It’s that time of year when I usually tell you that everything is gonna be alright, when i massage your swollen fingers so you little Dillites can tap your pads again. But this year I am struggling. I want to tell you that it’s all good but it ain’t. Rap is hurting. Not creatively, of course. In the opinion of this attic dwelling cracker, 2008 may have been the best year for rap since Boots knocked down the towers. But only the inner circle is paying attention to all that great rap. Commercially and in the eyes of a very confused media we are lost like Zoe said it. Last year our biggest concern was who was snapping their fingers before they disappeared. Now the best rappers are not rapping, going to jail, and just sucking. Now that Wayne has officially evolved into the hip hop personality sphere occupied by such irrelevant recording artists as 50 and Snoop Dogg we have no true rap stars. Kanye is leading the pack, but off the cliff.

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The Diary (aka The Dairy, according to my itunes) is the best Scarface album, but you already knew that. It took 35% of the vote in last weeks best Face album poll. For a minute I had thought about making it a poll for the second best Scarface album, but the margins were closer than I expected with The Fix and Mr. Scarface creeping on the proverbial come up. I’m curious to know who the one person who voted Emeritus was and why. The total votes were significantly lower than usual. I don’t know if that’s because I’m losing your attention or if people just prefer hating Kanye to loving Scarface.

With that in mind, this week’s poll is (once again) about bad meaning bad music from Chicago. Even as one of Com’s main detractors, I’m pretty surprised by just how horrible UMC is. The kid in me that used to recite all the words to “Sum Shit That I Wrote” in front of the mirror had some vague hope that it might actually be tolerable. I know Common is beyond gone, so unaware of himself and his career that he is selling his songs about not selling out to microsoft, but the involvement of Pharrell and Mr. DJ showed some promise. At the same time Kanye’s just being a selfish dick by even releasing his new album. I guess it boils down to which is more of an affront to tha culture: arrogance or indifference. I also threw Electric Circus and a Lupe record into the mix for the hell of it.

Full Scarface results after the jump. (more…)

Last post on the subject. Promise.

Common f/ Kanye West & Last Poets – “The Corners“
from BE LP (Interscope, 2005)

The long awaited BE has been touted as Com’s return to the playful lyricism that heads loved his masterpiece Ressurection, before Erykah Badu turned him into a male Macy Gray. And “The Corners” (i think) is set to be the first single.

As far as lyrics go, Com’s not exactly blowing any wigs back on this one, if this came out in ‘95 it’d be one of his least interesting joints. But let’s be honest, any hip hop head in his right mind would take this over 2003’s limp wrist avant garde opus Electric Circus. Anything that’ll get him to stop rocking stupid hats (see above).

And Kanye definitely stepped his game up on this one. Homie’s been on some lazy shit lately and I’m glad to see he’s saving the heat for Common and giving Brandy and Game the duds. Either that, or he finally got that drum cd from No ID.

Also, the Last Poets make a welcome appearance. While I don’t necessarily subscribe to the popular theory that they (or Gil Scott Heron or Watts Prophets or whoever) had any direct impact on the evolution of hip hop, they did make some very powerful records that are worth checking out

I think this quote I found on google really sums up Com’s approach to making music: “ Like Run-DMC, Common has made a career out of a fresh synthesis of hip-hop and rap.…. ??

Yes Cocaineblunts.com went down yesterday. I was (ab)using free space loaned to me by friendly Brits nearly five years ago, and I guess they stopped being so friendly. We’ll we’re back in a simple, streamlined form. I’m currently hosting it on my schools space, which isn’t huge (and I have no idea what the bandwidth is). What this means is, for the time being, the new tracks will only be kept up for the past three updates rather than the past five. Archives are also down during this period. Sorry, you’re just gonna have to jump on them quickly and sit tight until I find a real host on the cheap cheap. And the full redesign has been pushed back until I get this all figured out (hopefully within the next week or so). Sorry about this, I’ll still be bringing the dope mp3s and hip hop elitism that you know and hate, so, on to the mp3s:

Kanye West f/ Common & Mase – “Jesus Walks (Remix)“
Jadakiss f/ Common, Nas & Styles P – “Why? (Remix)“

Why are the two hottest singles of the summer pseudo concious rap exploito tracks that don’t bang in the club? Why is Common on the remix to both? What is Jimmy Iovine thinking? Why does the Why remix sound like someone held a mic up to their radio’s speakers? Why is noz actually posting recent music? Why couldn’t he think up a less cliched way to write about it? Like Jada, we present only questions, never answers.

Also, be sure to tune in to Small Change’s Nickel & Dime Radio Friday from 3-6 PM on WFMU 91.1, where I’ll be playing a set of classic and obscure Trentonian hip hop.