December 3rd, 2009
Only Internet rap critics complain about whether or not a rapper whom 99.9% of the world has never heard of is overrated. If there was a secret PR formula that Freddie Gibbs and his team possessed, he wouldn’t be living in the seediest part of Van Nuys, with overturned shopping carts littering the sidewalk and dudes mean-mugging you on the walk in. He wouldn’t have had to sleep on couches for the first six months of his return to Los Angeles. He would’ve dropped an album on Aftermath in 2006 and you would have heard him of him a long time ago, via the vast Interscope marketing machine.
Nor has any myopic or misguided nostalgia for UGK driven his rise in notoriety. If anything, 2Pac and Bone Thugs are more salient influences. Occasionally, good music can win critical plaudits off the merits of being good music (shocking, I know)–especially when many of his peers are shackled into making ill-fitting pop concessions or diluting their product with redundant mixtape after mixtape. Truthfully, I didn’t even realize how exceptional Gibbs’ music was until after I interviewed him for the LA Weekly, returned to the songs, and realized that everything that he’d told me was already there. He has a powerful story, he’s from a city whose story has rarely been told, he’s a skilled writer, and his flow is wicked. Find me another rapper with that same skill set and I’ll write about them. So will everyone else.
In the meantime.
LA Weekly: The Miseducation of Freddie Gibbs
Download:
ZIP: Freddie Gibbs-The Labels Trying to Kill Me
ZIP: Freddie Gibbs-”Midwestgangstaboxframecadillacmuzik”
ZIP: Freddie Gibbs-”The Miseducation of Freddie Gibbs”
Posted in Freddie Gibbs, LA Weekly | 22 Comments »
November 17th, 2009
Lost last week in the 45-post a day, ad impression shuffle was the video for Freddie Gibbs and Pill’s “Womb 2 the Tomb,” an instant-classic from Freddie Gibbs’ instant-classic mixtape, Midwestgangstaboxframecadillacmuzick. Directed by Skee TV go-to-director, Matt Alonzo, the almost five minute clip is a mini tour de force: a gothic, grainy, black and white blur of Gibbs and Pill stalking the badlands peripheral to downtown Los Angeles, shrouded by graffiti and conquered rivers, old aqueducts and faded tombstones. Their backpacks are bloated with drugs, and everything is swarmed by shadows. The clip derives a tremendous power from its solemn simplicity and concrete symbolism, particularly in context to Gibbs and Pill’s funereal ode to the art of hustling. Had it been released in 1994, it would’ve owned Yo! MTV Raps for months, earned terrestrial radio play, sold 250,000 cassingles, and won the duo face time in various rap magazines with a circulation hovering near half a million. It’s the sort of video that makes you remember why you loved hip-hop in the first place.
Instead, it was sandwiched between Teaser #2 for the next 48 Hours with Rick Ross and Triple C and pictures from a Sean Price video shoot, only to disappear from the home page of the major aggregators within the afternoon. Not to imply that Pill and Gibbs are exactly starving for media coverage. The New York Times and the New Yorker have devoted space to both, and I have a forthcoming feature in the LA Weekly on Gibbs. But despite the fourth estate attention, a salient problem persists–namely, how meaning and impact are perpetually blunted by the deafening babble of the Internet (and not in the good “perpetually blunted” way). It feels like very little matters, and when it does, it lasts only a news cycle. With listening patterns more diffuse than ever and even the most tin-foil hatted dissenters allowed a voice, there’s a sense of free-for-all, the atomization that Sasha Frere-Jones spoke of in his New Yorker essay, with rap fans clustering in like-minded hives, content to crown Wacka Flacka or Tanya Morgan the next to blow, depending on your acceptance or aversion to twang.
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Posted in Major Label, Wale, Pill, Freddie Gibbs | 45 Comments »
September 18th, 2009
You can’t trust a rapper who can’t roll a good blunt. You can trust Freddie Gibbs. During the 48 hours prior to his show with Atlanta Grind Time Rap Gang affiliate, Pill, Gibbs rolled the best blunts I’ve seen since the last time I kicked it in New York with Disco Vietnam. Durable Duracell blunts full of that kill: tougher than leather, thicker than a thigh bone, sitcom-length slow-burning blunts. Redman is getting long in the tooth and someone is going to need to teach the youth, “the way.” I nominate the Gary, Indiana native.
The only thing more impressive than Gibb’s (and Pill’s) rolling regimen is their rap ability. If you aren’t familiar with the pair, my Pop and Hiss piece should fill you in on the details. If like Ralph Wiggum you know the score, last night at On the Rox, the pair displayed why they’re the two most viable candidates for 2009 Rookie of the Year and prima facie evidence that gangsta’ rap will never die (despite what this unfortunate subhead that I didn’t write might tell you).
As the above clip displays, the sound system was muddy and their stage show still raw, but there was no mistaking either rapper’s talent, energy or inexorable march towards greatness. In a rap landscape littered with one mixtape wonders, I’m willing to wager that Gibbs and Pill will be two of the few to actually attain longevity. Hearing “Womb 2 the Tomb” and their latest collabo, “Run Up to Me,” had me hectoring their respective management on what they already know–these two need to do an album together (there has been talk of an EP but no concrete plans yet.)
Below the jump, Pill’s epic “Trap Going Ham”video, his 4080 mixtape and the latest video for “Glass,” off the forthcoming “4075: The Refill.” If you haven’t scooped Gibbs’ last two mixtapes, the links are still good. And if you already know, cop his first tape, Live from Gary Indiana Pt. 1. Ideal with a jar of that sunshine, a fifth of Hennessy, and grape Swisher Sweets.
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