rolling regional thug thread 2012

you dont like 'money on the floor' or 'we buy gold'?

yeah both of those are amazing

def convinced that krit should more or less stop rapping

i think a ball & g album prod solely by KRIT would be in my top 10 of the year at this point

there's way too many tracks on the krit album with him doing the repeat title a hundred times for the chorus thing. I actually like most of the smoother tracks, although Money On The Floor is still the best thing on it

yeah, i definitely support the idea of him doing a ball & g album though

he did a track for J. Stalin recently btw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CueKuqvMlA

'money on the floor' was good but i never really good to hyped on it

yo lgbt raps
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UHUYM7qqJw

^8.09 is fly

20.52 too!

8:09 rapper is good

We Buy Gold > Money on the Floor but I love both.

new young thug : http://soundcloud.com/archivent/youngthugworld-ft-skypadwar

he should keep doing his own hooks

deej's wet dream coming true : the new jacka album called the sentence features max b.

dr4ke gohard

the album's pretty cool, easily the best of the trilogy

this video is awesome
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHfWY0is3rE

she's great!

didn't realize how good that song is, too

video/song both awesome

cute!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzvLlUuMKfk&feature=player_embedded#!
interested to hear #livefromthenewbay

http://thewire.co.uk/articles/9204/

curious what ppl think of this

for my part, i think it misdescribes the dynamics of what actually happened with keef; the gawker article only provoked a critical article from smoking section & a single global grind interview on its own. It wasn't for a couple months, while major artists cosigned keef on twitter, that labels & publications started to pay attention, and it wasn't until the Kanye cosign that labels felt obliged to do so.

further, this: "Over the last year, Keef has become a legitimate street star in his hometown Chicago and could have built up a national celebrity à la Gucci Mane or Lil Wayne. Instead, his narrative rushed his infectious but under-polished Waka Flocka-inspired local hits into the peak of the internet hype cycle."

seems problematic. what makes 'i dont like,' which just hit the hot 100, any more under-polished than, say, 'o lets do it' by waka.

"The fans sort out the stars themselves, forcing the rest of the industry – cool-kid blogs included – to play catch-up later."

but then, if the 'cool kid blogs' bother to keep up with the fans, they're responsible for throwing him into the internet hype cycle, or whatever

i think my post upthread is more otm than noz' pouty jaded blogger blues, it's too early to call & he really just needs like 1 more hit sometime in the next year, could so easily happen. like the shittiest thing about the internet hype cycle has always been the rush to declare trends over, artists bust. reminds me of how last january whiney was freaking out about how we named the thread "gun sounds" when waka had already been in pitchfork and the fader. personally don't see a huge diff between 2 chainz, future, meek mill & chief keef, and like, how does waka even fit into this story?

deej youre like the regional thug caramanica throwin off the hype cycle

end of day an interesting story is an interesting story. i've been critical of kitty pryde coverage b/c i don't think it's an interesting story

like, im not mad that hype isn't "just" about the music (as if such a thing is even possible)

when she collabs with chief keef u will change your dn to goon caramanica tho

also noz is probably bitter because odd future have flopped since he nursed them into internet hype cycle life

btw link to ur post upthread i dont know what it is

noz is just tired i think

i think he gets a little caught up in putting different people on arbitrary sides of an ARTISTRY vs. CHASING CASH false binary instead of putting things plainer, more frank terms

i think there's some truth to what he's saying in the keef example in the sense that his increased visibility has definitely led to a string of collabs that have been pretty underwhelming, and there's certainly a chance that his next full tape will be bogged down by a bunch of guests. that said... is that deej's fault? no, of course not. and deej's post is pretty accurate. the gawker story has 65k views right now, which by gawker's standards is not really a huge number (no offense to deej).

the rap universe in general is shrinking, the underground and pop are coming together... 2 chainz is a good counter example to the sort of come-up that he's talking about, but it's not like at this point where he guests on every single rap song that he's not as much a part of the problem. i'm not sure why pop charts are not as accessible to rappers anymore, but that's as much to do with what noz is talking about as do blogs.

i feel bad for anyone who one minute has their own career, no matter how big or small, and then the next has almost no choice but to take a seemingly important opportunity in front of them and turn their biggest song into a posse cut shitshow with pusha t and big sean

after getting kanye's "i don't like" verse stuck in my head for like half a day last week i would like to declare it the worst rap of 2012 hands down btw

TRIFECTA

oh wait that's pusha's

keef is a bit of a tough example because he's so young and theoretically so impressionable, but all rappers regardless of how they came up are eating each other just to stay alive. dreamchasers 2 has way too many guests. once you reach a certain level right now, regardless of how you come up, you're going to feel pressure to cave to that mentality where you check off all the right guests (wale! 2 chainz! big sean!) etc. that's probably my main gripe with rap right now, and blogs are only a small part in that.

"pay homage, or k's vomit" is a great line in that pusha verse

blogs did topple the old models of both A&R & hype, but i don't think that explains rap's shrinking market in pop

i don't really get all the talk about guests on Dreamchasers 2, the first Dreamchasers also had guests on about half the tracks, nearly all major label artists (if of generally lower star power). not a huge leap or change of approach at all imo.

uh idk dude. he went from young chris, beanie sigle, rick ross (three times), yo gotti & some philly rappers to drake, jeremih, big sean (twice), kendrick lamar, fabolous, french montana, wale (twice), 2 chainz & mac miller. i think the homogenization is pretty obvious.

obviously this won't happen but i'd prefer if the pre-album mixtapes be collaboration heavy and then the actual album be more about showcasing the artist.

i dont think his original post was per se about me, and seemed more targeted at the headline i didn't write, but nonetheless i thought it was overstated. the story is resonating with people as much as the music, sure, but i'm not sure that i see them as intractable

wait. i misused that word. i meant you cant pull apart the music & teh story

i didn't even know he was on house arrest. but then i don't know shit about shit.

should pt out that the piece was actually at like 45k views until the kanye cosign

yeah most of the collabs have been so-so, although i liked the Trel track. "Finessin" is probably the best post-mixtape track, and its just aite relative to "3hunna" or w/e

i'm interested to hear it, although i'm willing to bet that once summer comes around keef's buzz will have dimmed & louie's will have risen slightly just based on the material i've heard from each recently & the assumption that louie will start to flood the streets

this is speaking purely of local coverage, btw

reflecting some more, it kind of seems to me like rap bloggers are almost more mad that their jobs are to be bloggers than anything else. like, there's not a zone for rap blogs or publications where you can actually weigh in on the relative merits (& lack thereof) of an artist; instead, all that happens is someone on rap radar is forced to post about keef so they just express how much they think he sucks, and post about him. meanwhile the fans are just posting I DONT LIKE on twitter over & over (guilty, or i was) & there's a lot of noise and he ends up in magazines & people just feel angry about how it feels like hes being forced on them

im saying this because lately it feels like a lot of people have come at me as if i'm blindly endorsing any & all keef material, or that i couldn't possibly have nuanced opinions about his work, or dislike some & like others, or see his relative shortcomings. i dont think anyone who likes some of keef's music has really inflated him to be something he's not, and so the backlash ends up feeling out of proportion

i complained about something similar w/ the killer mike record, just felt like a lot of the enthusiasm was a bit over the top & possibly affected by political sympathies, and i was like, i'd just like to see some more substantive critical writing about it that didn't take his general agreeableness as an inherent positive, and got someone saying NOW YOU KNOW HOW I FEEL ABOUT KEEF and i was like, wait, what?? b/c locally hes just SO controversial, i didn't think ANYONE was blanket pro-keef, he seems super divisive, but i guess when you live in an area where the real buzz is more distant and all you see is a few stories i've written about him that don't go into much music criticism & are more journalistic in nature, followed by a bunch of blogs/tumblrs picking up on it, you might see it as blanket enthusiasm?

idk been thinking about this stuff

i guess end of day i don't get why it matters that hip press jumped on him, as if there wasn't a soulja boy or a d4l or any other number of rappers who had big regional hits that came out of nowhere. this seems like an excuse to bemoan hype w/out actually addressing that its the music people like about this, if the music wasn't there, if 'i don't like' wasn't charting (w/out the remix), then maybe he'd have a point

like, if i hadn't written about this what would the difference be? a few months extra time spent through word of mouth until someone else cosigned him?

shit was going to happen period