Big things poppin'. It's still kind of surreal, but I now can say that I've been published in The Edmonton Journal. This is a big deal for me. I remember reading CD reviews in the Journal when I was like 14 and thinking, "Hey, I can do that!" which more or less sparked my desire to write about music. Plus, writing about one of my favorite rappers for a major Canadian newspaper is pretty mind-blowing, something I would've never imagined happening a few years ago. The strides I've made over the last few months have been exciting and humbling, and I'm just excited to be doing this shit, still. The fact I sometimes get paid to rant about music—still really weird and cool. Anyways, you can read my review of The Blueprint 3 here.

Pitchfork, holla at me.

Three song reviews I did at the Jukebox over the last week for you guys. Bashy's an British rapper who just released his debut album, Catch Me If You Can, and had a pretty big—and controversial—hit across the pond last summer with "Black Boys." He sounds a lot like fellow UK emcee Kano, especially in his phrasing and enunciation. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as long as your at least as good as Kano is, which I'm not convinced that Bashy is. "Your Wish Is My Command" is his latest single, complete with a chorus from Estelle's little sister.

I thought you had to be Akon to get an artist to take a hike on their own song to this extent.
[4]

"Down," from Jay Sean (who?), is a song so lame that it makes a phoned-in Weezy guest spot sound better than it really is.

If the sky was falling, I'm pretty sure you'd be worrying about something other than whether some girl is going to put out. Just sayin'.
[3]

Although it might sometimes feel like it, I don't only write about rap, and my review of Vitalic's latest track, "Your Disco Song," is evidence of that. Although "Down" isn't really a rap song at all either, even if it has rapping on it. "Your Disco Song" is pretty clumsy and brutish and way too obvious, but kinda awesome nonetheless.

The title almost carries a condescending tone, as if Arbez is saying, "This is what you asked for," and then washing his hands clean of the result. Justice took this sound to its logical (and maximalist) conclusion, and Arbez seems kind of stuck now. Turn things up even louder and he risks entering fuzz-disco (electro-static?) territory, which might not be such a bad idea at all. He can't go minimal all of the sudden; subtlety is not one of the clubs in his bag. So he does what he knows best, and admittedly this is still pretty engaging—I could definitely see myself being pretty amped if this came on at a club, but I wouldn't lose my shit over it.
[6]

Here are the two blurbs I wrote for the Passion of the Weiss Top 50 Rap Albums of 00s feature that's currently running over there. I was assigned T.I.'s King (still his best album to date) and Deltron 3030, a record that sometimes gets unfairly maligned as backpacker-only material, which is like saying Blade Runner is only for nerds. No, Blade Runner is only for people who like good movies. Anyways, I think my blurbs turned out alright. The funny thing about lists like this is that my own personal list has changed pretty drastically over the last few months, as I rediscover certain albums and simply remember others. And that remembering process never ends.

50. deltron
DELTRON 3030
(2000)

Del the Funky Homosapien has the rare ability not only to rap about nerdy things without sounding like a nerd, but to make these nerdy things sound positively badass. This is due largely to his prodigious talent as an emcee, which includes his singular voice—a buoyant thing that's always in motion, never stretching syllables too long but never rushing through them either, taking joy in carving the shapes of words as they leave his lips. Deltron 3030 finds Del at his nerdiest, which means at the top of his game. Over the best beats he's ever rapped over, produced by Del's Gorillaz collaborator Dan the Automator and with scratches from Kid Koala, Del concocts a futuristic allegory for the kind of turn-of-the-century uncertainty that society was going through in 2000, when the album was released; 3030 is pre-Obama cynicism packaged as a space-rap opera.

Rapping as an ex-mech soldier-turned-freelance rhyme mercenary gives Del an excuse to work in words like "hyperwarp" and "parsecs" and "nanoseconds" and "psychotropics" into his verses—all words that sound great in a rap song. Hearing him rhyme "digital," "citadel," "critical," and "pivotal" in the same bar ("Things You Can Do") is one of rap's purest highs. And crucially, Del doesn't sound like one of those rappers that try to cram fifty-two polysyllabic words in one line, as if using as many Big Words as you can makes you a good rapper. He's just being Del, the nerdy (but not a nerd!) badass rapper who fights aliens in intergalactic rap battles while sounding cool as fuck.

43. t.i.
KING
(2006)

It's tempting to say that if it weren't for "What You Know" T.I.'s career wouldn't have shot into the stratosphere, but the rest of King proves that Clifford Harris was already well on his way to appearing in Ridley Scott movies and topping the Billboard charts, even if his Roberta Flack-interpolating behemoth never existed. Revisiting King, "What You Know" still shines as brightly, but what's most striking about T.I.'s fourth full-length is how well it synthesizes the styles T.I. had been working on since I'm Serious, and how on subsequent albums, he would return to the templates perfected and erected on King, albeit unable to recapture the dirt-under-the-nails scowl and snot-nosed unrespectability that infused songs like "I'm Straight," where he sounds almost repulsed by the prospect of being a pop star: "You can keep the game and the fame, the haters and the lames/ Just gimme some cocaine and somewhere I can slang."

King has the best versions of every kind of T.I. song: the Mannie Fresh Trunk-Rattler ("Top Back"), the Bankhead Anthem ("Bankhead," duh), the Produced By An East Coast Producer Doing A "Southern" Beat song (the pair of Just Blaze tracks "King Back" and "I'm Talking to You"), the Unexpected Left-Field Collaboration ("Goodlife," with Common). Hell, even the songs for the ladies are charming. King is the sound of a monarch assuming his throne and donning his crown—or in T.I.'s case, his almost-falling-off fitted cap.

Liked "Dance Wiv Me." Thought "Bonkers" didn't live up to its title. I very much like "Holiday," even if the chorus is the weakest thing on the song. Tongue 'n Cheek should be interesting, to say the least. Alex Ostroff made a good point at the Jukebox in his blurb about the song—Dizzee is better at lighthearted club tracks than serious tracks these days, and a full album of jams for the dancefloor is just fine with me.

This time around the synths are more kinetic and Harris switches things up more often, even inserting little G-funk flourishes amongst the track's more traditional house elements, like throbbing bass and a sense of propulsion that threatens to careen off the track at any moment. Harris suits Dizzee much better than Armand Van Helden, and Dizzee's performance here is confirmation—he sounds more comfortable, catching the beat in a more natural way, never once in danger of losing control. Every syllable is expertly placed, every deviation in his cadence refreshing, every oddball sentiment genuine ("And I'll never let your belly get empty/ Even when your belly full you're still sexy"). Dizzee is playing the I'm A Rich Rapper And I'll Fly You To Insert Clichéd Holiday Destination Here card, but it never sounds desperate (in that being rich and famous is the only reason he's getting girls) or sleazy, which has always been a huge strength of Dizzee as a rapper.
[7]

BlaQKout is my favourite rap album so far this year. "9Xs Outta 10" is the album's lone face-scrunching, Holy Shit! moment amongst the rest of the album's equally impressive, only with smoother edges, material. Some people have been commenting that Kurupt sort of falls into the background and that BlaQKout feels more like a DJ Quik solo album than a Kurupt/Quik disc, but these people are wrong. It's not that Kurupt disappoints—he kills every track he's on—so much as the rest of his verses being less show-offy (but still as technically precise) than the Best Performance On A Rap Song-worthy "9xs Outta Ten," and that Quik, who has been underrated as a rapper for his entire career, is finally starting to be recognized as a pretty great one. I wouldn't have said no to another solo Kurupt track or three, but the important thing is that BlaQKout doesn't suffer from lack of them. Jukebox certified:

How great is Kurupt here? At 1:27, when it appears that Quik is going to drop a verse, he only manages to get in a line and a half before Kurupt yells "Stop!" only to resume decapitation of Quik's irradiated husk of a beat. Kurupt sounds so reluctant to relinquish control of the microphone it's as if Quik, once he began rapping, looked over at Kurupt and realized he best leave the booth. Right then.
[9]

I contributed a summer mix CD (er, .rar file) to my man Jeff Weiss' annual Summer Jamz series, and he posted it this morning over at his blog Passion of the Weiss. You can download and read a little blurb about my entry here. As you might notice from the title of the mix, it's only the first volume of 2009. This year I'm doing two volumes for the first time, the second one being put together as we speak. Look for it sometime in early July, right here. With more rap on it, too. Maybe. Hopefully.

starkey
"GUTTER MUSIC (feat DURRTY GOODZ)"
from gutter music 12" (keysound recordings, 2009)

If this was 2003, this would be your favourite blogger's favourite song. Unfortunately, bloggers and critics deserted grime for dubstep, which features actual rapping a lot less, mostly because it's pretty damn hard to rap over the kind of off-kilter rhythms that separate dub from garage and grime. If anyone is going to be up to the task, it's a British emcee like Durrty Goodz, who sounds completely at home over the bubbling synthesizers and hyperkinetic dancehall lasers that ricochet and refract off all the shiny surfaces of Starkey's "Gutter Music."

Durrty is a rapper with loads of personality, and it shines through here. Sometimes rappers shrink on tracks intended to get people up and onto the dancefloor, but Durrty raps like he was born to do songs like "Gutter Music." His flow twists and turns through the track; this isn't a methodical, monstrous left-turn only Nascar flow, this is skilled Formula 1 maneuvering. His voice doesn't get lost in the mix either—his confidence spills off the edges of the track and his faux-Jamaican patois gives the track a real international vibe. He doesn't hit you with silly things like complex metaphors either, his Gatling gun flow and intensity is all he needs to get you hyped up. Even so, Durrty's got lot of great moments here, such as when he half-laughs as he delivers the line "Yuh luhk oofffffal brah!" in his peanut butter thick London accent, or how his repeated claims of things' gutterness turn into one of the year's most infectious chants.

Durrty's thesis here is that "All the best rappers came from the gutter/ best producers came from the gutter/ best beats, came from the gutter," which is both wrong and right at the same time; by "gutter" he doesn't necessarily mean inner city London or the Marcy projects, but anyone on the fringe, anyone with an I'ma Take Mines By Any Means Necessary attitude, that sort of unhinged rawness that can't be denied; an unrespectability that's not a crutch but a weapon. Jay-Z used to be gutter; now he just pays kids to clean out the ones on his house(s). After all, Starkey is an American producer—essentially a dubstep outsider—and Durrty—who's British, and that automatically makes him an outsider in an important way too—is one of those British rappers with the sort of anxious, fidgety energy that works so well on the kind the claustrophobic tracks that still dominate grime today. It's kind of ironic that he calls this track "gutter," because it's made for raves more than it is the streets, but that only further proves Durrty's point. The fact he's making sunny club bangers over dubstep beats with American producers—that's gutter.