Been traversing the past so intensely, I got snow in my goggles and missed out on 420 Project Vol. 2, the NhT Boyz mixtape that dropped last week. Honestly, ya boy ain't the biggest fan of weed raps. Its legalization in certain states, and the monetization of a formerly outlaw market, has turned getting high into a respectable pastime and career. Wiz Khalifa is Sammy Hagar singing about tequila. Snoop's blunt is Bob Hope's golf club.
But when a group is involved, the drain-circling of a man trapped by stage persona alchemizes into the excitement you felt when you and ya boys was rollin' lopsided joints in the back of a hooptie driven by a 35 year-old man named Jesús. It's a rap truism: the tight-knit group is always greater than the solo artist. The tape sags toward the end, but not before pandering to my taste with two Cash Moneyhomages. Ima leave it to this Soundcloud user to describe the sound of NhT Boyz breaking into the "Get Your Roll On" chorus:
Groups planning to make another mixtape about smoking weed, please consider writing a concept album about steak and shrimp.
Wassup to all my my hogs 'n' hasas. Excuse me while I dust all this 2009 dust off my cryogenically frozen shoulder. Let that shit thaw and drip into the 2015 snow I still got on my Rossignols. Yes, ya boy been skiin' through time again. Here are some of the songs I found while I was fallin down the moguls, sinkin in the powder, laid up in the gondola with two bad highlander bitches and a bottle of Vicks VapoRub.
X.O. - OFF THE LOT FT. RIZZO & SOSAMANN (2015)
File this one next to Jose Guapo's "Run It Up" under Catchy Raps I Missed In 2015. Every generation gets the car anthem it deserves. As 1999 had "85," as 2002 had "Hot Wheels," as 2004 had "Still Tippin," as 2006 had "Chevy Ridin' High"—2015 had "Off The Lot." And I slept on it!
DELWIN THE KRAZYMAN - SWIGGIN REMIX FT. MOUSE ON THA TRACK & T MCK (2009)
Delwin The Krazyman is a Baton Rouge rapper with a great rap name. Now I ain't know how truthful his epithet is, but what is krazy is the amount of death that surrounds him. But couldn't that be said about rap in general, and Baton Rouge rap in particular?
Delwin rose to prominence with "Mobbin' on Em," a catchy "Triggaman" freak featuring the late Nu$$ie, shot to death by the same kid behind Boosie's murder charges. Although it was rumored that Boosie set a bounty on Nu$$ie, ADA Dana Cummings of the East Baton Rouge Parish set the record otherwise: "The word on the street was that Boosie would pay $25,000 for Nussie’s
execution. It was word on the street. That’s all. Mike Louding didn’t
even know Boosie at that time, had not met him, but took it upon himself
to, I guess, win his admiration and obtain the $25,000." Smh at this Rap Game John Hinckley.
Delwin later collaborated with CeddyBu, the aptly named Rap Sumo, whose 650 lbs. may have tipped the scales against Big Pun's longstanding claim to the title Most Morbidly Obese Rapper Of All Time (The MMOROAT). Shockingly, CeddyBu did not die from obesity-related complications. He died in a car crash at the age of 24.
"Swiggin" is a song about getting fucked up, featuring national treasure Mouse On Tha Track. Let's hope Delwin's Atuk-style curse does not continue. Last year he released Amerikkka's Most Wanted: Reloaded, which has beautiful cover art, a lot of old material, and very little promotional information available. A review of the first Amerikkka's Most Wanted is mysteriously unavailable on FrankieThaLuckyDog'z website. Given that Frankie is writing what amounts to an Infinite Jest of contemporary Baton Rouge rap, might this be a waggish lacuna designed to drive his most ardent fans to wild flights of speculation? Or did Frankie delete the entry in a fit of pique inspired by some real or perceived slight from Delwin or the Baton Rouge rap community at large? I hope I never know the truth.
Life is too short to listen to trash music just cause it came out in 2016. Lately I been feelin tha grim reaper breathin his stank breath on my neck, lookin over my shoulder tryna clown on my thirstiest DMs, and I realized I got tha entire corpus of recorded music at my fingertips. Shit's a continuum, you feel? Ain't no straight line blazing into the future, leavin the past in flames. We some flâneurs amblin through time, scanning ahead and watching our backs—lookin up for the time-birds droppin digital shits on our futuristic mohawk, checkin the obsolete code disintegrating on our deconstructionist Keds. Now pleezbaleev I ain't gonna go all fu-fu on ya ass and start listening to one of them wig-wearin pantaloon breeches ass 18th century Eurotrash bitch boiz diddling harpsichords and shredding harps. Baby steps, my G. Let's look back on some rap from 2015.
CHIPPASS - IDGAF (2015)
I got ya lady buggin, she crawl to me / She on my bone, I'm a thug, nice harmony
As a member of NhT Boyz, Chippass released some of the best raps of the past decade. Not that many people cared. Chippass's solo material is slightly more boilerplate-regional than his work with the Boyz. As to be expected, it lacks that rare symmetry of a group locking into the same plane, but effective networking and fun HBK-style cartoons depicting Chippass as former Atlanta Brave and Sandy Hook truther Chipper Jones might help him pop. Marketing: the 6th pillar in the temple of hip-hop!
How come Ezale seems poised to break out nationally, and Chippass is still on the local grind? Someone holla at Lord Jamar or DJ Akademiks to discuss this egregious example of AZN PRIVILEGE!
LA4SS - JAYSON TATUM (2015)
Bitch I eat my shrimp and steak in gravy / And I got crack just like the '80s
La4ss is the hottest thing to come out St. Louis since King Chingaling. Sometimes he raps in the standard post-drill + generic trap vein a lot of young rappers seem to favor. Other times he rap-sangs like Durk, or Dej, or even Kamaiyah! On "Jayson Tatum," La4ss situates himself in the pantheon of two venerable rap institutions: the surf-n-turf banger, the athlete apotheosis. Rather than mythologizing an established talent like Lil Cray on "Kyrie Irving," La4ss keeps it forward-thinking and local, invoking the name of St. Louis high-schooler and future Dukie Jayson Tatum. Futuristic swag indeed, but let's keep shit un-Bambaata and draw the line at ballers of legal age. Thank god the modern pederast innanet wasn't around to record "Ballin Like Kendall Marshall" in 2002.
Huzzah! The Stresmatic video I've been waiting on has arrived, forsooth! When the 16-second trailer arrived on April 1st, I wondered if it wasn't all an elaborate April Fools joke. Nevertheless, I was inspired enough to jot down the following lines in my Jay Electronica moleskine: "Promises to be the best video of the year (or at least the best Bay Area
use of green screen since DB's 'Gas Chamber'). Prayin for a Rick
Moranis cameo, but I'll settle for Bug Hall."
Promise fulfilled. The concept is simple: Matic smokes cannabis so potent he shrinks down to the size of common household objects. Finally a video for those of us who get p-noid off the herb. Might be the first rap video featuring a bottle of Dove Moisturizing Conditioner; definitely the first rap video to feature a rapper riding a sponge. But yo, I can't say it no better than Thizzler's youngMONC, who summarizes the video as "a
whole bunch of Stresmatic gigging all over the place."
Matic The LP remains one of my favorite releases of the year. The kids can have their Lil Boat and I can have mine. So what if I think his reductivist genre games have more in common with the smart-dumb absurdism of Motörhead or the Ramones than Wesley Willis? At the end of the day, we all sniffin from the same pot of glue.
Rap Music Hysteria is more than a blog. It's a safe space. A judgment-free zone where we can admit shameful secrets and indecent desires. In 7th grade I hit the state bird with a rock. The A$AP Ferg song about buying shovels bodies everything on the radio right now. I enjoy thesesongs. Now that I've earned your trust, let me ask: Would you like "Panda" if it was a Future song? Do you have to hide the lean and the Fanta when your friends come over, for fear that you'll be lectured on how the song is an ironic sign of the way the wind blows in the rap culture wars? Do you just wanna hit off licks in the bando without considering notions of appropriation, authorship, and intellectual property? If you're anything like me, you want to let the choppa go Oscar for Grammy without some ghoul sliding up with a gleeful smirk and the yearly announcement that New York rap is really dead this time.
Alas, poor Desiigner! Thrust into the fire of public discourse when he was just a teenager tryna swing on the bozack of a popular rapper. He and Lil Yachty are the frontrunners for 2016's White Iverson Award, but let's not forget that Rich Homie Quan was dismissed as a Future jizzock around the time "Type Of Way" hit. For those of us who want to enjoy "Panda" without all the baggage, I recommend the far superior reggaeton remix featuring Almighty, Farruko, Daddy Yankee, and Cosculluela. It's entirely guilt-free, unless your Spanish is bad because your teacher was a queer woman who made you dance the pasodoble with another dude. Daddy Yankee is rapping about Netflix and The Matrix and Elvis, so you can sing along even if you don't know what it mean.
The past couple of months have been rough on rap fans. Bankroll Fresh was killed. Phife Dawg passed. Now we learn Afrika Bambaata was allegedly diggin in tha grapes of a Zulu warrior-cub.Florida hasn't had it much better. Our ball teams got bounced from the tourney, we lost a smoove architect, and Marco Rubio suffered the worst treatment a Miamian got from a Queens cat since Officer Ricky's cartoon drubbing on ThisIs50.com. So don't ask me why I'm mothafuckin stressed, mean-muggin watching drill videos and wondering why God took Young Pappy instead of Papa John!
Like Uncle Murda recovering from getting shot in the head, ya boy been nursing his wounds with Newports and Henroc—that and classic Florida rap songs. These mostly encompass the jook era (mid and late-2000s), with a heavy emphasis on Tampa and Polk County artists amidst the usual Miami-Dade and Broward County representatives. Can't forget about Treal from Orlando, or T-Pain coming out of Tallahassee with Nappy Headz. Some were legitimate local hits. Some hit on a more grassroots level. Some have endured far beyond their moment, galvanizing specific lives, places, and groups—classics in the most meaningful sense, even if their reach went no further than an area code or two. Others IDK about. Think of it as a companion piece to my Greetings From The Gunshine State compilation: the Pippen to its Jordan, the King Of Comedy to its Taxi Driver, the shingles to its chicken pox. Life is hard and potentially meaningless, but poppin booties and beans can make it seem worthwhile while you're here.
