Monthly Archives: December 2018
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
