If you haven’t heard, Gold Dust is putting out an album of live Doom performances called Expektoration. To be honest I’m not really expecting much from it – Doom’s shows are good when he actually shows up but my general impression of most live rap albums has been negative. Still, the promo stuff Gold Dust is releasing for the album is surprisingly solid, so it might end up worthwhile after all. Rehashed Doom is better than no Doom I suppose.
Remarkable Mayor just make good rap with no predicates. No angle, no agenda, not trying to prove anything, not saving or eulogizing or embalming hiphop, no attempts to go back to the 80 or 90 jump ahead to 2030, no overt politics, no trapping, no anti-trapping, no trying to show these youngsters how rap is supposed to be (I believe they’re both in their early-mid 30s), none of that. They just rap well about everything and nothing in particular, and have a solid ear for beats, and they’re not pretentious dicks about it.
‘The Campaign’ as a whole is very consistent, I had a hard time picking out obvious standouts. So the songs below are more of a general sampling of the album than its highlight reel.
Rugged Man steals yet another track, I can’t think of a single guest appearance he did in the last few years that didn’t end with the same result. Not that Razah does poorly here by any means, he nails his verse. But RA’s paranoid machine-gunned litany of social ills is just too good to beat.
The mashup itself is sloppy and fairly mediocre (just my opinion of course, it seemed to have some legs with the internet at large), but the video for it is surprisingly clever and effective. Bonus points for tiny instances of meta-meta-referencing like the stop-motion blunt rolling sequence that mirrors the opening credits of the Ali G show. Actually, bonus points just for making an original video for a goofy internet mashup in the first place.
(No disrespect to Mazzi but…) FUCK YEA A BREWIN VERSE!! Breezly Brewin appearances are scarce as hell these days, so I celebrate every one of them like my own personal complete double rainbow. It helps that Mazzi and the song itself are pretty good aside from the guest feature.
Some dope shit from our inbox. Chicago’s F.Stokes is a versatile rapper, with a manner ranging from fast and forceful to mellow and measured. I usually prefer the latter, but in Stokes’ case the slower cadence didn’t engage me as much as the brisk delivery heard in the songs below. This rapid-fire approach works particularly well on Jo Jo Dancer, where Stokes avoids the southern-ish inflection and just exhales his verse with much intensity but little stylization.
I don’t know what this is or when it drops but I know this has been 10 years in the making and Gary Grice is behind it all. Anytime you have Wu members fighting with one another on tape, you have video GOLD. CANNOTFUCKINGWAIT! –Philaflava
This is one of the bonus tracks from the OBFCL2: Deluxe Chocolate Coin Edition. The chorus is too long. Deck inexplicably triple-times his whole verse. GZA’s verse is great but his delivery is surprisingly kinda sloppy. Still, the song works.
