Kendrick Lamar will kill your favorite rapper for money

"money trees" is the next one but apparently they cut the jay rock verse

― J0rdan S., dimanche 13 janvier 2013 22:17 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

smh

ya. that jay rock verse is easily best moment on the album.

hold on

lol the entire album?

yea, for me at least

it's up there

the contrast of a voice like Jay Rock or MC Eiht cutting through the middle of the album is used to great effect, definitely think those are standout moments

it hadn't occurred to me that people who have difficulty parsing american argot/slang/accent might not be able to glean the """CONCEPT""" on this album
thanks for making me listen to z-ro again today

Enough time has passed to ask this question: Do you guys return to this album very often?

I played it a bunch for the first few weeks. Now just returning to my favorite songs a couple times a week.

I play something from this at least once a week, usually daily

haven't really returned to it at all

i let it sit for a month and am now finding it on repeat front to back about two or three times a week

Still spinning it frequently enough that putting it at #7 on my EOY already feels too low.

I burned out on it in a week (which isn't all that unusual with albums I review), and haven't really revisited it b/c of its length and blockyness.

That distance hasn't really hurt my opinion of the album, though. Some friends played some album tracks on a satellite jukebox in a bar a few weeks ago and they sounded amazing.

I still don't believe it's a "classic" rap album as much as its a "substantial" one. Those aren't quite the same thing in my mind, though they're both certainly something worth celebrating

"i let it sit for a month and am now finding it on repeat front to back about two or three times a week

― an old penis drawing is now "new and notable" (forksclovetofu), Monday, January 14, 2013 4:45 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink"

yep. fwiw this happened to me with Section.80 as well

I do sit-ups every other day and make chicken fricassee once a week.

Section.80 is easier to break into bite-sized pieces, so it's the more re-playable album in my mind

seriously what's wrong with some of you in that you can't even conceive of listening to songs on this album in isolation

did you guys also play the entirety of De La Soul Is Dead front to back every time so as not to divorce it from the context of its skits

Not a fair comparison. De La Soul Is Dead was zippier and less thematically rigid

idk man he's just got a weird voice and a questionable ear for pop, i get why people dig his whole persona i guess but i don't need to hear weird crap like "swimming pools" on the radio

the contrast of a voice like Jay Rock or MC Eiht cutting through the middle of the album is used to great effect, definitely think those are standout moments

― some dude, Monday, 14 January 2013 16:44 (5 hours ago) Bookmark

definitely, eiht sounds like the voice of god when he comes in. embodies all of the certitude and lustre of gangbanging that agonises kendrick and his neurotic flow

i loved the story i read in one of the listicles at the time where one of the black hippy dudes was saying eiht is always exactly like he is on record like writing "jyeah" in text messages and stuff

Not a fair comparison. De La Soul Is Dead was zippier and less thematically rigid

That's incredibly dumb IMO; it's like saying you can't listen to an aria from an opera, or a number from a musical, without listening to the entire thing. If you've already heard an album, you already know the themes and the context for the songs and you really shouldn't NEED to listen to the whole thing in order in order to understand/appreciate the function and meaning of the songs on it.

Now, sometimes you just WANT to listen to large stretches of an album because the whole thing works so well; that's an entirely different proposition and usually not one that I look upon as "a problem" because the end result is that I'm listening to music I really enjoy.

I mean, nobody's saying you NEED to listen to the whole thing. It's just that one is a Calvin and Hobbes comic collection and the other is a John Steinbeck novel. Both are great, but one is a lot more inviting to just pick up and page through from time to time

i don't come back to this album super often (really did gorge on it at the time) but i'm finding i underrated its replay value still - otm what was said upthread about the basic hookcraft shining through past context and journey narrative and whatnot

"Now, sometimes you just WANT to listen to large stretches of an album because the whole thing works so well; that's an entirely different proposition and usually not one that I look upon as "a problem" because the end result is that I'm listening to music I really enjoy."

it's closer to this for me imo. some of the stuff on here--like the good kid/m.a.a.d city duo, Real, Swimming Pools--just feels incomplete to me without the preceding and following tracks for context. dunno what it is, but a few of those tracks are just sorta boring to me in isolation (while Art of Peer Pressure, Money Trees, BDKMV, etc. all work in or out of context)

after i'd gotten used to major label rap LPs getting shorter the last few years, the 68 minutes can be a little daunting even if it's justified. plus you get into such a deep rabbit hole by the 2nd half that just dipping in for a track or two at a time tends not to have the same effect.

I play "Swimming Pools" and "Backseat Freestyle" to psych myself up in the mornings

^ alcoholics anonymous employee of the month

it's not that i have to listen to it all in sequence, it's that there aren't any weak tracks and the sequencing as is is pretty solid

He killed it in Dublin tonight. Crowd were word perfect, scarily so. There was kind of a messianic fervor in the air. And whatever you might think of Backseat Freestyle it absolutely goes off in a live setting

I still listen to it a lot. There was a bit of a drop out after the initial WOW but I still really love this.

I do listen to it all the way through more often than not.

Poetic Justice gets a lot of solo spins. Ditto Swimming Pool, Money Trees, m.A.A.d city and also The Recipe and Black Boy Fly from the bonus tracks.

but yeah, this is immensely satisfying. Future's Pluto might have edged it out eventually as my favourite rap album of last year depending on the day of the week, but i love this album - i don't just like it.

From the Pazz & Jop essay:

Good kid, m.A.A.d city also implicitly echoes the vérité actors and anomie of neorealist classic Bicycle Thieves.

I don't know how I could have missed that.

i missed it by not reading a word of pazz and job this year

You're not missing much. The comments are particularly glib and smug, apart from Alfred's. Who writes stuff like this and thinks it's smart?

Think stuffing your album title with 24 words is pretentious? So does she—the joke's on you.

Kendrick was great in London tonight btw

Ta-Nehisi Coates:

I must confess my bias. I grew up in Baltimore during a time when the city was in the thrall of crack and Saturday night specials. I’ve spent most of my life in neighborhoods suffering their disproportionate share of gun violence. In each of these places it was not simply the deaths that have stood out to me, but the way that death corrupted the most ordinary of rituals. On an average day in middle school, fully a third of my brain was obsessed with personal safety. I feared the block 10 times more than any pop quiz. My favorite show in those days was “The Wonder Years.” When Kevin Arnold went to visit his lost-found love Winnie Cooper, he simply hopped on his bike. In Baltimore, calling upon our Winnie Coopers meant gathering an entire crew. There was safety in numbers. Alone, we were targets.

The world I lived in, and the preserve of Lamar’s album, was created not by mindless nature but by public policy. It is understandable that in the wake of great tragedy we’d want to take a second look at those policies. But in some corners of America great tragedy has bloomed into a world that does not simply raise the ranks of the dead but shrinks the world of the survivors. “Good Kid” shows us how gun violence extends out beyond the actual guns.

Now i am never going to be able to listen to this lbum and not think of the wonder years

Savage

Sherane
http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mehbvpgVAF1rcaf53o1_500.jpg
http://24.media.tumblr.com/f5b97f1d9bb7e80795b43c3dddd331ac/tumblr_mg0xsuqvwD1qfe20eo1_500.gif

that part of the "Backseat Freestyle" video is legit mesmerizing

This is pretty damn great
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=525vQAGO6fg

Kendrick Lamar and the Decline of the Black Blues Narrative

#longreads

that was a fantastic read

agree, excellent read! ty!

the only thing I think is being undersold (a point more relevant to another thing I started reading by her on The Roots' album undun) is the idea that some of the material-based bragging being waved by Jay-Z and Kanye West is a manifestation of the threat of black people breaking through the economic barrier she is describing in her rejection of the fiction of post-racial America, and that that bragging isn't being done in a "race doesn't matter" way but more in a "we are coming to get you on your own terms" way, which is IMO empowering from a different angle and more radicalized than people realize

just to preserve my initial cynicism going into this: people really want to make this record capital-I Important, like it signifies some kind of shift in thinking or attitudes and I'm concerned that actually seeks to undermine what makes the record smart and interesting.

but now I will read it