Hip Hop/Rap Fanatics Unite!

[noiseredux]

thanks noise.

Take Me To Your Leader is my favorite MF Doom album btw.

Also, here's another awesome OGC track:

And of course "The Fab 5":

[noiseredux]

um, got some new CD's...





...the bonus CD w/ that A$AP DVD is actually a pressed version of Live Love A$AP!

[J T]

I'm surprised you didn't already have Midnight Marauders or Things Fall Apart, but good job on filling that gap in your collection.

[noiseredux]

I'm surprised you didn't already have Midnight Marauders or Things Fall Apart, but good job on filling that gap in your collection.

I owned 90% of those in the past. All but 6 of those CD's are ones I had on my HDD actually. Midnight Marauders has been my favorite hip hop LP since it dropped. Back in college I ditched my CD's and kept everything digital. But in the past year I've gotten back into collecting physical CD's for my hip hop collection.

[noiseredux]

Fabolous - Real Talk
This album is pretty frustrating. After opening with an attention-grabbing spoken word intro (performed by Black Ice) it kicks off with a few pretty strong tracks and gives you the impression that the record on a whole will maintain a good momentum. But before you know it Fab's focus is lost and a sort of aimless meandering takes over for Real Talk's mid-section. There seems to be some kind of confusion over what kind of album Real Talk should even be. The title track seems worlds apart from songs like "Tit-4-Tat," "Baby" and "Girls" for instance. By the time you make it to the album's closing third you get hit with "Breathe," one of the defining single's of Fab's career. In fact the song is so good that it actually makes most of what has preceded sound even weaker. It's unfortunate, as Real Talk could have been a great album but instead is mostly a mixed bag of decent-to-great material.

[noiseredux]

a few more.

Lords of the Underground and Judgement Night were yard sale finds. The SpaceGhostPurrp I nabbed off the 'bay. He made some limited edition physical copies earlier this year, and they're sold out already. The other 3 were grabbed at a record store for $6 each - NEW.

[TSTR]

yo is that spaceghostpurrp hot?

in the meantime

all i wanna know is where the cheese at

[noiseredux]

yo is that spaceghostpurrp hot?

yeah dood. He dropped it at the beginning of the year as a mixtape. But it was so well-received that he ended up remastering it and ditching the DJ drops. The physical copies were only available straight thru the Raider Klan site. Anyway, I've been listening to it all year. Really slow, really evil sounding.

[noiseredux]

flea market finds for $8:

[noiseredux]

Makaveli - The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory
It always sort of bugged me that this was released as a Makaveli album instead of 2Pac album. But whatever. Logistics. Seeing as how it was released so shortly after 2Pac's death, and all the references to resurrection, it's easy to see how The 7 Day Theory could be seen as exploitative at the time. But this really was a 2Pac album that he wrote and laid out before his death. Rumors via members of the Outlawz suggest that it was intended to be a more underground release, which makes the brown paper bag artwork make sense in a sort of 'official bootleg' kind of way. This record was a rush job (seriously, 7 days) but an intentional rush job. As such, there's definitely an urgency to the material. Opener "Bomb First (My Second Reply)" for instance has a beat that at first feels like it has an unfinished demo quality to it. Repeated listenings reveal it to have a more first-take-best-take quality, not unlike punk's warts-and-all aesthetics. Though plenty of the material is well thought out and well produced. "Hail Mary" is a classic for sure, as is "Toss It Up." And "Me And My Girlfriend" would eventually serve as the blueprint for Jay-Z and Beyonce's massively popular "03 Bonnie & Clyde." In hindsight I think that it's easier to praise All Eyez On Me as it was a more expensive record that netted many career-highlight singles and was a sort of defining record in mainstream gangsta rap that seemed to work in a party atmosphere. On the contrary, The 7 Day Theory is far darker, moodier and condensed into a svelte piece of slightly paranoid perfection.