Lil Scrappy - No Problem

yeah.

cool video too.

i like that song 2. its hard to define the poetics of scraps style but its so real and raw, to put the pi in the onion. stylus could never understand the choral nature of crunk rap. the entire verses are fatter and more cyclic than what stylus is used to hearing.
esp the trillville half of that disk somewhat transcends the verse-chorus-verse form, and almost gets to something more unified, like one long chorus that can be an interesting piece by itself.
this lil jon sponsored shit is really checking rap by paring it down to what they think is its core. fewer symbols that hold more power, no nonsense wordplay. i think they might be right

Lil Jon is as retro as rap gets.

as rap has gotten

which is good. as now it can reinvent itself.

Erm I guess he's retro in some senses, but really he's a huge jump forward...I mean, nothing hip-hop has ever produced really sounds like that (certainly not his inspirations - Miami Bass, Mantronix etc)

And the whole chorus-chorus-chorus form (or absence of standard verse-chorus verse structure) doesn't have much of a precedent from what I can recall.

i agree w/you on lil jon. it's very poetic. two murderdogs ago, black dog bone was trying to get the crunk artists to tell him the "chant" form was akin to african tribal music, and i like what he was getting at, but i wish some ethnomusicologists could do it with his charisma

I'm not downplaying the influence of his music's african via african-american origins by saying that I think the whole chant thing is a very human element - crowd participation. Very democratic. Populist (in fact, this is why I thought all those folks comparing crunk to fascism in their blogs were being ridiculous).