Kendrick was interviewed on Howard Stern yesterday!

Yeah, that’s a great line. We’ve talked about it a few times now.

It’s weird that he song “4:44” is he track that’s up for the Best Song Grammy (which exists ostensibly to honor great songwriting), when there are so many better instances of actual lyrical awesomeness on that record.

I actually think “Marcy Me” is one of the most well-written songs Kay has ever made. Not only does it, like, make fucking sense and shit, but it also just flows off the tongue, it’s smart, it’s clever, it MEANS something.... and it really does feel like Jay’s lining up new rapper and just plugging them off one by one from a book depository somewhere.

Anyway, whatever. Grammy cares about celebrity and the Beyoncé/Jay dialogue is what they think is the important part. Dumbasses.

I dunno about mine. I really liked that Calvin Harris (I know, shut up) and Frank Ocean song, “Slide.” But more in an “I appreciate that this is a really good pop single” way than in whatever way I usually appreciate Frank’s music.

Definitely wasn’t my *favorite* song.

Probably listened to DNA./YAH./ELEMENT. more than any other 2017 songs. Actually I probably listened to 4:44 (all of it) more than anything else this year, but that album just doesn’t hit quite like DAMN. does.

Almost positive DAMN. is my *easy* album of the year chloce, not just in hip-hop be in music overall. I think this is the first time my favorite album has been an Album of the Year nominee. Hmm. I’m getting old and lame.

I’ll do a perfunctory Top Ten Albums list. It’ll probably be super easy actually. In 2015 it took me... well, well into 2016 go actually finish my shit. And in 2016 I had some many albums I loved that when I decided to pare down my then-normal Top 50-or-so to a top 10, it took me forever to sort that shit out.

This year it’s just gonna be ... whatever ten albums I listened to more than twice.

“Shout out to Nostrand Ave., Flushing Ave., Myrtle
All the County of Kings, may your grounds stay fertile
Shout out to Big Poppa, Daddy Kane, heroes
Thus concluding my concerto
Marcy me”

...

I fucking love that ... “Thus concluding my concerto.”
What a line.

I'm not sure who even votes for Grammy awards, but DAMN has made it to the top of enough year-end lists that I think he'll get the gold.


I think Radio Silence is another solid TK album. He is quietly building up a very respectable discography. One of these days he'll release a best-of and maybe everyone will acknowledge his greatness. I don't always think he has the greatest taste in beats, but I love his flow and he's definitely one of the good guys.

!!! I just went to go listen to Radio Silence on youtube and read this comment:

Talib is low-key crafting one of the biggest and most comprehensive discographies for a rapper ever created. When he's on his 20th album and people finally respect him like they should all of these will become retroactive classics.

youtube comments are so wise.

Talib used to have pretty broad recognition. He was on a level with, say, MF Doom at one point, but he’s faded from the relative spotlight (like Doom) because he doesn’t give a fuck about the spotlight. Anyone who knows hip-hop and isn’t an idiot knows he’s a legend of lyrical hip-hop. He’s reverted in semi-underground circles, and he was basically he face of “Conscious” for a good five years.

But without doing anything drastically new sonically, he sounds like an artifact at this point. But... man, he’s a legend. That’s the one-half of BlackStar that’s still making decent rap music right there!

Talib and Common both suffer from the same disease: awesomeness in a former decade. But it’s still awesomeness.

I haven’t heard the new one yet.

No new ground broken. Just a solid spin. Like always.

He's one of, like, three rappers I've been following for a few years and I'm so glad he exists.

Well, he is pretty great. When Jay Z takes time out of his supposed last album to lament how he was not what another rapper was, that rapper is just a fucking legend. Period.

I forget what the last Talib album I bought was, but I think I’ll spin this new one.

Listened to the Eminem album out of curiosity.

I expected bad, but not THAT bad. My advice? DON'T LISTEN TO IT!

It's basically MMLP2 meets Recovery, but worse.

Memorable lines:

“But Marshall, you are terrific, so smart and gifted
I'm so narcissistic, when I fart, I sniff it”

“You got buns I got aspergers”

He said that it's his last album. One can only hope. Please go away, Eminem.

I previewed it on Apple Music and it is ABSURDLY TERRIBLE, OH MY GOD.

I don’t care if he’s trash-talking republicans or white redneck America... that’s admirable, but the way he’s doing it soinds freaking DISGUSTING.

He should quit. Like, seriously. Quit. Go be a politician if he wants to make a difference.

IT’S SERIOUSLY SO BAD

Young Thug and Future's Mixtape, SUPER SLIMEY, is the best hip hop release of the past 3 months. Love it.

Oh my no. It’s just the same exact ridiculous boring beat and ridiculous boring flow repeated what feels like a million times. It’s truly a mediocre pile of shit.

Talib’s new album came out in the last three months, and owns the crap out of these two assholes jerking each other off and making the same sounds over and over with their stupid mouths.

(I’m being a dick because I’m still cashing in on all the times you’ve been a dick about Kanye, but all joking aside, this album is TERRIBLE.)

Have you not bother to listen to Rhapsody? Or Kamiyah? Jesus man.

Ok so yesterday BLACK THOUGHT dropped a legendary freestyle on Flex. One of the best in hip hop's history, seriously!! This shit was so ill that it got him the #1 spot on the trending chart on Twitter. Go ahead and WATCH IT!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prmQgSpV3fA

IT IS AWESOME. 100 bangers the whole way through. SUPER SLIMEY!!!!!!

Same shitty song 30 times.

I kept listening, actually hoping and WANTING to hear some variety, but it never came. It’s like being smacked in the face with a pillow over and over and over again until your skin is too numb to feel the barely-there impact.

Ho Lee Shiiiitttt!!! Mind blown. Jaw on floor. This is the greatest thing ever. I have no problem spending an hour listening to this six times in a row.

listening to trap for variety is like listening to Kanye for altruism.

I love some Roots albums but I always feel they shold have another rapper alongside Black Thought. I get tired of his flow on the albums. He needs a mix-it-up, like Fugazi with Picciotto and McKay. It helps keep it fresh

Fuck yeah man. Black Thought is so underrated. Here are the lyrics: https://genius.com/Black-thought-hot...eestyle-lyrics

That freestyle reminded me that he had a guest appearance on Freddie Gibbs' album two years ago where he went verse for verse with him and completely washed him. And that was impressive as hell because Gibbs is a very strong MC himself, the kind that rarely ever gets outshined on a track. Truly left me in awe.

BTW, Reverend RUN has yet to say anything at all about his rapist brother huh?

I listened to it. It’s amazing, but I saw no point in the Kanye dis “Be a Kardashian, Kanye!” Ok, guy whose band used to be at the forefront of conscious hip-hop and is now playing late night talk shows. Why make a dig like that? Just shut your ass and focus on making Roots albums sound as good as this supposed freestyle.

It was good though.

It was not a genuine Freestyle.

What do you mean? Why doesn't it count?

I didn’t say it didn’t count (I don’t think), but I don’t really think “Freestyle” exists. There is no way he was coming up with all of that shit right on the spot. He’d clearly rehearsed large chunks of it, probably many times. That’s what most rappers do when they “freestyle.” They rap verses they haven’t finished writing yet, or fit into a song. I think most of these seamless freestyles are just memorized bars stored in someone’s mental RAM. I guess I could be wrong, but I don’t think I am.

Doesn’t really matter though. It was awesome as hell.

Yeah. No freestyle is really off top anymore. Rappers clearly do a lot of rehearsals before they perform their "freestyles" on radio shows.

SATURATION III is another solid album. I think that as a collective, BROCKHAMPTON are better than Odd Future were.

MF DOOM's son has passed away:
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bc28iJon...n-by=gasdrawls



So sad. RIP.

Eminem is expected to sell 250,000 first week (including streams):

http://hitsdailydouble.com/news&id=309769

It's pretty much over for this guy.

Are you saying a quarter of a mil in a week is bad nowadays?

---

14 years old. Brutal.

I wish this shitty year would die already.

---


Does anyone else do that vocal thing, shifting between rapping and singing? That was pretty cool, but I wonder if someone else does it better.

---


I don't understand. So the old stuff is awesome, but the new stuff which sounds similar isn't?

I'm seeing Talib in Feb 2018. I'm flipping out. The year is looking good already.

---

Speaking of outdated-but-who-cares, DJ Premier's two-month old beat sounds maybe two decades old and I love it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVOOGDI-0kY

Dude, that’s more than Kanye’s sold in a week since like 2010, and more than Kendrick’s sold on anything but DAMN, and all of Kendrick and Kanye’s albums have been #1 (or #2 in the case of Cruel Summer and College Dropout; #?? in Section80’s case). For 2017, 250,000 is a pretty solid #1 album.

I’ll bet its at least in the top ten opening week sales of the year. In fact, I’m almost fucking positive.

But it should certainly be over for Em. He’s terrible.

Eminem actually went from 800,000 with Marshall Mathers LP 2 to this. Yeezus did 320,000 and To Pimp a Butterfly did 320,000 too. That was all before the streaming era, nowadays the numbers are actually higher due to equivalent sales. DAMN did 600,000 first week (on a side note, it has gone double platinum since and is the highest selling album of the year, all genres included). 4:44 was only available for streaming on TIDAL during its first week and still sold the equivalent of 260,000 copies.

250,000 would be great for almost every other rapper, but for an established pop star like Eminem this is really bad. He's lost most of his fan base and since this album is being received so poorly I don't think he'll even be here for another album.

We officially live in an era where Kendrick, Kanye and Hov are all more popular than Eminem.

I guess I’m mis-remembering about Yeezus’ first-week sales. I thought Ye had been hovering around the 100-150,000 mark for the last few releases. My bad if that’s not true. And I thought MMLP2 sold 700,000-something. ?? But yeah, Kendrick annihilated with DAMN., but TPAB didn’t go platinum until late 2015/early 2016, when streams were counted toward sales. Yeah it sold 300,000-plus in its first week, but it then sat around that same level for the better part of a year, and had only gone gold before the streaming bump launched it suddenly into plat-stat.

I consider 100,000 to be a solid #1 actually, because in 2017, it is. But yeah, Eminem has fallen quite far. He’s the only rapper to release more than one album that went platinum in its first week (Marshal Mathers LP, Eminem Show), and even in the twilight of his career he was still scoring big hits and selling around the 400,000 mark with his awful Relapse crap.

But to say he’s “less popular” than Kanye and Kendrick is maybe a stretch. I get. A lot of my info on millennual culture from some folks I work with. They’re 23-25 and becauze they share office space with ME, we end up taking music a lot. One of them just got into Kendrick last month. Like, just listened to something other than “Don’t Kill my Vibe” for the first time ... last month.

Another one thought Kendrick Lamar was a football player, as of the release of DAMN. (which is pretty pathetic).

They know a ton of Kanye songs because most people do. But they all still thoroughly believe Eminem is the best rapper of all time, and think it’s ridiculois to suggest that this isn’t the case. They now know about Kendrick, and they know about Kanye, and they stream both artists’ hits, but they identify with Eminem. Eminem *is* rap to these white middle-class millennials who were, like, five years old when he came out.

And Em’s influence runs deep in America. Even if his new shit isn’t selling very well, there’s this trilogy of albums that many mainstream music fans have on a pedestal. Slim Shady, Marshal Mathers and Eminem Show. For a while he was the biggest musician on the planet, and even if he’s drying up, he’s a legend to a lot of people.

We have to acknowledge that. He’ll occupy an Elvis-like space in rap, where closed-minded thinkers imagine him as the alpha and omega for a very long time.

Sales really don’t measure up with popularity anymore.

I was amazed by the fact that Kanye didn’t want to release his sales figures for Pablo right away. The thing streamed like crazy, and it was downloaded illegally more than any album whose illegal download stats have been recorded, I believe. Just INSANE numbers of people stole that album.

But he didn’t release a week’s sales until a month and a half after the thing had “come out.” The fact that it still “sold” the equivalent of 100,000 copies 6 weeks after release is pretty freaking amazing. I think he missed a huge moment there. If he’d released it as an album, physically or for sale via mp3 right away, the numbers would have been good.

But the numbers on record aren’t good. So if we’re talking about sales and popularity, you can’t argue that Kanye’s more popular than Em, because on paper, he didn’t sell half that many albums in TLOP’s first week of available sales.

I think he’s certainly more relevant and more timely and more talked about than Em, for sure. He has a much bigger presence, and his legacy is more solid than Em’s by far, but is he more popular? Eh.

Also Jay only “sold” as many albums as he did because he cut a deal with Sprint. Sprint made that 4:44 go platinum. That was all bullshit. Meanwhile he can’t sell out a stadium. So even though he’s thoroughly part of the zeitgeist, he’s more legendary than actively popular, I think.

Ok solid points, you're right 100%.

I actually have two pals who are huge Eminem fans (both are in their early 20's) and after a few listens, they somehow managed to convince themselves that REVIVAL is a "good album".

Flower Boy is actually a cool album.. top 5 of the year as far as rap goes, all things considered.

Kendrick
Jay
Vince
Brockhampton
Tyler

Flower Boy is ok, but still more trolly than I would like. I think I prefer albums by Kamaiyah and Open Mike Eagle to Flower Boy.

If you add up the best moments from all of Brockhampton’s 2017 releases, it might qualify as a list-worthy release, but I haven’t been impressed enough to put any of the albums they did release in a spot like that.

Louder...

Have you heard Moses Sumney’s “Afromanticism?” It’s certainly not hip-hop, but it’s dripping with some weird soul shit I think you would dig.

Travis Scott and Quavo just released an album!



It’s some trap shit for sure, but so far I’m hearing soul samples, weird synthy shit, and other stuff that makes me immediately like this more than Future and Young Thug’s bitch ass bullshit.

“HUNCHO JACK, Jack Huncho” ... Not bad! Dope art too.

Travis Scott doesn't do TRAP. his shit is hip hop psychedelia suburban Houston style.

and Young Thug is the best in the game right now.