent split mixtape with Governed by Loyalty, Southern Loyalty.

Big K.R.I.T. and Southern Reality Rap

Big K.R.I.T. - King from Creative Control on Vimeo.

BIG K.R.I.T. HOMETOWN HERO from Creative Control on Vimeo.

So as I wrote up here last week, I was traveling through the Northeast U.S. and Eastern Canada all last week. Before I left I uploaded a bunch of new music to iPod, including some tapes and albums I'd been ignoring. One of those was the Big K.R.I.T. tape from December that David Drake wrote up over at So Many Shrimp, The Last King. Drake's generally a great writer, but I have to say his review, while glowing, didn't exactly appeal to me, and I don't really know why. So I listened to the little Youtube freestyle posted there, didn't feel it, and then forgot about him until a couple weeks ago, when the "King" video dropped. It's impeccably shot, with a grimy, claustrophobic feel normally reserved for Motion Family videos (props to Creative Control for their amazing filming). But even moreso than the wellshot video was the track, a hookless, urgently spit track about hard times and grandiose dreams that caused me to sit up and immediately notice. After replaying the video 5 or 6 more times I finally grabbed the tape for my trip.

It turns out that tape was the thing I listened to the most on my trip, listening to the whole thing at least 7 or 8 times and several times since then. K.R.I.T. would like you to think he's a King, and he makes a damn good case for being one. The dude rhymes with such a ferocity and hunger it'd almost be cliche if he didn't sound so damn sincere about it. "King" is K.R.I.T.'s style in a nutshell: he talks a lot about growing up in hard times in Meridian, Mississippi, but also spits about his almost obsessive plans to get rich and feed his family. He also has a lot of time to throw around tracks about riding through his city feeling good, jamming screw tapes, and hanging out with his people. It's a 360 degree worldview; not just about hard times but also celebrating bits and pieces of the world around him.



Production-wise, the K.R.I.T. tape is impeccably mixed by DJ Break 'Em Off: the sequencing is great, and unlike a lot of mixtapes he doesn't let any idea run for too long. Check "Get Money", which runs the hook through 3 or 4 different iterations of the beat, never letting it settle or rest. According to K.R.I.T. on twitter, he produced "most of the tracks" on the tape, and he's an amazing beatsmith. He's also uses samples to great effect: the sample of dialogue from "Friday Night Lights" is incredibly effective on the above track, "Hometown Hero".

K.R.I.T. is the latest rapper to advance a growing thematic movement I've noticed (God that's pretentious), at least amongst my favorite rappers out of the South, in the last couple of years. Along with Playboy Tre, All Star, and a whole slew of Alabama rappers led by G-Side and Yelawolf, K.R.I.T. has been moving forth with, for a lack of a better term, something I'm calling "Southern reality rap". Over the last decade or so, it seems that a lot of southern rap has been more or less been drawn up in the blueprints of niche rap styles, so much so that you could virtually play Mad Libs with figuring out the latest rap trends simply by putting random words in front of "rap" (trap, snap, swag, bass, club, street, gangsta, etc). Of course, there are a few rappers that have refused to be comfortably pidgeon-holed by a singular style: the Dungeon Family's entire discography, Killer Mike's slept on albums, as well as the first Kanye West album immediately spring to mind. But more often than not, the best known and most successful rappers out of the South have been more than content to work a single sound or subject.


Not to discredit those styles, as dudes like Gucci Mane and Jeezy have made a lot of great music essentially by talking about the same subjects, but I'm really starting to prefer these observational, genuine storytellers that not only document what's going on around them, but then also forcefully place their own philosophies and ideas into the mix (i.e. G-Side's W-2 Boy movement). So often rappers easily avoid taking responsibility for their own music by saying "I'm just writing about what I see". It's encouraging to hear dudes say "I'm telling you what I see AND telling you what I'm doing to change that situation". You have to be a much better writer than Dorrough or Hurricane Chris to write about yourself and your values and not come across as preachy.

More often than not, as well, many rappers consciously keep a distance between themselves and the listener by refusing to place themselves into their music. Except, of course, on the token "conscious"/autobiographical track that seems to appear on every mixtape or album, which a lot of rappers seem to record only to throw out as a bit credit to say "yeah I really CAN rap about REAL LIFE" (seriously, how many bloggers have you heard defend Gucci Mane by citing "Worst Enemy" or "Neva Had Shit" to show HE REALLY CAN WRITE ABOUT THINGS BESIDES DRUGS?) But dudes like Playboy Tre never hesitate to put themselves right in the mix, freely offering up their own shortcomings along with pressing forward with the unmistakable swagger you need to be a rapper. I have no idea if the Liquor Store Mascot character Tre's built is truly reminiscent of the ~real Tre~, but the character is consistent and compelling as Kanye West was back when he was trying to figure out his own identity on College Dropout.

Real life is hardly ever the way music tells us it is. No matter where you live or what you listen to, that's almost always the case. Taylor Swift might sing about teenage boys and girls falling in like with each other, to the point that it might seem that ALL white middle class teenagers are doing in this country are lusting after each other from their bedroom windows, but that's almost certainly not the case. While it's a large part of growing up, it's certainly not the only part. Similarly, living in the hood is not all about selling dope or riding around in tricked out cars. There's a whole lot more going on there, and a whole lot of people that have never done either of those things. The dudes I've mentioned above are trying to broaden their scope to a cinematic level, showing us all people, from the D-Boys to the dudes hustling in school or college, to give us the image of life AS A WHOLE, not simply as a part to be fetishized and obsessed over. That's why I think it's appropriate to call it all "reality rap".


In a few songs this reality rap style can masterfully combine pieces of all those other styles together into one song, but this style is really better suited for albums or mixtapes in which the artist exerts a large amount of control over the tracks selected and the sequencing (DJ Burn One's concept of the "street album" in lieu of the mixtape is great for this style). K.R.I.T. has the extra advantage of being able to craft his own beats to fit his style, but G-Side's production team Block Beataz and All Star's collaborations with Burn One have also yielded great results. At any rate, it's clear that for such a mature and complex writing style to work over the course of an album, the producers and the artists need to have a pretty tight working relationship. Albums by these guys aren't DRASTICALLY different from the blueprint many other artists use: they have their club songs, their for-the-ladies jams, and their introspective jams. Weaving all of these styles together into a cohesive unit that actually tells us something about the artists behind those songs though, is something entirely different.

Below I've got links for tapes from Big K.R.I.T., G-Side, All Star, G-Mane, and Playboy Tre that I think best exemplify this style:

Big K.R.I.T.- The Last King
G-Side- Huntsville International
All Star- Live From the Back of the Class
G-Mane- Sunday on Da Porch
Playboy Tre- Liquor Store Mascot and Goodbye America