new Cam'ron single is fucking amazing!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgfZgBpDzPM

beat by Just Blaze, Juelz Santana on the hook.

didn't see it coming at all. i thought dude was done. wow.

Listening to this a lot since picking it up last week.

I'm dangerously on the verge of being that guy who doesn't listen to much hip hop lately... I don't want it to happen but that's just kind of how it's going.

Do it. It makes that hip hop revival moment all the more rewarding

Don't worry. It's normal.

I've been that guy several times in my life, for long periods of time.
The first time it happened was around the time Wu-Tang Forever came out and I had my mind blown by how hard the clan still went, in spite of their own maturity and wisdom. To this day I think it's a better album than 36C, though not a more important one.

Every time I was "that guy", until maybe my mid 20's, I had no idea how to reconcile the fact that I was a little post punk scenester kid listening to, shit, Mary J. Blige and Method Man. It felt like it was unnatural in some way. But eventually I realized that my ego and my warped understanding of my identity were way too heavily wrapped up in what I felt I should be, and what I thought others thought I was.

Doesn't matter. Be that guy until you're another guy. I go months without listening to anything on dischord or SST, butI know where my roots are.

Plus, hip hop is the most interesting thing going on in music. It's just where the excitement is these days. I'm fine with that. Hop hop makes up at least 50% of what I listen to, and the rest is an amalgam of noise, drone, indie pop, punk, experimental and electronic shit.

And old favorites.

I'm carrying on a bit now aren't i? Yeah, I think I am. Anyway, be that guy if that's what's doing it for you right now.

so you guys were right, Believe Me was just a street single..

here's a new song: https://youtube.com/watch?v=VmddPo_c2oE

love it. INCREDIBLE!

still doesn't sound like THE lead single.. but finally some album worthy material.

i'm speechless, seriously.. what a comeback. i'm so happy right now.

Ain't no one gonna be sippin' lean no more.

http://grantland.com/hollywood-prosp...n-or-off-lean/

you are fucking dead man, honestly like, fuck off already.

Parts of that article were very saddening, others ridiculously funny....


I had a huge bottle of sizzerb leftover from when the doctor had prescribed it for me when I was almost dying of pneumonia. That shit was psychedelic!

Sad situation, but good for him to finally admit it. Irony that opiates have plagued music consistently for the past 130 years at the least. First it was morphine, then heroin, then pills, then heroin again, then stronger pills, then heroin again, then sizzerb, then pills again, and now heroin is on the rise which is really kind of frightening. The problem with pills and drank is that it doesn't carry the soul-crushing obviousness of the needle and the damage done, yet as a narcotic its abuse causes all the same physical and social damage! In this regard, its almost more dangerous. You notice people who are getting strung out, its kind of obvious within a short time, people with narcotic pill addictions do that shit for years and years without pause.

Gucci just went to jail for 3 years. would've been 20 if he was a normal person, he's lucky he's famous.

your thoughts, NR? :)

I'm not sure about that. Phillip Seymour Hoffman was a intravenous and intramuscular heroin injector for the entirety of his career, and I think everyone was shocked.

The obviousness of problem drinking is harder to pin down, since "non problem" drinking is done by pretty much everyone above 21 (maybe 17) pretty much every day. Now, while that is totally problem drinking on a global scale from a clinical perspective, it somehow doesn't seem like it... Probably because alcohol is a highly profitable marketable product, and is not nationally regulated as an illegal drug until it reaches like absinthe strength.

Heroine is easy to blame because corporations and western governments are not (openly) making money off of it. It's not patented (though it was at one time and probably should have remained so).

The really sad truth is that all those people dying from heroin, pills, cocaine, meth... All the hard shit... I'm guessing 90% of them were killed by mixture of whatever drug they were using and ALCOHOL.

Plus, when someone is just a drinker and doesn't do anything else (like I don't know... Mel Gibson? Orson Welles?) they eventually have very public incident where the world realizes that they've effectively been transformed from men into monsters by our innocent little investment, and small business champion, alcohol. Only Mel Gibson was not drunk on a micro-brew when he ended his career, and turned his face into the spitting image of everyone's second generation Irish/Polish/Romanian/Dutch/German/Italian great uncle (remember him?) who, before dying when we were in elementary school, would chug whiskey and bellow profanities at our mothers, maybe slap us around a little when our fathers weren't doing a good job of toughening us up.
Once the world sees someone in that state it can't un-see it.

Alcohol is the drug that has brought down civilizations. Heroin is just what the bored, weak later generations of addicts who don't have the dedication or commitment to become a hard, hard, live-threatening addict have resorted to when they despise life no matter how great theirs is.
But opiates ain't no fuckin joke either, and yes- they're so prevalent it's goddamn unbelievable. And yes, it's getting worse. Alcohol no longer packs the punch to bring down nations.... Opiates are different. Nobody is immune to the dependency that might develop after a one week course of morphine following a surgery. NO ONE. And once you've had it in a large enough dose to understand that you like it (more than "like" it; you prefer life on it to life not on it), and are taken off it, only to suffer through the surprising intensity of the first withdrawal, you will never be able to watch Trainspotting or Requiem for a Dream or even Pulp Fiction again with the naive sense of observational separation again, because you will feel a little tingle in your stomach every time you see someone injecting.

This era has not had it's opiate peak yet. There hasn't been one in a few hundred years, really. But when fucking post millennial America does go head to head with a drug that powerful, everything will change. Most of us won't notice.... We'll already be addicted to a massive amount of prescription opiate derivatives. Everyone who drinks will have to either stop drinking or die, and many will stop drinking in a heartbeat, which they probably couldn't do before having to choose.

Anyway, I think opiates should be legalized and mildly regulated, but also open to markets just like alcohol. We've accepted that we can't live without our liquor by keeping it legal despite the war on drugs and tobacco. We should just do the same with opiates and make it so people over 21 can get a few high potency morphine and codeine tablets at the grocery store if they feel like it, and have a documented pain condition.

And heroin and opium, laudanum, etc. should be watered down and given in bars to consenting adults. Then at least we'd be admitting that it's going to rule us if we try to fight it. And at least we as a society would take some goddamn ownership of the fact that drugs feel good.. Universally. Globally. Whatever. Whoever you are, whatever you think, you'd rather be able to have an opiate in ya when you wanted one than to never have one at all. Embrace it. Admit you like it. It will lose its power, and eventually it will only be as bad as alcohol is now... Killing several hundred people a day, nationally. Mostly due to underage use and improper or unmonitored administration in man unsafe environment (like a car). Not too bad considering what it COULD be doing if things continue as they are.

Because when it comes down to it alcohol and opium are two sides to the same coin. The fact that they are so present in our culture makes me feel like someone is finally doing to us what we did to the American Indian with liquor.

I love how when you're young, you're given the impression that heroin and cocaine are, like, SUPER rare. Only used in the worst places by the most ducked up people after years of pot and LSD. In reality, both drugs are in every town in this fucking country. Every goddamn one. If you got a lecture about coke and h in high school, I'll bet there were kids doing one or both of those drugs in the bathroom at the same time that police officer was droning on and on, waiting for his shift to end so he could hit the bar.

Getting carried away here, guys... Sorry. It's an important conversation and (as you can probably tell, I've had some experience with it in my youth) but it's not "multiple paragraph in the cafe" important. Haha. Begging your pardons

Now what the fuck is Sizzerb?

Sizzerb is the 1999 LA interpretation of the 1999 dirty south sizzurp, which is what is now called "lean"



its some sippin ass, pourin it up ass, smokin ass, gettin high ass ninjaz..

That's stupid unless that cough syrup is loaded with hydromorphone. In which case it's smart. :)

Nah, dumb as hell. I'd rather have one Xanax than everything on that table including the jewelry and glasses and black person's arm.

Since I just swallowed two Klonipin and an Ativan for bed, of which I have many more in a legal prescription that I refill with my iPhone every month, I guess that makes me a pretty rich man for the last 45 minutes I'm awake.

(Well, the klonipin doesn't start to help my pain for at least 15 min, so I guess it's more like a half hour. Still... Rich as a ninja in my own, broken white man kind of way)

wow you're so useful here, thank you.

i really can't wait for Ab-Soul's new album. been listening to Control System non stop lately, such a unique album.

I don't understand what's happening here, BUT....

All of you guys should totally avoid this Bishop Nahru kid. He is crap, despite the "MF DOOM produced" tracks, the kid sounds like a bored (or more bored) Earl Sweatshirt who's never seen much of anything. That's what he is, actually. Being sixteen ( and telling us his age at least that many times on his last mixtape. Ugh!) and not having the bizarrely compelling drone flow of Earl... Who's already at least half a genius.

Anyway, when's Carter V gon' leak?!

Wait, I thought we were all kind of not crazy about that guy. Didn't we have a conversation about this that pretty much settled the matter? I did hear a track of his that made my earls go up like a dog's the other day... Gave it a few stars on my iPod after months of not hearing a single thing on any of his tracks that sparked my interest.

Anyway. I'm thinking about that new guilty Simpson album. Maybe giving it a chance. Or this Gasface guy. Awful name, but he does have a strong rep. growing in in the "guys who listen to Has Lo, Blu, and MellowMusicGroup comps that feature has lo and blue" demographic. Too bad most of toes guys suck, am I right?

haha, what? i always tell you guys how much i like Control System. "The Book Of Soul" is one of the best rap songs in the last few years.

Oh ... Jeeeez man, take an ambien or something. Or maybe I should. Then his rapping may actually sound like it is appropriately metered instead of sounding about as fast as sap traveling down the trunk of a massive redwood. ;)

good. Good?

The beat's nothing spectacular. But at least it sounds like a Lil Wayne song. And he's going pretty hard lyrically. I'm with it. Looking forward to C5.

Take it from me, rich kids can party harder than anyone this side of Bangkok. At least in my day (late high school, college in the late '90s/early '00s) the rich kids did all the hard shit, knew more about it, had more connections, and were actually sometimes scarier than the hustlers and thugs and stoners.

I fell in with a grouping extremely rush Brent Easton-Ellis clichés when I was starting college. I went from thinking I was hardcore for being a seasoned hard alcohol drinker and occasional weed and LSD user to literally being the most inexperienced person in my own life. The rich kids I befriended were experienced cocaine and heroin users (though not habitual ones) who were familiar with drugs if never even encountered before.

These kids with money don't grow up with the same notions of consequence and fear of reprimand that the rest of us have. We used to "hang out" at so and so's loft, and everyone would just sit down in a circle and pull whatever drug they happened to be carrying in mass quantities out of their bags and we'd all just dive in, like that scene in The Darjheeling Ltd. where the bro there's meet up on the train for the first time. Hah.

Crack was way beneath the kids I knew. They preferred the purest cocaine I've ever fucking seen.. The kind of shit I couldn't have purchased a gram of with my own life savings at the time. Granted, many of these kids graduated with C averages after six years of fucking around, or fell off the face of the earth. But I assure you, rich kids can be fucking crazy. I've never been rich, and even in adulthood I'm only moderately well off with a job that's under constant threat of termination. I will never know the kind of crazy that they were familiar with by eighth grade. Lol.

Electronic music and experimental guitar based music also have an edge by being willing to try new technologies and mix things up. I think a lot of the organic music of the world is kind of dying, for the moment, and that's fine with me because you're right. Punk hasn't offered anything new in a very long time. Since the dawn of hardcore, really. Hip hop is constantly trying new things.

Yeah, I've said for awhile that hip hop and electronic music are still really interesting and evolving while guitar music seems stuck in limbo, constantly replicating the sounds of the past.

this is all very simplistic thinking.

Big Black sounded nothing like VU and used a synthetic drummer way before other "rock" bands did it.

Sonic Youth did so much innovation on guitar that it now seems old hat, but they surpassed VU's sound many times over.

"rock n roll" has been around now for 60+ years.

Hip Hop music has been around for almost 40 years.

Both genres have been recycling themselves for decades now.

Bands/groups in either genre who seek to expand the musical vocabulary of these genres are always ridiculed at first by the purists , then their innovations end up seeming boring and trite once everyone catches up. It is what it is.

at it's core, rock n roll is riffs, a backbeat, and songs about primal things.

at it's core, hip hop is a looped beat, and an MC talking to their people in rhyme.

Both of these allow for an infinite variety of sound.

What I used to love about Hip Hop was how it was structured so differently from traditional song forms. That shit went out the window in the late 80's, early 90's when record labels and rappers realized mad money could be made by essentially making pop songs with rapped verses, and sing along Rhythm and bullshit choruses. After that (and after the labels sucked the creativity out of sampling) most mainstream Hip Hop was just the same old tired formula. verse, chorus, verse, chorus, chorus chorus.....

innovation in music happens because people get tired of the same old shit, but it can only go so far.

The history of Jazz shows this, having reached a maximum level of innovation that took shit to such far out edges that everyone lost the thread of true jazz improvisation. Fusion sounded like drug addled funk. Free Jazz became cacophony for it's own sake. Smooth Jazz became adult contempo background music.

The same is happening as we speak to rock n roll. rock music did so much with a riff, beat and a song that there is not much else left to do with that framework that has not been done.


In ten or twenty years the same thing will happen with Hip Hop.

I have been predicting the next big wave of young people's music to piss off parents will be Tejano/ranchera inspired accordion music, good for drinking and for dancing, and it will usher in a new wave of polyphonic multi-instrumental music that is as far removed from rock as hip hop was back in the day.

rambling.....

I suppose hip hop makes white, jaded, privileged kids feel ok about their racism.

that it do...

You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to Genteel Death again.

I wonder why white folks have not made inroads into taking over Hip Hop like they did with Rock n roll?

I mean, in the 80's a "black" rock band was such a rarity! (in the mainstream)

why do you guys think that is? rock music got taken by white folks REAL quick.

The flip side of that is that, in the 80's and 90's Rap music's explosion in sales was mostly due to white kids buying it. I don't know if it was because of "relating" as much as it was because it was something different, something thrilling in it's newness. white kids like to scare their parents.

I disagree with this analysis, hip hop like all other musics is simply recycling and revisiting and remixing previous incarnations of sound and style. There is nothing "new" just renewed ways of looking at the same things.

Just the 1980s? I can't think of s single mainstream, popular, black fronted rock band of the 2000s, period. And only a handful from the 1990s. Its insane how when guitar oriented music from 1920s-1950s was dominated by genius black guitarists and song writers, that since the 1980s Prince, Lenny Kravitz, and HR are about it. Honorable mention to Fishbone but I'm from LA where there from, so they may not have actually had as much reach or influence as they did here where they're a household name from anybody from the 1990s..

new vid of Weezy in the studio, recording a song "Tina Turn Up Needs A Tune Up": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H71OPcYRfsc

amazing.

"Pops treated mom like Billie Jean
Like hot sauce, I put it on everything
I'ma give that fuckin' woman everything, everything"

There were a few. Fishbone, Living Color, 24/7 Spyz (poor man's fishbone)

There were a few black dudes rockin' in other bands too.

Suicidal Tendencies (Rocky George), Kings X (Doug Pinnick)


the list of white hip hop acts who made $$ is fairly short too,

Beastie Boys, Eminem are the top tier in terms of quality output I guess. Vanilla Ice was a joke. Marky mark & The Funky Bunch were a joke. 3rd Bass were an odd thing, and MC Serch's solo stuff never caught on.

I just wish more people listened to a wider variety of stuff, which would help create a wider range of sounds.

Chuck D once said the more you know the more you can rap about. The same goes for music I think.

well as far as white rappers go, now we have Mac Miller, Macklemore, Action Bronson, Riff Raff, Lil Ugly Mane..

at least a couple of them aren't a joke.