Mondays With Monchhichi: Spirituality & Live Performance

I completely forgot to post this recent interview with Pharoahe, conducted by Davey D. Davey D kinda talks too much but it’s still a great interview in which Pharoahe talks about how he tries to capture the spirit whenever he performs live.

Beautiful Skin Mix

I made a mix for a girl (who we will from here on out refer to simply as Girl) for her birthday because I’m a sucker like that. I won’t exactly be sharing it with you because yknow, it’s a gift for her and not you. But I did take some time picking out the songs and sequencing them and I thought I did a pretty good job. This isn’t saying much but this is my best mix yet (thanks also in large part to Audacity, which I’m finally beginning to learn how to use). Here’s what I included in the mix and some explanation of why. It’s mostly love/girls’ songs because I generally don’t give girls enough credit to be down with hard-assed gangster rap (except Monique, who is a 5-star chick like that) and also shottas don’t make for good hollas. But it’s still generally good rappity rap regardless.

1. Ryan Leslie – How It Was Supposed To Be

Well, except for this. I don’t listen to enough R&B to be a good judge but Ryan Leslie’s album is one of the best R&B albums I’ve heard in years. And this song has been stuck in my head for months, causing me to involuntarily sing it aloud throughout the day, sometimes rocking the harmony, betraying my high school choir roots (poorly at that …… our choir really sucked). I realize throwing this in first sounds cocky like “This is how a mixtape is supposed to be done.” But it’s just that this is the only straight-up R&B joint and I didn’t know how to fit that into the mix. I decided to tack it onto either the beginning or the end. I chose the beginning because it’s upbeat and I want to start off upbeat or fun for the mix.

2. Method Man & Redman – Mrs. International

These first four songs are all songs with fun concepts. It’s no surprise that two of them are from members of the Wu-Tang, which is prone to coming up with great concepts for girl songs (e.g. “Ice Cream,” “Killa Lipstick” come to mind). “Mrs. International” fits right into that mold with a great hook and hilarity from Redman (“Weren’t you on Maury?”). The concept fits the Girl really well too because she loves travelling the globe, is very interested in world politics, and seems to value bougie worldliness in general.

3. Atmosphere – Domestic Dog

The Girl also loves Slug from Atmosphere so I wanted to work him in. This joint off Atmosphere’s very good Strictly Leakage mixtape finds Slug extolling the virtues of picking up chicks at the grocery store. He’s usually really emo so when he gets a chance to be an asshole, it’s refreshing. Great hook too. The song reminds me of my pick up lines, which Girl really enjoys when I use them to fake hit-on her.

Lil Boosie keeps it real x ‘Mind Of A Maniac’ video

It’s kinda sad that it’s gotten to the point where I look up to this dude just for being real. Like how fake do people and the world have to be for me to put this guy on a pedestal just for being real? I’m not talking “real” in the sense of being an actual gangster like he says in his songs. I’m talking about someone who can be honest about their emotions. Stuff like The Secret and all this positive vibe shit feels real fucked up sometimes. Everyone’s thinking positive and you gotta stay positive and look at wackness in a good light and stop hating, stop hating, stop hating. And then you say anything remotely real and people just dog you for being negative. Seriously, sometimes it feels like I’ve become the one sane man in a crazy fucking world. Lil Boosie has the balls to say what he feels in the moment. What people don’t get is that the negativity lets the positivity carry that much more weight when it comes around.

After the jump, a great video by Boosie:

Things I Like About Gucci Mane’s Burrrprint

I’m slowly coming around to Gucci Mane, which is looking like a bad thing in the sense that he’s dropping a ridiculous amount of material these days and I won’t be able to keep up if I keep coming around this slowly. I’m still bumping Burrrprint, which dropped last weekend, and then Gucci has to fuck around and drop a three-part mixtape series this weekend.

The Burrrprint is his most enjoyable mixtape so far, a lot of it having to do with the fact that the beats bang so goddamn hard. But Gucci is kinda hilarious too and pretty weird. Here are all the lines/moments/aspects that I think makes Gucci stand out as a rapper on this mixtape:

Intro
-Gucci talks to the mirror on the wall a la the witch from Sleeping Beauty. Which reinforces my perception of Gucci as goofy, Alice-In-Wonderland rapper.

Dope Boys
-”I don’t feel you cuz I’m parapalegic, where’s my paralegal?”
-”I got court in the early morning, I don’t really wanna go/ Said I violated probation just because I blew my nose”
-”Gold stacks up in my closet, I can’t see my fucking clothes/ And my belly is so big, I can hardly see my toes”

Jay-Z jockin’

Jay-Z “Empire State of Mind” [ft. Alicia Keys]

J-Live “Brooklyn Public pt. 1″

I was just listening to Jay-Z’s Blueprint 3 and thought “Empire State of Mind” sounded really familiar. I tracked down this joint from rapping schoolteacher J-Live off his underwhelming Hear After album. It’s not like an instance of beat-jacking by any means but the piano line sounds pretty similar. After the jump, Suckapunk extraordinaire revealed a much more similar beat from a David Banner song that samples a character from The Boondocks. As you might’ve guessed, it’s great.

Thoughts on Drake’s ‘Forever’ and hipster rap

I feel like maybe letting the homie rangerbob go in on Drake (and blog-rap in general) might’ve been a bad look without me supplementing his rants with some thoughts on the subject. Because sometimes you gotta be direct with the people.

At this point, Drake has gotten big enough so that regular people who don’t look to the Internest for their hip-hop needs actually know of him. That’s a breakthrough for blog-rap. This shows that on some level, blogs can be used as a viable testing grounds to launch an artist from Internest fame into actual, real-life fame (though whether that’s by the power of bloggers or by the power of labels to manipulate bloggers is a different debate).

So we get to “Forever” which isn’t really special one way or the other except that it features Drake, a rising star, and Kanye and Lil Wayne, the two artists that labels are trying to mimic the most and most definitely, the two artists from whom Drake derives his style the most. One of my rap friends told me that this track, “Forever,” is what converted him. He had been hating on Drake previously but this made him give Mr. Degrassi some respect. We talked about it some and then he described Drake as “like if Kanye could rap.”

New Blog: Let Me Holler At You

I started a new blog. I spend a good amount of my idle moments thinking of terrible pick-up lines that I use on my female friends to sorta-flirt but mostly fuck around with on some self-deprecation steez. My bad for being Cedric Ceballos for a minute but I’ve been having this urge to live in the real world for a minute. Which is to say I got burnt out from blogging on the Internest. This new blog is my way of staying in the blog mix without having to really give a shit too much.

HOLLER AT ME!!!

Song Of The Day: Michael Jackson ‘Butterflies’

My day-job has been making some drastic changes lately, the main one being that employees are no longer allowed to listen to personal music devices. Instead, we must listen to one communal boombox. It’s been agonizing. To prevent myself from offing myself any time Lady Gaga plays on the radio, I’ve been burning CD’s from home and bringing them to work to play on the boombox. And it’s had this cool side effect of making me think more like a DJ with my music selection than the douchebag music critic that I usually portray. I’m actually trying think about what normal people might actually want to listen to to get through the workday. I know, what a novel idea, right?

I’ve generally stayed pretty safe so far, bringing in classics like Tribe’s Midnight Marauders and Low End Theory and Kanye’s College Dropout. I brought in Wu-Tang and Tupac too but I guess I need to find work-appropriate, clean versions before I try that again (if anyone’s actually got this, throw me a link!). Unsurprisingly, the biggest hit around the office has been this Michael Jackson mix that I nabbed from Metal Lungies. It’s tight in that it focuses on great songs from MJ’s catalog that aren’t as immediately recognizable or canonical as say, “Thriller” or “Smooth Criminal.”

“Butterflies” is one such song and it also closes the mix.