"I'm Different"?

Couldn't really be much more the-same, the-generic, the-like-everybody-else! From delivery to content to beat....

Which is not to say it doesn't great coming out your radio, driving through LA

As Joy perceptively noted, the icy plink piano refrain would, in a movie, indicate emotions like sorrow, trepidation, sadness, doubt, regret, dread

It seems to undercut the bluster of the MC

Smore changing same ratchet rap from the local rap station Power FM

And this one from Juicy J

Again with the melancholy-eerie refrains in the background


Heard something really great yesterday on Power FM but the deejays never identify  and i didn't think to write any lyrics down to google later ....  it was a cut above, though, in the complexity of the production, the mood ...  808-snares taking the military rat-a-tat-tat thing to the point where they were verging on this textural shear slashing across the track

[Goes to Billboard Hip Hop Chart]

Ah, it was this -

Tyga, who did my favorite rap tunes of last year

Now Future, he's good, yeah, I can see that -  but in my humble Tyga's better - or rather, the beatmakers who work for him are

i mean, yeah, Tyga, as MC-ing, it's pernicious and offensive, if effective, nonsense

but these beats

they really cut the Mustard

(apologies)

i haven't got around to checking out drill  properly yet, but i got a feeling i'm going to like it

a  lot more than cloud rap at any rate

bassline on this radio rap tune is pure junglizm circa 94-95

cf

yet another song i heard on Power 106

which is the station in this town for street rap -- i.e. commercial but X-rated / minimal / hardcore...

the most aurally striking stuff you can find on the FM dial

cold and dry and hard and stark

Tyga... "Beez in the Trap"


in some senses it's just the barest extension of  the rap i liked so much in the early 2000s (dirty south, crunk, ludacris, ruff ryders etc etc) that then turned into trap

but with a High Definition upgraded quality to the production - more space and glisten... the drums at once emaciated yet with a dimension to them that feels like a quantum leap

it's like if crunk/dirty south was a movie, and this new sound is the movie digitally converted to 3D

 a lot of it, including many tracks i've not been able to identify   (because the djs neveR say what the tune or artist is), has echoes of Northern bleep or jungle

so that again adds to that slight doubt feeling of "is this really new?" because if it's not exactly a reiteration, neither is it much more than an incremental intensification of a long established template

(and for sure, the lyrical content, being utterly retrograde, adds to a sense of stuck-ness, arrested development...  a culture ever more narrowly focused on the nexus between sex and money)

still

it does have, at least, that aura of NOW about it

(cf EDM or Cataracs-style radio/club  dancepop)

you listen and you think, "it's 2012"

maybe a 2012 that hasn't advanced on 2002 as much as one would have expected, in 2002

but still contemporary