forclosure
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i have better teeth than either of those men @WashYourHands
when swordsmen of different styles connect
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forclosure
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it will get chillier woops
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@shakahislop was TPAB the first time you really engaged with Kendrick at all? that album more so than what came before and after it was impossible to avoid for a period of time. but i still feel the same way on it now i did back then
I liked Section 80 with all the flaws that had and good kid maad city despite not listening to it in years had some some songs i remember liking i don't think i'd be as enamoured with the concept as back then but then again it wasn't the album i was really looking forward to or listening to heavy at that time
I liked Section 80 with all the flaws that had and good kid maad city despite not listening to it in years had some some songs i remember liking i don't think i'd be as enamoured with the concept as back then but then again it wasn't the album i was really looking forward to or listening to heavy at that time
forclosure
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@shakahislop it might help you to understand my taste in rap in that i tend to prefer people who work in specifics rather than broad strokes not that there isn't anything broad or with mass appeal that i like but music that works in a specific styling or approach that feels or comes across singular to them rather than just "this just sounds like X but with worse mixing or with more deliberate flow" it doesn't pull me in as much
forclosure
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woops please i understand if you're trying to be funny but can you do your weather forecast somewhere else please?
forclosure
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@shakahislop where are you at?
Leo
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On a slow boat to Nairobi.
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shakahislop
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yeah that was my way in. i already was a bit in love with kendrick like a lot of people from maad city. that was perfect for cruising around dhaka, honestly. but pimp a butterfly had a lot of offputting layers. eventually it clicked and i got a lot out of it. but most of the time now its dense, cluttered, quite an arty album that i need to be in the mood for. blacker the berry i think the anger appealed to me. and the righteousness. but then there's another layer as well isn't there, there's the introspection and self-loathing. obviously he's very popular. there's a weird thing that's happened with indie / rock friends in the uk who would never ever listen to hiphop who are into him, which took me a bit by surprise. there's a lot going on there, a lot of threads. but i do think for those two albums, maad city and pimp a butterfly, he fits into the 'arty' category for me, which is something that supersedes genre or even form (music, painting, films etc). i think he's trying to get at pretty knotty subtle things, ideas, emotions which i associate more with stuff i see in art galleries more than the hiphop that i listen to.
shakahislop
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i listened to maad city recently and didn't get much out of it. i like the ambiguity around alcohol in swimming pools and everything about the with the homies one though. that snare sound on that is still amazing to me. as well as just the whole tone.
shakahislop
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you'll probably laugh your head off at this: i listened to Ether for the first time this week, after some clickbait took me to an article about the nas vs jay z thing. always hated everything i'd heard from nas but, i'm sure i'm not the first person to say this, that tune is quite an amazing thing
also i can definitely drink steve austin under the table
also i can definitely drink steve austin under the table
forclosure
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will definitly get back to you on all these but i think you're the first person @shakahislop i've heard in a very long time to talk about ether positivly, Takeover vs Ether is one of those discussions that all even now i'm surprised people STILL want to address and i feel like these days especially through like the expectations that were placed upon Nas at the start of his career,Jay's self mythologising bullshit aswell rumors and hearsay regarding Nas's judgement of his own musical abilities and beat picking have led to this place where alot of people feel like he should've stopped rapping after It Was Written(which is just crap if you ask me), people are too harsh on him where as they're too delicate on Jay Z.
It might come off like i'm being defensive but i'm only defensive of Nas in the sense that there's alot of hot air taken as fact regarding him, what songs have you heard from him anyway? Waat's funny to me is considering what you've said about Kendrick by my understanding you should like Nasir cause they've both been hit with the same complaints about their music.
The somber, humourless nature of their music, the weird conceptual songs that don't feel like they were properly though out, the lack of any real "bangers" when Good Kid maad city first came out the big question for alot of people was the idea that it was the best debut album to come from a rapper since Illmatic but the thing so many people failed to bring up in that discussion was that its because his album is working from a similiar kind of template a young man making a serious album about how dangerous the world he inhabits is.
It might come off like i'm being defensive but i'm only defensive of Nas in the sense that there's alot of hot air taken as fact regarding him, what songs have you heard from him anyway? Waat's funny to me is considering what you've said about Kendrick by my understanding you should like Nasir cause they've both been hit with the same complaints about their music.
The somber, humourless nature of their music, the weird conceptual songs that don't feel like they were properly though out, the lack of any real "bangers" when Good Kid maad city first came out the big question for alot of people was the idea that it was the best debut album to come from a rapper since Illmatic but the thing so many people failed to bring up in that discussion was that its because his album is working from a similiar kind of template a young man making a serious album about how dangerous the world he inhabits is.
forclosure
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With white indie/rock people its not surprising there's been a history of rock people who hardly ever listen to rap getting into a particular kind of "dense" and "layered" rap music that appeals to their expectations and ideas of what they want rap to be like, back in the day they would've been all over the Def Jux backpack shit but now its like Kendrick,Danny Brown, Run the Jewels definitley Kanye ever since Yeezus came out the jokes been that if Yeezus is your favourite Kanye album chances are you're white. "Prestiege rap" is a thing even if some people don't want to admit it."
It used to be that this lot thought of themselves as smart for only listening to rap from the 80s/90s and some of that is still there but definitly not in the same abundance even they had to accept that trap was good despite only accepting it after everybody else did.
I can see how you wouldn't find maad city as appealing now because he's very much a overthinking rapper and both that and To Pimp a Butterfly imo as you get nearer the end melt down into stodgy sounding mess that i'd associate with the Soulquarians(2000s collective Erykah badu,Common,J Dilla and The Roots were all a part of). The fact that his albums can be so knotty and overstuffed it doesn't give you much room to breathe or anything to feel loose.
forclosure
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@shakahislop His albums have like some notable LA jazz musicians on TPAB, George Clinton and he got MC Eiht on his first album but none of it really feels "immersive" like he's only engaging with these cause as he's an LA rapper and people know the histories of black music from that city because its "expected to have lived and grown up with these things when he's stated as much that hes a guy who grew up listening to DMX and old Cash Money.
you might find this comparison scathing but it reminds me of that Floating Points/Pharoah Sanders album that came out last year that i didn't like.
you might find this comparison scathing but it reminds me of that Floating Points/Pharoah Sanders album that came out last year that i didn't like.
I always liked Section 80 the most. It seemed kinda pitch perfect, with that balance of conceptual ideas and the rapping that just seemed to expand and build on those themes. You had that sense he'd been planning what to say for years, and then just said it. I'm surprised it doesn't get more shine tbh.
forclosure
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i mean the reason why is cause his first album was when he got annointed the crown and the 2nd album netted him the Pulitzer so its no surprise it gets lost in the mix.
i liked Section 80 but there's definitley certain songs that haven't held up over time either due to the beats or just the weird narrative touches he puts on them,Keisha's Song and Tammy's Song have a weird kind of scolding parental quality to them when you listen to them now
@DannyL you ever listen to Overly Dedicated? that's the mixtape that netted him his deal with Dre if i remember right
two other things i think with Kendrick aswell is 1) most of his features have been very bad and 2) i feel like if he were to put out an album now it wouldn't do too great for him both in terms of what's expected from him and how much the rap landscape has shifted
forclosure
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@shakahislop where you at?
forclosure
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these two have an album coming out tomorrow(aswell as billy woods and DJ Preservation)
have you listened to much Detriot/Michigan rap at all?
have you listened to much Detriot/Michigan rap at all?
forclosure
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@shakahislop alright so go ahead with your Drake theory then, one thing i've noticed in our talks on rap so far is that maybe barring Dababy much of our discussions on rap have tended to focus on the rappers at the very very top in terms of acclaim,number of streams,hits etc
forclosure
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@shakahislop you know you ever got back to me bout your drake theory..or any of the other questions i brought up in here lol