Le1f - Dark York (2012): QPOC SHAKUR / #seapunk

http://media.prefixmag.com/site_media/uploads/images/post/l/le1f/artworks-000020165298-ol03zj-original-1_jpeg_630x900_q85.jpg

Per Rev's request, a thread for Dark York because it really is that good.

Le1f is a queer rapper/producer from NYC (although, his queerness isn't the selling point, per se). He's responsible for the production on Das Racist's 'Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell', as well as a bunch of random #seapunk instrumentals.

Some of his earlier tracks are playable over at his soundcloud - http://soundcloud.com/le1f/tracks - particularly of note is 'Born Underwater' which flips a gorgeous Erykah Badu sample.

His first mixtape, Dark York is streaming as of today at Fader, and gets released for download next week. A bunch of tracks on the mixtape are produced by ILM-favourites Nguzunguzu and a bunch of others are produced by his frequent collaborator Boody.

Probably one of my favourite rap releases of 2012 - spanning from twinkly opening-of-B.O.B. synths on ΩΩΩ to this awesome horn riff on 'Wut' to all kinds of other stuff production-wise. Rapping wise, he has a pretty broad spectrum - he goes from interpolating Nicki's bit from Bottoms Up on Bubbles to a string of dated tech/geek battle raps on 'Emulator' to more explicit queer stuff to.... rapping about being a mermaid on 'Fresh'. It's certainly weird at times, but it's worth a listen, even if I'm not pitching it properly.

Vocals are mixed a bit low, but he's got some quotables. My favourite moment right now is still on 'Yup', where he opens a verse with:

Fuck these white dudes / You know I love to fuck these white dudes

Also,

I'm not a gold digger / But if he wants to pay for brunch, cool
Money money money

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBRfRYGPVpY

you can download it now: http://www.mediafire.com/?dbh7uoxw4p2rswj

this has died on my at ~136 out of 158 megs on two different networks. HE IS BREAKING THE INTERNET.

took forever for me to dl

"infinity" and "wut" are the two stand-outs on one listen

that new mykki blanco track bangs though

yes, mykki blanco. i was thinking maybe this thread or another could be the nyc queer rap/neo vogue thread. zebra katz also comes to mind.

Homosexuality and Hip-Hop : The Gay Rapper Thread

thread of ballroom chants, vogueing beats, and associated cuntiness (MikeQ, B. Ames, Vijuan Allure, DJ Sliink, etc.) <--still need sliink removed from title

I haven't had a chance to dig back into this after playing it off the stream a week ago, but I already feel like it's one of the best this year off that one play.

i have to dl this, because that stream was not doing it justice sound quality-wise (hopefully it was just the stream).

still sounds a bit murky to me, but maybe that's what they're going for

the 320 version now posted at the fader is still murky-ish but a lot clearer than the stream esp. the vocals.

venus in furs, boys in nothing

I can barely hear what he's saying. I know it's part of the aesthetic but still...

Hm. I've been able to hear him fine on the download.

The vocals are mixed pretty low.

TOO LOW. :(

I want to move to Dark York.

kk listening on my good headphones I can hear him adequately.

not sure what QPOC means but if anybody needs a free marketing strategy for their new bedroom witch house beats project i suggest you do a chopped-and-screwed tupac mixtape and call it SCREWPAC

queer person of color

oh god i was hoping it was a typo and not an incorporation of that fuck-awful acronym

also is this what seapunk is? really?

at this point i'm pretty sure you can take any reference to seapunk as a joke ref to seapunk

unless it's in big media at which it's a joke ref to seapunk + big media

QPOC Shakur is the pseudonym he puts on his Twitter - I promise it's not my pun.

Although, I think it's pretty clever.

also is this what seapunk is? really?

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/fashion/Seapunk-a-Web-Joke-With-Music-Has-Its-Moment.html

http://coralrecords.bandcamp.com/

i liked this (listened off the stream) - i can't really listen to 70 minutes of anything anymore and i wish the vocals weren't so buried but there are some bangers here

'dark york' kinda drags (no pun intended, eh) as a whole, but there are definitely some 6 or 7 great songs in it. the overall murky mastering doesn't help, also.

dark york is my favorite rap album this year cause it's the only one that a) says what's in my head and b) sounds like what i'm actually listening to in 2012

"triple-omega"/"mind body"/"& gomorrah" is such an amazing opening stretch

haven't listened to this yet but the title makes me think of

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJeJtK7Q2kk

Mind Body is so great.

But my favourite stretch is probably Wut --> Yup --> Fresh or Gimme Light through Fry Dem.

this is such a densely packed listen, it takes time to get into but it really keeps on giving - just noticed the aaliyah baby sample distorted and resampled on "fresh"

THIS IS FOR MY CUNTS WHO KNOW I CAME TO STUNT

I'm in my castle, I'm king of the beach, I'm princess peach

where was you in 95? where i was in 94.

Really digging "Lavandin" atm; real deep album.

Yeah, that's been one of my sleeper favorites.

Seven songs in, mind = blown

I'm an emperor when they see me in my new clothes

wow this is like the loudest thing on my ipod. i like it but the mix + mastering makes it a harsh listen sometimes.

very dope show tonight. i danced very a lot. (and based on my short chat with him before he went on, he's a pretty nice guy to boot)

very

err strike the second "very" i mean

this is great! so many awesome little lyrical bits bobbing around in the murk

Important: All the lyrics (the actual lyrics, from what I can tell, so presumably le1f is responsible) are up on RapGenius.

If those are the correct lyrics, I'm very disappointed to learn that the line "my twat is just a metaphor" was just a figment of my imagination. (n.b. that is totally what he says)

What does it say the lyrics are instead? I haven't had time to go through them all yet.

"patois is just a metaphor"

oh, yeah. i already was hearing 'patois'

:(

I like my version so much better

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nrnq4SZ0luc

I was just coming to post that!

!!!! so good.

looks to be as gif-able as Lemme Smang It

also, ilx gayz, pay attn from 1:02 onwards for a familiar not-face.

This is incredible. Mr. Jukebox Selection Committee, you know what to do (if you, or someone else, hasn't already).

also (xpost) i give up.

I mean. I was about to send the email. I wanted to cover it the week the mixtape/album came out but the video got delayed.

Ah, just posted that to the other gay rappers thread. Great video! Makes me realize how awesome this track is.

i really want someone to remaster this shit. not to keep harping on it but i wish i could listen & enjoy it.

it's really not that bad. i don't really get what's 'wrong' with it? a little murky but not as much as people make it sound and it's deliberate, not low quality or whatever.

oh and xp @ jer - it's lou.

something about the bass being too loud and then the mix being overcompressed to fuck, whenever the sub hits everything gets squashed in away that is oppressive/unpleasant to my ears. i'm not trying to be on some audiophile shit, i'm really not that picky in general but it's hard to get past here.

man I kind of love that tbh

only on track 1 right now, but are his vocals always so buried in the mix?

frequently not always but that's what folks are complaining about. the 320 kbps free download is better than the stream. but you get used to it the more you listen.

Not saying this is what's happening in every case, but I think the fact that it's mixed more like a dance record than a rap record is throwing some people off?

i need to listen to more of this but "wut" is rad as fuck.

v glad that he's put the lyrics up

can't watch the video

mixtape keeps on giving

it seems "seapunk" in the thread title is understandable putting people off (INCLUDING ME tbh), can we delete it? it makes me cringe

Don't delete it until we've found out what "seapunk" is!

http://www.itisamystery.com/itisamystery.gif

Been googling it on and off for the past couple hours and am now searching southern Michigan for a place that sells turquoise hair dye.

so long as his lyrics still include lines like "i'm such a mermaid that I stay in your waves"

and "i'm banji, i'm foamy, i'm kunty believe me"

and as long as he keeps producing gorgeous instrumentals that sample erykah singing 'i was born underwater' i will continue to jokingly include him in #seapunk

Yeah all that stuff just makes me love it more tbh.

damn, I just realized no one had posted "Born Underwater" itt

http://soundcloud.com/le1f/boody-le1f-born-underwater

song (wut) is pretty cool. he has mad swag and i like his rapping mostly but his double time flow is srsly cringe.

Yeah. My one critique is that sometimes his fast raps are a little forced and out of sync with the beat. Especially on Wut.

damn, mind/body

http://www.npr.org/2012/08/30/160324187/guest-dj-pulitzer-prize-winning-author-junot-diaz

New EP out today with Boody, featuring early banger Sweet Tea and also SODA which has an amazing video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=6herO1dIc4s#!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=6herO1dIc4s

argh.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6herO1dIc4s

there

Thanks, rev!

Anyway, it is the greatest and the EP is pretty great too.

Apparently the 12" vinyl opens with 'Born Underwater', that amazing track Boody & Le1f did that flips a Badu sample.

Also, the final mix of Sweet Tea on this EP gets rid of all the verses and just leaves the chorus and bridge in place - the rest is instrumental

The verses reappear on the Cedaa Remix but it's weird to not hear them after getting used to them on the demo for so long.

the Mike Q/Divoli S'vere Ha Mix of Soda is also pretty great.

"Soda" wtf
this rules

loving this ep

also this jubilee (one of my favorite djs right now) mix opens with the cedaa remix https://soundcloud.com/heartymagazine/jubilees-space-heater-mix-for

<3 this boody track that dutty artz just put out: https://soundcloud.com/xlr8rmag/boody-guap

late pass but "Soda" is great. Love the video too

just saw him last night <3 <3 <3 played for an hour at 1 am and it was breathtaking. so many jams. endless jams. so much dancing. so many people.

recently came around to this guy... don't have anything to say but he is kind of a genius and should be a pop star

venus in furs, boys in nothing

― hologram ned raggett (The Reverend), Tuesday, April 24, 2012 6:27 PM (8 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Dude's new mixtape, Fly Zone, was supposed to be out January 21, but just got pushed back to the 28th.

Coins is the lead single, dropping some time this week. Production by Drippin & Souldrop.

"Coins is like a gay brick squad song"

that's kind of otm

http://www.thefader.com/2013/01/23/stream-le1f-coins/

re-listening to Fresh, oh man! is that the fucking jam

shit. forgot to post it here.

yeah. really like it so far. not LOVE but like.

yeah. I like it more than "Wut", but I never liked that one as much as a bunch of other people and that was never one of my favorite songs by him.

i mean, i love wut, but it's not my favourite. (yup, & gomorrah, gimme life, fresh, bubbles, my oozy, EMULATOR)

i was just gonna write yup and then realized how many i loved.

wut blows up a dance floor tho, which is important.

have you heard the new cakes track?

http://soundcloud.com/bloglin/cakes-da-killa-goodies/

Dude's new mixtape, Fly Zone, was supposed to be out January 21, but just got pushed back to the 28th.

― twinkin' and drinkin' and ready to fly (Alex in Montreal), Tuesday, January 15, 2013 4:22 AM (1 week ago)

http://www.thefader.com/2013/01/28/download-le1fs-fly-zone-mixtape/

been posting about it on twitter/tumblr/etc.

all pretty great stuff on first listen. vocal mix is up front esp. compared to dark york. less experimental in some ways but gets weirder as it goes on.

might love dark york more but i'll be playing this a lot.

plenty more nerd stuff, including lots of x-men and avatar: the last airbender references.

favourite line the first time around is a rakim-via-eminem flip:

I am whatever you say I am / Stop worrying about how gay I am / Or how gay I’m not / Does my shit not knock? / Are my people getting tipsy til they piss the pot? - Airbending

and 'airbending' is built around a wiley sample <3

"Pocahontas ft. Kitty Pryde (produced by Drippin)"

Hrrrm, Hercules ref instead of the expected The Little Mermaid one, heh.

Couldn't get through Dark York due to the mixing on the vocals (though "Wut" made my various 2012 singles ballots), but this new one sounds pretty great on first listen. The Kitty Pryde track is a definite highlight.

I still can't comprehend people who see the vocal mix on Dark York as a bug rather than a feature.

New one's cool but doesn't have anywhere near the same "omigod what the fuck is this?" factor as Dark York let alone hearing "ΩΩΩ" in contextless isolation on soundcloud a year earlier.

Yeah, finding it difficult to get excited about. I've only given it one listen.

I still can't comprehend people who see the vocal mix on Dark York as a bug rather than a feature.

― The Reverend, Thursday, February 14, 2013 1:39 PM (4 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

cosign til I die

I haven't had a chance to listen to Fly Zone yet, but I am really diggin the Hate2Wait/Lavandin/Emulator run right now...

in fact I am p much completely down with the back half of DY, which you all probably could have guessed...

I should go back to Fly Zone. I'm not sure I gave it a fair shake. I was just kinda like "THIS ISN'T DARK YORK!" *knocks everything off table* about it.

Yeah I def need to give it a listen myself

http://okfoc.us/seapunknames/

☯ LIL ∞WAVE ☯

iii TRΔP .rar iii

☥ SAMSUNG 420 ☥

▽▽ ΔCID PVRP ▽▽

^might actually use this somehow

☥ †Ɍïɭɭ L0RD ☥

♛ LIL UNIT ♛

O0⦰ W4LṪER MΔṪṪH▲U O0⦰

// †Ɍïɭɭ •WINZIP //

https://soundcloud.com/le1f/damn-son
this is nice

that is nice,

i couldn't get into Fly Zone, it just kinda washed over me without leaving much of an impression.

I must be alone in liking Fly Zone way better than Dark York. Either the vocal mix was greatly improved this time out, or Le1f's particular style was better suited to Fly Zone's more uniformly hazy, echoey atmosphere.

Looking forward to the new mixtape.

Tree House has landed.

Roxor.

Stoked!

can't wait til I can listen to this tonight. Love this dude!

this is fucking good

i probably like this more than anything he's done tho i still can't totally get into him

they need to mix his vocals higher and/or he should stop rapping in a whisper

he does that live too so i think it's the latter

totally on board with this. it's like an entire tape of "Lavendin"

and still this, still still still...

I still can't comprehend people who see the vocal mix on Dark York as a bug rather than a feature.

― The Reverend, Thursday, February 14, 2013 10:39 AM Bookmark

good call on the lavendin comparison, all very croaky and melodic without the wild dips into lynchian weirdness

yeah, I'm way more into Tree House than Fly Zone

Seems to be the consensus, but I haven't found a way into it yet. Fly Zone, otoh, I'm still really enjoying.

Right on, exact opposite for me

I think "Jack" is my favorite song on this

shit Dark York is totally wonderful

I'm 2 tracks in

this 'Fresh' song is fucking wild

!!

every so often we meld in the astral dimension, rev. see also: erykah badu

Coil s/d c/d etc [Started by Wyndham Earl in February 2002, last updated 4 minutes ago by stirmonster on I Love Music] 8 new answers
Le1f - Dark York (2012): QPOC SHAKUR / #seapunk [Started by twinkin' and drinkin' and ready to fly (Alex in Montreal) in April 2012, last updated 17 minutes ago by HAVE YOU SEEN ME? Please don't hesitate (imago) on I Love Music] 9 new answers

freaky thread connection which is basically confirming my theory that Le1f is Jhonn Balance reborn as a rapper

yeah, two listens-through. amazing music.

:D

Hey EP is streaming at Pitchfork.

http://pitchfork.com/advance/366-hey-ep/

~I'M A CHARMANDER -- A BANJEE COMMANDER~

!!!!!:

i'm playing David Letterman next thursday!!! **bites nails**

Yay!

^^^^^

Letterman Performance:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_kKjCnaoyc

www.youtube.com/embed/7_kKjCnaoyc

well I tried.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_kKjCnaoyc

nice. song kiiiiiiiiiiiinda sounds like thrift shop tho *ducks*

uh

How on earth was 'suckle on my muscle' allowed on network television?

ha, I was kinda wondering that too

kind of annoyed he's still pimping a two-year old song tho

Well, yeah. But on the other hand, it is amazing, and should be pimped until the whole world has heard it. There's definitely some hits on Hey that he could pimp instead. I like it.

"Wut" has been just about my least favorite song on Dark York since it dropped

also i'm not quite sure he pulls off the second verse live

A few minutes ago:

Le1f ☥ ‏@LE1FNY 9m
thank you so much to @Letterman for inviting me to perform on his stage as a musician and not as a spectacle.

Forgot the end:

that's major.

lol @ 'are those shoes yours or are those rentals?'

yes, that was classic

great performance and this ep is the best thing he's done - had been lukewarm on basically everything post-dark york but this bangs, good to hear him easing up on the trying-to-fit-too-many-words-into-the-line flow as well

dear Lord Jamar,
Choose your battles. If the whitening of rap is a concern to you, please leave my name out of it. If you think being gay is the same as being white, you are as ignorant as your enemies. I'm darker than you. I'm african. I'm a black man and I experience all the same racism you do, if not more, on top of homophobia, including from black men just like you. Are you proud of being a hateful member of a majority? Rap started out as a creative response to oppression, and no matter my outfit, I know oppressions you will never understand.
All respect,
Le1f

boom

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2014/03/lord-jamar-rap-hip-hop-conservative.html
some background

but yeah, boom

jamar is such an asshole

his twitter feed is so insufferably self-righteous

though tbf

‘Yeezus’ was wack to me,” Jamar said, in reference to Kanye West’s most recent album, a strange and sonically abrasive work that received acclaim and solidified West in the eyes of many as this era’s most important pop star. “You got people who blindly say, ‘That album was so genius.’ And those are the people who will take hip-hop and fucking let it drive right off the fucking cliff—who will listen to ‘Yeezus’ and say, ‘That was so artistic, the way he drove hip-hop off a cliff.’ ”

Except that driving genres off a cliff is a great thing to do. Not taking a sound to it's limits because your afraid it can't handle it, that's weak. And conservative.

yup

Also Yeezus isn't necessarily more abrasive than vintage Bomb Squad & a bunch of other stiff Jamar is probably down with

Wow, if anyone could make Macklemore look sympathetic, it's this clown.

i think "driving hip hop off the cliff" can be interpreted as demolishing the car rather that "taking a sound to its limits"
and my beef with yeezus is not that it's abrasive so much as it is unfun, bloviated and generally uninteresting
i guess really my reasons for disliking kanye and jamar's reasons for disliking kanye are really different
i just don't like kanye is what i'm saying

jamar's objection to the sound seems token in comparison to his weird fixation on "masculinity", which is a) bullshit and b) explains a lot...this idea that hip-hop is inherently a masculine venture. that's where his conservatism seems to stem from - not the beats, it's all about gays and beta males (and white people) (i guess women are not on his radar at all?).

i mean i'm a drake hater but his grounds for criticising drake are also bullshit, this guy is the worst

although as always anything that gets people invested in Traditional Masculinity shook has to have some worth, and when those people are shook it's always fun to see

beta males thing made me lol... is ariel pink the new threat to rap??

https://soundcloud.com/kelelam/oicu/
this is pretty good

New album, Riot Boi out this Friday, Nov. 13. First taste of it is very promising:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0zjfW2qY1U

listening to this now. wooo yeah

the album, i mean

this album is so great, le1f is so great

rly good

Seapunk is still alive. Girl at the coffee shop has a prominent jellyfish tattoo, seapunk dyed hair, and is dressed in athleisure