Liked "Dance Wiv Me." Thought "Bonkers" didn't live up to its title. I very much like "Holiday," even if the chorus is the weakest thing on the song. Tongue 'n Cheek should be interesting, to say the least. Alex Ostroff made a good point at the Jukebox—Dizzee is better at lighthearted club tracks than serious tracks these days, and a full album of jams for the dancefloor is just fine with me.

This time around the synths are more kinetic and Harris switches things up more often, even inserting little G-funk flourishes amongst the track's more traditional house elements, like throbbing bass and a sense of propulsion that threatens to careen off the track at any moment. Harris suits Dizzee much better than Armand Van Helden, and Dizzee's performance here is confirmation—he sounds more comfortable, catching the beat in a more natural way, never once in danger of losing control. Every syllable is expertly placed, every deviation in his cadence refreshing, every oddball sentiment genuine ("And I'll never let your belly get empty/ Even when your belly full you're still sexy"). Dizzee is playing the I'm A Rich Rapper And I'll Fly You To Insert Clichéd Holiday Destination Here card, but it never sounds desperate (in that being rich and famous is the only reason he's getting girls) or sleazy, which has always been a huge strength of Dizzee as a rapper.
[7]

BlaQKout is my favourite rap album so far this year. "9Xs Outta 10" is the album's lone face-scrunching, Holy Shit! moment amongst the rest of the album's equally impressive, only with smoother edges, material. Some people have been commenting that Kurupt sort of falls into the background and that BlaQKout feels more like a DJ Quik solo album than a Kurupt/Quik disc, but these people are wrong. It's not so much that Kurupt disappoints—he kills every track he's on—so much as that the rest of his verses are less show-offy (but still as technically precise) than on the Best Performance On A Rap Song-worthy "9xs Outta Ten," and that Quik, who has been underrated as a rapper for his entire career, is finally starting to be recognized as a pretty great one. I wouldn't have said no to another solo Kurupt track or three, but the important thing is that BlaQKout doesn't suffer from lack of them. Jukebox certified:

How great is Kurupt here? At 1:27, when it appears that Quik is going to drop a verse, he only manages to get in a line and a half before Kurupt yells "Stop!" only to resume decapitation of Quik's irradiated husk of a beat. Kurupt sounds so reluctant to relinquish control of the microphone it's as if Quik, once he began rapping, looked over at Kurupt and realized he best leave the booth. Right then.
[9]

I contributed a summer mix CD (er, .rar file) to my man Jeff Weiss' annual Summer Jamz series, and he posted it this morning over at his blog Passion of the Weiss. You can download and read a little blurb about my entry here. As you might notice from the title of the mix, it's only the first volume of 2009. This year I'm doing two volumes for the first time, the second one being put together as we speak. Look for it sometime in early July, right here. With more rap on it, too. Maybe. Hopefully.

starkey
"GUTTER MUSIC (feat DURRTY GOODZ)"
from gutter music 12" (keysound recordings, 2009)

If this was 2003, this would be your favourite blogger's favourite song. Unfortunately, bloggers and critics deserted grime for dubstep, which features actual rapping a lot less, mostly because it's pretty damn hard to rap over the kind of off-kilter rhythms that separate dub from garage and grime. If anyone is going to be up to the task, it's a British emcee like Durrty Goodz, who sounds completely at home over the bubbling synthesizers and hyperkinetic dancehall lasers that ricochet and refract off all the shiny surfaces of Starkey's "Gutter Music."

Durrty is a rapper with loads of personality, and it shines through here. Sometimes rappers shrink on tracks intended to get people up and onto the dancefloor, but Durrty raps like he was born to do songs like "Gutter Music." His flow twists and turns through the track; this isn't a methodical, monstrous left-turn only Nascar flow, this is skilled Formula 1 maneuvering. His voice doesn't get lost in the mix either—his confidence spills off the edges of the track and his faux-Jamaican patois gives the track a real international vibe. He doesn't hit you with silly things like complex metaphors either, his Gatling gun flow and intensity is all he needs to get you hyped up. Even so, Durrty's got lot of great moments here, such as when he half-laughs as he delivers the line "Yuh luhk oofffffal brah!" in his peanut butter thick London accent, or how his repeated claims of things' gutterness turn into one of the year's most infectious chants.

Durrty's thesis here is that "All the best rappers came from the gutter/ best producers came from the gutter/ best beats, came from the gutter," which is both wrong and right at the same time; by "gutter" he doesn't necessarily mean inner city London or the Marcy projects, but anyone on the fringe, anyone with an I'ma Take Mines By Any Means Necessary attitude, that sort of unhinged rawness that can't be denied; an unrespectability that's not a crutch but a weapon. Jay-Z used to be gutter; now he just pays kids to clean out the ones on his house(s). After all, Starkey is an American producer—essentially a dubstep outsider—and Durrty—who's British, and that automatically makes him an outsider in an important way too—is one of those British rappers with the sort of anxious, fidgety energy that works so well on the kind the claustrophobic tracks that still dominate grime today. It's kind of ironic that he calls this track "gutter," because it's made for raves more than it is the streets, but that only further proves Durrty's point. The fact he's making sunny club bangers over dubstep beats with American producers—that's gutter.

clipse
"I'M GOOD (feat PHARRELL)"
from till the casket drops (columbia, 2009)

Your enjoyment of "I'm Good" depends on a few things: your fondness for Neptunes beats that sound like a cross between the T.I. and Common collaboration "Good Life" and a bunch of the beats that Chad and Pharrell did for Slim Thug a few years ago, your tolerance of sung Pharrell hooks and Clipse songs that hew closer to the aesthetic of Lord Willin' than Hell Hath No Fury. Because I'm a sucker for all three things, I enjoy "I'm Good." I just think it works a lot better as a deep album cut than the first official single (was "Kinda Like a Big Deal" kinda just the street single?) from the forthcoming Till the Casket Drops, which is slated for a tentative September release. As always, Malice and Pusha T sound like gold over a Neptunes beat, even if it's one of their tracks that straddles the line between their glittery synthetic schmaltz and their springy, spacey funk that they rarely do these days. What's more important is that "I'm Good" sounds like a genuine Neptunes track, and not just a Pharrell- or Chad-produced track. From the persistent pop of the drums and the hiss of the claps to the way the keyboards melody compliments the cotton candy synths higher up in the mix, which shine brightly and spiral deep into the tracks spacious cushion, this is the sort of beat that supports rather than hogs the limelight, the kind that the Neptunes were so great at effortlessly churning out until about 2003.

As for the actual rapping, it's less We Got It 4 Cheap hunger as much as it is earned haughtiness, more autopilot than autotune. Pusha T cackles as he compares himself to Shamu and references the Ice Cube classic "It Was a Good Day" while Malice drops two memorable lines, one about the sound his engine makes (purr) and the second likening the colour of his diamonds to that of Minute Maid juice through a very Gucci Mane-esque simile. This is the kind of rapping that gets mistaken for complacency; rather, this is simply the warm-up, the pre-game stretch. Yeah, the Thornton brothers got out-rapped on "Kinda Like a Big Deal," but Kanye's been on fire lately, even with his C+ verse on that Keri Hilson song, and Pusha and Malice are even more laidback here. If this is the track most approaching a single on Till the Casket Drops, then maybe there's reason to loosen those collars and feel a little worried. But if this is the introduction, the one before the smash, then we'll allow Clipse their first-at-bat ground single. They all can't be grand slams, right?

I'm not feeling the new Mos Def album as much as a lot of people are, so I think I'll review the thing in the next few days. Here's what I had to say about "Casa Bey," the third official single from The Ecstatic.

At least he sounds like he gives half a shit on this one, although he continues to lapse into his recent habit of simply rattling off adjectives describing his dopeness, a standard fallback for rappers who have forgotten how to rap. Otherwise it's syllable stockpiling, feel-good metaphysics and lukewarm braggadocio. And to be fair to the guy, the samba jam session he raps over has a lot of abrupt direction changes and detours to deal with, and Mos is probably one of the few rappers who could ride this beat without being bucked off within seconds. But it's telling that my favourite part is when the Final Fantasy pianos emerge from the din and dance like sunbeams on the ocean as the track fades out.
[5]

I never did write too much about 808s and Heartbreak, but it wasn't for a lack of (positive) things to say about it. I proclaimed it my second favourite album of last year, behind only Afterparty Babies, and months later my feelings toward Kanye's coping-mechanism-on-wax haven't budged much. The Jukebox reviewed the album's latest singles—in Europe, "Welcome to Heartbreak," and on this side of the pond, "Amazing"—the other week, and this gave me a chance to finally say something about the album. "Welcome to Heartbreak" seems an odd choice for a single, especially when deep album cuts like "Coldest Winter" and the lighthearted "Robocop" remain, but as long as "Paranoid" gets a proper push as a single, and this seems to be the case, with the B-movie video starring Rihanna and all, I'll be content. By far my favourite song off of the album, could "Paranoid" be the summer jam of 2009? I like the video mix of the song too; more Mass Effect synths from 'Ye are always welcome in my world.

"Welcome to Heartbreak (feat Kid Cudi)":

I don't know who (finally) taught Kanye how to ensure his drums slap you across the face, but 808s & Heartbreak is the kind of album that producers are going to be sampling from well into the next decade for their breaks. Here the low-end is storm-like, brewing and sinister, the drums spongy but still devastating. The lyrics are kind of ham-fisted, but crucially, Kanye absolutely nails their delivery; there are few other figures in hip-hop that could make the lines "My friend showed me pictures of his kids/ And all I could show him was pictures of my cribs" sound like the saddest thing ever. Kid Cudi's vocals float around in the background, sounding like they're caught in a vortex, flitting in an out of this dimension, displaying his excellent ear for melody. The bottom line: the melodies on 808s are so affecting, so viscerally primal, that "Welcome to Heartbreak" only scores a 7 because the rest of the album is that good.
[7]

"Amazing":

"Amazing" finds Kanye attempting to remove as much as he can from his music while retaining maximum pathos. The use of space on this is astounding; the track isn't minimal so much as bereft of all hope. The insistent, tribal lurch anchors Kanye's repetitions of amazingness; it's clear from this battering of his head against the wall that Kanye is spewing what is expected of Mr. Ego himself but inhabiting none of it. Jeezy sounds worn-out as he staggers through his verse, searching desperately for his footing amidst the all that wide-open space. He sounds even more larger-than-life than usual, but in the kind of way that perturbs rather than triggers. Yeah, his president is black and his Lambo might be blue, but none of that matters out here. Not quite amazing, but as close as mortals can get.
[8]

Also, look for much more frequent posting here and a shitload more of actual writing from me from now on. If Pitchfork is going to hire me, I've got to give them reasons why I should be hired—and I'm going to give them a lot of reasons.