This isn’t hip-hop, per se, although Prefuse 73 produced it. However, I’ve been playing this song for months. The video is okay, but it doesn’t really do the track justice.

Directed by Cuauhtzin Gutierrez. Taken from the Origins EP, which is in stores now.

From the press release:

“The video for El-P’s “Time Won’t Tell” is inspired by a childhood memory of director Shan Nicholson, who grew up in the “Old New York” during a time when necessity often bred creativity. This video depicts a young boy innocently finding a way to embrace his imagination amid an urban wasteland. El-P’s all instrumental album Weareallgoingtoburninhellmegamixxx3 is out now.”

Here’s one from New York group Mazzi and S.O.U.L. Purpose, with Maya Azucena on the chorus. From the forthcoming mixtape The Inspection.

Here’s a clip for the new collaboration between Invincible and Waajeed. The song is not only a celebration of the community organization Detroit Summer, but a sequel to “Detroit Winter” from Platinum Pied Pipers’ Triple P. The duo just released a 7-inch single; the full-length drops in 2011. You can buy the record (limited to 1000 pieces) from Invincible’s website.

Directed by El-Iqaa.

Tejano psychedelia, courtesy of Duey FM. Directed by Brian Torres Korlofsky. Taken from Me Gusto, which is in stores now.

Video time. First up: a clip featuring Thundercat, a lady in green foliage, and 8-bit gaming graphics.

Directed by Special Problems. Taken from Cosmogramma, which is in stores now.

When I posted my article on the so-called “Blog Rap’s Second Wave” yesterday, I realized I haven’t posted other entries from my Rap Is Not Pop column for Rhapsody.

Actually, I didn’t re-post this one because I wasn’t happy with it. I initially planned to make a grand statement about the hyped “rap’s new generation,” but realized that concept seems a bit outdated now, even if its leading artists have only begun to release major albums instead of just mixtapes.  (I freely admit to contributing to said hype.) So I tried to reposition the essay as a commentary on where this first wave of Internet age MCs is heading since emerging in 2006-2007.

This essay was posted April 28 on Rhapsody’s Music Stuff Place blog. I wrote it for my Rap Is Not Pop column.

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Rap Is Not Pop: Rap’s New Generation

We’ve waited years for the much-blogged-about new school to emerge. It appears that moment has finally arrived. The music charts are teeming with hits by Drake, from 2009′s inescapable “Best I Ever Had” to the new “Over.” Kid Cudi continues to show up in the strangest places, whether it’s on dance-club tracks with Dan Black (“Symphonies”) and Sharam from Deep Dish (“She Came Along”) or on Vitamin Water’s new “Pursuit of Happiness” ad campaign. Asher Roth is courting MTV attention with Asleep in the Bread Aisle while maneuvering between frat-rap expectations and online haterade. And B.o.B is currently sitting at the summit of the pop charts with “Nothin’ on You,” his shaggy-dog ballad with Bruno Mars of the Smeezingtons; his soon-to-be hit debut, The Adventures of Bobby Ray, is now landing at online and brick-and-mortar vendors.

Meanwhile, Cool Kids, Pac Div, Blu, Chiddy Bang, Jay Electronica, Theophilus London and others wait in the wings. For those of us who suffered through nearly 20 years of gangster-ism and thug-ism as all-conquering ideologies, it feels like the clouds have lifted. No one is going to start wearing black medallions and claiming “word to the Mother” again — those days are over. And urban streets remain hip-hop’s cultural nexus, now and (hopefully) forever. But more goes on there than just drug dealing, pimping hoes, random acts of violence and being confronted by law-enforcement overseers. The new generation of rap nerds hanging out, spitting rhymes, chasing girls, playing with genre and dreaming of stardom isn’t brushing over society’s ills in favor of a suburban wonderland. It’s expanding the narratives.

Much like punk rock — an amorphous sound and style that coalesced with ‘zines like Creem, Punk and Sniffin’ Glue — the new school draws from Common and Kanye West’s boho/buppie aspirations, the true-school heroics of Little Brother and Tanya Morgan, Detroit’s slum village realism, and Los Angeles’ array of beat technicians and future soul interlocutors. It merged on blogs like the New Music Cartel (2dopeboyz.com, Nahright.com), sympathetic websites (ByronCrawford.com, Okayplayer.com) and the occasional magazine (URB). (And yes, MySpace played a role, too.)

Just as punk shed styles as it evolved, like power pop and mod, the new-school sensibility grew and contracted. The so-called “hipster rappers” who ruled in 2007, including Spank Rock, Pase Rock, Amanda Blank and Kid Sister, would hardly be considered part of it now. Meanwhile, the intricate lyricism and storytelling abilities of Mickey Factz, Charles Hamilton (before he ethered his career), Wale and Kidz in the Hall have become mere rocket fuel for the requisite moon launch toward mainstream pop stardom.

One trait of hip-hop in the new millennium is that rappers no longer tell you they’re successful a la Public Enemy’s “we ride limos too” assertion on “Bring the Noise.” They demand you make them successful, beg you to make them successful, predict that you’ll make them successful. Drake’s recent singles, including “Successful,” “Forever” and “Over,” reveal an artist with conflicting emotions, feeling anxious and empowered, as he stands on the precipice of Making It Big. “It’s far from over,” he half-promises.

The same could be said for B.o.B, who sings of alienation, feeling like a “Ghost in the Machine” and decrying the limits of “Fame” on The Adventures of Bobby Ray. Still, he pursues the audience’s rapture, stocking the album with big keyboard melodies and chimerical pop stars like Hayley Williams and Rivers Cuomo. He’s not the only one pursuing the arena moment. Every rap star with an eye toward supplanting Jay-Z, or at least opening for him, uses the same slick musical packaging, whether it’s Kanye West, Lupe Fiasco or even Lil Wayne.

Some crusty old punks might blanch at comparing their beloved anti-establishment heroes with the over-marketed new school. To be sure, there’s nothing grassroots about it: most of the aforementioned names benefit from savvy, well-connected management and flashy street marketing teams straight out of Rob Walker’s Consumed. But while Talking Heads struggled through Fear of Music paranoia and The Clash dissembled en route to the proverbial brass ring of platinum sales and stadium tours, there were smaller, less burdened bands like The Feelies and Dead Kennedys who continued to push sound forward. (Bear with me, I’m generalizing here.)

Unfortunately, hip-hop’s all-or-nothing credo endures; perhaps an outgrowth of its impoverished, Horatio Alger origins, it now feels like the monkey on its back. For every Tanya Morgan that seems content with a creatively rich, commercially modest existence, there are hordes of “blog rappers” that haunt email inboxes with zShare links to MP3s, issue freestyles over the latest hot beats like Just Blaze’s “Exhibit C,” and will do anything to get noticed — and simply postpone the realization that they aren’t going to be media stars.

I would love for rap’s new generation to establish a vibrant indie network that feeds and anchors its pop exploits. But after watching the rise and fall of ’90s underground hip-hop, I’m not holding my breath. If they can continue to illustrate their interior lives, create a thematic landscape that not only includes the inner cities and cracked ghetto streets but also the suburban sprawls and sparsely populated plains, and maybe even deliver some form of gender equity, then they will have accomplished plenty. It’s a vision of hip-hop as a universal state of mind that has been lost for decades. But if youth movements are good for one thing, it’s boundless optimism.

MED and Madlib go the boogie route. My only problem is that MED lays his head to sleep on a stack of records near the end. A true record lover would never do that.

This essay on the latest crop of street rappers was posted August 10 on Rhapsody.com’s Music Stuff Place blog. I wrote it for my Rap Is Not Pop column.

I freely admit that I don’t specialize in breaking new artists. I analyze finished products. So I don’t have any personal stake in claiming that I was the first to write about Lil B or any other MC that the Internet-arati currently gags over. It’s an honorable and necessary vocation, but it’s just not my lane. I’m the tortoise, not the hare.

But as a potential counterpoint to the recent “new rap generation” represented by Drake, B.o.B., et cetera, whom I have written about quite a bit; this new wave of hipster thugs presents benefits and challenges. No matter how you excuse it away, or switch focus to an appreciation of formal technique (hence music critics’ over-reliance on the greatness of “internal rhyme schemes” and vocal “casualness”), this group relies too much on tropes. Each one loudly professes his ability to hustle and sell drugs, even though it’s farcical to think that any of them (with few exceptions) sold enough cocaine to attract serious scrutiny by law enforcement.

Unfortunately, street themes have become a crutch for rappers. They don’t know how to rap about anything else that affirms their masculinity, and being a Man capable of dishing out physical punishment is crucial to gain acceptance from hip-hop fans. It’s been that way for nearly twenty years. Concurrently, listeners no longer listen to hip-hop for rich content, because they’ve grown inured to these repetitive topics. Hence, the focus on form over substance, or “internal rhyme schemes” over what a rapper actually has to say. We seem to concede that rappers nowadays are saying nothing, even if this flies in the face of what hip-hop is supposed to be about.

However, that doesn’t mean these new rappers are full of shit. In fact, their music is really interesting. I’ve obsessively listened to Lil B’s “B.O.R. (Birth of Rap)” during the past several days as well as Wiz Khalifa’s recent Deal Or No Deal. And Curren$y’s Pilot Talk is one of my favorite albums this year. They have compelling stories to tell about being young, indulging in female flesh and weed smoke, and striving to overcome obstacles and establish a permanent legacy in this world.

I truly believe that the current wave — which, perhaps for promotional purposes, I pronounced was “blog rap’s second wave” — is a necessary counterbalance. As much as I like Drake’s work, and appreciate what B.o.B tried to do with The Adventures of Bobby Ray, I’m wary of their commercial bent and gleeful abuse of pop conventions. (Exhibit number one: B.o.B.’s effective but treacly “Airplanes.”) At least the current wave’s arsenal of familiar topical riffs are thoroughly rap-identified stereotypes.

I sympathize with alternative heads like Mychal Smith, who recently drew a rebuke from Talib Kweli for criticizing his Gucci Mane collaboration as “the demise of conscious rap,” arguing that “it has become more important to adopt the look of rebellion without appropriating the accompanying mentality.”

I’ve long hoped that the indie and conscious scenes that flourished in the late 90s would renew themselves. It hasn’t happened. I’ve been working on an essay that presents some reasons as to why it didn’t. Hopefully I can present it here in the next few days (or weeks).

But for now, let’s just say that the heroes of the “independent as fuck” era have reached their 30s, and no longer bring the same level of avant-garde innovation to their work as they did ten years ago. And post-millennial acts like Little Brother and Tanya Morgan don’t want to, as Anti-Pop Consortium once put it, disturb the equilibrium; they just want to create an indie network that supports their variations on established styles. Few current rap artists, young or old, have any interest in sustaining a radical anti-corporate, anti-commercial philosophy. (Shabazz Palaces, whom I mentioned in this piece, is a notable exception.)

That’s fine. It’s okay to be an entertainer and nothing else. However, please don’t confuse my thoughts with faint praise. If I didn’t find Lil B, Freddie Gibbs et al interesting from a musical and intellectual standpoint, then I wouldn’t have re-posted this article.

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Rap Is Not Pop: Blog Rap’s Second Wave

Blog rap’s second wave epitomizes hip-hop’s scales of artistic justice. Just as complaints over the new rap generation’s increasingly pop output have reached a fever pitch, a new crop rises that embraces the familiar codes of street life. What makes them different from the usual parade of thugs is their youth — descriptions of a hipster thug lifestyle abound — openness to new sounds and varied collaborators, and linguistic dexterity, an unexpected benefit of Lil Wayne’s memorable 2007 mixtape run and its underlying theme that any fledging rapper, no matter how lame, can transform himself into a great emcee with hard work.

This isn’t a definitive list, but just a small sample of a few artists burning the Internet. All of them have material on Rhapsody; other promising voices such as Atlanta rapper Pill (1140: The Overdose) and DaVinci (The Day the Turf Stood Still) were left out because they don’t. Interestingly, nearly all of them are survivors of the major-label system, having signed development deals a few years ago and then summarily been dropped, only to attract renewed interest after converting Internet hustle into industry buzz. Only Shabazz Palaces doesn’t fit among this group, but their excellent recordings were impossible to omit.

Big K.R.I.T.: This Mississippi upstart is one of the leaders of “country rap,” a newfangled term for Dirty South rappers with linguistic chops. (This incarnation of “country rap” doesn’t refer to C&W/rap crossover artists like Colt Ford and Cowboy Troy.) On his acclaimed mixtape, Big K.R.I.T. Wuz Here, he offers “Country Sh*t,” an impassioned paean to the D-boy lifestyle and “candy car superstars.” Surprisingly, however, his mixtapes on Rhapsody, See Me on Top and See Me on Top 2, date back to 2005. On them, he sounds more like a T.I. copycat than a hungry young purveyor of Mediafire files. Five years later, it appears that Big K.R.I.T. has grown into an artist to be reckoned with.

Freddie Gibbs: “This rap sh*t saved me dog,” says Freddie Gibbs on “Rep 2 tha Fullest,” a track from his new Str8 Killa EP. While most of blog rap’s second wave gleefully appropriates street imagery, Gibbs really was a hustler, and he has a litany of charges for criminal offenses to prove it. Str8 Killa follows a doomed tenure on Interscope Records and two heavily traded 2009 mixtapes, The Miseducation of Freddie Gibbs and Midwestgangstaboxframecadillacmuzik. With features from UGK’s Bun B, the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach and the Cool Kids’ Chuck Inglish, Gibbs resurrects ’90s mob music and G-funk — think underrated greats like Big Mike and 8Ball & MJG — and, much like the greats from that era, tries to deliver gangster raps with a conscience. “Absentee fathers and dope-fiend mamas got my hood turned out to the point where a n*gga wanna go and get paid,” he rhymes on “National Anthem (F*ck the World).”

Lil B: Four years ago, Lil B was one-fourth of The Pack, the Berkeley high school kids behind the classic single “Vans.” The group then watched the city of L.A. cop its skater-hop style, rename it “jerkin’,” and patent it via innocuous jingles from New Boyz, Cali Swag District and others. After The Pack’s poorly received debut, 2007′s Based Boys, Lil B transformed the phrase “based” into “Based World,” a full-fledged lifestyle. “You ain’t in the game until you make 1000 songs/ And you dying for this rap ’cause it’s the only thing you love,” he rhymes on “B.O.R. (Birth of Rap)” from 2009′s 6 Kiss, invoking overachievers like Soulja Boy Tell ‘Em and Lil Wayne. As the “Based God,” Lil B has made hundreds of songs and posited them on dozens of MySpace pages. On 6 Kiss, that philosophy leads him to vacillate between incandescent musings over trance loops (“I’m God”) and boorish rants (“Pretty Bitch”).

Shabazz Palaces: On most days, Ishmael “Butterfly” Butler leads what’s left of Digable Planets on frequent reunion tours (Ladybug Mecca left the group last year). But Ish has another, more relevant project in Shabazz Palaces, a collective of Seattle musicians whose two 2009 EPs, Shabazz Palaces and Of Light, float ominous raps over dread bass dubstep and gunshot percussion. As Palaceer Lazaro, Ish dispenses with the playfulness of Digable Planets; he kicks “100 SPH” (Styles Per Hour) over “Gunbeat Falls,” dissing “pop rappers looking cute” without imagination. With its renewal of roots reggae’s anti-Babylon sentiments for today’s post-millennial ghetto survivors, Shabazz Palaces could never be accused of that.

Wiz Khalifa: Warner Music Group seems to enjoy dropping and then re-signing its artists. The flashy, tattooed style of Pittsburgh rapper Wiz Khalifa, displayed on the 2006 indie album Show and Prove, earned him a deal with W.M.G.’s Warner Bros. division. Two years later, when Wiz’s crazy rave-rap mashup “Say Yeah” (which samples Alice Deejay’s “Better Off Alone”) didn’t propel him from blog glory to radio domination, the company dropped him. Undaunted, he recorded another indie album, 2009′s Deal or No Deal, upping the ante with smoked-out floaters like “Friendly” (with like-minded stunner Curren$y). At the end of July, W.M.G.’s Atlantic Records signed Khalifa, inducing a case of a déjà vu: nearly 10 years ago, W.M.G. dropped Wilco and subsequently re-signed them for their 2002 album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.

YelaWolf: Prominently tattooed Alabama rapper and skateboard enthusiast Yelawolf stuck out like a sore thumb when his tentative debut single for Columbia, “Kickin’,” hit the net in 2007. His work on Rhapsody hints at even more stylistic confusion, especially the early 2005 indie rap album CreekWater. It took a few years for YelaWolf to find his lane and wait for the music industry to figure him out, while demonstrating artistic growth with indie releases like the 2008 EP Arena Rap. By spring of this year, when he released the mixtape Trunk Muzik, his rap skills had improved considerably, and he settled on a persona that mixes hipster thug insouciance with a country persona reminiscent of Bubba Sparxxx. Interscope is reissuing Trunk Muzik this fall.

Collage by Max Warsh.

Street Sweeper Social Club, The Ghetto Blaster EP
SSSC/ILG

Tom Morello writes some of the best intros in modern hard rock, and Boots Riley from the Coup is an ace satirist. And when both click on The Ghetto Blaster EP, they yield powerful tracks like “Scars,” which picks apart America’s hidden bootleg economies; and “Paper Planes,” which breathes new life into M.I.A.’s overplayed hit. Even when the two resort to easy leftist sloganeering like “The New F*ck You,” they provide energy blasts that, thanks to the EP’s short running time, don’t wear you out.