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Over the past few weeks, I've received some emails asking why I haven't been showing love to the independent artists as much as I used to. Some of that is due to my continued technical difficulties, as I still haven't found the time to replace the laptop that I shorted out at the start of the summer. More importantly, though, over the past several months independent artists have become much more savvy in their leveraging of facebook, twitter and bandcamp in ways that they hadn't previously with the older generation of social networking websites like myspace, amassing followings numbering in the hundreds and even thousands despite any sort of acknowledgment from mainstream outlets. The result is a connection with fans that I'm not sure a blog post from a third party can improve upon. That's not to say that I won't continue to feature independent artists, just that I've begun to question what impact I - and numerous other blogs - am having on the internet's signal to noise ratio by putting up songs that can be found more easily through other avenues.
That being said, there are a few artists that I consider to be part of the 33Jones extended family and who continually inspire me to post every time they release a new song. At the top of that list is Minnesota's Mally, one of a handful of young emcees bucking the trend of mainstream hip hop and putting the focus back onto lyricism. There have been times in the past when Mally has completely foregone a hook in favor of bar after bar of metaphors, to the delight of aging backpackers like myself, yet as he's gained more experience he seems to have come to the realization that some concessions need to be made to achieve a level of success that matches his talents, putting more and more work into his hooks.
The payoff of that work can be seen in Mally's latest release, Lights Off. Over an epic beat driven by an organ sample, Malik attacks each bar with his usual lyrical fury while managing to drop a nice little hook shouting out three of the four elements of hip hop. Peep:
Mally - Lights Off (right-click to d/l)
Lights Off was produced by The Sundance Kid, and will be featured on an EP that Mally and Sundance will be releasing next April. Leading up to that release, Mally will be releasing a new song every month. It's a safe bet that I'll be putting them all up on this site.
9/15/2010 5:45:50 PM posted by Fresh