rap
joe.muggs
You’ll want to love Loyle Carner. There’s so much about what he gives and how he delivers it that’s disarming, charming, brilliant even. His lyrics across this album are very obviously from the heart and took real courage to hammer into shape. He talks about his sense of self as he’s struggled to form it in the battlegrounds of race, class, masculinity and nationality, in clear and direct language that leaves you in no doubt that he’s telling the truth. He tells the kind of stories that are all too often completely pushed to the side in UK pop culture by the sellability of the slick brutality Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
If ever a moment summed up the spirit of a gig perfectly, then it is the segment in this arena showcase where Machine Gun Kelly is confronted by the internet, represented by what appears to be a blow up statue with a monitor for a head. As it demands the American rap rocker should be pigeonholed into one genre, he strikes on a solution which involves a helicopter flying in to shoot it. That was a defining trait of this relentlessly bombastic show, of going loud and direct as often as possible.In reality Colson Baker has avoided damage from internet criticism fairly handily, transitioning from Read more ...
joe.muggs
22 is a pretty young age to be jaded. But this album starts out with Mancunian rapper Aitch detailing how tough it is at the top, and how traumatised he is by life: "sitting on my throne with an open stare / 'cause to me it's just a broken chair". Alright, through the rest of the record there’s lots of rambunctious narratives of sex, wealth and partying, in which he seems to be having the time of his life. But that nagging sense of loneliness, mistrust and self questioning does remain a theme throughout too.It usually takes artists a couple of albums before this price-of-fame stuff starts Read more ...
joe.muggs
You can’t really blame Lizzo for playing to her strengths. When she started putting out records some nine years ago, there wasn’t really a niche in the market for a flute playing, twerking, positive-thinking, plus-size rapper-stroke-disco-diva.Roundly ignored by the mainstream “urban” American music industry despite her obvious abundant talent, she went about building her own diverse – but leaning female and/or LGBTQ+ – cult following, which grew fast until she couldn’t be ignored. Without changing or dialling down her approach, this eventually resulted in her 2019 ascent to global mega fame Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Is gig theatre the latest sugar rush? Okay, it ups the brain’s serotonin levels and charges around your body like a crazy electric current, but amid the joyous nerve reactions does the music speak louder than the words?These questions won’t bother many in the young audiences that are targeted by the Soho Theatre as it stages Bangers, a “mixtape play” written by Danusia Samal and directed by Chris Sonnex, and featuring original music by Duramaney Kamara, Samal and Sonnex, but they are worth asking. After all, this is meant to be a new writing theatre.Bangers comes to this venue’s sweaty studio Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Onstage at The Old Market in Hove, New York’s Mykki Blanco has been waving around a knot of garlic bulbs as if it were a wand or occult aspergillum. At some point during Blanco’s punchy rendition of 2016 single “Loner”, or possibly the dizzier “Summer Fling”, they transfer it to the flies of their trousers, let it hang there, all mischief. They explain that this is the result of the band becoming obsessed with “a mad coven of witches in Italy”.Whatever, it certainly adds to the freeform conviviality. Blanco (pictured left) no longer adopts a draggy look. The non-binary MC first enters wearing Read more ...
joe.muggs
Kendrick Lamar is so breathlessly revered it’s sometimes hard to pull apart what’s going on in his records. It’s sometimes felt like he might become the rap game Radiohead: exploratory, aware, hugely technically accomplished, endlessly thematically “important” – but not actually that interesting to listen to.And certainly on the 18 tracks of his comeback album after a near four-year break – five since his last album proper, DAMN. – there’s a lot that’s potentially extremely worthy. There’s a lot of moody piano lines, there’s a lot of ultra-intricate rhyme patterns, and Read more ...
howard.male
It was two female artists who mainly soundtracked 2021 for me. And they couldn’t be more different. Although Off Off One by Kate Stables (aka This is the Kit) was recorded just before Covid changed everything, there are some ominous mentions in the lyrics of infection, coughing and hospital. But we’re not dealing with something maudlin or doom laden here, far from it. There’s a sly wit and quietly surreal joy to Stables’ gorgeously melodic pop songs. Yes, ‘pop’ not ‘alt folk’ or whatever the critics call it. I believe Staples would have been as big as Kate Bush in the 1970s, an era when Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
From underground curiosity to cult icon, now label head and superstar, Atlanta’s Young Thug has continued to reinvent himself, as well as rap at large, for the better part of a decade. After being announced over two years ago, his new album Punk is finally here.It’s an album which sounds like previous Young Thug eras in conversation with each other. There are weird and heavy beats which could be taken straight from 2019’s So Much Fun, but mostly there are sombre plucked guitars, reminiscent of 2017’s Beautiful Thugger Girls. It’s enjoyable but, unlike Thug himself, kind of predictable. Read more ...
joe.muggs
Lil Nas X is good at being a pop star. Like, what could pop culture need more than a young, flamboyant, witty gay rapper from the deep south who can top the US country charts then just when it appeared he might not be able to live up to the success of “Old Town Road” lap dance Satan in the video for the Latin-tinged “Call me by Your Name” and storm to mega sales all over again? He is in many ways the culmination of the deconstruction of hip hop machismo, being from a generation that grew up on the dweebiness of Drake, the thoughtfulness of Kendrick Lamar, the camp of Nicki Minaj, the Read more ...
joe.muggs
AJ Tracey is one of Brit rap’s aristocracy now. Along with the likes of Stormzy, Dave, J Hus and lately Headie One, he is massively bankable, with streams in the tens of millions for singles, sellout shows in Alexandra Palace, and radio ubiquity. It’s the kind of sustained success that completely eclipses anything achieved by the previous generation of grime musicians, but also, because it’s uncharted territory it poses all kinds of questions about musical identity and about what happens next. And this, Tracey’s second full album, embodies many of these questions.Its structure is interesting Read more ...
joe.muggs
Theartsdesk is a labour of love. Bloody-mindedly run as a co-operative of journalists from the beginning, our obsession with maintaining a daily-updated platform for good culture writing has caused a good few grey and lost hairs over the years. But it has also been rewarding – and looking back over the 10 years of Disc of the Day reviews has been a good chance to remind ourselves of that. One thing in particular that drew me into the collective when it was founded, and has kept me going throughout, was the understanding that artistic forms would be treated with equal respect and Read more ...