The dylannn (west coast hip-hop) listening club

gahhhh

what the hell

yall serious right now??????

what do you think is going on here? i know this thread kinda outs me as a neophyte with some pretty wellknown music but try to keep it in perspective. when i say i don't know, like, ice cube or e-40, you gotta know what that means. like, cube, i'm saying i'm young enough that i think of him 50% as the dude in barbershop and he hasn't released an important album since i could count how old i was on two hands but i know the big records, i know the importance of amerikkka's most wanted, death certificate, i could tell you who he was in beef with roughly when.

pac, man... even with the kids that still rocked bleached undercuts in 8th grade, white working class kids or native kids that just moved down from nipawin, even if he was dead by the time we were downloading "brenda's got a baby" off napster in information processing class or buying scratched up copies of all eyez on me at pawn shops, pac was a legendary figure. that's outside of me ever being into rap or whatever. that's just growing up in the 90s.

apart from that, i've been trying to write about rap music for, like, ten years now. even if i've had some corny periods in my rap listening and i spent too much time contemplating it was written, pac is crucial to a lot of what i love. how could i be feeling z-ro and never heard of pac???? pac's ghost haunts at least a small corner of everything i love.

haha was gonna say

You want another pick from sisi then?

nope. i'm fired up now.

every future review will contain several references to pac. i'm hopin my true motherfuckers know, this be the realest shit i ever wrote.

i'm also going to dig up some ten year old william wiggins posts repping for pac's raw emotion over the good times swagger of big.

but i'm going to write about this e-40 album first.

put me in for another round

e-40 - grit & grind

this isn't really fair because i mean i've heard at least a taste of something off most albums e-40 has put out over the last couple decades. he's been cosigned by and worked with a lot of rappers i respect. i've heard e-40. every track off in a major way has popped up on a screw tape at least once, and in the case of "dusted and disgusted" and "sideways" about a dozen times each-- the fact that most screw tapes were bespoke mixes for local buyers shows you the love that houston's southside had for e-40 (and b-legit and mac mall and pac and c-bo). i still get goosebumps off "it's all bad" after hearing it by chance on codine fien pressed in between a run of west coast classics ("ghetto serenade," wc and maad circle, "what's my name," eazy e, "it's all bad," e-40, and closed out with "groovin on a sunday," c-bo). the voice on that is amazing, the way he flows running against the beat running with it, rising to a warble and sinking down into a suspicious crouch, slipping into the voice of the boys on the block and back into his veteran slang.

e-40 from '95 to '02, he's pushed that voice, that style way into the red zone of not feeling this at all. the vision of rap i like as presented on this thread just gets grimmer and crazier-- let's add it up and throw in a few extras: must be grimly realist, must not contain any indulgence in artistic flourish for its own sake, and i'll always prize lyrics over vocal performance. but forget about that for a minute. some of my favorite rappers actually get by on style alone, a great voice. but e-40 doesn't do it for me. the compressed tightness of his voice... it doesn't appeal to me... it doesn't seem to work for lots of things that he attempts... i can't listen to that voice for more than three tracks in a row.

i really like suga free when he pops up on this, though!

best tracks:
"the slap"
"til the dawn" ft suga free
"mustard and mayonnaise"

coming in isolation, between palate cleansers, those three tracks are amazing.
esp.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RBYyDu68x0

when e-40 hits something he's good at, like that crazy slang shit on a beat made of fox 40s whistles and marching bands, digital riffs... perfect, had it on repeat for ten minutes. but a lot of time, it just doesn't work for me.

again, though, it's not really fair because my opinion of e-40 has been set in stone for a decade.

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

Since Freestyle Fellowship is out and the gangster canon has been well rep'd,
might I suggest some contemporary Seattle slaps:

Nacho Picasso 'Exalted'

must be grimly realist

this is so limiting

partly because it implies a very specific kind of "realism"

don't go by those rules. those rules are crazy. i think the suga free recommendation was the best one so far-- not my favorite album so far but the best recommendation in that it's outside what i know and love but is really surprisingly dope and interesting to think about.

I've been meaning to check for Nacho Picasso beyond the couple tracks I've heard.

lol i was gonna say dylannn you're way too familiar w the disciples of pac to ignore pac

but on the other hand 'i never listened to west coast rap' is already kind of crazy to me so who knew how far ... etc.

plus i dont remember ever reading you write about pac before.

i started to think you were joking when you mentioned bob marley tho

anyway i don't think dylannn will like nacho picasso. i'm still a little curious what he thinks of freestyle fellowship tho

yeah, pretty sure nacho will not be to his liking but i'm eager to hear his take. more so re: freestlye fellowship should he choose to revisit it.

a dylannn review of makaveli would obv be the most interesting thing to me

after viacom is done, for mine I would like to do J. Stalin - Prenuptial Agreement (assuming it's easy to find on the net!)

Gas Nation!! >>>

lol I knew someone would say that.

honestly I just went with the one I heard first (and most often).

giants & elephants with guce >

i never got the love for that

that's what started my interest in livewire/dj fresh/the mekanix stuff

yeah, pretty sure nacho will not be to his liking but i'm eager to hear his take. more so re: freestlye fellowship should he choose to revisit it.

― viacom dios, Thursday, July 11, 2013 7:33 PM (3 days ago)

i think i like this!

nacho picasso - exalted

ayo i find this difficult because i don't want to just give a feelin it/not feelin it response and the more i write, the more i'm drawn into coming to a conclusion and feeling around in my memory and charting out my immediate response to put something, anything down. that's why you've got me coming up with rules about realism and chalking out the zone of things i like. so, what i'm trying to say is: i'm caught between brevity and maybe giving careless treatment to musics that people have recommended with sincerest heart and trying not to wade too far out into the duck pond of profundity and bold statements and saying some stupid shit. so i'll be brief here:

i'm feeling nacho picasso. kinda stuck on it not sure what to say except that. album is funny in a way that a lot of rappers he's compared to are not funny. i think it helps that his style is still bound by formal lyrical rules and firmly stuck in known lyrical tropes and he's just pushing them outward rather than leaping right to the abstract. he goes for the absurd by stretching tropes or expressions or images that are familiar to me. probably needs to be crimp dated mid summer 2013, though. so that's it feelin it.

In a commonsense way, you write about the impingement of one upon the other—my subjectivity bumping into other subjectivities, or into the Prime Rate. You exist for me in my perception of you (and in some rough, Raggedy Andy way, for yourself, of course). That’s what’s curious when people say, of writers, This one’s a realist, this one’s a surrealist, this one’s a super-realist, and so forth. In fact, everybody’s a realist offering true accounts of the activity of mind. There are only realists.

i actually think i have more to say about it. but i'd like to hear what other people hear in the nacho album if they've heard it.

Yeah I dont know that one

who's next?

think Neanderthal's up next?

Never heard that record either. Yeah Neanderthal recd the j Stalin record.

alright j stalin, 23 tracks, this better be good

Considering himself as a blend between Messy Marv and TQ, the West Oakland native, born Jovan Smith, has modeled his persona after Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin...

"westside" tq?

in an oakland accent it sounds a lot like he's saying "stylin'!"

Yeah that TQ but I don't really hear it.

this guy is like the westcoast chris and neef to me i dunno

good:
"rock day"
"hnic" ft messy marv
"g in me"

i hear the intro to "rockin wit tha best" and i think, yeah let's hear this... then it's more j stalin rapping to broads. "stop my shine," mcdonalds straw whistle, occasional flashes of lyrical interest in emotional breathy talent show singer voice.

"get me off," e-40 comes in and scoops all the girls j stalin was giving his number to, "get my rocks off like i'm on the yola track"

skip, skip, skip. "like a job": okay.

"when it's real," teena marie flip with west coast young gunz vibe failed rappin to broads lyrics about how he likes the pussy bald, that voice works with the image i have of him awkwardly putting his arm around pinky in his video looking like he was fucking around with his mom's younger sister.

"red and blue lights," jacka on some lowkey paranoid sadness feelin it.

yyyeahhh i think 'gas nation' is a much better record these days and part of the appeal of 'prenuptial agreement' to me at the time was the discovery of this scene that was doing this kind of rap music w/ an expensive production sound, all '80s R&B sheen and open grandiosity while the rest of the south was getting all pointillist and harsh and then aggro. It was a lot about it sounding like the stuff that hit used to cross over, but stuck in this bay area bubble, undiscovered by the outside world

i still love a lot of that music and prenuptial agreement is dope imo

esp this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mC8YaOlKfNM

he's a funny dude, i guess, is my defense of that

prenuptial agreement is *still somewhat* dope imo, although it has sorta gone down in my eyes compared to the street album that dropped before it.

maybe i'm listening with a too critical ear and i definitely don't have the background to really place these albums in any sort of context.