Three generations of art-rap coming together to get cold. If you’ve been following LA rap for the last decade, you don’t need me to play connect the dots. The Blowed influence filters in through the abstraction and questioning of false claims. Even if you exclusively want rap harder than basalt, you can’t deny the honesty or emotion on display. If you like Drake, you should like this. And if you dislike Drake because the blood seems hand-painted onto his sleeve, you should also like this. It’s polished and raw at the same damn time.
Milo offers the daffodil eating riddles expected from a Philosophy major. Busdriver and the college senior split hook duties. Nocando slits throats down the middle, the bridge between the generations. Mike Eagle is missing, but you can hear him airing out lucid complaints with J. Baldwin’s ghost. This is the second single leaked from Hellfyre Club’s Dorner Vs. Tookie compilation. Two crazed but weirdly rational approaches to the same problem. Nocando, Milo, and Busdriver find the third way — not the watered down 90s idea of Clintonian compromise. But the ability to build an extra lane on a well-rolled highway. This is where Blowed was supposed to be in 2013, allowing the old ideas to seep in through practice and osmosis and re-routing through new sounds, syllable placement, and attacks on your banality. It feels redundant to admit inherent bias, so I won’t even bother. But I do believe that people should stop paying attention to every other crew and their rapper friends. This is one of the best.
