Rob Cave - God Dose

"The closest I've ever come to seeing or feeling God is listening to rap music," goes a line on R.A.P. Music. Same; I've also watched a college kid on mushrooms see God in the skies over Ocean Parkway while hearing Supreme Clientele for the first time in his life in the backseat of my car. One might include both of the aforementioned albums in a list of folk-rap essentials—that is, raps rapped in rap-handed obeisance to the art of rapping. Add God Dose to said list. This is not to say Rob Cave raps about rapping. He raps about God, the nature of the universe, and all existence. It's just that he does it in such a way that it makes one suspect only rap can truly get at the crux of these matters. While we're making imaginary lists, God Dose also forms a natural triptych with previous Cave releases Respect Wildlife and The Sun Tape. The first of those projects was about the world around us, the second the world beyond us, and this third installment the world inside us.

Chow Lee - SEX DRIVE

What's good with the dude on Love Is Blind who's so afraid of getting his girl pregnant they haven't had sex yet? Does he not know condoms exist? How is this question not asked by the producers? Are we, the audience at home, meant to think that condoms are not an effective birth control measure? This is like the opposite of the no glove, no love rule. This is like the opposite of the dude on Bridgerton making pulling out look like tucking and rolling out of a moving vehicle. 

"This ain't never getting cleared so here," Lee says (thrice). "Girls cum first," adds his T-shirt and various pleasure enhancement products notably sold as collector's items not intended for consumption. (Maybe the guy from Love Is Blind could use some of these.) This, of course, begs the question: What would happen if one were to consume any or multiple of said products? 

Also, {Butthead voice}, "He said wood." Also, sexy drill openly flouts the conventions of heteronormative sexual power dynamics. Do you love it?

LL Cool J - THE FORCE

Start at the top. Imagine the Kangol never came off, its removal never going-going from local apocrypha to convenient metaphor. Does Chris Dorner's manifesto begin where N.C.I.S. Los Angeles ends? Having only seen the former, I couldn't tell you. I also couldn't say what it's like to hear, "They’re after this killer cop, and he looks just like you. They’re not looking to take him alive, so you best stay indoors, or you could get caught up in something."

 

Justified by virtue of creativity for obvious reasons concerning entertainment, THE FORCE is the boss. Appropriately then, the Abstract's doing damage, channeling the unconventional spirit loops that permeate The Infamous and Reloaded into a full album in the mid-2020s by none other than Uncle L. Alternate universe rap; if someone had told you 10-20 years ago that this would happen in 2024, you wouldn't have believed them, and yet here we are. What if The Renaissance never ended?

Somewhere Canibus is listening to LL Cool J rapping "Molecular structure of the nucleus of his cranium / Platinum, uranium, lyrical titanium" on a four-person posse cut and feeling all types of ways: proud, regretful, absolved by history, ghostly, telekinetic. 

KAD - ALPACA

DOOM's passing put the following fragment on this website: "the dollar-bin sample selection that was in constant conversation with itself; the smorgasbord of pop culture references that mined philosophical treatises from Saturday morning cartoons and Saturday afternoon Daikaiju films." Doombot or not, KAD pads the vocab. His crates seem to recall this description of the late villain more than they do his music itself, like a hologram baseball card. I'm not saying the holographic principle is an intelligent design plant intended to get creationist text books into middle-school science classes across the Western world, but I'm also not saying it's not that. It's ALPACA, you herd?

Half Pint & MC Glamorous - 2 Queens and a Mic

From Glam to Islam to SpitSLAM, and from the Son of Bazerk to the mother of all ladies of Long Island rap team-ups, it's themmmmmmmmmm, as in the royal they. Read that with an echo chamber and hear this through gender affirming circuitry. The least expected five-song EP of the summer just might also be the most refreshing, like a 70-degree day in August while the ocean "still holds the heat" as per my neighbor. Call it community organizing rap, the cement in public service announcement.

Akari - edits vol. 2

Lucidly ill audio-machinations suffuse with skittering light drums. Does the speed of sound remain constant absent an observer? Trees' forests in the plotline take hold. Rap still? I once thought I'd reached my goal of writing liner notes. Then I read William Parker's WEBO sleeve. The experience was like swapping bodies with my 17-year-old would-be rapper self hearing Breeze Brewin for the first time, i.e., transcendent/formative—take your pick. Somebody with editing chops lay his acapella tracks over drill beats. Takers? This might be another one of those be the change you want to see in the world moments. Peace to Eight Immortals.

Dana Hilliard - Clouds / Anybody

Floating, I watched a robin soar past just overhead. And I mean just overhead, no-sudden-movements close. Next, it came at me head-on and then back the other way. As I bobbed in place, it repeated its flight pattern over and over like we were stuck in a loop. I thought that robin and I were having a moment. "It was protecting its nest," my wife tells me, "trying to intimidate you." What can I say, birdie? Maybe environmental cues aren't exactly my forte. She stays away from the nest, my wife. But it's on our property. "The bird doesn't respect the government." It believes in squatters' rights, and sure, me too, but then also maybe it was just a keen display of aerial prowess. I'd like to think that. After all, it's not as if I was climbing the tree or even touching it. I was just floating on below, well within dropping range, oblivious to my avian comrades.

AZOMALI - Music for Solo Camping Vol. 1

Trim all the fat. Cut past the meat to bone itself and arrive at the question around which all civilizations live and let die. 

Would you rather fight a bear or a shark? 

This is not a test. It's the test, fool! Well, what's it going to be? Who's the apex predator now? Music For Solo Camping Vol. 1 proffers the kind of headspace one needs to contemplate such central queries and crucial conflicts. It's a place of roaming epiphany, like the realization that "Hay" has essentially the same beat as "Millie Pulled a Pistol on Santa." Only here may one truly and completely consider the implications thereof. 

Keeping it 100, I'm no camper. I'm a beach cat not a mountain lion. In other words, I'm team shark. For one, you can just hit the shark in the nose. Like Cam's coach said, he might be pussy. Second, whereas Jaws was fiction, Grizzly Man was a goddamn documentary. You must never listen to this. You must feel it between your toes like morning dew-coated blades of grass.

If everyone is an island, and here we are—you, me, us—then living unhoused equals solo camping. 

Confines - Work Up the Blood

When I was about 15 years old, I wrote and began shooting a script for a parody of the wrestling documentary Beyond the Mat entitled Beyond the Fat: The El Grande Story. One character in the film was a wrestler named the Vigilante. For his finishing move, he would pull out a gun and shoot his opponent. Because of this, he was always on the run from the law—hence, the vigilante. (In hindsight, the fugitive probably would've been a more appropriate name, but I was 15 and super into Death Wish at the time.) The script may be lying here somewhere. When Confines drops another project, I'll dig it up. Until then, enjoy this joint from December 2021.

Blaq Kush - There's Always Hope Vol. 4

Blaq Kush's mom speaks my language when she opens this album proclaiming "I can't tell you anything about this business, I don't know anything about it." This has essentially been my pitch to Kush to put a tape out on Long Island Rap Records for the past three years. To be fair, it was also my pitch when he contacted me eight years ago asking me to be his publicist. I'm nothing if not persistent. Hell, with my swimmer's ear, I may as well be the proprietor of "Deaf Man Records." "But I can tell you" that any new Blaq Kush release is practically guaranteed to get run back like "the hottest record in New York City" according to Flex on any given Thursday night. What I'm saying is this: We live in a time and place where Cash Cobain and KRS One share programming blocks. The game is a wrap. Tonight, I googled Blaq Kush and found out about his experimental noise project, This is not Blaq Kush. It's over. We won. Everything from here on out is a bonus track. Let's put two volumes on each side and call it the definitive edition.