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

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 mean ppl in THIS VERY THREAD have reviewed gucci mane mixtapes on big bad pitchfork

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?

― wack nerd zinging in the dead of night (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Thursday, May 31, 2012 2:24 PM (19 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i didn't say how large a group "some people" is or how much it intersects with "pitchfork types" although obv i'm trolling here

also i think it's pretty natural honestly for the general critical community to be late on something that genre critics/nerds have been raving about for months or years

there are, uh, def other aspects to why people care about this mike album, but that's one of them

"something" is a stupid term, i mean "artists"

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.

― congratulations (n/a), Thursday, May 31, 2012 1:19 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah and when i raised stuff on twitter i got accused of all kinds of hipster contrariness or what have you. & fair enough, i can say that i was kind of ready for this to be what we all agree is great & that kind of put me off to begin, although i have def come around on some tracks & the production on it.

i mean, rather than being like, 'i wish more people hated this' its more like, i wish this was making more waves, or causing more discussions, that it almost feels like by being so uncontroversially agreed-upon that its the same as when something is universally reviled, the battles arent being fought over it

i'm kinda suprised Fox News hasn't tried to drum up something with the "i'm glad reagan's dead" line, seems like that would be fun for those guys

i mean tbh i stopped paying attention to mike bigga (lol) around the time pitchfork dropped a FIVE STAR TRACK REVIEW on that stupid "that's life" song so dude has coded as overrated critic bait to me for 6 years

plenty of good writing/criticism can come even when almost everyone agrees

well, if you mean, causing arguments isn't a measure of quality, i agree

but when its so politically coded, surely that has to be taken into account?

maybe i'm just used to years of hearing about nwa being targeted by the fbi, how incendiary ice cube records were, the response to 'cop killer,' etc.

i guess lots of critics really supported PE though too

holding mike up to the social agitation standards of NWA or ice cube seems a bit unfair

the state of 'political rap' on a mainstream level at this point is just kanye saying the same "the government invented aids!" shit over and over and lupe fiasco managing to look dumb next to bill o'reilly. below that level of media exposure it's not like what someone as relatively unknown as killer mike is going to cause any controversies OR change anyone's mind.

no one now coud ever have that level of impact like PE or NWA. it's a different world. plus at that time rap was still relatively new to america.

yeah things are definitely different now, but the problems NWA & PE were talking about are still here.

no, the police have been fucked, they won iirc

Mike's politics are definitely more interesting than the average simplistic "conspiracy" rap bull, and def more nuanced here than they were on, say, "Burn" - and anyone for whom the "politicians are killers/corporate shills" angle seems reductive/simplistic...I think I'd better just stfu about this right now.

no stfu-ing allowed, thats why we're having discussions about this

his writing feels a little more forced on the political joints or maybe my listening gets a little more critical when you are talking about the drug war vs banging some strippers.

i guess its privileged of me to suggest that what killer mike is saying is the unspoken subtext of street rap, like, most ppl don't receive street rap that way & there's obviously an audience for this, so why shouldn't they enjoy it?

maybe what i'm feeling is this sense that mike is doing the writers' job for them & maybe thats why he's so beloved; illuminating the context for the genre so the writer doesn't have to. or that writers really like it because what he does is closer to what they do. i dunno just thinkin baout things

the 'reagan' track does stick out as a clunker lyrically to me, i quite like the beat tho. I think I prefer pl3dge to this one, but I still dig it.

with "that's life" and "reagan" there's like a big initial hit of "oh this is awesome" but then like 5 plays later I don't need/want to hear it again. like the message has been received and there's not much to get at beyond that.

the track i really didn't like was 'country fried.' if it was big k.r.i.t. no one would talk about it. i like reagan more.

is mike's first proper album w/ clunky songs like a.d.i.d.a.s worth going back to? i still bang pledge 1 & 3 (don't have 2 for some reason, should sort that.)

yes

pledge 2 is dope as well. 'grandma's house' was my shit

'i'ma shine' was my favorite off the first pledge. speaking of, SL Jones dropped a project this week too all produced by DJ Burn One

that tape is really good. Think it's Burn One's best production job to date

agreed.

This album is amazing and still like the third best Killer Mike album. Another one for the latepassapedia

how do u rank them?

Monster
Pl3dge
R.A.P. Music
Ghetto Extraordinary [unreleased album from 2005, awesome stuff]
Pledge Allegiance to the Grind 1
Pledge Allegiance to the Grind 2

it floors me that ghetto extraordinary never got a formal release

1 pledge 2
2 rap music
3 pledge 1
4 monster
5 pl3dge

ghetto extraordinary is indeed awesome

yeah pledge 2 is the shit

i forgot about this "underground atlanta" thing -- my interest is perked retroactively

this album is better than big boi's, i'll say that much

nah prefer Big Boi's, only because BB has the gift for picking weird sounds and giving T.I. a better moment to shine.

that underground atlanta comp mike did was TERRIBLE. really bad if i remember right

ha, really? shit.

Huh, weird on Spotify desktop the real album shows up, but only the clean version shows up on my phone. Unless I'm doing something wrong, which I probably am.

hit the "dirty" app

maybe I need to get a whole new dirty phone

i forgot about this "underground atlanta" thing -- my interest is perked retroactively

― fapper don (J0rdan S.), Thursday, May 31, 2012 6:00 PM (36 minutes ago)

it was kind of whatever iirc - good pill song and a couple other ok joints but other than that it sucked

also iirc was like 30 songs?

oh ha what d-40 said

this album is a banger