Popular rap magazine XXL made a list of rappers again this year. They’re supposed to be famous by next year. A few of them will be, but mostly because they’re already famous today.

They really busted out the demographic dart board for this one. White people! Teenybop kiddies! Lyrically lyrical fast rappers! Generic Southerners! Half the Def Jam roster! Two people from Compton! Based God! Surely making a list like this is damn near impossible given how fractured hip hop has become, but this seems like a particularly slapdash selection. At the peak of this list – Yela, B, Kendrick, Meek – there’s more talent, creativity and promise than the previous two years combined, but the lows are far lower than they’ve ever been. (more…)

Tuck fumblr. I’m back.

Killer Mike – “Burn“

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from PL3DGE (Grand Hustle, Coming Soon)
Killer Mike is rapping over Funkadelic. Not Mothership Slap Bass Funkadelic, but painful psychedelic rock era Funkadelic. So it’s getting posted. This is one of those Mike tracks where he beats you over the head with his politics. He is great at that, he wields a fucking mallet and it hurts everyone it’s supposed to hurt and heals the rest of us but sometimes I wonder if a subtler approach might be more effective. Spoonfuls of sugar and all that. Wait. No. Fuck that.

Rittz f/ Yelawolf & Big Krit – “Fulla Shit“

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from White Jesus (Mixtape, Coming Soon)
Rittz’ is an undeniably impressive rapper but his purpose and by extension his existence is perplexing. How is it possibly in Yela’s best interests to put on another (white, yeah that matters) rapper who raps just like him before he himself has really established much of a foothold or a following yet? It’d be pretty difficult for the uninitiated to tell the both of them apart on this song. Of course none of that means that the track doesn’t jam because it does. Krit in particular steps up well in the presence of more technically ambitious rappers. He and Yela have plans to release a collaborative mixtape, Trunk Muzik Wuz Here and that seems like it’ll be a very comfortable fit. (more…)

Big K.R.I.T. – K.R.I.T. Wuz Here (Cinematic Music Group, 2010)

For those of you not paying attention to Google Reader, Big K.R.I.T.’s K.R.I.T Wuz Here is one of the things that’s on rap blogs this week. It’s a solid tape, deserving of the attention. The Mississippi native is still finding his voice as a rapper, alternately sounding like either Pimp C or T.I. but it’s important to recognize him as a producer as well. He personally laced the entirety of the project and is something of a beast behind the boards. His sound, like the Justice League and Burn One before him, is modern in construction yet still sample driven. So much so that this note that was tagged on to the press release, and subsequently most of the blogs that specialize in cutting and pasting press releases:

P.S. We dug deep into the crates for the music & movie samples on this one. The first person that can tell us which samples we used, will receive 1k cash & a pan of Shipe’s famous brownies.

This sort of crate fetishism through artist sanctioned sample spotting is something of a first for country rap tunes. While many Southern producers have implemented many samples over the years, crate digging as a ritual was never much of a conversation point. (more…)