Please use the thread to discuss the selections and inform everybody of your voting intentions. A poll will be added at a later date in order to tally votes, once everybody has had the opportunity to listen to all of the selections. If there are specific links to the albums or singles you have nominated (on Youtube, Spotify, etc.) that you would prefer voters to listen to, please post them in this thread. _________________ 2021 in full effect. Come drop me some recs. Y'all know what I like.
Last edited by Skinny on 02/10/2021 19:54; edited 1 time in total
My initial thoughts here are that this 2005 team is one of the best of the tournament so far. It features two of the most underrated rappers of all-time in the album section (Little Brother's Phonte is a wonderfully old-school technician in the Black Thought mould, but with an added line in very personal humanism and an easy melodicism, and it makes perfect sense that Drake counts him as one of his all-timers; Sean Price is one of the greatest New York rappers ever, a man with a booming fill-any-room voice, a clarity of thought and vision, and endless fantastic punchlines), with their respective best albums. Then, there are two beaming singles that show off a further two of my favourite rappers doing what they do best. I've often argued that Dangerdoom deserves to be considered among DOOM's best, and 'Sofa King' might be its best song, whereas 'Down and Out' is a brilliant example of that turn-of-the-millennium/Dipset/Kanye chipmunk-soul style, with Cam'ron doing his succinct, internal-filled, free-associative street rap thing over the top, pure rap comfort food for me. _________________ 2021 in full effect. Come drop me some recs. Y'all know what I like.
Post subject: Re: BYHH GW2: Group A - 1998 vs. 2005
Skinny wrote:
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Shurik'N - Où je vis
Just wrapping this up. Not 100% sure what I can say about it as I only understood maybe 15% of the lyrics, but the final beat piqued a weird note. I've caught samples I've used in my beatmaking phase from time-to-time and it triggers some weird part in my brain, but this one really hit me. This is from '98, and it wasn't until '03 that Nujabes used Yusef's version of that sample in one of his most iconic tracks— and some decade ish later, I was like "I'm going to make a quick Nujabes tribute beat", and I used this exact sample Alex North Shurik'n picked in order to honour The Final View. Guess he was way ahead of the curve.
Production's solid. I'll google translate some of the lyrics now
haven't heard Où je vis yet so won't vote just yet, and depending on how much I dig it it could sway my vote, but atm I'm leaning '06. Two very underrated albums, and two unsung masterpiece singles. The singles for the '98 are solid as well (albiet not as good as the '05 ones), and Black Star is probably as good imo as either of the '05 albums, so really it's all up to Où je vis here haha. will get back after listening _________________ A Variety of Artists
"I love it when my bitch cook, come home to a hot meal, it's not real, the bitch can't cook / I love them bullets I sent you, you know what's up, I'm broke as fuck, and n***a the rent due / I love my moms and her drug habit, I love a double-jointed bitch up in my Craftmatic / I love snatching n***as' jewels up on the mass transit, I love busting in your mouth, I know you can't stand it."
These bars perfectly exemplify everything I love about Sean P (a.k.a. The Brokest Rapper You Know). The persona he built himself is great, a scumbag who gets off on fistfights ("gangster rappers can't fight, so they rap about guns") and petty crime and doing drugs, but one self-aware enough to realise he's a scumbag. He isn't gonna pretend his girl likes it when he busts in her mouth, but it's not gonna stop him from enjoying it. It feels like he's mischievously pulling the curtain back to reveal how rappers really live, outside of the 1%. He had a real sense of humour, but he was no novelty rapper. He's also a master technician, but one who raps at his own pace. It's some of the cleverest hardnosed New York street shit ever made. He also does classic rap bravado as well as anyone ever. There's a parallel dimension out there where Sean Price's death led to the mass outpouring of grief and the analytical broadsheet articles that we just witnessed in the wake of DOOM's. I still think about the fact that he's gone regularly. He had so much left to give.
"Friends ask, 'what you smoking?', ain't none of your biz, it's Father's Day and I ain't get shit from none of my kids." _________________ 2021 in full effect. Come drop me some recs. Y'all know what I like.
I 'm gonna make an exception and switch the order a little bit, starting with Shurik'N - Où je vis, as I really wanna get this out of the way. First of all, I find it extremely courageous nominating such an album, I would never do it, so props to RoundTheBend for that. Hip hop is a genre that is heavily based on lyrics, so if you take them out of the equation, it brings everything else down, too. Now, if I reflect on my favorite hip hop albums, the vast majority of them focus on production rather than rapping/lyrics, but this one here is something different, it's as if there are no lyrics at all. Actually, you could make a case it would be better if it were an instrumental. The sad thing is the production sounds really promising, so much wasted potential. I am by no means an expert on French hip hop, but for the most part this shared many similarities with typical American boom bap albums. But then there are songs like Fugitif or Memoire, which for me were the highlights of the album, they added an extra twist and sounded French-ier than the rest of the album-there were more, but these really stood out-, so there was an overall balance. I mean, if you are going to go out of your way to listen to something like this, it better be something different and original, not another version of what's in your comfort zone. And of course the eastern influences in Oncle Shu would make RZA proud. Not much to say about the delivery either, I guess it's good, but it's hard to evaluate without knowing what's going on lyrics-wise.
To sum it up, were it not for the language issue and I can imagine this would be fantastic.
Next one is gonna be Black Star - Mos Def & Talib Kweli Are Black Star.
French nomination - not only is RYM filled with quite a few french albums from this year, but when I evaluated this against the rest, it felt like the flow and music (the things I care most about with hip-hop) felt the best. To me flow isn't just what the words are saying (although I know that's really important to a lot of you), but how musical/liquid is the flow, and this album stood out the most. Plus I probably wouldn't have had the guts to do so without cestuneblague's recommendation of this year being full of a golden age of French hip-hop and my attempt to diversify the round with still a heavy hitting music/flow combination. I'm not a fan of doing something just for the wow factor, rather is it good, and to me, yes, Où je vis is great musically and flow feels incredibly tight. But you guys are right, I should care more about the lyrics, even if Sigur Ros... I still have no idea what they are singing about, yet Ágætis Byrjun is one of my favorite records of all time.
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