Tag: #RushHourRap

#RushHourRap – Clear Soul Forces – Get No Better

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A song that dropped back in 2012 and is one I only stumbled onto after it was used on Toucher and Rich as a bed coming back from commercial. Love the old school Mos Def/Talib Kweli sound and style. But this is what I love about hip hop man, this beat just sounded familiar to me so I was trying to track down the sample and it led me to this artist/producer Alien Folk Urban Aire / Kankick, which led me to the original sampling of this Latin jazz artist, Airto. Unreal. Thats exactly why Kanye will forever be one of the best producers to ever lay down a beat. The samples the man was able to repurpose are just absurd.

It would seem like these guys never really popped mainstream, but as we all know you can make a hell of a living as an indie rapper these days. So I may be nearly a decade late on these guys, but better late than never.

#RushHourRap – NF – The Search

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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.

#RushHourRap – On This Day 17 Years Ago 50 Cent Released Get Rich Or Die Tryin’

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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.

Hey Google, play 50 Cent radio!

#RushHourRap – Eminem – Darkness

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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.”

#RushHourRap – Lupe Fiasco – Switch

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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.

#RushHourRap – Logic ft. Eminem – Homicide

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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.

#RushHourRap – Drake – Draft Day

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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.

#RushHourRap – Logic – Supermarket

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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.

#RushHourRap – Travis Barker – Let’s Go

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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