Album Review: Himanshu Suri's "Nehru Jackets"

Heems clearly puts a heavy emphasis on community-building in many ways. Like the RZA twenty years ago, Heems is building a small rap empire in New York City. He elicits strong performances from Lakutis, Despot, Big Baby Ghandi, all artists on his own Greedhead record label. There are also appearances by similar-minded blog A-listers Danny Brown, Mr. Muthafuckin Exquire, Action Bronson, and of course Victor Vasquez. Das Racist/Greedhead releases tend to use similar guest artists, evening out their inconsistency with an underlying artistic unity. And throughout the mixtape, there are little melodic and verbal callbacks to older songs that give the crew something like a mythology by simply hewing closely to catchy leitmotifs.

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Shit Everyone Says: What Does the Latest YouTube Meme Say About The People Making It?

The whole point of these Shit People Say memes is to highlight the minor ways in which we’re all different. A guy would say this to indicate hunger whereas a girl says this. The truly funny iterations of the meme make a good effort at being insightful about these differences. The more ignominious ones merely make fun of difference; they’re simply misogynistic.

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Poor White Blight: How Rapper Yelawolf (and Eminem Before Him) Turns Hip-Hop's Eye to the Trailer Park

A white rapper is an odd sort of creature. A brief survey of the media tells us that, culturally speaking, there’s no higher accomplishment in America than being a white entertainer. Unless, that is, you’re a rapper: there’s a line of embarrassment spanning generations from Marky Mark, Vanilla Ice and Snow to Tommy Hilfiger’s kid, Tom Hanks’ kid and Bob Dylan’s grandkid. Apparently, it’s still too soon for rap to have its "stealing from Robert Johnson" moment.

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Will The Real Donald Glover Please Stand Up?

It seems like Glover’s automatic response to the (perceived) defect of being a nerd is to brag about how much he gets laid. This tactic seems like a miscalculation. Half the time, Childish Gambino sounds like an un-self-aware parody of Bigger Thomas — or a pale imitation of Kanye West.

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Is "Relax" The Album Of The Decade?

When Das Racist draw on their upper-tier liberal arts education, it seems like they’re writing for educated (read: “historically white”) people, letting in white people. They’re not. If they have a primarily white audience (an assumption I don’t necessarily buy), it’s because of latent racist assumptions that education and cultural literacy are an inherently white thing.

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The Same Boys You've Always Known

It is tempting to simply write off this new song with ICP (billed as “featuring Mozart” in a parodic trumping of The Throne’s featuring Otis and Curtis) as a purposeful curveball; you could say it’s weirdness for its own sake, like White’s black, red, and white wardrobe. Doing so, though, would overlook the fact that White’s musical kingdom is built, essentially, upon the flotsam and detritus of musical history

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An Excessive Attempt To Watch The Throne

Like, the album is about wealth. But it's also kind of not about wealth, you know? Seeing a pair of really rich dudes rapping about Margiela jackets and Murciélagos is not actually about wealth. It's about the crushing poverty that basically literally everybody else experiences.

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Is Kreayshawn the Future of Hip-Hop

But the signing of Kreayshawn is actually a good thing for rap music, even if it would have been unimaginable 10 years ago. That's not to say that she (and her White Girl Mob) don't make a mess, but rap has never been a simple, unproblematic medium. 

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"I Crossed The Line"

As we see Kanye get caught up in the snares of race, class, and violence, it never seems artificial or like a set up. He just dives into his Olympic-size ego and comes up with another contradiction that normal people have learned to ignore or sublimate into one or another pernicious lifestyle choices. In this way, adding a disclaimer to "Monster" seems like a rare misstep.

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Not Another Odd Future Think Piece: Rap, the Internet and Female Agency

There are ways to be provocative and socially conscious that don’t require a litany of mental gymnastics to justify. It may seem like I really despise OF. I don’t. If you were to google my name or check out my tumblr, you may find I’ve written a lot about them, a lot of it positive. I think OF is captivating as hell, and I’m constantly struggling with why that is. (Cf, this essay.)

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Childish Gambino: Sitcom Tested, Hipster Approved

A big part of the Childish Gambino project is to destabilize traditionally white cultural codes. The semi-joke blog-to-books like the Hipster Handbook and Stuff White People Like are actually condescending in their roping off and classifying as white entire large swaths of culture like wearing sweaters and Ray-Bans, writing in Moleskines, traveling internationally, and even using Nalgene water bottles.

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Playing the Race Card Again. And Again. And Again.

Das Racist (rhymes with "glass vases") takes rap literalism to its highest. That fake Jamaican accent? That's racist. Ignoring people of color? That's racist. Saying they look like Puerto Rican cousins? That's racist. Like Don Imus? That's racist. A line from "Nutmeg" sums up their somewhat quixotic project: "Play the race card again. And again. And again. Drinks at Bennigan's." 

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