Wiz Khalifa & Riff Raff – Dumb Shyt (download)

When I saw there was a Riff Raff and Wiz Khalifa song called “Dumb Shyt” I hoped it would be three minutes of them trading bars about shit they did while high. A back and forth of inebriated oneupsmanship. Maybe Riff Raff could talk about googling “unicorns leprechauns racist” in attempt to explore the hidden plot by mythical creatures to keep the black man down. Wiz could rap about the time he was so high that he forgot his own name and convinced himself that he no longer existed. Little known fact, Wiz gets wild existential when he’s high. Luckily, Amber Rose has a PHD in magical realist literature and can usually talk him down.

While “Dumb Shyt” doesn’t go down quite as spectacularly, it does have a huge Lex Luger-ish beat and a “good enough for Wiz Khalifa” verse. Khalifa talks about being rich and getting high in an endearingly pedestrian way, going back to his mixtape days of sounding like a kid that was aight at rap and having a lot of fun doing it. Riff Raff on the other hand, comes through with another of his increasingly common, absurdist verses that phase in and out of making sense like descrambled pornography. When he’s using English in the way most of do—to express feelings and ideas through concrete symbolic representation—he’s coming up with increasingly clever lines “Walk inside my house, all you see is new couches and thumb prints”.

When Riff Raff is painting pictures using word association and random allusions dude gets really good (if you’re willing to take the journey through his riddles). “Circulize the world, circulize diamonds/ Got babies, lil pearls/ I’ma bowling ball swirl/ Might be sherbet/ Work wood like pervert”. Those lines might be complete nonsense or they might be Riff Raff talking strictly about rich shit (diamonds/pearls/woodgrain). There is also a distinct possibility that homeboy broke down a story of traveling around the world, bedding hot foreign chicks and having a grip of lil mixed race babies into seventeen words. If it’s the latter (pretty sure it is) thats’s an incredibly artistic way to say some dumb shit.

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Beat by Southside (Lex Luger‘s little brother). Murderous threats by Waka Flocka, Bo Deal and Chief Keef. This is essentially, The Avengers for dudes that have been to court mandated anger management classes.

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WAKA FLOCKA FLAME – BRICKSQUAD TRAPPIN (FT. OJ DA JUICEMAN)
GUNPLAY – JUMP OUT

There’s an old adage that goes “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration”. People generally hold this sort of “work hard and you’ll do better” theory as a bit of tested folk wisdom. Allen Iverson disagrees. Ten years ago today, A.I issued the greatest interview in the history of sports with regard to not giving a fuck. On this decade mark, let A.I.’s rant of defiance inspire you to challenge traditional wisdom and do shit your own way. Remember the words of Iverson and think “what are we talking about here?” when you’re faced with any dogmatic or pedantic situation. Granted, Allen Iverson never won a championship, put out a horrible rap album, wore braids for way too fucking long, and is now currently broke… But, on this of all days, let’s try to look for the positive in A.I.’s body of work.

Entrapment was a movie featuring Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta Jones stealing shit. It was exceptionally unremarkable and I dare anyone to remember anything about that movie, other than CZJ slinking her way between some lasers with her ass in the air like some kind of participant in a futuristic version of American Gladiators: Strippers.

While that show doesn’t exist, (yet) we do have this mix Entrapment from Philly’s Dirty South Joe (Luvstep, Mad Decent, Black Swag shirt model) which sounds like the soundtrack to American Gladiators: Strippers. This mix—celebrating the opening of STRFRNT, a DJ supply/streetwear boutique—is part heavy bass, part trap rap, all mixed together with some laser sound effects. There’s enough songs by dudes like Future, Plastician and Rick Ross that the American Gladiator dudes could get their pump on, and enough chilled out vibing joints that the strippers could work on their laser guided twerk routines. Everybody in the gym at the same damn time and it’s all good. Now all we need to do is actually get this show in production, and fire up The Eliminator. Someone get Sean Connery’s old ass outta retirement to host this shit.

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Chief Keef – I Don’t Like (feat. Kanye West, Pusha T, Jadakiss & Big Sean) (download)
***Updated with CD Quality***

Chief Keef‘s “I Don’t Like” is a haters anthem. It’s angry music, for being angry at the world. Surprisingly, the song is menacing and catchy at the same. It’s a song about shit dudes violently don’t like, but the melodic backbone of the song is essentially a lullaby over 808 drums. It’s a weird contrast, but it’s born of the same DNA as Keef’s forefathers in violence jingles, DMX and Waka Flocka Flame. After hearing the song twice you can’t help but walk around muttering “Bang!, Bang!” like a displaced gulf war veteran with PTSD. You might also find yourself telling the sandwich artist at your local Subway “Mayonaise? That’s that shit, I don’t like”.

Honestly, this remix pales in comparison the original’s “twenty five dudes moshing shirtless in a trap house” energy. There’s more people on the track, all of them better rappers than Keef and a few subtle musical enhancements, yet the whole thing falls flat. I guess you lose the ability to tap into the angry, spiteful, shirtless sixteen year old that lives inside of all of us—no Sandusky—when you spend all your time draped in the finest fabrics and sex symbols from esoteric European countries. That’s not even an indictment of Kanye, such is the downside of being rap royalty, you lose the joy of throwing stones at the throne when you’re sitting in it.

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Kitty Pryde – “Justin Bieber” (download)

Back in the 80s, Marvel Comics introduced a spunky 14 year old girl to the X-Men lineup named Kitty Pryde. Presumably, they introduced her to help attract some younger female readership and because the X-Men roster needed some members under 25 attending a “school for gifted children”. The character was cool, representing a light diversion from the occasionally overly serious, life or death world of X-Men. Wolverine could be all sad loner about having to kill more dudes in Japan than Type 2 Diabetes, but then Kitty would come along and be like “hey dude, let’s go fuck up the ice cream shop” and they could bond over a sundae, while they talk about how they’re both into the Japanese concept of kawaii. Light and dark, all together.

In the comics, Kitty could walk through walls, was kind of a smart ass and had a pet dragon. In the real world, Kitty Pryde is a 16 year old girl out of Florida that raps about boys, working at the mall and other shit 16 year old girls are concerned with (read: Justin Bieber). She’s got a keen ear for melody and might be the first rapper to cop to cosplaying (DOOM doesn’t count). As far as I know, she’s not friends with a dragon.

While normally, my taste in rap is dudes talking about cocaine distribution, asses, murder or Buddhism disguised as insanity, there’s a charm to Kitty Pryde’s small output of music. Her rhyme schemes and flow aren’t some crazy complicated Scribble Jam shit that’ll have you doing rewinds of her couplets, but she’s killing it on feel. All of her music is really catchy and poppy, yet with enough wit  and weird details to give you the feeling that homegirl is fully aware of her cuteness and using it to great effect. There’s also a reoccurring vibe of infatuation tinged with insanity that feels a lot like the better “I’m in the bushes outside your house—watching you” love songs from Tyler, The Creator. In a way, her whole vibe is kind of like Waka Flocka Flame—if you hear it the first time and don’t immediately “get” the emotion she’s going for, you’ll probably never feel it. While Waka is the demigod of anger, getting buck and not-giving-a-fuck, Kitty’s best joints are the siren calls of cute, #teengirlstruggles.

Now I know some of y’all are going to say your hearts are too cold to feel homegirl’s Tumblr life woes, but if that’s the case I better not ever catch you singing along or two stepping to any Michael Jackson, Lisa Lisa, Katy Perry or Aaliyah joints. All of those cats are on some 10^th grade emotions shit, at least this chick has the excuse of actually being in 10^th grade…

Kitty Pryde – “Okay Cupid” (download)

In this episode of Conversations With Bryan, we discuss ideas for bold, futuristic, blockbuster movies that will push the art of cinema to its limits.

Conversations With Bryan Episode 5: Cinematic Gold (download)

^{Disclaimer: This podcast contains discussion of a frank and often profane nature. The views of the podcasters are often filled with factual inaccuracies and untenable logic. Enjoy at your own risk.}

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There’s two giant blockbuster movies dropping this summer that’ll actually convince me to go hang out inside a dark theatre instead of practicing the fine art of warm weather perving. One of them is the new Batman movie, which will obviously be the second coming of Jesus Christ and that Lil B lecture at NYU rolled into one and committed to film. That’s to say it’ll be transcendant, life affirming and may inspire me to adopt a cat. The other is Prometheus, Ridley Scott‘s prequel to Alien.

There’s so many amazing allusions in this trailer to the cinematic history of robots. It’s not simply winks and nods to older incarnations of robots, instead all of the movies they make reference to are ones that specifically deal with the emotional core of artificial sentience. Little details like the ones below give hope that this movie isn’t just a cash grab inspired prequel to a thirty year old classic.

- Obviously there’s the amazing acting by the god, Michael Fassbender (Inglorious Basterds, Shame, X-Men: First Class) as a perfectly “not quite human” android trying to sell the idea of robotics. It’s great that Fassbender seems to be channeling the passively homicidal (and emotionally conflicted)  HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey with the stilted yet soothing delivery.

- Shouting out another Stanley Kubrick written science fiction movie, A.I., there’s the too shiny skin and Hitler youth combover Fassbender has, which makes him look a lot like  Jude Law‘s android lover Gigolo Joe. Why a robot prostitute would look kinda like a nazi, I can’t say. I guess we all have our own visions of how dystopias will manifest themselves. The interesting conflict in that character was to see a robot as a caregivers, lover and comforter—yet, watch the equal parts lust and disgust exhibited by it’s human clients.

- Continuing on the A.I. nod, there’s the childlike music, and forced sense of innocence throughout that calls back to the presentation of the boy robot David. The opening birthing/packaging scene of the trailer is also a lot like the end of A.I when David returns to the factory he was constructed in. In fact, Fassbender’s character shares the same name as the kid and the clear metaphor of robots as the children of men.

- The most compelling allusion has to be Fassbender shedding tears as he proclaims that he understands “human emotion, although I do not feel them myself”. A clear shoutout to the “hard as fuck, yet wild emotional” finale of Terminator 2 when Schwarzenegger’s father figure terminator tells teenage John Connor “I know now why you cry, but it’s something I can never do…” which pretty much encapsulates the aspirational elements of fictional robots.

Here’s to hoping Prometheus can go as hard as any of these movies.

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09: TRILL WAVY by PL△NE✝ DE△✝H
Planet Death specializes in making remixes that transform songs into deformed, creepy, funhouse mirror versions of themselves. When he recently warped Aaliyah’s “One In A Million” from a teenage anthem of lust into a horror movie anthem of murderous intent, it was clear that I needed to work with dude on a mix for the site. Anyone who hears Aaliyah and thinks Texas Chainsaw Massacre is the type of weirdo I want to collaborate with. Fast forward a couple of weeks and we have ✝RILL VV△VY with music by Planet Death and visuals by yours truly.

The ✝RILL VV△VY mix brings over some of the haunted house vibes present in the “One In A Million” remix while being an altogether chiller affair. This isn’t immediately scary death by a knife-wielding hillbilly like “One In A Million” was, this is a more long term, creeping death like when you go insane from syphilis. It’s still creepy as fuck—and not the sort of thing you’d want to listen to while you sat alone in a house in the middle of nowhere—but it’s a journey of moodiness. The tape smoothly evolves and shifts moods over it’s runtime to go from deeply tense and paranoid one moment to morosely uplifting the next. This joint really should come with a limited edition Ed Gein x Louis Vuitton dufflebag made out of human skin leather, but I think Kanye is already doing that for the Air Yeezy 2 release.

PL△NE✝ DE△✝H – ✝RILL VV△VY by beholdthedestroyer

(Alternate download link)

Tracklist:
1. The Weeknd: “Big Boy Outside” (TLS Edit)
2. Evian Christ: “MYD”
3. SALEM: “Krawl”
4. BEAR: “King Mac”
5. Friendzone: “Change” (Featuring Main Attrakionz + Shady Blaze)
6. GLC vs. VEILS: “Angry Bird” [PL△NE✝ DE△✝H edit]
7. Burial: “Archangel” [Sleepless Nights Rmx]
8. Holy Other: “Know Where”
9. Watch The Throne: “No Church In The Wild”

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Back in my early high school days—when all the kids I hung out with discovered low level hallucinogens (read: weed) and their older brother’s record collections—dudes got heavy into Pink Floyd. Heavy like the ass of that one Puerto Rican chick that would wear the spandex pants during gym class. Dumb heavy.

Seemingly every weekend, cat’s would spark that shit and then chill in someone’s basement watching The Wall or that Pink Floyd live from Pompeli joint and lose track of wild amount of time. That is, until someone ordered OD amounts of Chinese food and we wondered why Rosa from gym class didn’t want to hang out with us (hint: it was prolly because we spent all our time smoking weed and hanging out in someone’s basement watching Pink Floyd videos). I suspect, this scene is still playing out right now across America because Pink Floyd is the perfect rock psychedelia. The Wall especially is spacey as fuck, paranoid and generally sounds like drugs put to music. This shit is what heads in the western world think of when we think of being fucked up. With Floyd being the ultimate high music for rock, and screw being the ultimate high music for rap it’s wild that no one thought to mix the two together.

The boys H3VTH CVR1NG—who chopped up the Drive soundtrack a couple of months ago—come back around this time with a chopped and screwed version of Pink Floyd’s masterpiece. Like the Drive joint it’s less of a full album screw and more of a impressionistic remix that sounds like a fucked up radio set on “trippy” switching between the classic rock station and the rap station. THX WVLL focuses on the dark and paranoid vibe of the original and ups the ante with help from the likes of The Weeknd, Ice Cube and weirdly, Roxy Music. Shit gets real heavy, like the time your pops found that lil joint in your room and you had to have that talk about durgs, poor life choices and how you don’t wanna end up like your shitless uncle. Real heavy.

Download THX WVLL here.

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Check out my profile on polymath rapper/producer Grande Marshall over on the Mishka Bloglin:
“The affinity for cats from Philly, has something to do with their multifaceted nature. I’ve seen white chicks from down there bust grown men in their grills with broken bottles and talked with wild hood motherfuckers about Hannibal’s use of elephants in the defense of Carthage — at the same party. It’s hard to pin down why people from Philly seem to be so all over the map, but it’s an observable fact. When you think of Philly as a place that houses some of the more gully yet eccentric heads in the Northeast it makes sense that a dude like Grande Marshall is from there.” Read more…

SpaceGhostPurrp – Lustful ’97 (download)

At this point we should all just accept that SpaceGhostPurrp‘s entire body of work is scoring the closed doors rituals of some kind of black Illuminati deep in the seediest part of Miami.Black robes, Egyptology, purple and green lasers, fog machines, roman columns, all kinds of voodoo and shit. Wild dudes from The U are involved. You get the picture I’m painting here.

“Lustful ’97″ is the theme song to the ritualistic orgy where strippers from King Of Diamonds (that link is NSFW, yet fascinating) are sacrificed to the Egyptian fertility god Min. That may sound like some kind of wild horrorshow misogynistic shit, but in reality, it involves a lot of massaging the strippers with exotic oils and them dancing, while dudes meditate on nothingness. Lost in the zen like wobble of asses. It’s really a very empowering look for the strippers and overall powerful experience, if you’ve never experienced it. Clearly, SpaceGhostPurrp knows about leaving an empty seat for Min at the orgy.

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Check out my profile of the rap game Andy Kaufman—Riff Raff—over on the Mishka Bloglin:
“Riff Raff the person is fucking hilarious in the same way Will Ferrell’s characters are, you can’t help but watch them and wonder if it was one big bad life choice that lead them to their delusion or if they’re the result of a glacially paced divorce from reality. Think of Ricky Bobby from Talladega Nights, Ron Burgundy from Anchorman or Danny McBride’s Kenny Powers from Eastbound and Down and then you begin to see what Riff Raff is doing with his persona.” Read more…

Check out my review of Kid Cudi‘s WZRD over on the Mishka Bloglin:
“Most of the album is comprised of songs like “Dr. Pill,” “Brake” and “Efflictim” that run upwards of four minutes but never really go anywhere. They’re just a repetitive beat and Cudi cooing over ‘em in his trademark nasally whine. If you stripped off the vocals they’d actually probably work as a hot soundtrack album for a mumblecore movie about a 25 year old dude that works at Hot Topic and spends most of his time sitting on boxes in the back, being depressed while making too detailed portraits of Rebirth era Lil Wayne in Draw Something.” Read more…

Check out my review of Lil’ B‘s God’s Father over on the Mishka Bloglin:
“God’s Father—the latest in Lil’ B’s unending stream of mixtapes/albums—sees the Based God create an album that’s a solid two hours long. Two hours. In the time it takes this album to unfurl you could easily reenact The Artist with a cast of monkeys from India, including a twenty-minute intermission to account for inevitable poop slinging. Dudes staging plays with monkeys in India is apparently a thing, so maybe somewhere this is happening right now which would be pretty #based. Much like this simian staging of The Artist, God’s Father is a lil much. Lil B falls into the trap many rock bands (but surprisingly few rappers) have fallen into, he made a double album that should’ve simply been a single album and probably a great one at that.” Read more…

Waka Flocka Flame – Bricksquad Trappin (ft. OJ Da Juiceman¹) (download)

If you listen to a lot of Trap A Holics mixtapes, you’re familiar with his trademark “Damn son, where’d you find this!?!” drop. It’s executed by a voiceover guy that sounds like he studied heavily under the “In a world…” movie voiceover dude from the 90′s. It’s an exclamation, a rhetorical question, a signature and a self congratulatory pat on the back all at once. When Trap A Holics times the drop just right, it becomes the voice of the sleeping caveman that lives in all of our brains and is only awoken by fights, murder, and music that sounds like fights and murder. It takes about ten seconds and four repetitions of the main riff before the “Damn son…” drop appears on Waka Flocka Flame‘s “Bricksquad Trappin”. Ten seconds into the song before that caveman wakes up.

“Bricksquad Trappin” is the thematic sequel to “Hard N Da Paint”. If “Hard N Da Paint” was an anthem celebrating the brutality of war, “Bricksquad Trappin” is the anthem for returning victorious to the homestead with someone’s head on a pike and blood on your face. Those dudes from 300 would’ve bumped this hard when they got back to Sparta—that is if they didn’t all die. Spoilers for 300. The song somehow manges to be triumphant, invigorating and menacing at the same time. The first few times you listen to the song you want to give all the credit to Lex Luger‘s oversized bear of a beat. The instrumental sounds like it could easily come from the Game Of Thrones: The Musical soundtrack. On closer inspection though, this song works because it’s a perfect synthesis between Waka and Lex’s talents. The beat makes you clench your fists and grit your teeth slightly but it doesn’t become amazing until 1:47 in when Waka’s verse begins.

He comes in with a rising chant of his own name that crescendos with him screaming “Bricksquad!!!”. It’s an auditory explosion of Waka Flocka Flame. Call it the “Waka Chant”. Waka Flocka Goku for you Dragon Ball Z heads. The chant is a key part of his arsenal as a rapper, if you “get” Waka it abstracts and signifies all the anger, rage and triumphant struggle of dude’s entire body of work in two words. If you don’t “get” Waka, it sounds like a homeless dude on the train powering up to take a train ride from “uncomfortably smelly” to “criminally insane and violent”. Either way, the effect is similar. With the rising horns of “Bricksquad Trappin” following beneath his chants there’s a multiplying effect, the song becomes greater than the “Waka Chant” or Luger’s amazing beat alone. The chant is Waka’s “Damn son, where’d you find this!?!” drop, an exclamation of his anger, a signature, and congratulation to Waka from Waka. If only all of us could have our proclamations of existence scored with such dramatic music.

^{1. Shoutout to OJ Da Juiceman—not a good rapper—for coming up with the line “My right wrist like the light, left wrist like London fog”. It doesn’t quite make sense with regard to jewelry (unless Juiceman is making a convoluted allusion to the Green Lantern), but damn if that isn’t an amazing bit of imagery.}

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Dear Ridley Scott,
Ancient aliens. Idris Elba. Alien. Charlize Theron. Space jockeys. The god Michael Fassbender…
Please don’t fuck this up.
Love,
The World

Midway through watching a sprawling parking lot brawl on WorldstarHipHop there was a lull in the action for the combatants to catch their breath, pickup pieces of their weaves and talk shit directly to the camera. During this break there was a briefly audible sound from a car stopped in the background—the signature “spaceship taking off” drop of fight music maestro Lex Luger. In the video you can’t make out the song or the artist, you just know someone in the car is jamming Lex Luger beats while watching this parking lot melee. If this cameraphone movie had been a feature film, this moment would be one of the genius diegetic music choices in film history, possibly on par with the “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” shootout scene in Face/Off.

Gunplay‘s entire career has been an amazing feedback loop of auditory violence building to the moment he’s involved in a similar scene. Imagine him watching footage of the Battle of the Bulge on mute while writing music and then passing his songs to troops headed to war in Afghanistan. His hope is that one day he’ll be watching video of an insurgent firefight and hear himself screaming “Maybach Music Group!” in the background as a Taliban foot soldier speeds away in a 98 Nissan Ultima. Then and only then, will he be fully realized as an artist—with the cycle of art inspiring life and life inspiring art complete.

In our new episode of Conversations With Bryan we discuss reconnecting with lost loves, purchasing drugs from racists, rules our fathers should’ve given us and chilling in the VIP with D-listers.

Conversations With Bryan Episode 4: White Lines and Thighs in the Big Easy (download)

^{Disclaimer: This podcast contains discussion of a frank and often profane nature. The views of the podcasters are often filled with factual inaccuracies and untenable logic. Enjoy at your own risk.}

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Over the weekend, legendary french comic artist Moebius passed away. While he was huge in France for works such as The Incal and Blueberry, he never reached the same levels of wild fame outside the world of comics fandom. Primarily, Moebius was a leading creator in the French comics scene of the 70s (with dudes like Caza and Philippe Druillet). While American comics audiences of the time were fully getting asses handed to us by first wave tales of cosmic adventure and self reflective superheroes, dudes in France were making comics that looked like everyone was taking wild amounts of psychedelics and reading from ancient Sanscrit scrolls—and without a doubt Moebius was the best of them. All of his artwork shows incredible line work, astounding amount of detail, insane tricks of perspective and amazing color palettes. Beyond his work in comics, Moebius was also known for his contributions to film via concept art (and people outright stealing his ideas/designs), throughout the years he helped to shape the visual language of films such as Alien, Tron, The Fifth Element, Jodorowsky‘s aborted version of Dune anda lil picture called Star Wars.

This is a huge loss to the world of artists that dream weird and big.