killer mike raps el-p produces "R.A.P. Music"

got a rave review from Sound Opinions

does anyone not like this? finding negative reviews of r.a.p. music is like finding negative reviews of black hippy stuff

NME to the rescue!

Fast off the back of last year’s ‘PL3DGE’ LP comes Grind Time Official star Killer Mike’s sixth full-length outing. Built on a somewhat uneasy collaboration between the OutKast protégé and Def Jux founder El-P, it’s a set of two halves whose hands won’t hold. Mike’s an angry, earthy rapper and his standard “hardcore G shit” (‘Big Beast’) chips and bumps against his producer’s strained attempts to lift it skywards with spacey electro noodling (‘Don’t Die’). Worst of the back end is ‘Reagan’ – a politi-rap analysis of the Iran-Contra scandal. It’s a relic – a meandering, studenty thought piece that’s been dug from the ratty recesses of the ’90s West Coast conscious scene. Mike has dabbled with politics in the past, and even made unlikely forays into experimental soul, but ‘RAP Music’ lacks the fury and vitality that usually sustains him. The ambition is to be applauded, but half the album’s a grind. And not the good kind.

does anyone not like this? finding negative reviews of r.a.p. music is like finding negative reviews of black hippy stuff

― littledotheyknow (D-40), Wednesday, May 30, 2012 8:02 PM (59 minutes ago) Bookmark

i would listen just for the possibility of putting a negative review into the world but i don't want to break the 14-year streak of avoiding el-p's music that i've managed since back when that one stupid co flow video used to get played on rap city

I find the political history more interesting than the politics of strip clubs.

...this time.

I wasn't completely sold on this... Lots of interesting lyrical stuff, but I was disappointed that Killer Mike still has the same monotonously aggressive, punctuate-every-other-word, flow as when I last listened to him 10 years ago, when Monster came out. That combined with El-P's heavy beats, which are okay, but kinda too compressed and too busy throughout the album, make thw whole thing hard to listen except in small chunks, despite its shortness. IMO Vast Aire was a better foil for El-P's style, and the Cannibal Ox beats also had more air in them, which is kinda lacking here with everything being so in-your-face.

Also, the label this was released on seems to be otherwise specializing in albums by cartoon characters, what's up with that?

it definitely was surreal to look on the back cover of the CD and see the Adult Swim and Grand Hustle logos next to each other

Adult Swim have had a Stones Throw connection for a while

i would listen just for the possibility of putting a negative review into the world but i don't want to break the 14-year streak of avoiding el-p's music that i've managed since back when that one stupid co flow video used to get played on rap city

I hated Company Flow in the 90s too, but I think El-P has gotten much better as a producer since then. The beats on the Can Ox album are on a whole different level than the beats he did for Co Flow. He still sucks as a rapper though, but the Can Ox album (where he only has one guest verse) is definitely worth checking out.

just gonna throw my opinion that el-p has never been involved in the creation of anything less than great, and that he's also a pretty damn good rapper, into the ring here.

Tuomas do you find it difficult to listen to amerikkkaz most wanted or it takes a nation.... ?

i'm still half-ehhhhh and half-sure-okay on el-p as a rapper, but i've never not liked anything he's done as a producer since the turn of the millennium.

this album is amazing btw.

this is great. so is the new el-p 'cancer4cure'. old dudes in rap otm.

it's pretty good but def. overrated and people are glossing over the flaws - production gets pretty monotonous over the span of the album and the choruses are boring. the choruses are even more of a problem on cancer4cure.

the skits and speeches on "Don't Die" and "Reagan" unnecessarily stretch those tracks.

this is way way better than cancer 4 cure which i found as wearily worthy, if not actually awful, as every el-p thing i've heard

the politics might be the worst thing about rap music, it's all a bit...standard conspiracy theory BS

and the bit where he goes on about worrying whether women will change their names is seriously eyeroll-worthy, he seems an old dude in the bad sense there

It's more complicated than conspiracy drivel, lex. He's pointing the finger at his community for falling for the likes of Reagan, both Bushes, and Obama: "We should be indicted for bullshit we incited." Plus his tone and timbre are A+.

yeah the best thing about "reagan" is that he acknowledges rap's history of bullshit conspiracy theorizing even as it falls prey to it a little bit

killer mike contains multitudes, etc.

i mean it verges on bill hicks style "every politician is a servant of the corporate overlords" simplification but the first verse's implication of mike himself (as well as rap as a whole) for selling violent pulp as a lifestyle and the second's life-someone's-lived specifics almost earn it.

standard rap conspiracy theory shit rules lex!

you sound like someone that's never truly beheld a pale horse :(

danity kane is illuminati politricks >:(

mike's politics, at least what he presents on record, are a little simplistic, but i think it's good that at least someone is putting these kinds of lyrics out there. n/a otm about the hooks and tunas otm about his flow - i like it in small doses but it does get tiring after a while. and to tie this all together, his flow does seem to stiffen up when he's trying to deliver those political punches, which make them harder to take

that was all kind of a mess sorry, ftr i agree with most of deej's stoned twitter thoughts from last night if anyone else read them

the amount of love for this record really does baffle me though, i'll never understand what makes p4k types rally around a certain record, especially rap albums. this sounds like every other killer mike record.

this sounds like every other killer mike record.

^^this is why i like it

though i think ghetto extraordinary is still his best record

the amount of love for this record really does baffle me though, i'll never understand what makes p4k types rally around a certain record, especially rap albums. this sounds like every other killer mike record.

― twittering spinster (k3vin k.), Thursday, May 31, 2012 1:35 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

k3v are you kidding, the title may as well have been "best new r.a.p. music" when they announced the fucking thing

seriously

well also they've been pretty supportive of his last couple of albums so it's not really weird that the trend would continue for a new album that sounds like his others

oh yeah don't get me wrong i like it and killer mike. pledge 2 is probably my favorite mike. it's just always funny when this kind of attention seemingly comes from nowhere. and good for him, he's had a nice career and deserves the buzz

xp m@tt

the amount of love for this record really does baffle me though, i'll never understand what makes p4k types rally around a certain record, especially rap albums. this sounds like every other killer mike record.

― twittering spinster (k3vin k.), Thursday, May 31, 2012 5:35 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Has little to do w Killer Mike and mostly everything to do with El-P, imo.

well it's the combination of El-P's production and the idea of Killer Mike as an underrated craftsman who's been toiling away all these years

the amount of love for this record really does baffle me though, i'll never understand what makes p4k types rally around a certain record, especially rap albums. this sounds like every other killer mike record.

― twittering spinster (k3vin k.), Thursday, May 31, 2012 1:35 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

k3v are you kidding, the title may as well have been "best new r.a.p. music" when they announced the fucking thing

― some dude, Thursday, May 31, 2012 1:40 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh yeah i get this, on some level it was a business decision. and it was a smart one! i'm not knocking him for it or anything, and like i said i'm glad he's getting the wide attention he's apparently getting now

outside of "reagan" this album isn't really more or less political than any other killer mike album

i think the production is good, i think El-P did a good job of trying to make his style work with mike's more southern style and it's a good hybrid IMO

agree

apparently only the clean version is available on spotify smh

?? i am listening to the explicit version on spotify as we type

lol i forgot that the last thing i heard killer mike on was a song called "slumerican shitizen"

all time song title

i really like some tracks on the killer mike fwiw

its def not surprising that this record is big & its not that i don't think good criticism hasn't been written about it, more that once something hits this critical consensus mass i feel like it's no longer about what's happening on the record & becomes a kind of boring general enthusiasm. where you end up hearing people talk about the record in revered tones

its at least a more singular / less uneven record than that big boi one everyone went nuts for, even if i like some individual tracks on that one more

While I agree (2nd para), what can you do? Just not talk about it?

its def not surprising that this record is big & its not that i don't think good criticism hasn't been written about it, more that once something hits this critical consensus mass i feel like it's no longer about what's happening on the record & becomes a kind of boring general enthusiasm. where you end up hearing people talk about the record in revered tones

i agree but i don't know what you want to do about this? i think people are pretty much honestly reviewing the record and just like it a lot. you might have some people who are just following consensus and reviewing positively because everyone else is but this gets balanced by the knee-jerk contrarians. it's more just a problem of too much criticism in general.

maybe the thing going on is some people don't listen to much southern rap unless there's a wite auteur type co-signing it (see also "climax" being probably the most acclaimed song of usher's career)

Lol the first I realised "everyone's talking about it" was seeing everyone talk about how everyone's talking about it

Having lived with it for a couple of weeks the immediate impact def wears off, it doesn't even have the repplay value of big boi let alone quik + k. Totally a fine album but doesn't merit instacanonisation (not that any album does really)

Climax surely not husher's most acclaimed! That's yeah, right?

maybe the thing going on is some people don't listen to much southern rap unless there's a wite auteur type co-signing it (see also "climax" being probably the most acclaimed song of usher's career)

― some dude, Thursday, May 31, 2012 1:21 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

are we living in some imaginary world where southern rap hasn't been dominant for like a decade and embraced by pitchfork types for a long time?

acclaimed relative to its success would be more precise i guess -- "yeah" was #3 pazz & jop, "climax" prob won't be that high

I see no Joy-Ann Reid fans on ILX, just shaking heads at how ridiculous Mike's been

KM makes up with JAR (he's going on her show), backs off from the NRA, and endorses the Socialist Rifle Association, which I just learned exists

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bhl0jEXjjZq/?hl=en&taken-by=killermike

well their reddit is certainly excited about it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SocialistRA/

Mentioned this on Twitter yesterday but how do these dudes get a free pass for "fuckboy"? Pretty clearly a homophobic term, they use it all the time, still get glittering press in Pitchfork etc. I know it's an issue in rap in general but seems especially glaring for RTJ who seem to have little to no audience outside the indie market.

― Immediate Follower (NA), Thursday, 9 October 2014 15:33 (six years ago) link

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— HBO Max (@hbomax) July 12, 2021

fuck·boy
/ˈfəkˌboi/
Learn to pronounce
nounVULGAR SLANG•DEROGATORY
a weak or contemptible man.
a man who has many casual sexual partners.
Definitions from Oxford Languages

is kinda funny that ILX went from tut-tutting the usage of the word cos of their collective incorrect understanding of what it meant to using it, if not often, at least 'regularly', if I use ILX search to confirm (which I just did)

where is the outrage over "punk" which is far less ambiguous? or all the dick sucking stuff. which I'd have hoped these dudes would have grown out of

tbf I do recall at least el-p using the bad f word in the past but (no excuse) that was rampant back then. I still wish he would stick to making beats. which I feel used to be a more common opinion than it is now

I first heard fuckboy in reference to people like bieber & if anything it was about overbearing heterosexuality as well as general dickheadery. it could have a homophobic resonance on occasion but there's far more blatant stuff surely

lol i had no idea 'punk' originally was a homophobic term

searching around and it seems like 'fuckboy' did sometimes have homophobic connotations in the past but that usage had largely disappeared or been overshadowed as it got popularised as a slang term last decade

In prison slang "fuckboy" and "punk" mean basically the same thing

"punk" is ancient homo argot

About 20 years ago a couple of dumb redneck guys were often at the lake house down the road from my inlaws and they would set off fireworks late at night and constantly yell "FUCK" all the time so my wife and her family all started calling anyone who was loud out in the woods 'the fuck boys'.

I was super confused when I heard the first RTJ record and didn't know how they picked up slang that my 50-something midwestern mother-in-law invented.

you can go back just a couple of years earlier in the killer mike discography and find some much-less-veiled homophobic terms. "fuckboy" is a step up.

I've got some bad news about ATCQ

i was enjoying BORN LIKE THIS the other day until "batty boyz" came on, this shit is everywhere

yeah that blatant homophobia is hard to ignore, especially in dancehall

i say dancehall cause that's where doom got the batty boyz slang from

yeah it was basically the f-word equivalent at my school

oops Killer Mike's got Chappelle on his new track

DBNS

That was really disappointing to see. Feels like a misreading of a large part of the audience he's gained since Run the Jewels blew up, but then again I see a lot of uncritical praise for the songs on Twitter so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Not sure how big the Anti-Chappelle Rap fan contingent is

The Chappelle intro is easy to skip at least. It's gross but not really surprising - KM hasn't taken issue at all with TI's creepiness about his daughter or any of that, BFFs with Bill Maher, etc..

not to mention appearing on NRA TV

I can understand that appearance, as he believes in Black gun ownership as a means of self-defense given the lack of support from police, which makes total sense to me in the current climate. He was a bit naive to think the NRA wouldn't pervert why he was actually appearing, for their own reasons, which is why he apologized afer.

*after