Come and Share This Jam with Me

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...

November has come . "Garage Palace" is a track coming from Gorillaz's  Super Deluxe Vinyl Boxset of their most recent album, and one of my favorites of this year,  Humanz . Humanz, is another new approach that Damon Albarn and the rest of the Gorillaz have taken, this time, in the vein of R&B and Soul. It was an impressive feat with obvious enthusiasm and care in producing due to the album's 26 tracks and seven bangin' singles " Andromeda ," " The Apprentice ," " Ascension ," " Let Me Out ," " Saturn Barz ," " Strobelite ," and " We Got The Power ." Unfortunately, Humanz was  a little of a mess with so much content, and not enough consistency in theme with each track, which may be due to the volume of songs. It's not to say the songs aren't dope, because I think they're all pretty much stand-alone, but together I think a thematic or evocative approach becomes misconstrued. ...