NF is someone that I stumbled onto last year and is kind of a throwback to the underground rap days. Listening to this guy rap is like reading someone’s diary without any filter, which is refreshing in this era of mumble rappers. Back in college I used to scour HotNewHipHop for the up and comers, but given that I’m a 30-year-old guy with a 9-5 these days I was a little late to the party on NF. With four albums released since 2015 he’s been on a tear dropping music and even hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts, but the first time I saw him really hit mainstream was on an ESPN college football commercial last summer.
For a white kid from the burbs, this album was like being transported to another world. I love Jay-Z, but was probably just a little too young to really understand what The Blueprint was about when it was released. When Curtis Jackson came out of nowhere in 2003, co-signed by Eminem, he took off like a rocket because he was authentic with a wild origin story to back him. In what is nearly an urban myth at this point, 50 cent was shot 9 times and lived to tell the tale.
There were FIVE singles from his debut album, three of which I’ve heard on the radio within the last week – 17 years after their release. Get Rich or Die Tryin’ had one of the greatest B-sides of an album I can remember too. What Up Gangsta, Patiently Waiting, High All the Time, Heat, Like My Style, Don’t Push Me, Life’s On the Line are all still bangers to this day. I feel like I forgot about a lot of these early 2000s albums once they stopped putting CD players in cars. I have like 50 CDs in my trunk with no way to play them. Damn technology.
Em dropped his new album “Music to Be Murdered By” in the middle of the night a couple weeks back and it definitely shows that Shady’ still got the juice as it hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts. There aren’t any instant classic singles here nor are there many radio friendly tracks, but there is a ton of elite rapping. Eminem shows off his unmatched lyrical dexterity while recruiting some big names to fill out the album’s 20 songs. Ed Sheeran returns for his second Eminem collab on “Those Kinda Nights,” he brings out old friend Royce Da 5’9″ for a few songs, as well as the likes of Skylar Gray, Anderson .Paak, Q-Tip, Joell Ortiz and more. The song everyone is going to remember from this album though is the incredibly morbid track “Darkness” where Em raps from the perspective of the Las Vegas mass shooter. The song is more “Encore” than “The Eminem Show” and whether it’s profound or tasteless is up for debate, but it’s definitely an engrossing track that samples Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sounds of Silence.”
I was in my daily cocoon of sadness sitting in soul crushing traffic this morning when I opened up YouTube and went down the Lupe Fiasco rabbit hole. It wasn’t long before I came back to the 2006 mixtape heater “Switch.” In addition to the 10,000 pound bass booming throughout, this song is incredibly clever and shows just how slick Lupe was back in the day. Lupe himself even describes the song as “a little science experiment” as he literally switches back and forth from subject matter without missing a beat.
In the song Switch, Lupe runs an “Experiment” during which he lays out for the listeners several different facets or niches that all rappers tend to fall into. Every time the background says “Switch”, Lupe will change the flow, meter, cadence, vocab, and topic to correspond to another niche of rap. – Genius
So turn up your factory ass system or pop in your headphones and let this Lupe classic bang.
Logic + Eminem. Two of my favorite artists of all time jump on the same track to put together an absolutely hectic flurry of rhymes. And the beat bangs too. Sometimes with tracks like this you get one or the other. Incredible flow and wordplay, but a lackluster beat. Well Bobby Tarantino came hard here and Marshall Mathers came in to close it out. What I’d give to see these two tour together. Hey, Logic did open for Em at a recent show in Hawaii so it could happen.
Draft day, Johnny Manziel Five years later, how am I the man still? Draft day, A. Wiggins Fuck that other side, bitch we stay winnin’ Aw man, you know I had to do it for you You know I had to do it for you Yeah, suits and ties yelling out, “Pay the guys”
It’s NFL Draft Day baby so what other song could I possibly have gone with today? A little Throwback Thursday Drizzy to go with your morning coffee.
Switching things up a bit today and rather than picking just one song for #RushHourRap I’m giving you a full album because its that good. Logic released the experimental Supermarket recently, but it isn’t just an album, its a soundtrack to a NOVEL he wrote and dropped from the clouds. My guy Bobby Tarantino is a five tool player it would seem.
Supermarket is yet again another departure from what you would expect from Logic. He’s made lyrically stunning rap albums, trap albums, conscious social issue albums, and now he’s created something that I can only describe as a mid 2000s alt rock album, but in the best way. A lot of crooning, piano and acoustic guitar make this sound like something you could just as easily hear in a swanky lounge as you would on HotNewHipHop.
Although it got crushed by outlets like Rolling Stone, I dig it. I’m partial to the titular track “Supermarket” but this entire album is excellent. Check out a few that I picked out below.
So I finally got around to listening to the Travis Barker episode of the Joe Rogan Podcast and it was an excellent way to spend an hour and a half. Travis is one of the most interesting dudes in music with some crazy stories including everything from the early days of Blink 182 to his insane airplane crash but it also got me thinking of this underrated project from back in 2011; Give the Drummer Some. It was really something out of left field and as Travis described it, there had never really been a spot for a live drummer in a rap performance. Well he put this album together from scratch and got some of the biggest names in rap to appear on the album. LETS GOO
Fort Minor is one of the greatest blips in rap history in my opinion. I remember stumbling onto Fort Minor my junior year in high school when Petrified (remember that??) dropped in 2005 and just being blown away. I was always a big Linkin Park fan so a new Mike Shinoda project was something I would have given a shot regardless, but this album was way more than I ever expected it to be. The one thing I always remember about the album Rising Tied was that Shinoda famously did *everything* on it.
“Shinoda told Corey Moss of MTV News that he imposed on himself a requirement to play all the instruments and write all the lyrics to the album except for the strings, percussion, or choir parts.”
And it still stands up FOURTEEN years later. Holy shit I’m old.
Something I never knew until just now though was that Jay-Z was an executive producer on the album, which makes sense after the massive success Jay and Linkin Park had on their 2004 mashup album, Collision Course.
Remember the Name is arguably the most popular track from Rising Tied, but Where’d You Go was a bigger hit commercially (it was their only single to crack the Top 25) reaching No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100. This may not be the most talked about album, but I still have it in rotation all these years later. It even turned me onto indy rap groups like Styles of Beyond.
Unfortunately for whatever reason this was a one time thing as Fort Minor never made another album again. So for all the uninformed, below are a few of my favorite Fort Minor tracks AKA just about the whole album.
I know we’ve been doing a lot of J. Cole lately, but hey the guy is on fire right now. Yesterday he dropped the visuals for his latest single, Middle Child, and it is a trip. J. Cole, so hot right now. J. Cole.
I’ll let HotNewHipHop break it down for you below:
The visuals start out on a dark note with a group of figures behind the rapper as he sings for the camera. Things brighten up when he sits passenger side in the whip, ending up in a lavish cabin by the fireplace. A woman bounces her booty back and forth in the corner of the room with Cole paying little attention to her. The most lighting in this video comes when Jermaine rolls through the supermarket, casually flowing through the juice aisle with so much swag. This is one of the best videos of 2019 and it may remain in that category at the end of the year.
The 300s 