“If you weren’t a part of it, at least you got to witness” One day (and a day, not very far off), Mr. Watts will be quoting Drake’s line from Forever to describe his own place in the game. With the release of his birthday mixtape, entitled 24, DK steps into his grown-man shoes even more than on previous projects.
His subject matter is Rated M for Mature without being unrefined, which is what we have come to expect from the proud son of the DMV. Musically, his selections can most accurately be described as “experimental” (not the experimental genre, but that he experiments with different sounds than we are used to hearing from him). Watts tests out new lyrical styles with his faithful soul or jazzy samples, always careful to remain positive and expository. The truth about DK aka Wayne Watts is that he will never escape the posture of a teacher. Through and through, his goal appears to be personal development and passing the lessons of his own experience in generalizable ways to his listening audience. Read more…
A truthful survey of my opinion on the current hip-hop game’s climate around the time that Raekwon’s OB4CL2 came out would have included a treatise on the death of the “gangster lyric” in hip-hop. Make no mistake, it isn’t my belief that those lyrics are gone from the landscape, only that they have lost all of the minimal contact with the reality of the artist’s lives that they may have previously had. For as much as the studied observer of hip-hop music and culture may decry the general apostasy from the image and the styles that they’re used to, is it truly possible to deny the disconnect between lyrics and reality? It is the opinion of the writer that a person who has reached a certain age along with a certain level of success should show an appropriate shift in subject matter reflective of their state of being – then again, if you believe that the biggest drug kingpins in New York are 50 Cent, Cam’ron, and Raekwon this argument will continue to be lost on you. The point being, that no matter what a person used to do, the public expects an artist’s message to mature as time goes on and circumstances change. Read more…
Raekwon the Chef. The man has been cooking up lyrical flavor for 16 years and with the release of Only Built For Cuban Linx 2 he takes us right back to the kitchen – and it’s stocked. Rae’s original Cuban Linx album, released a whopping 14 years ago and known as his masterpiece, brought the rap audience back to his original Wu-roots as he, yet again, painted pictures of the grimy street-life that New York has to offer.
The album begins with “Return of the North Star” which features Papu Wu. The track serves as an introduction to the album through the taped dialogue that is played talking Raekwon’s reputation. The track’s title is a little less subtle. Read more…
In this day and age it’s quickly becoming evident that albums are no longer the most succesful business model for the music industry. In the onslaught of individual song downloads and ringtone sales who can be bothered with creating a cohesive collection of songs encompassing a beginning, a middle and an ending? The unexpected answer seems to be Fabolous, an MC who was never known for his consistency throughout his previous albums recently announced that his latest record ‘Loso’s Way’ would be a concept album loosely based on the movie ‘Carlito’s Way’.
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In 2003 The Black Eyed Peas asked people ‘Where’s The Love?’ in a highly accessible tune posing a rallying call that in actuality no sane person would disagree with and every parent could easily approve. If every Yin must have it’s Yang than the Yin to the BEP’s Yang has arrived in the form of La Coka Nostra. Read more…
Ladies and gentlemen, Nickle Nine presents The Revival EP. A four-track release, The Revival only runs for a shade less than 15 minutes, however the EP is aggressive and serves as an establishing tool to familiarize new listeners to Royce -his flow, his style, his persona and his crew – despite two of the tracks (“Warriors” and “Gun Harmonizing”) having already been leaked. Read more…
To be honest I laughed when I came upon G.’s page on the RAHM Nation website. I was doing a little background research on the New Orleans emcee when I read the following regarding the title of the album.
Yes, American Scholar is a play on the title of Jay-Z’s last effort, American Gangster. But it is not a diss album or a treatise on street culture. It is, to the contrary, a celebration of Black American academic culture, a culture that is just as vibrant and prevalent in the Black community but scarcely represented.
I suppose those three sentences wrote my lead for me. G.’s American Scholar is exactly that, an album filled with thoughts and observations from not just a scholar but a lawyer, father, husband and emcee. Read more…
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