Review: Drake – Scorpion
As sometimes happens, Drake’s symbolic infallibility cracked, and the fruit was an album that drastically lowers the listener from heaven to earth – nothing is more everyday and sobering than the stuffy, insincere dude who tries to put himself in a favorable light.
If I were offered to describe Drake’s “Scorpion” in one epithet, I would say that the disc is unfair, and at once in every sense of the word. This is probably the worst thing that can be said about the Drake album due to the niche it occupies in contemporary pop culture. There are three reasons for this:
1. What Drake sings about Continue reading
RUSSIAN RAP AS A DETONATOR OF THE REVOLUTION
A lot has already been written about the reasons that prompted young people to come out to protest against corruption, but one of the main aspects – the impact on the minds of modern and very evil Russian rap – has remained almost unnoticed. About how rapper Oksimiron (Oxxxymiron) and others had a hand in “rocking the boat” – journalist Alexey Papperov:
“Everyone is asking why teenagers went to a rally against corruption. It is interesting to remember that the most popular music album “Vkontakte” in 2015–2016 was “Gorgorod” of Oksimiron – a powerful political statement with a conceptual history about the soldier who sold out, who was involved in a power struggle against the depraved and all-powerful Mayor. Continue reading
“Graduation” 10 years later
“Graduation”, of course, was not the first loud disc in Kanye’s discography. By 2007, the West had the hands of a full-fledged mainstream artist, who wasn’t playing a gangsta authenticity card and telling more close and comprehensible stories to a wide white audience with humor and to think about college, American materialism, faith, love and family. Which, of course, was not an absolute novelty (before Kanye, ATCQ and Outkast, for example, were engaged in such things), but considerably refreshed the hip-hop story space of that time. Continue reading
“Long.Live.A $ AP” after 5 years
Long.Live.A $ AP, released exactly five years ago, is an extremely rare example of how a young promising artist managed to sit on two chairs at once. Usually, guys like Rakim are faced with the following problem – the greedy fat A & R of a large label hangs over them, and he already has a clear album structure in his head that should target everyone – boys, girls, backpackers, dandies and ghetto blacks. For each segment of the audience on the album should have its own song, for the most solvent – a single for TV, radio and clubs, the intro should be ambitious, and the outro should be soulful. Naturally, with such initial conditions, the album cannot turn out to be solid and authentic in sound, and in the zero years this formula (by which 90% of the records were released) destroyed a large number of interesting artists who had to play by the rules of their owners. Continue reading
Top foreign nonformat albums
A bit late, but still publish our top for 2017 from the best foreign releases that do not have (or have a minimal) relation to hip-hop and are usually published under our regular column #Neformat.
Gord Downie – Introduce Yerself
October 17, died Canadian musician Gord Downey. His death did not come as a surprise, because back in May of 2016, he was diagnosed with brain cancer in an advanced stage. A week after the death of the artist, his latest album “Introduce Yerself” (“Imagine Yourself”) was released, and he began working on it with the frontman Broken Social Scene after learning about the impending death. As it becomes clear from the introductory part – the disc is entirely composed of elegies, so that depression and melancholy come through from every line, every word and chord. Continue reading
