Kendrick Lamar will kill your favorite rapper for money

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

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

― This beat is TWEENCHRONIC (DJP), Monday, February 25, 2013 11:21 AM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

super otm

usually i resist academic proclamations that things are HUGE and IMPT but i found this angle interesting at the very least

“There’s a certain kind of American story that is characterized by a laconic surface and a tight-lipped speaking voice. The narrator in this story has been made inarticulate by modern life. Vulnerable to his own loneliness, he is forced into an attitude of hard-boiled self-protection,” writes Vivian Gornick in her essay “Tenderhearted Men,” in which she takes to task the terse, unchanging masculinity of Raymond Carver and Andre Dubus. Gornick, however, could just as easily be writing about the emotional impasse found in hip-hop.

also, wow do i wish my students read that much.

i'm with this and then

In 1992, David Foster Wallace coauthored with Mark Costello one of the finest essays ever written about rap music, Signifying Rappers.

lol

yeah i didnt think anyone was into that book

A few months ago, when Kendrick Lamar released his album good kid m.A.A.d city, it excited all of the critics who get paid good money to not get too excited.

lol one of those adjectives doesn't belong

did you think that the paragraph she quoted from the DFW/MC essay was unfounded/wrong?

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

― This beat is TWEENCHRONIC (DJP), Monday, February 25, 2013 11:21 AM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm

most clever thing either of them have done in like half a decade is to give their ubiquitous pop hit a title that makes - or should make - all non-black people awkward

this is thankfully low on hyperbole and simply argues that kendrick has 'made a third way' but per usual w/ academics its all 'hip hop, voice of the dispossessed' but only engages w/ hip hop via one artist and not as a whole

what DJP said, too

but, it is a very good piece

did you think that the paragraph she quoted from the DFW/MC essay was unfounded/wrong?

― This beat is TWEENCHRONIC (DJP), Monday, February 25, 2013 10:49 AM (13 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

no.

the Thomas Chatterton Williams sounds fantastic

I am not really going to fault an academic writing about a particular person for focusing on that person; it would be more problematic issue if the focus of this paper was a Grand Unifying Theory of Hip-Hop rather than an attempt to describe a specific rapper in terms of a wider literary and socioeconomic context.

can I get a full breakdown on what's wrong about "signifying rappers" while we're here

has anyone read it? i just had never heard anything good about it so had never investigated further

Get the feeling that you'd really have to be interested in DFW to enjoy it.

I have it. It's flawed there are some great parts. Get a bit sick of ppl with big opinions 4u about dfw who haven't read him

ive read him but i havent read 'signifying rappers' i've just been warned to avoid it like numerous times

ha yeah same and i'm a dfw fan, like him too much to be embarrassed for him if it sucks

but i would be interested in hearing what the most common criticisms of it are

the excerpts ive read from it seem like stuff that is either self-evident but written in a suuuper academic way that seems like it would make for tedious reading