After almost four years in prison Rio Da Yung OG is back, and his new tape RIO FREE (Something Happen) has two sides (literally and metaphorically) to it. He hasn’t lost talent during the hiatus, but he also hasn’t made any progress.

Keep reading

Icewear Vezzo

It’s getting harder, year after year, to sift through the hip hop mud to find something even remotely resembling a gem. The problem is not that rappers nowadays have nothing to say. Ninety percent of all artists in any genre have nothing to say. It’s that to even say nothing and sell it for something requires artistry. And artistry is the last thing hip hop artists care about. With easy availability of any platforms and dirt cheap studios and whatnot, anybody who says something on the mic thinks of himself\herself as an artist. After losing enough time sifting through dozens of the new so called geniuses who can’t even rhyme I found myself returning more and more to the artists I discovered in the past and who continue to put out solid music and are always reliable. None of them (Vezzo, Z-Ro, Boldy, Rio, the late Ka, Cash Kidd and half a dozen of others) had a breakthrough album in 2024, yet they carry artistry on their sleeves proudly.

Keep reading

Nobody’s denying the service Ice Cube did to hip hop culture but the new effort by the L.A. legend feels hollowed out, tired and patchy.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s Cube did political rap like nobody else. His greatness was easy to explain. His critique of modern society was concrete. Police brutality, racism, social injustice, ghettoization: all of it felt real, and that is why it resonated. Ice Cube went left wing as far as possible for a black poet in white America.

Concreteness is what is lacking in Man Down. Cube voices out a few of the grievances here and there, yet they are so abstract you wouldn’t know who they are aimed at. He is suddenly so shy to name all the deficiencies of our society in his lyrics, he acts like a little boy, wiggling and waggling, embarrassed to ask where a bathroom is.

Keep reading

The way muography works is similar to an X-ray in that it’s basically a noninvasive form of photography, only more intense. Muons, which are cosmic particles akin to neutrinos, are constantly moving through space and matter; captured by a muon detector, they can show an extremely detailed image of what they’ve just passed through. In practical terms, this intense imaging allows engineers to examine the integrity of stuff like the crumbling Brunelleschi’s dome or Berlin’s Kongresshalle. It also acts as a good conduit for thinking about how Elucid raps.

Keep reading

The Thief Next to Jesus is a return to form for the Brownsville’s firefighter/MC after a few misses.

Ka’s music has always been low key, but his last double album Languish Arts / Woeful Studies (2022) was so low key it went under radars. He caught heat for his drumless beats. He was castigated as too elitist and too far from modern trends. He pursued an unusual business model, selling music only from his website (the hell with the streaming platforms). Still, he has never been a cult priest pandering only to his followers.

As with his all previous CDs, The Thief Next to Jesus is heavy on the Bible references but it is as far from Christian rap as possible. Poets have long used Bible references, even if few of them lived Christian lives. What makes The Thief Next to Jesus so bold (despite that the production here is still low key) is how Ka mixes together two recurring themes in his lyrics.

Keep reading

After a quarter century in the business, Lyrics Born has announced his plan to release two more albums and then drop out of the music industry indefinitely, turning his attention toward acting and his cooking show (and whatever else he might discover). The news came out on April 1, so it’s hard to take it completely seriously, but it’s mid-May and he’s still going with that story as he puts out the first of those records,  That 1 Tyme in the Studio: Acoustic Selections. It’s not the first time LB has done something like this (Same !@#$ Different Day’s remixes of his debut being the most notable), but it’s certainly fun. He brings in a band to take on some of his favorite tracks, occasionally completely reworking them but more typically staying close to the original.

Keep reading

Philthy Rich \ Yung X –– Principles & Morals (FOD Ent)

Philthy Rich swears that almost every CD is his last, that he’ll quit his solo career after this one and work only as a CEO of his FOD label. It is most generous of him to give voice to the new California artists and bring a lot of guests on his solo projects. But it is also most unfortunate that his signees don’t even have a quarter of his talent.

Keep reading

Roc Marciano’s music has been a bumpy ride for the last few years. Not since 2018 when he put out KAOS (fully produced by DJ Muggs) has he created anything even remotely close to his stone cold classic albums. Marcielago, Mt. Marci, even the last year’s The Elephant Man’s Bones left a bitter aftertaste. Not that they have been straight out duds, but they had only a few bangers.

Keep reading

Peezy is writing the most disgusting rap in 2023

Let’s be honest: we can’t just have exciting years in music. The year people stepped on the Moon was more exciting than the one when they didn’t. We love to cheer when during a year we discover new talents, when we are buried under tons of great stuff which just keeps coming. But we shoegaze when our favorite musicians fall off. We tend to stay silent about it.

Keep reading