ALL I NEED IS 5 JOINTZ

Here some joints I been listening to, I listen to music a lot cause I like it.

EARL SWEATSHIRT - FAUCET
Never been a huge Joy Division fan, but Ian Curtis hanging himself after watching Stroszek is mos def in my Top 5 suicides of all time.   This song reminds me of that, only it makes me sad imagining Earl dangling from a ceiling fan wearing a 5-panel hat.  Step ya game up doggy, you ain't wanna die in anything less than a Panama.

STARLITO & KEVIN GATES - STUDIO AND GAS STATIONS COMING SOON
I don't really fuck wit Gates beyond a detached "yeah he got skillz" level.  Ol' dude is too emo, plus he look like a fat dyke according to an ingeniously stupid YouTube comment I once read, but I was a Cuban Linx stan in my teenage years and I'm easily seduced by a genuine rap collab.  Starlito is the definitive rapper's rapper, but that's a limiting accolade.  Take it as it is: he'll never be better than a master craftsman.  He consistently drops well engineered joints that just ain't got the je ne sais quoi that the Frenches always be talkin bout.  Nothin really push ya wig back.  Rap Game Gordon Lish, John Sayles.

RICH HOMIE QUAN - FLEX (OOOOHOHOHOHOO)
"Trap Queen" mighta spawned a thousand thinkpieces, but this is the best Song Of The Summer.  Just cause Clear Channel playin a song you like for 6 months straight, and maybe u heard it while u was applyin ur genitals to a foreign body, don't mean it's the Song Of The Summer all of a sudden.  Song of January maybe :/.  SMH, I thought we was livin in the accelerated Internet age or somethin, time feelin like analog molasses.  We got calendars for a reason.

DYNAS FT. SLICK RICK - WHO U?
Don't know what the fuck a Dynas is, but he don't get in the way of the Rapper Emeritus too much.  Remember that Nike jingle where Rakim goes, "Age don't count in the booth / When your flow stay submerged in a fountain of youth," except he literally sounds like his iron lung is collapsing?  Slick Rick actually preserved his flow.  It's all about the Ricola, my binaca.

LIL WIKI AND GOOGS
True story, I discovered Ratking when I was browsin Aron Bondaroff's abandoned Off Bowery channel.  I didn't run to my local A&R community outreach center or nothin, but I did think to myself, "Yo, these kids could help me sell $35 tshirts one day."

KEVIN GATES WROTE THE AURAL EQUIVALENT OF A 15 YEAR-OLD GIRL'S TUMBLR

The booty eating was a non-issue trumped up by VladTV and the distinguished analphobe LORD JAMAR.  I can even get past the cousin fucking, although I pray the young lady is on some form(s) of birth control.

But KEVIN GATES has pushed me too far on this "Perfect Imperfection" schlock.  It's the kinda corny sentimental dreck hormonal Tumblr users quote in handwriting font over "evocative" images of moody nature scenes and young people having fun.   Yo, this shit belongs on a needlepoint throw pillow in an apartment full of IKEA furniture and some fuckin vases and mahogany bureaus from Pottery Barn.  They're the kind of lyrics someone with a heavy arsenal of bath bombs would have in a frame surrounded by scented candles.

Guess we know what the teardrop tats mean: homie is mad emo.  And I don't mind emo, but this is just bad art.  Z-RO went full emo on "Happy Feelingz," but he restrained himself from the kind of maudlin self-pity in which GATES indulges.  Both rappers get lachrymose, but where Z-RO approaches it with a degree of perspective ("Yeah I'm a grown man, but I still cry sometimes") and unaffected confessionalism ("Cause I'm a sponge soaking up pain, trying to come out the rain"), GATES blubbers some of the most laughably histrionic lyrics ever penned by a postpubescent ("Is it okay to cry when you're dying inside?").  When did I walk into a LINKIN PARK song?

I'm a perfect imperfection and I don't find interest in the radio

Is that really true?  Seems like he'd fuck with some NATASHA BEDINGFIELD or SAM SMITH.

Emotionally I'm a introvert, but it comes off as aggression
No one understand me and everybody can't be slow
It's refreshing to find someone who thinks like me so I can't be wrong

No one wants to read your journal, my dude.  Art is a kind of alchemy: you gotta transform the content with some detachment and artifice, otherwise it's just some whiny dude embarrassing everyone with his emotional outpourings.

If I wanted some I'm OK, You're OK bullshit I'd hang out in the self-help section at Barnes & Noble.  I don't wanna say there's no crying in rap music, but KEVIN GATES really comes close to ruining it for everyone.  You can thank him, sensitive rappers of the future.

FLIPPIN GRAMS ON MY FLIPAGRAM

Back when piracy was starting to become the norm, every writer with a pair of glasses and a studio apartment in Williamsburg was speculatin on how the Internet was gonna change music, with dreams of being the next Walter Benjamin or some shit.  They read too much postmodern bullshit in college and was all, "Golly, this influx of information! Young Greil Marcus up in this bitch finna predict the future."

By now most of that wankery has stopped, and the answer has so far revealed itself to be satisfyingly underwhelming: there's been a little bit of change, but not as much as everyone predicted.  Regional styles persist alongside hybridized pastiche.  KANYE did that wack song where he samples CAN, but even the crit-types it was baiting knew it was terrible and swept it under the rug.  Besides, that's called sampling and it's been happening forever.  On a smaller level, rap music functioned like the Internet when nerds were sharing ASCII dick-pics on Usenet, but y'all could make that argument for almost anything.

Someone's gonna read these thinkpieces in the future (prisoners in Gitmo?) and clown on us the way we clown on dudes who thought there would be flying cars by now.  Actually, them dudes was cool.  Keep dreaming, friends.  One day we will bump BOOSIE as we fly the skies together.

But yo, lately Instagram always gets mentioned on my favorite rappers' projects. YO GOTTI and DJ DRAMA mention the 'Gram a couple times on the new Concealed joint, notably on "Ion Feel 'Em" with Kevin Gates (spoiler: not actually about ions), wherein GOTTI ridicules the dissonance between IG/Twitter puffery and reality, thesis fodder for a freshman philosophy major with a torrent of The Matrix and a dimebag of mids.

Oh you a Microsoft plug / You got thrax for sale?

 These bitches ain't really bad like they on IG / In person might think it's a whole 'nother person

It's an evolution of the real vs. fake dichotomy, but where rappers used to question street-cred, they now question the authenticity of social media self-representation.  GOTTI doesn't believe the sepia-toned images of your TECs on the dresser, but he clearly has an account of his own and an unhealthy familiarity with those of his inferiors.

Yeah yeah, Instagram has become a touchstone of online life, but let's not minimize the weirdness of this development.  We have an artist who staked his career on coke-raps talking about picking up chicks, an old and staid trope, except now it's on a social media platform originally designed to make digital images look like they were taken by a vintage LOMO, where pop-feminists lead hashtag campaigns to #freethenipple and you can flame an NYHC luminary into threatening you with bodily harm.  This ain't even a permissible realist prop and status symbol like the pager: it's a free application for sharing photography and connecting with other enthusiasts of the visual form. YO GOTTI breaks character, the coke-rap genre is no longer self-contained, and the world loses meaning.  It's like watching James Bond beat off to PornHub, or living to see Jordan wear distressed jeans big enough to host a family of beavers.

Seeing behind the curtain has its price.  We must honor mystique.