Four swirling organ notes and a snare tap — that's all it takes for one of the sexiest soul songs ever to get juiced up and ready to roll. Like in the past, trap remains popular today too. Dre between and The main instrumental is house style synth hits, but a nice harp accents the production. Mystery and Suspense. Description : A little melodic piano, good for trap or rap. An upbeat energetic hip hop Christmas music version of "Joy to the World.
In that case, the size is pretty much always. If you use or hear this loop in a track, please leave a link in the comments, thank you! Click my pic for more of my loops, and how to contact me for new loop packs!
Description : Cloud rap type loop for future, draingang type Answer 1 of 2 : I assume you want to make an educational rap about the human body. You really get a New York summer vibe when listening to this song and especially Blue Raspberry's vocals give off good vibes despite the serious subject matter.
These healthy habits song lyrics are available from a variety of albums. Released in , at a time when soul music was being List of songs performed. Between the strophes should be a blank line. The classical piano influences here Freddie Mercury grew up playing classical piano are very prominent and mixed hard with a lot of rock n' roll, incredible vocal harmonies, and Brian May's famous electric guitar solo.
Muhammad Ali". Browse our library of educational rap songs including: science, language arts, social studies, current events and math videos for kids. We also have sample kits for musical instruments like piano Apple Music Hip-Hop. Dance with the Devil by Immortal Technique.
With lyrics based on the Biblical passages in the Psalms , and the Epistle of James from the Latin Vulgate, and the Renaissance hymn, "Ave Rap music is fairly new still and it has evolved from various genres but mostly Jazz and Blues genres. Artist Track Album Genre.
Songs to create an intense atmosphere for the Halloween period. Birds by Death Grips. Despite missing a vital organ, Savage is a popular figure in the rap community. Say thanks to Zen Man. Get drum kits by your favorite music producers, drum kits for specific music genres, and free sample packs with individual drums. The Tiera Show. Adding an epic feeling, this hip hop beat will set the tone for a daring video that will shake your audience to its core. In honor of the Queen of Soul, we've selected 10 rap songs that sample Aretha Franklin's music.
This is my feature request gig what happens here is, you make a song with an intro, first verse, and hook and leave me open 4,8,or 12 bars to provide my feature for your song. Hip-hop has always been politically charged, but with racial and social divisions becoming ever more fractured, conscious hip-hop is making a return.
Chance's, Vic Mensa's, and Twista's verses are all rhythmically tight and on-point, and the theme of family and the regret of their disapproval is one that is very identifiable. Use the audio track and instrumentals in your next project. Low notes on a sports organ, city-style horn section, and a groovy drum beat. Def Jam Rapstar is the latest attempt to merge the worlds of hip-hop and video games.
Description : Cloud rap type loop for future, draingang type Songs to create an intense atmosphere for the Halloween period. Chill and positive background music hip-hop beat with a catchy beat. When most people around 14 would probably think of playing some sexually perverse rap song on a date, I would think of playing this song. You can see current projects seeking funding here. Lopez wanted to incorporate inclusive coloring books into her lesson plans, The Allstate Foundation fully funded her project so she was able to purchase them.
Each week, Ms. Lopez and the students would focus on a page in the book and discuss its message. And she plans to do the same again this school year. Without the support of all the donors that come together on this platform, we wouldn't have a sliver of what I've been able to provide for my students, especially during the pandemic," she says.
To help teachers like Ms. Lopez drive this important mission forward, donate on DonorsChoose. In perhaps the most universally agreed-upon choice it's ever made, People magazine has named Paul Rudd as 's Sexiest Man Alive.
Rudd, with his boyish grin and flawless skin, is certainly cute. But when you add in his well-established talent and extreme likability, the miraculously immortal year-old becomes beloved. He's got it all—the eyes, the hair, the teeth, the bod, as well as the acting chops, the humor, the humility and the genuine nice-guy-ness that makes a man sexy in the eyes of most, if not all, of us.
There are so many people that should get this before me. I just hang out with my family when I'm not working.
That's what I kind of like the most. After some giggling and shock, she said 'Oh, they got it right. She was probably not telling the truth, but what's she going to say? I would. I mean I'm going to lean into it hard. I'm going to own this. I'm not going to try to be like 'Oh, I'm so modest. But all of my friends will destroy me and I expect them to. And that's why they're my friends. And I figure I'll be on a lot more yachts. I'm excited to expand my yachting life. And I'll probably try to get better at brooding in really soft light.
I like to ponder. I think this is going to help me become more inward and mysterious. And I'm looking forward to that. He said he had to read the email twice when he received the news, and his first reaction was "Oooh, get ready for outrage. But of course, there is no outrage because Paul Rudd is a perfect choice. Nailed it, People. And just to add one more fun bit to the mix, watch Stephen Colbert put Paul Rudd through a rigorous audition process to see if he was worthy of being named Sexiest Man Alive:.
Thank you, People, for finally acknowledging the obvious. And thanks for the crushforlife hashtag that speaks for all of us. As a kid, Jamel Holmes knew he wanted to be a teacher. He would spend rainy days giving spelling tests and playing math games with other children in his apartment building in New York's South Bronx.
But throughout elementary school, Holmes never had a teacher who looked like him. It wasn't until seventh grade that he had his first Black male teacher—Mr. In some ways, he was lucky. Teachers of color make a difference, which is why education nonprofit DonorsChoose has teamed up with The Allstate Foundation to support them. An analysis published in Education Next also found that Black teachers tend to have higher expectations of Black students, which contributes to greater success.
Diversity in teaching helps white students, too. Educational laboratory REL Northwest found that white students with non-white teachers develop better problem-solving and critical thinking skills, expand their range of creativity and social and emotional skills, and increase their sense of civic engagement.
A joint initiative from DonorsChoose and The Allstate Foundation offers individuals and groups opportunities to help bridge racial gaps in the classroom. For one, The Allstate Foundation will match all donations to teachers of color who are using DonorsChoose to crowdfund projects for the first time.
DonorsChoose has also partnered with The Allstate Foundation to launch a Racial Justice and Representation category on the site, making it easy for donors to help fund classroom projects focused on increasing diversity in curricula and creating a more inclusive environment. From buying books written by diverse authors to providing materials for anti-racism education, donors can directly support teachers working toward racial equity. By creating this new category on DonorsChoose, we want to support these students and give voice to their teachers, tapping their frontline wisdom.
You can see those projects here. Jamel Holmes did grow up to become a teacher. He earned a master's degree and now teaches special education for sixth graders at East Bronx Academy for the Future, the same school he attended. Holmes uses DonorsChoose to help his students get what they need both inside and outside school.
He has crowdfunded technology tools for his classroom as well as personal care items for his students. He drives through the Bronx to give school supplies, clothing, laundry essentials and food to kids whose families are in need, and even takes students to get free haircuts.
He wants to be a role model students can turn to. Courtesy of Jamel Holmes. Schools are charged with providing a safe, nurturing and equitable environment for students and teachers. Supporting educators who are trying to create that environment by helping fund their racial equity projects is a good place to start. The New York City Marathon took place this past Sunday, as 33, runners of all shapes and sizes ran the Among them was a runner no one would have expected—an energetic white duck named Wrinkle.
Wrinkle's owner shared her triumphant running videos on TikTok and YouTube , which highlight Wrinkle's daily doings, and people have been sharing them with great joy on social media. Who can blame them? Ducks are adorable. Ducks in shoes are super adorable. And a duck in shoes running in a marathon is too adorable to handle. Wrinkle's owner wrote on the video share on YouTube:. The video of Wrinkle running in the marathon has garnered more than 4 million views on TikTok and thousands of comments.
One commenter wrote, "I know this may seem silly, but I've been so deeply depressed lately and seeing this little lady running has actually made me smile. Wrinkle responded: "As an official emotional support duck hearing this makes me feel like I'm doing my job well. Wrinkle loves you. The New York Rangers hockey team wrote, "She's a runner, she's a track star" a reference to the song "Track Star"—of course, several commenters chimed in to correct it to "quack star".
Undoubtedly, Wrinkle did not run the entire If you're wondering how Wrinkle trained for her five minutes of fame, check this out with the sound up, please :. Okay, wrinkle. You've won us over with your cute widdle waddle and the pitter patter of your widdle footsies.
The shoes are really just icing on the cake. In a world filled with division and strife, perhaps we can all agree on the delight Wrinkle the emotional support duck brings to us all. Pete Davidson, 27, has earned the reputation as one of Hollywood's most prolific ladies' men for dating some of the most beautiful A-list women over the past three years. However, there are a lot of people out there who don't understand the "Saturday Night Live" star's appeal.
Davidson is tattooed from head to toe. He suffers from Crohn's disease, has done multiple stints in rehab, describes himself as looking like a "crack baby" and only recently moved out of his mother's basement on Staten Island. But he's also been one of the most popular cast members on "SNL" for the past seven years and co-wrote and starred in the critically acclaimed, "The King of Staten Island. Here's a brief rundown of Davidson's romantic ties over the past few years.
Davidson and the pop megastar revealed they were in a relationship at the end of May and quickly got engaged. The pair called off their engagement and broke up in October after just five months together. The two were caught kissing at a New York Rangers game in January , but the pair broke up that April because Davidson had to go to rehab and Beckinsale was busy making movies.
Davidson and the "Once Upon a Time Her mother, Andie McDowell, called their flirtation "nice. Four months later, the couple broke up while Davidson was dealing with addiction and mental health issues.
Davidson and the "Bridgerton" star saw each other for about six weeks, but things eventually soured because Dynevor was geographically undesirable. Davidson and Kardashian were spotted holding hands while riding a Halloween roller coaster together, leading some to believe they were romantically involved. However, Page Six sources say they're "just friends. Obviously women find him very attractive. Guys are like, 'Wow. As Laura Snapes wrote in her review of Golden Hour :.
Golden Hour is filled with these awed revelations, undercut with enough anxiety—and, more than once, snappy in-the-pocket disco—to keep Musgraves from floating off into a fever dream. As Jazz Monroe wrote in a profile:. After sneering at the gentrifiers who swagger down local backstreets, though, he checks himself, finding a sense of empathy.
Is it when they benefit you, now that all these hipsters are employing us to play? Well, what a fucking hypocrite you are. Chart-topping dance-club diva.
Warholian pop-art star. Avant-grotesque performance artist. Oscar-nominated actress and Oscar-winning balladeer. Protest singer. Old-school standards crooner. Metallica frontwoman : Few artists in history have reinvented themselves as many times as Lady Gaga, and fewer still have done it as successfully.
The world is a weirder, more boundary-free place with her in it. She hatched herself from a semi-translucent egg at the Grammys. Her repeated and earnest disavowal of anything remotely normative was and remains plainly empowering for anyone sitting at home alone in her room, feeling like a true weirdo. The idea was always to fracture and reestablish a hierarchy. Lauryn Hill is one of the most idolized rappers of all time and an incredibly magnetizing singer who conveys resilience and heartache with every word.
On her solo debut, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill , she found her truest, most sacred self and honored that person with everything she had: She celebrated the birth of her child, freed herself from exploitative relationships, and grappled with how her celebrity status impacted her art.
Miseducation went on to win five Grammys, sold over 10 million copies, and made Hill the first female rapper to earn a diamond record. The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill is a declaration of independence. And it is a love letter to the liberated self, the maternal self and to God. It is an album of junctures: Between adolescence and adulthood, between Lauryn as one third of the Fugees and Lauryn as a woman on her own, between being a child and being a parent. She conceived of the album at 22, single and pregnant with her firstborn.
At her best Lauryn Hill flirts with legitimate prophet status, digging to her deepest to harness the power greater than herself; a power we all need to survive and overcome. She offers it to us. Startlingly prolific mixtape innovator. Originator of the Based freestyle. Leader of his own cult. Early Black Lives Matter supporter. College lecturer. Emoji tycoon. Cat lover. His benevolent cult-leader persona—a Zenned-out internet addict in tiny pants with a direct line to the wise and mysterious Based God—has certainly laid the groundwork for a generation of social media myth-builders.
From her beginnings as a Biggie protege and member of Junior M. At the height of her career, Kim courted controversy with her sexually explicit, take-no-prisoners rhymes. Only in recent years, as women in rap ushered in a renaissance, has the music world more accurately attributed Kim as a primary source.
As Clover Hope wrote in a excerpt from her book The Motherlode :. Kim brought a raw sexual energy to the genre and became the model for a generation of female rappers caught in a battle between owning their sexuality and exploiting it.
She made the new concept of a female rapper—with a sexy visual to go with their music—not a choice but a necessity. As Matthew Strauss wrote in It was difficult to know Lil Peep. You could say he was sad or depressed. He had a lot of tattoos. He sang and rapped about drugs. He died tragically young. Lil Uzi Vert has quickly become one of the most important rappers of the last decade, not just a product of a transitional moment in hip-hop but a defining star of it.
The following year, he broke out with his debut tape for them, Luv Is Rage. The tape became one of the first landmarks for a diverse, exciting rap scene that was emerging on SoundCloud. The other day she spoke too truthfully in an interview and accidentally insulted Taylor Swift; Katy Perry asked her to tour with her and—politely but firmly—she said no. The message is clear: Lorde has introduced herself to the world as someone who gives very few fucks.
A cult indie rock band should form in some out-of-the way place and seem like a secret club that would want you as a member. They should have a cute name and use punctuation in funny ways and they should sing and shout their songs in a way that demands you sing and shout along. All hail Los Campesinos! Gareth Campesinos! For a decade, nearly every word that has come out of the Los Campesinos!
Like that time he sang of an awkward hookup that was blown when a girl upchucked all over his rented tuxedo; or when he recounted that early heartbreak when he got wasted, ate too many potato chips, and then deposited the greasy snack right back onto a soccer field. They are essential experiences, embarrassments that turn into collective elation once they hit open air.
Because, for all its indecency, throwing up makes us feel better. Low emerged in with a sound so unusual that it inspired its own subgenre: slowcore. But while many lesser acts sprung from such minimalist origins have ended up repeating themselves, Low have remained dynamic, resilient, and surprising, as evidenced by their breathtakingly experimental album Double Negative. Rich Juzwiak wrote of the record:.
Double Negative would knock listeners on their asses coming from any band at any time, but it is extraordinary that Low is doing such challenging, relevant work 25 years into their career. The album is like a discovery of a new mutation of still-recognizable DNA. The London-born child of Sri Lankan refugees, M. Always contradictory, often inflammatory, M. She was the very first hipster pop star for a generation that has now created a space for many of them, from Robyn to Grimes to FKA twigs.
Simply: For all her zigging and zagging, M. Between and , M83 issued three increasingly ambitious and successful electro-pop classics that used big synths to make big music about big feelings. As Devon Maloney wrote in a profile:. Gonzalez has spent years capturing his own nostalgia on record, trying to make it breathe and soar and thrill.
All of his wistful fantasies came to life. In , a Canadian punk who used to go by the name Makeout Videotape crashed indie rock and made his mark as both a grinning prankster and a melancholy janglelord.
You have to take the whole thing—the guy who shows up in videos and onstage, and the person singing these songs—together. Mac Miller accomplished a great deal in his short time on Earth, but he was always in the process of becoming. Artistically, he never stayed in one place for long, and his life and work were filled with paradoxes—he rapped about the ache of loneliness while building a loving community, and he could make an infectious banger out of his struggle with substance abuse and depression.
Each record dug a little deeper and brought a new sense of possibility, which made his death at age 26 that much more tragic. Another damn white rapper. Did we not learn our lesson from Asher Roth? S mixtape in Eventually, the murmurs of a Wiz Khalifa co-sign gave me the motivation I needed to go on my cruddy family desktop and download the tape to my iPod classic.
And shit. I came across some of his music videos, and this clean shaven, brightly smiling kid only three or four years older than me was really spitting. Soon enough, I watched Mac change, navigate life, and fight to not lose himself, all while feeling those same feelings myself.
In the past 25 years, Madlib has risen to eminence as the underground rap polymath of a generation. Both shared a magpie eye for vintage sounds, but Madlib showed little interest in translating his jaundiced vision into pop, instead coveting the attic-y and moth-bitten. His resulting body of work—released via a toy box of alter-egos like Yesterdays New Quintet and the helium-voiced rapper Quasimoto—is a sprawling, singular genre unto itself.
Listening to music can be a way of making it. Few artists understand this better than Madlib. Across dozens of releases and nearly as many alter egos, the West Coast hip-hop producer, DJ, multi-instrumentalist, and de facto archivist born Otis Jackson Jr. Madlib places these moments at the center of our attention, stuttering and alive, their significance impossible to ignore for those of us who might miss it otherwise.
Cue up one of his beats side-by-side with its source material and you may be surprised at the similarity. But such an attempt at demystification would miss the point of his music. Some producers specialize in manipulating their samples until they are unrecognizable; for Madlib, the hearing itself—the noticing—is as important as whatever happens after that.
The Magnetic Fields redefined, if not single-handedly invented, dead-pan indie pop. In fact, its place near the end of the album almost signals—more than the impact of the breakup—his growing mastery as a songwriter. It suggests that our deepest wisdom can be located in our most personal thoughts.
His music builds a sensuous world around the endless, perhaps fruitless, pursuit of monogamy, even when the idea of a minute groove was and still is quaint and foreign. The long-stroke idealization of sex as intimate connection ran counter to romance-challenged, freaky-sex tunes storming the charts around the same time, like R. As Rawiya Kameir wrote in Offset, Quavo, and Takeoff must have realized early on in life that repetition is the mother of all learning. The Migos became mainstream stars.
The song itself is a perfect distillation of everything that makes the Migos irresistible: a Gucci Mane-derived gift for quotables, a sizzling Metro Boomin beat, ad-libs for days, and an ear for perfectly placed guest stars—in this case, a before-he-was-huge Lil Uzi Vert, rapping about falling asleep in a jacuzzi.
Soon enough, the Migos were matching chart feats once set by the Beatles, cementing their status as generational titans. As hip-hop became the dominant force in popular culture—and Atlanta, the dominant force in hip-hop—trap-inspired production suffused the mainstream. Mike WiLL went on to produce many of the most popular songs of the s, as he adapted his immersive, detailed instrumentals and thundering beats across hip-hop and pop.
Mike WiLL Made-It, so named by Gucci Mane in the thick of his prolific mixtape run, has expanded his repertoire with radical pivots—zany psychedelic trips and chic pop promenades. When WiLL shared instrumentals from his discography, it was a dizzying flex, a colorful mosaic of pop-trap stems that omitted key moments by mistake. There are so many jams he forgets some. The album delves into that harrowing moment in the vanity mirror when you realize what others see does not match your reflection.
How can they think you are so big when you are actually so small? His funk- and soul-sampling productions are as deep as house music gets, by turns playful, sensual, and militant.
Rather than positing a break from the past, he explicitly positions himself within established traditions—soul music, roller disco, the black church. In a Red Bull Music Academy lecture in , he confessed to having made a track on the demo equipment at Guitar Center once, when he was young and broke.
That Dixon spent the entire lecture having his afro combed out only contributed to his mystique: part trickster, part philosopher, and all keeper of the flame. Singer-songwriter Moses Sumney broke through in the mids with a quavering, powerful voice and shapeshifting music that draws on folk and avant-garde pop. In , the Los Angeles-based artist released his debut, Aromanticism , a stirring take on intimacy that defined his equally lonesome and sensuous sound.
His interpretation of greyness is not just the kind of cloudiness that sometimes marks his temperament, but the kind that rejects binaries, that asserts that life is not lived in blacks or whites but in the gloriously complex in-betweens.
The album is sprawling and yet tight, dense but accessible, an elevated version of the things that have become his signatures in recent years: artful lyricism, conceptual depth, playful vocals and melodies, unexpected sweeps of soundscape. He, it seems, wants neither, and both. Fronted by vocalist Matt Berninger, whose baritone mumble often accompanies the kind of unromantic adult anxieties rarely found in rock music, the Cincinnati transplants outlasted many of their peers in the Brooklyn art community of the s.
Like R. The fact that no one can talk about the National without invoking their dependability might feel a bit unfair to them, or at least a bit tired. Consistency is not boring. Consistency is a miracle, a small act of defiance against entropy.
Berninger has compared the band to a marriage, as all band members do, but their music feels particularly devoted to the quotidian nature of lifelong unions, the way that your success is measured in time, how each year together turns your commitment into its own kind of monument. Renowned for her indomitable singing, she has always demonstrated an equally commanding voice as a songwriter, spelunking further and further into the human condition.
As Sam Sodomosky wrote in his review of Hell-On :. She sings of bloodshed and mystery and revenge, but in her albums there are also pleas for basic compassion that are intimate and deeply felt.
Mangum sings about himself and the people he knows. Instead of mountaintops and oceans, he sets his songs in bedrooms and public parks. His characters smoke cigarettes and hate themselves for being horny. They break up and hook up and yearn for each other like teenagers. Hailing from Vancouver, British Columbia, the New Pornographers barrelled onto the scene at the turn of the century with the type of ecstatic power-pop anthems that other indie rock bands were often too self-conscious or belligerently difficult to offer up.
The term is usually reserved for one-off vanity projects by famous people with too much time on their hands. And besides, the results of the supergroup collaboration are almost invariably doomed to be regarded as secondary and inconsequential. You listen to his Old Testament-style narratives and hear love, murder, anguish, and lust, featuring people who are gripped by anguish and angry at God. You have to search long and hard to find a punk rocker who has aged so gracefully. People die in Nick Cave songs.
They get wiped out in floods, zapped in electric chairs, and mowed down en masse in saloon shoot-outs. But in the years since his celebrated debut, Space Is Only Noise , he has pushed himself far beyond those origins, turning his hand to experimental soundtrack projects, heady psychedelic rock, and more.
Sirens , his ambient-leaning follow-up, conceived partly in reaction to the rise of Donald Trump, illuminated the cyclical nature of power and the illusion of democracy. Can we get out of this abstract bubble? How can we resist? She tweets about ways to organize, runs a book club, and releases music that dreams of revolution.
As Rawiya Kameir wrote in a essay that touched on how artists are grappling with issues of social justice today:.
But instead of becoming defensive and issuing a Notes-app apology, she engaged with the ideas she was challenged with, did her own research, and publicly admitted she was wrong—much like she did when she discovered her original stage name included an offensive slur. In that twin vulnerability and accountability, I see a model for what it might look like for artists and the general public to engage with one another in a meaningful way. In a profile, Mike Powell wrote :.
His early recordings are dim, insular pieces of music characterized by handmade cassette loops, percolating keyboard arpeggios played on an old Roland Juno he inherited from his dad, and washes of ambience that sound like third-hand field recordings of weather on other planets.
Returnal, released in , had a bigger, cleaner, and more conventionally epic sound. The foggy, loop-based follow-up Replica sounded like a deliberate reaction: Toy-like and repetitive instead of open-ended, made over the course of a few feverish days using micro-samples from old commercials, an album conceived of almost as a game instead of some oceanic chunk of personal expression. That these artists were an average of 5-and-a-half years old when Riot! Mike Hadreas began Perfume Genius in the shadows, with two albums of delicate piano melodies, vocals buried beneath clouds of feedback, and heart-rending honesty about the hardships of living and loving as a queer person.
While as an artist, his catalog is a grab bag, his production work both solo and with partner Chad Hugo as the Neptunes has spanned generations, from the era of N. Just listen to this supercut of songs that feature his signature four-count intro to be reminded of his decades-long consistency. As Carrie Battan wrote in Pharrell Williams occupies the sideline of culture so compellingly that it often becomes its own unique stage.
With his hushed voice and his faith that every fleeting thought and passing emotion might reveal a deeper truth, Phil Elverum of the Microphones and Mount Eerie brought new intimacy to indie rock. But his essential approach has been remarkably consistent and speaks to the power of simplicity—if you look deeply enough and say something true, a quiet melody and basic chord progression is all you need to get it across.
The album sounds like an Elverum work. The music is low and murmuring. His voice is hushed and conversational. The theme of impermanence can still be felt. Unlike many works about grief, though, there is no glance towards redemptive larger meaning, which makes it all the more bracing.
Listening to it is like pressing your hand against ice and leaving it there. In his review of that album, Sam Sodomsky wrote :. Phoebe Bridgers is a master of collapse.
The year-old California native writes songs for those moments when things fall apart, when language fails, when you long for so much distance that you need a spaceship to reach it. While Punisher is only her second full-length collection as a solo artist, Bridgers has already established a distinct worldview. It can be sad, but she is also the first to call bullshit on letting one emotion consume her. Across the s, Phoenix honed their sophisticated take on arena rock music enough to actually start headlining arenas around the world.
In his review of that breakthrough album, Ryan Dombal wrote :. The issue of thematic directness is especially important to Phoenix—this is an established indie band writing songs about love that are armed with hooks primed for a mainstream embrace. Flaunting a devil-may-care style marked by squeaking ad-libs and a delivery that made it sound like he was rapping while chewing gum, Playboi Carti helped lay a foundation for a community of rappers on SoundCloud in the s.
He also pissed off a lot of hip-hop fans who were taught to respect traditional lyricism above all else. Being a great rapper has never been a prerequisite for making great rap music, but few rappers have ever tested that premise quite as aggressively as Playboi Carti. On his self-titled debut , the twitchy Atlanta rapper compensated for his shortcomings as a lyricist with vision and spirit, bouncing his sticky ad-libs off of gloopy, gummy beats that played out with the insane logic of a Double Dare obstacle course.
Die Lit is all cream filling, no Oreo. In November , before he even had any music out, Pop Smoke appeared on the YouTube channel of New York street rap interviewer Melz TV with the confidence of a comic book villain promising he would soon take over Brooklyn. Soon, his roaring voice could be heard on every block in New York City, from the row houses of Canarsie to apartment complexes up in the Bronx, and well beyond. As Alphonse Pierre wrote of that moment:.
Have you ever had an NYPD officer throw you against the wall and aggressively pat you down in search of drugs you never had? Have you ever made that eye contact with an officer where you can just tell they think nothing of you? It openly unifies and helps define our current rebellion.
Those same qualities also defined the music of Prodigy and Havoc, a duo who helped form the vocabulary and bedrock of New York rap in the s. Prodigy in particular stood firm in this authenticity throughout his solo career, until his death in The Infamous marked the moment that the language in gangsta rap shifted from corner scrambles and specific vendettas to all-out war, endless and impersonal. During their astonishing s run, Clipse released several classic albums and mixtapes, perfecting a coke rap aesthetic that was thoroughly catchy and hardcore.
With musical partners the Neptunes, Clipse have crafted 12 unrelenting tales of desperation and distribution, glamour and gloating. Lyrically, the album is spare and incisive—wordplay abounds but the punches are quick and devastating—and musically, Malice and Pusha-T have arguably snatched the best dozen Neptunes tracks in years.
As the Roots were navigating new commercial success at the turn of the millennium, Quest was already looking for ways to be more than just a drummer. Moore wrote :. Before the sessions for Things Fall Apart began, drummer and bandleader? He was spending time with Voodoo engineer Russell Elevado, learning new ways to manipulate sound to give his own music a more granular, less studied feel.
The best rap of that era had to feel at least a little gritty: Though the Notorious B. Realizing he needed to improve as a producer,? Over the course of three albums before breaking up in , the New York dance-punk band matured into beatific and magisterial art-rockers. As Ryan Schreiber wrote when naming Echoes the number one album of Treble-charged guitars attacked like guard dogs and back alley killers, lunging out with knives drawn and stabbing furiously.
When this era enjoys its renaissance in 15 years, we will remember this album: Nothing says more. As the mainstream American music industry opens its arms more widely to Spanish-language music, more work remains to be done.
As the internet homogenizes individual music cultures into a big, studio-quantized mish-mash, how do musicians retain the singularity of the hyper-local, often dissipating histories of their cultures?
It is one of the most exciting and passionately composed albums to appear not only in the global bass tradition but in the pop and experimental spheres this year. And they just might be the only group that can pull off pointed political statements and then remix them using nothing but noises made by cats. As Nate Patrin wrote in The connection makes a kind of retroactive sense going back to their early s solo debuts, Fantastic Damage and Monster. Both albums seethed with the anxious funk of retrofuture s-and-synths production that rattled trunks and cages with unrestrained intensity.
And both portrayed the artists as out-of-control forces trying their damnedest to stay true to friends, family, and hip-hop while confronting disenfranchisement, abuse, and cynicism.
That their creators would gravitate towards collaboration makes even more sense now than it does with hindsight in mind, as the hooks to the head of Cancer for Cure and R. Music shared not just a producer and a timeframe, but the kind of catharsis-fueled defiance that career no-sellout vets live and breathe. No excuse to relax here. Blige, Usher, and TLC. As Clover Hope wrote in a recent retrospective review of that album:. Back up. A man, no matter how devoted, no matter how selfless, no matter how in love, needs shelter.
Otherwise, a man will die of exposure and hypothermia. A man can't put up with that kind of isolating behavior. A man needs friends! Once a man's whole support system erodes out from under him, a man will be bitter, ungrounded, and alone.
And a man's mental health will deteriorate. This is not what happens "when a man loves a woman. An abusive woman. A woman who, in truth, only loves a woman. Side note: Lest it go unsaid, there is way more than one way for a man to love a woman. Maybe they spend every waking moment cuddling and bopping each other on the nose. Maybe they sleep in separate bedrooms. Maybe they dress up in large, plush cat costumes and refer to each other Mr. And when a man loves a man, I imagine it feels much the same.
Or when a woman loves a woman. Or when a gender nonconforming person loves a gender nonconforming person. Regardless of the depth of commitment, living situation, or combination of genders or sexual orientations, there's no one-size-fits-all love solution.
Every relationship is a unique snowflake. Variety is the spice of life. Necessity is the mother of invention. There's more than one way to skin a cat. A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. It doesn't matter if it's the right metaphor, as long as it's a metaphor. Point being: Generalize at your peril, Sledge. And please, seek help! You can do this! And if you ever find yourself in a similar situation, please give these people a call.
This song is perfect. You should always be listening to it. If you're not listening to it now, smack yourself in the face and Google it.
It's just that important. I am singing the phone book. You are weeping like a tiny baby. Over pounding drums and a soaring melody, Heart sisters Nancy and Ann Wilson deliver a primal tribute to the one true romantic fantasy shared by every living being on Earth: picking up an unnervingly attractive man for one night of mind-blowing sex and then releasing him back into the wild to bone — but never quite as compellingly ever again.
Counting the days since. The relationship in "All I Wanna Do" seems too good to be true. And it is. Because it's not an equally loving ,or even equally lusty, pairing at all. Good at recognizing no-win situations and delicious with lemon?! For a while, things are humming along just fine, like any wholesome, illicit, anonymous affair should:. Sure, many of us might hesitate to pick up a strange leather-jacket-clad man standing on the side of the road for a no-strings-attached screw, but our narrator just has a feeling about this guy, and sometimes, you gotta go with your gut.
But then, without warning, the song starts to sound less like an all-time great romance and more like a story men's rights activists tell each other as they vape around a campfire:. I'm not a poet. Symbolic language often eludes me. But unless "flower," "seed," "garden," and "tree," suddenly mean wildly different things in the context of human reproduction than they have since sex was first invented in the earlys, we're talking about a surprise, non-mutually-consensual pregnancy!
Of course, metaphors are opaque, interpretations vary, etc. You might be tempted to think, "Maybe Heart meant something else by that.
One: The narrator of the song is recently-deceased Jerry Orbach from this creepy New York City subway ad from nine years ago:. Photo by eyedonation.
Cool, so this all makes sense and is in no way the nightmarish scheme of a deranged sociopath who has now wrecked not one but two lives. The best you can say about that is that it's not technically illegal, and that leather-jacket man probably should have been responsible for his own birth control. Or, at the very least, asked more questions.
It's not romantic even the Wilson sisters themselves agree. And at the end of the day, the shadiest character in this song is somehow not the rain-soaked hitchhiker wandering to nowhere in the night. You know, that guy? That guy! As catchy as "Candy Shop" is, as fun it is to dance to, and as cathartic as it can be to scream in the middle of a crowded fraternity house at 2 a. The lyrics are The beat is kinda basic. The hook is like the music they play when Abu Nazir sidles scarily by in "Homeland.
It doesn't get played much anymore. When it does resurface, it feels It's not a song you'd put on a mixtape for your crush. It's not a song you'd play for your spouse when the kids are at home with the babysitter and you've got nine hours to tear up the Piscataway Hampton Inn.
It's certainly not a song you'd include on the video photo montage you made for your grandparents' silver anniversary. You wanna back that thing up or should I push up on it? The bass drum hits. The MIDI violins whine. The singer starts filling out his fellatio permission slip. It's only been 20 seconds, and you're already getting ready to hang it up with "Candy Shop. But then Go, cunnilingus doves, go! Rather than simply imposing his desires on the person he's with — a la the dude in "God Only Knows "I'm going to invest my entire sense of self-worth in you!
But here's the key thing : the lady on the receiving end of those desires? She's clearly into it. And we know this because she says so. The lines of consent in "Candy Shop" are bright red, highlighted, and soldered into the weirdly sticky club floor. Meanwhile, Robin Thicke is outside trying to convince the bouncer that his uncle is a lawyer.
No matter how nasty they freak, it will be intimate. It will be private. There will be no revenge porn the epilogue to " Blurred Lines ," to wit, would definitely be a protracted, emotionally devastating lawsuit. Sexual compatibility is key to the survival of any relationship, whether years, weeks, or very possibly in the case of "Candy Shop" minutes long.
She may have a high sex drive, but dude is graciously offering to accommodate her. What a gentleman! These crazy kids just might go the distance after all. Thanks, Obamacare! The "Candy Shop" guy is a keeper. Because he's not a hero or a stranger in the night or a funky, shimmering love god. He's a good partner. But when you strip away the swagger, the back beat, and the weird strings from "Best of Public Domain Middle Eastern Music ," by the end of the song, both people are satisfied.
0コメント