Hip Hop Monday #3: Pitchfork, Lil B, Jay Electronica, Nicki Minaj

Kanye West feat. Pusha T – Runaway

This one pretty much has to begin with an acknowledgement that Kanye West got a 10.0 on Pitchfork today. Excluding the Robert Pollard onstage banter album that’s annoyingly scuffing up the records with its (1)0.0 dual score, the last albums to get the brave first release 10.0 were Source Tags and Codes by …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead in February 2002 and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot in April 2002. Both of these albums are boring, but the point is that it’s been a while, and that Kanye’s not exactly the type of music that gets a 10.0 on Pitchfork first time around. So Pitchfork is Saying Something. Decide for yourself what they’re saying, and don’t doubt for a minute that there was a board meeting and teleconference about that score.

Here is a Gchat I had with Seán Mc Tiernan. Shout out to No Chorus. Fuck Nah Right and 2dopeboyz.

Sean: still
it remains irritating to read all this bullshit by people like that
who are like
patting rap music on the head
because of kanye’s album
like i don’t treat any genre of music like that
17:12 i can’t imagine why someone would
aside from making themself feel smart
me: You Did It, Rap Music
Proud of u

I’m reviewing it for Totally Dublin, so I won’t do it here. Maybe I’ll post it next week.

Lil B – Exhibit Based

Last week I posted Bitch Im Bill Clinton off Lil B’s Red Flame mixtape, which was stupid. Lil B does that sort of thing quite a lot, but it clouds the fact that he’s actually a great rapper. It turns him into a cartoon, and that’s not cool. The track above is what happened when he jumped on Just Blaze’s beat Jay Electronica’s Exhibit C. Just Blaze is one of my favourite producers, as an unashamed Jay-Z fan (1996-2004 + Empire State Of Mind), and this could be his best beat. It’s linear and there’s no hook. Jay Electronica murders it, but so does Lil B.

Split a nigga wig make him think that he James Bond
If I ain’t James Bond, bet I got the same gun
Plus I got money in the bank for the bail-bond
Pay him 80 Gs if he thinkin he can tell on
No witness make him run like Rev Run
No blood in his genes like a stepson
Yeah I got 45s I’m travelin to India
I’m finna have 10 kids, it’s my millennium

Jay Electronica – Exhibit C

Fuck it, while we’re here, here’s the Jay Electronica track.

“They call me Jay Electronica. Fuck that.
Call me Jay ElecHannukah
Jay ElecYarmulke
Jay ElectRamadaan Muhammad Asalaamica Rasoul Allah Supana Watallah through your monitor.”

This was last year, and he only eventually signed to Roc Nation, Jay-Z’s odious capitalist enterprise, about ten days ago. A back story about being homeless, not selling crack, if you’re worried about that. This is Mainstream Hip Hop. Revise your opinion on it.

Nicki Minaj feat. Eminem – Roman’s Revenge

Also, Pink Friday leaked, hyped endlessly by Nicki Minaj’s torching of Jay-Z on Kanye’s Monster (which you might have noticed last week if you haven’t got Presumably What Pitchfork Consider The Best Hip Hop Album Ever yourself yet).

She’s a chameleon. Listen, and hear the rappers she likes. Lil Wayne on Did It On Em, a little ODB shudder occasionally, the Drake punchlines (or “hashtag rap“) thrown in throughout, notably “I’m a bad bitch, I’m a cunt/And I kick that ho – punt” on this before Eminem rolls in to remind the public that he’s still in a rage. Probably more I don’t recognise.

Then there’s the give ‘em enough rope, I’m-cute-OH-WAIT-I’M-ANGRY stuff. And that weird English accent that narrates MBDTF. “Two shows tonight, that’s Brooklyn and Dallas, then the private party at the Buckingham palace” she says on I’m The Best, and that’s kind of a good metaphor for it. Never a dull moment, even if coming out the same week as Kanye seems like a bit of an oversight.

Finally, Jay-Z’s got a book, and he considers rap lyrics poetry. It’s not. Neither’s Bob Dylan though. And TV’s not film, and blogs aren’t magazines.

Hip Hop Monday #2: Kanye West, Lil B.

Kanye West, Bon Iver, Rick Ross, Jay-Z, Nicki Minaj – Monster

So Kanye West’s album leaked.

The thing about Kanye is that he jumped the shark and stayed relevant. It’s him and Lady Gaga when it comes to present, all-consuming fame at the moment and, as luck would have it, he’s also in the habit of producing excellent music. Everything gets that bit more significant when someone has enough of a profile to be an entire side of the cultural conversation unto themselves.

So Kanye went autotune, went out with that snaky woman, interrupted Taylor Swift and started being more accessibly strange hourly on Twitter. He’s still the guy. If you’re Rick Ross, Nicki Minaj or even Jay-Z, you have a different ringtone for him and you answer with the word ‘yes’. There are a few of these posse tracks on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, but none of them are as good as this or as significant as this.

Bon Iver opens proceedings, because Kanye is plugged into the lumberjackcore scene or because he heard his voice with a sampler’s ear and thought ‘with distortion that could sing a hook’. Rick Ross trundles in and calls himself a “fat motherfucker”, in keeping with the be-self-deprecating-around-Kanye trend established recently, then decides 4 bars is enough.

Kanye? He calls himself “the best living or dead hands down”. People will tend to say this from time to time, but it’s different when you’ve got this much cultural (and actual) currency. He also says “have you ever had sex with a pharoah?/I put the pussy in a sarcophagus/Now she claiming I bruised her oesophagus” which is Lil Wayne batshit at best.

Then it’s Jay-Z. There was a time when he’d call himself the best rapper alive every 8 bars or so, and as far as something like that can be true, it was true. But here, after Kanye whose vaguely lazy, self-regarding but ultimately satisfying flow is clearly a cut above, he’s shown up as old. If you’re guesting on something as high profile as this, you don’t get killed, especially if you’re still hanging on to claims of ‘best’, and he’s dead as soon as he starts.

And then Nicki Minaj shows up – 3.30 will get you some of the hook, and then her verse. She does voices, if you didn’t know. Sri Lankan, normalish/reggaeton, nice girl, reggaeton, Barbie, growl, Barbie, normalish. She’s head and shoulders above anyone else on this track, and it’s probably the best verse on the album, in my early stages of listening. Guess what’s rumoured though? She has ghostwriters. Is that just sexism because a GIRL without even an album out managed to dance all over Jay-Z, Kanye West and Rick Ross for about 80 seconds on Kanye’s own track? Put it this way, there’s no evidence either way, and Nicki herself says this:

“I write my own raps, I go in the studio by myself. There are some female rappers who can’t go in the studio unless they have a ghostwriter sitting right next to them,” says Minaj. “I’m the complete opposite—I’ll go in and ghostwrite for someone.”

So that addresses that. As for the rest of the album, it’s Kanye coming back to take possession of his evolution of boom-bap rap. It’s a nutcase at the top of his game, lyrically astute but with an odd worldview as divorced from reality as you’d expect from a guy this far away from the real world for this long. The window might not stay open long, but it’s open now and he’s doing it without breaking a sweat.

Lil B – Bitch I’m Bill Clinton

In other news, Lil B, who is definitely bad milk, put out a mixtape that he claims is the greatest mixtape of all time. He tends to claim a lot of stuff that’s not true though. For example, that he’s Bill Clinton. It’s free.