Big Boi's latest Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumors drops on December 11 and here's the first video from the album 'Mama Told Me' featuring Kelly Rowland in a wig and some speccy graphics. Big Boi is known for releasing video's for most tracks on his albums, so expect more where this came from.
Kendrick Lamar’s new album is many things. Most classic albums are.
It’s a coming-of-age story, capturing a tumultuous time in a
young man’s life. It’s a commentary on
life in general as it exists in Compton, a suburb of Los Angeles made famous
by many rappers over the years, but also
a poor suburb beset by violence.
It’s a west coast Hip-Hop album, in both production
(overseen by Compton’s greatest export Dr Dre), and in its reverence of the history
of Californian rap (appearances by MC Eiht, references to Ice Cube lyrics).
It’s about the power of family to influence decisions and to
ultimately save. It’s about the
temptations in the broader society that test those same familial bonds (drugs,
alcohol, and peer pressure).
It's also great.
In trying to capture all of the above, Kendrick risks
confusing his audience, but this never happens.
The narrative is clear and runs steadily over the course of
album.
At the outset, Kendrick illustrates his protagonist and his
surroundings. A giddy young kid is
trying to get the girl, whilst trying to make sense of his world and impress
his friends. The laid-back groove of ‘Bitch,
don’t kill my vibe’ hides the troubled thoughts of a pressured teen, while ‘backseat
freestyle’, backed by booming beat from Hit-Boy, uses teenage bravado to disguise fear of failure.
Now that we know who we’re dealing with, the story sets sail.
The intensity is quickly turned up on ‘The Art of Peer Pressure’ as Kendrick
and friends get caught up in a shoot-out and car chase following a house robbery
gone wrong. The tension is palpable, and
the scene is vividly rendered through lines like “They knew we weren't from
round there, cause every time we down there we pull out the Boost Mobile Sim
cards”. The details are specific,
emotive, and you feel every heavy breath.
‘Poetic Justice’ finds our protagonist back on safe ground,
this time brimming with confidence and laying down his best lines on his ever
present romantic interest ‘Sherane’. The
track takes a sample from the Janet Jackson track of the same name, and a verse
from the ubiquitous Drake, and turns it into a summer smash.
Both ‘Good Kid’ and ‘m.A.A.d. city’ catch Kendrick in the
crossfire of violence brought about by the decades-old feud between the Crips
and Bloods. It’s a part of the tapestry
of the area and it’s a little unsettling as a fan of the early 90’s movie ‘Boyzin the Hood’ to realize that this feud is still an issue. ‘m.A.A.d city’ also breaks down halfway into
a industrious beat that would sit beautifully alongside Ice Cubes classic
records, and allows west coast veteran MC Eiht to give some aged perspective to
the contemporary violence. It’s a nice
touch.
Once we move past the day-to-day stress of the
just-beneath-the-surface violence, Lamar finds that there are very few escapes
made available to young poor men, and alcohol is one of the more prevalent (and
acceptable) vices. ‘Swimming Pools
(Drank)’ is one of the best contemporary songs about the addictive nature of
alcohol and its effects. It also highlights
how especially effective alcohol is as a tonic to the ever-present violence.
The track leads directly into a consequence of that
violence, the death of a sibling.
‘Sing about me, I’m dying of thirst’ finds Lamar looking at
these consequences from not only his perspective, but also those of a prostitute and the recently deceased. It’s
delivered sincerely and self-effacingly over a gorgeously restrained track,
accentuated by a sliding lead guitar and slight orchestral flushes.
The redemptive arc of the story is provided in ‘Real’, a
track that ends with two young boys listening intently while a woman street
preaches and engages both of the boys in prayer.
Of course, every success story needs a triumphant arrival
anthem, and that’s ‘Compton’, a bombastic Dr Dre track that seems out of place
on this album, but then really, that’s the point of it.
Kendrick Lamar joins Dr Dre’s Aftermath label at an
interesting time. Big name artists and
groups have come and gone from Dre’s label in the last 5 years, and the only
real releases in that time have been the Eminem albums.
So the fact the Lamar album has surfaced show how much faith
and confidence that the Doctor has in his new protégé, a similar enthusiasm
that drove him to sign and produce the classic Eminem and 50 Cent records.We can only hope that Kendrick resists the commercial and
societal temptations that have rendered his peers either irrelevant (50 Cent)
or a cautionary tale (Eminem).
It's pretty clear at this point that Freddie Gibbs won't be making any concession in his sound any time soon in a bid to win mainstream love. They call him 'Gangsta' Gibbs, and he's not about to relinquish that moniker any time soon.
His recent mixtape, Baby Faced Killa, continued his string of strong releases, and 'BFK' was a standout. Given his street persona, where else could he film the video clip than his hometown, the city of Gary, Indiana. It's as economically poor a city as you'll find, and the city represents Gibbs as much as Gibbs reps for the city.
What is hardstyle? I’ll
be honest, I was one of those uneducated types who’d avoided any contact with
any type of hard dance music and had lumped ‘hardstyle’ in with ‘hardcore’. This was a big mistake.
Hardcore purists are a world away from their Hardstyle second
cousins. Hardcore celebrated brutal node-destroying
beats and breaks, whilst Hardstyle was living off the ether of rave and
slowed-down nu-gabber.
When discussing dance music (or any music), you have to talk
about the way that it makes you feel. In
a lot of cases (including hardstyle) you don’t have vocals to give narration to
the story of the song, and so the weight of translating emotion in the song is
laid entirely on the beats and melodies.
The beats in dance music serve an important function. House is perfect for those who want to go to
a club and dance but not spill their drinks from dancing too hard, whereas a
style like down-tempo is more likely to be consumed at home in a relaxed
position in your lounge-room. I am
generalizing a bit, but you get the picture. The beats drive action (or
inaction, in the case of down-tempo).
Hardstyle is uptempo, as its name would suggest, but not as
speedy as its Hardcore brethren (Speedcore, Metalcore). Its predecessors such as Rotterdam and
Nu-Style Gabber were embraced by soccer fans and dis-affected college
students. Hardstyle was born out of
those styles but became somewhat slower and more deliberate, making the beats
and synth stabs more pronounced.
The sped-up beats of the older Hardstyle music do not carry
with them much emotion, although compared to the hardcore genres they do allows a small amount of room for introspection
Hardstyle seems less angry, but yet still fronts with a somewhat tough facade.
The current hardstyle offers a little more variety, and the
emotion is measured in the rise and fall of the melody. It uplifts, and then uplifts a little more
before leveling out and waiting once more for the coming build up and bass drop. Recent Hardstyle sounds have been dressed up
with vocal clips and other random aural accouterments cribbed from the
stadium-sized sounds of the Euro Trance cliques, making for a more commercial
sound.
Today’s hardstyle certainly has a lot more variance than it’s
early incarnations, and even tries for a real punt at emotional connection that isn't ecstasy. Where it goes to from here
is anybodies guess. Music cross-pollinates
these days in ways that it never did before, so I don’t think Hardstyle is
immune to change or about to die out.
Its strength is comes from two directions – its power and
ability to empower the disaffected and angry youth (of which there will never
be a shortage), and its desire for pure ecstasy, the fleeting delirious thrill
sought by many young dance music aficionado's.
Maybe one day we will evolve to the point where any emotion
can be expressed at 140bpm, and Hardstyle will be a rebellious outlet for a new wave of musical
genius. Or maybe it continues morphing and moving, it’s lack of relative
connection with the everyday confining it to the basements of the world.
I'm a bit late with this one, but if you haven't seen it, prepare to enjoy. The chorus "I'm gonna pop some tags, I got $20 in my pocket" is all you really need to know, as newbie indie-rapper Macklemore waxes lyrical about the virtues of looking GQ-style on the cheap. That's a philosophy we can all get behind.
There was also a short doco made about their DIY rise through the independent music scene. Worth a watch.
