I must be slipping, because this kid Slik D has been amassing tens of thousands of hits on his videos and mixtapes over the past couple of years but I had never heard of him until I stumbled across Blown this morning. Apparently he's been making some noise in the Southern Cali underground circuit, but if he keeps pumping out weed anthems of this quality he should have no trouble gaining a national following among stoners and hip hop heads alike.
As a companion piece of sorts to Curly Castro's recent ode to West Bal'more's Detective Bunk Moreland, Zilla Rocca has put together his own tribute to Bunk's partner in crime (fighting) Jimmy McNulty. As usual Small Professor sets the scene with his typically incredible beat work, while Mr. Rocca uses the hard drinking life and times of Detective McNulty as inspiration for a rather memorable verse:
As I understand it, Bunk and McNulty are intended as a one-off coupling of songs. However, I'm hoping that the rest of Zilla's extended crew find themselves similarly inspired by The Wire and keep the trend alive. Ethel Cee as Kima, anyone?
Following up on the release of his most succesful single to date, Shine - at least if success is to be defined by the metrics of downloading and streaming - Mally recently dropped a video for it as well. With visuals as clean as the Jordan 4's on his feet, the video for Shine is so good even Okayplayer took notice of it. Here's hoping that okp and the rest of the internet continue to show him love once his next album, The Last Great..., drops on May 15th.
If you missed it, you can download Shineover here.
Further confirming my initial impression of The Highest Low as a group more intent on recreating (and further evolving) the sound of mid-90's hip hop than following the latest sonic trends of the genre, the Chicago duo of Just Wise and Snotty Pippen recently dropped a new video that is not only called "Boom Bap," but also references a line from the classic Choice Is Yours. As if to further prove its throwback credentials, the clip even makes use of that staple of 90's videos, the fisheye lens.
Boom Bap is off of The Highest Low's newest album, Insomnia, which you can cop for free over on their bandcamp page. As with everything I've heard from the group thus far, it's well worth a look.
The homie Airospace put me up on this video from his fellow Chicagoan Blaise Bullion. Never heard of Blaise before, but his flow over this Raz Pro beat had me looking for more of his music. I couldn't find much, but he's got a mixtape coming out soon, Confessions of a Blunthead, that I'll have to keep an eye out for.
I didn't want a whole week to go by without mentioning the latest offering from Zilla Rocca and Curly Castro (two thirds of the Wrecking Crew trio of emcees, along with Has-Lo) off of their upcoming Wu-Tang Pulp project, so forgive the brevity and check out Zilla's reimagining of Ghostface's Mighty Healthy:
During a recent scan through twitter (@33jones, tell a friend!), I saw that Uncommon Records founder Nasa offered up a recommendation of an emcee I had never heard of, Wiki. It's not too often you see a record label owner give props to an artist that's not on his own label, so I had to check it out and I came away quite impressed after seeing the above video.
Hailing from the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Wiki seems to currently be drawing the sort of shallow comparisons to Eminem that virtually every white emcee garners when they're first discovered. Yet his unorthodox delivery and lyricism mixed with that unique brand of swagger and slang that is found among NYC kids reminds me much more of a young Cage circa 1988. Regardless, I found his EP 1993 to be quite enjoyable and coming so soon on the heels of Joey Badass and Capital Steez's Survival Tactics, it has me excited about the future of NY rap for the first time in several years.
There are a couple of hiccups on 1993 that could prevent Wiki from achieving success outside of his current underground following, however. His nonchalant appropriation of the "N-word," consistently prefixed by "Guinea," seems likely to be a point of contention for more than just one ethnic group. And the bizarre 20 minute audio clip of an interview with Christine Choy that ends the album - either an inside joke that flew over my head or an incredibly cynical approach to stretching the length of the project from a 20 minute EP to a 40 minute album - may have some customers wondering what they just spent their $5 on. Nevertheless the six songs that are on the EP are about as faithful to the spirit of 1993's era of New York hip hop - without ever pandering to nostalgia - as you're likely to find in this day and age. And that, in and of itself, is worth a few bucks.
Omar Little:Shoot, the way y'all looking at things, ain't no victim to even speak on.
Det. William 'Bunk' Moreland:Bullshit, boy. No victim? All this death, you don't think it ripples out? You don't even know what the fuck I'm talking about. I know you remember the neighborhood, how it was. We had some bad boys, for real. Wasn't about guns so much as knowing what to do with your hands. Those boys could really rack. My father had me on the straight, but like any young man I wanted to be hard too, so I'd turn up at all the house parties where the tough boys hung. Shit, they knew I wasn't one of them. Them hard cases would come up to me and say, "Go home, schoolboy, you don't belong here." Didn't realize at the time what they were doing for me. As rough as that neighborhood could be, we had us a community. Nobody, no victim, who didn't matter. And now all we got is bodies, and predatory motherfuckers like you. And out where that girl fell, I saw kids acting like Omar, calling you by name, glorifying your ass. Makes me sick, motherfucker, how far we done fell.
Though there continues to be some debate on the subject, it seems safe to say - some four years removed from the finale of The Wire - that Omar Little is the consensus favorite character of the internet. The most feared homosexual stick up kid in television history, Baltimore's fictional version of the real 50 Cent, Omar's popularity remains so high to this day that even Obama name dropped him recently. I must admit that I, too, was quite a fan of his until watching the above scene in which Bunk strips away the mythology behind Omar and reveals him for what he truly is, just another gangster doing as much harm to his community as any of the drug dealers that he had been hunting. It seemed to be as much of an indictment of the television audience that heaped praise on the character as it was of the character himself. Which is perhaps why I've never been particularly nostalgic about Bunk's character, seeing as how, in one brief scene, he made me truly resent a character that I had spent the past four years rooting for above all others. (But damn, I wish he never went to buy those Newports.)
And yet...that same Bunk was the inspiration behind Curly Castro's recent collaboration with Small Professor (playing the role of Lester Freamon to Castro's Bunk), a song that I happen to really like, so I guess four years later I can finally forgive him. Have a listen:
As a further sign that his career has finally begun to reach a level that is on par with his prodigious talents, Mally's recent single Shinehit 20,000 downloads within just a couple of days of its release. Now I realize that in this day and age, when just about any random act of choreographed ignorance can get close to a million hits on WorldStar, that number might not seem too overwhelming at first glance. Yet the fact that an unsigned, underground emcee devoid of any gimmickry can get that much attention just on the strength of his verbal skills is nevertheless quite impressive. Check it out:
