Come and Share This Jam with Me

As a fan of J. Cole's "1985," I am sort of taken aback with "Old N*ggas." J. Cole is not trying to save Hip Hop or completely remove this recent trap trend that has crept into Hip Hop, however he has been critical and has attempted to mold and assist the new generation of sound cloud rappers and trap stars for the "better." J. Cole's recent KOD   (where "1985" is featured) uses trap at times with irony of J. Cole's and many other's negative perception of trap, but nonetheless does not negate its influence and can't help but embrace it. Being someone who has been in the "game" for a while, J. Cole is aware of having to adapt to new trends and niches that come about, but as someone part of the elder generation who think this style of Hip Hop is dumb, J. Cole cannot help but think something needs to be done for these kids who have embodied trap as part of their identity. Enter "Old N*ggas." YBN Cordae...

On April 16th, 2018, Kendrick Lamar has become the first rapper and artist outside the Jazz and Classical Music genre to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music. DAMN , is personally my favorite album to come from the Kendrick Lamar canon. Every song on the album is poetry and is able to transcend that fine line between artistic merit and commercial appeal. Most importantly, it's an honest and current observation of African American life in the United States during what we are now recognizing as a controversial time period.  The committee's decision is not only agreeable, it's important. To choose DAMN is to choose an idea of progress in music and in our culture. The decision is indicative of the fact that we are able to move away from a narrow mindset of what constitutes as music, or what constitutes as a proper medium, to express and evoke imperative and palpable themes and ideas.  This decision reiterates the fact that we do not need to constantly look into the...

A rule of thumb, if you see the name MF DOOM attached to anything, immediately listen to it. "Bomb Thrown" is the lead single off the CZARFACE and MF DOOM collaboration,  Czarface Meets Metal Face , and as imagined, it's rife with impressively witty verses and superhero themes mixed with enough traditional elements to give you nostalgia for 90's Hip Hop. What's interesting about "Bomb Thrown" and Czarface Meets Metal Face,  is the flow of the instrumentation: sounding like a 60's cartoon score, with an exasperated snare. The end result is a mix between a classic Hip Hop beat and and an echoed superhero cartoon of the 60's...now that's worth a listen. However mesmerizing the nuanced beat may be, the best thing about "Bomb Thrown," and both CZARFACE and MF DOOM individually, is their word play and witty verses. In particular, MF DOOM is known to use an incredible amount of assonance (vowels repeating the same sounds) in his r...