rap
Natalie Shaw
One image remains stuck from Watch the Throne's second of five sold-out nights in London; it’s a song-long vision of Kanye West and Jay-Z – aka J Hova or just Hov – sat side by side for Hov’s “Hard Knock Life”. Hov’s words fell out of his mouth seemingly effortlessly as the track's structure emerged while ‘Ye sat in a silent, contemplative stoop - his dripping sweat and jewellery making him look post-marathon mid-set.They’re hip hop’s biggest stars, sure, but here we have two very different entities. For their numerous collaborations – aside from the Watch the Throne album, some of Jay-Z's Read more ...
joe.muggs
Tonight on Channel 4, a new music series begins with a fantastic premise. A group of music obsessives drive around the USA in a London black cab, finding interesting musicians and recording them performing and talking in the back of the cab. Sounds a little bit like the 2008 Stephen Fry in America series, doesn't it? Well maybe, except Black Cab Sessions has been broadcast online since 2007.Watch the Black Cab Sessions trailer:And there's the rub. BCS has now featured hundreds of acts in various cabs, from complete unknowns to top ten-bothering popstars, from gangsta rappers to Brian Read more ...
joe.muggs
I've seen some genre intersections in my time, but gangsta ambient takes the biscuit. Baghdad born South Londoner VersA Beatz began as a grime producer, but like many has moved from that genre's hyped-up energy into the slower, more menacing electronic “trap beats” of hip hop. This in turn has overlapped with a current American style of melancholic leftfield hip hop sounds pioneered by Clams Casino (best known as producer to Lil B and current sensation A$AP Rocky) to produce, in this free album of instrumentals, a narcotic sound that feels as if gravity has been loosened and the imagination Read more ...
joe.muggs
It's become a fairly common trope for herbally enhanced rappers to hype up their individuality by referring to themselves as an “alien”, but with Wiley you could believe it. In “Can I Get a Taxi”, the odd extended skit that forms the centrepiece of this album, he inhabits various London archetypes – the yardie, the cockney wideboy, the posh bloke – but while his accents are hilarious, it all feels strange, curious, like a child poking at creatures in a rockpool, and his ever-wayward stream of thought keeps veering off course. As with so much in the decade-old career of the father of grime and Read more ...
howard.male
Some critics have lazily compared Baloji to Somali rapper K’nann: both are African rappers who had lucky childhood escapes from countries about to descend into war and chaos, but beyond that they seem to have quite different approaches to what they do. K’naan is as much a pop musician and poet as he is a hip-hop artist, firmly concentrating on melody, song structure and hooks. Whereas Baloji, at least on the evidence of this album, seems to want to engage more with roots music while finding ways for his rhymes to fit in with already established musical idioms.So Kinshasa bands Zaiko Langa- Read more ...
caspar.gomez
Friday 9th SeptemberA ferry adds to the fun. It may seem rather childish but the fact you have to take a ferry to the Isle of Wight makes the whole Bestival experience seem more of an adventure. Sitting on the open air deck with my youngest brother Enrico, the wind tempered by a warm, bright sun, and a bottle of cider passing between us, the only perturbing issue is the amount of wax jackets making the journey to the festival, Barbours and the like. When did the wax jacket become acceptable? When I were a lad they were only worn by Sloanes and men with shotguns Read more ...
joe.muggs
When I lived in Brighton in the mid-Nineties, a certain type was 10 a penny. Young, stoned, middle-class buskers, acoustic guitar strummers who were au fait with hip hop and able to improvise endless streams of witty wordplay and often to make human beatbox rhythms. They tended to have an innate sense that what they were doing was a novelty act, though, and as if embarrassed about adopting the tropes of rap for their whimsical amusements they rarely pursued it as more than a cabaret act – although you can hear echoes of what they did in certain bands of the time such as Gomez.Ed Sheeran is Read more ...
joe.muggs
If you want the distilled sound of global hypercapitalism, David Guetta is your man. A genial, workaholic Frenchman, he has created the sound of superclubs from Miami to Dubai to Kuala Lumpur – the sort of clubs where the VIP section is bigger than the main dance floor, with Guetta's own “F*ck Me I'm Famous” parties in Ibiza as the ideal model – and, thanks to the trickle-down effect, the sound of every shopping mall and taxi from here to eternity. His sound is the cheesiest of Nineties commercial dance music given a turbo boost with every possible megastar from the worlds of rap and R&B Read more ...
joe.muggs
I'm not claiming some major prescience or insight here. I am as guilty as anyone of dipping into the music of the sink estates for a small dose of frisson then returning to art and music that confirm my own worldview. But maybe, just maybe, if we had all paid more attention to what was being said by young British men and women from those estates over the last decade, the events of the past few days might not have come as such a horrific surprise. After all, French rappers had been explicitly predicting the riots that took place there in 2005 for a decade beforehand, as I noted (with, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
As subtlety in popular music becomes increasingly worshipped by heritage-led taste arbiters, we should relish proper shouty moron tunes. Few come more shouty and moronic than LMFAO, a Los Angeles duo named after the text abbreviation for "Laughing my fucking arse off". They comprise Berry Gordy's youngest son Skyler (AKA Skyblu) and his grandson Stefan Gordy (AKA Redfoo), renowned for goon club anthem "I'm in Miami, Bitch". They claim their second album is "more refined" - but it isn't unless your idea of refined is pole dancing to Limp Bizkit.A decade ago the hard house sound Read more ...
joe.muggs
It's not often you can call pop music revolutionary, but this record is - in more ways than one. Bringing together techniques of engagement that have been honed by Radiohead, Lady Gaga, Lil Wayne and... um... Justin Bieber, the 21-year-old Berkley, California rapper Lil B appears to be on the verge of becoming the first bona fide internet-birthed superstar. I'm Gay (I'm Happy) appeared on iTunes yesterday, announced with a single tweet, with no prior warning whatsoever bar an announcement of its provocative title a couple of months back. It has seemingly no standard record company support Read more ...
caspar.gomez
Thursday 23 JuneHaven’t left yet but someone sends me an email saying, "Not going to Glastonbury this year and feeling rather smug about it." What are they feeling smug about? The fact that they’re going to have a forgettable, normal weekend while this extraordinary event is going on? It is, of course, to do with ideas of rain. A lot of the pre-Glastonbury coverage focuses endlessly on rain and mud, as if home comforts are everything. When did comfort become the big cultural draw?Possibly when the average age of music journalists went from 27 to 45, or possibly when we began our techno- Read more ...