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#thundercat

mcc
@mcc

What I listened to last week: And you ain't never heard hip-hop

Here is some of my favorite rap music.

  1. "Twice the First Time", Saul Williams

Saul Williams is a rapper/spoken word artist who militantly refuses to acknowledge a distinction between the two sides of that slash. This was his "first" song, before he started making albums, it showed up on some compilations and since has been a bit forgotten (omitted even from the discography on his Wikipedia page). It's still my fav of his, a traffic pileup of violins and beatboxing. One of the strangest and most beautiful pieces of hip-hop I've ever heard.

  1. "untitled 02 | 06.23.2014.", Kendrick Lamar

Kendrick Lamar thinks big— his albums have huge concepts and are stuffed with ideas. Which makes Untitled Unmastered, an unlabeled collection of unused songs from the To Pimp a Butterfly era, a little easier for me to digest because tracks stand alone more. This one track's amazing, downtempo dark jazz over a trap beat.

The second half of this song is universally agreed to be a style parody of Drake, but it doesn't seem mean-spirited to me. (That would come later.)

Big Boi walking a pit bull

  1. "Black Ice", Goodie Mob ft. Outkast

This is an Atlanta group from the 90s whose name expands to "the Good Die young, Mostly Over Bullshit", and who introduced the world to Cee-Lo Green (not present here). The mood here is absolutely immaculate and gives a good intro to the timbres the Dirty South was introducing the world to at this moment. Also, a video featuring Big Boi walking a dog in an Astros jersey with the old design, the good one; tragically I cannot find a usable embeddable copy of this video online, but I grabbed a still for you. Look at the good boi (the dog. I mean the dog)

  1. "LOOK OUT FOR DETOX", Kendrick Lamar

Kendrick is now a 17-Grammy-winning institution, but his introduction to the world, outside indie mixtapes in LA, was this incredible, minimal YouTube video from 2010 originally posted as promo for a never-released Dr. Dre album. Not helping Dr. Dre much here I guess, but as an intro to Kendrick Lamar it was absolutely unforgettable, just a verbal onslaught in which Kendrick does not even stop to breathe.

  1. "Dead in Motion", Antipop Consortium

This group (and its members' solo acts) have a sprawling, poorly preserved discography with some true high points; this is from 2002, when they briefly broke through into near-public-consciousness with Arrhythmia, a fun album that plays with electronica production (yeah, this is the album with "Ghost Lawns").

The video here is a deconstruction of "Hamburger Hill", a 1987 film that is mostly remembered for a subplot exploring the experience of Black American soldiers in Vietnam.

⬇️ Click below for more Saul Williams / more Outkast / "hidden track" ⬇️