So yeah, sorry I've been so absent on this shit for the last few weeks. Real life been gettin in the way. Anyway, live shit that happened/will be happening:
A) checked the Yelawolf/Wiz Khalifa show up here a couple weeks back. Met up with the homie DJ Burn One and Will Power with Yela before the show and talked a bit with them, cool dudes. Yela killed it as you might expect, but I was really surprised with Wiz as well. I was not a big fan of his coming in, and didn't know much of his material, but he has a legit rock star presence onstage. It also helps he has a DIEHARD core of young fans, some of whom were obnoxious in their fandom (shouts to the Becky that hit me in the face before Yela came on when I refused to let her in front of me because I literally had nowhere else to move). However, dude is nice live. Noz had a pretty accurate write-up of the show in DC. Also check Will Power's pics he took to see just how insane this tour was. They sold out nearly every venue they played, from what I understand.
B) I'll be headed down to Greensboro, NC with my homie Nate next weekend to check this Huntsville show at Guilford, featuring G-Side, G-Mane, Kristmas, Bentley, and Jackie Chain. I am beyond psyched for it. Nate's a super dope photographer and hopefully I'll be returning from it with a bunch of great pictures and ridiculous stories to share.
Edit: I made this long ass post 3 smaller posts for easier digestion.
Back in Boston from a ridiculous long weekend in New York. Big ups to the homie J Dirrt from Baller's Eve for taking the time out to say what up and give me some free beer. Also checked out this Yelawolf show last night at Brooklyn Bowl, then followed that crew over to a bar where Wolf put on a secret show. Dude's a monster performer. If the fact that I don't know how I got home, waking up still totally wasted at 2 pm, and the broken knuckle on my hand are any indication, it must have been a pretty sick night.
Below's video of Yelawolf performing "Pop the Trunk" from the show last night. Ignore me shouting the hook into the microphone. Also thanks Wolf for giving me my hat back:
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 theLiquor 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:
So Yelawolf dropped the video for his track "Pop the Trunk" off the amazing Trunk Muzik mixtape he released earlier this year (probably a top 2 or 3 tape of the year, along with the Starlito and X.O. joints), and there's not much more I can say about it than what some otherbloggers have already said. It's a great video from the amazing Motion Family (who I'll hopefully do a post on later this week), and puts a literal face on the lyrics Yela lays down on the track. Kind of seeing his juxtaposition of rural life and sudden violence in the first verse with the parking lot argument ending in a murder in the second verse is a good statement of what Yelawolf appears to be about in totality.
I'm extremely interested to see how Yelawolf goes over in the music world this year. I predicted that he'll be huge by the end of this year. He certainly has the pure talent and skill to put out some GREAT work, and his work on the hook for Santana's "Mixin Up the Medicine" seems to show he has some crossover appeal. As perhaps it was inevitable for Asher Roth to be compared to Eminem, people are beginning to compare Yelawolf and another rural southern rapper, Bubba Sparxxx. It's not a terribly long stretch to compare these two, but whereas Bubba Sparxxx' sound appeared to be artificially constructed with help from Timbaland or Collipark, Yelawolf seems to be totally in control of his own sound and image. He draws from a variety of disparate sources to create a wholly organic sound and image that's thrilling. Also, for the record, comparing him to Kid Rock is terrible.
Below I've compiled a video of Yelawolf freestyling and an interview off of last week's Baller's Eve, as well as a couple of tracks, "Fifty" with Grip Plyaz from his 2005 release Creekwater, my favorite track off of Trunk Muzik, "Speak Her Sex", and his track off the new SMKA album "Deer Mama":
