Jonah Bromwich slightly prefers Ashley Banks. What made “212” great? It’s actually pretty easy to explain. 1. It came from a person that no one had ever heard of. 2. It was well-rapped, (incredibly well-rapped, actually) by a person that no one had ever of. 3. It was raunchy as hell, while being well-rapped, by […]

Jonah Bromwich blinks plenty, thank you. Meg Myers doesn’t blink enough. It’s not as if she never blinks, but they come a little too rarely for someone who’s purporting to be a regular human being. Between the fifteen seconds that the “Monster” video takes to ramp up and the fifteen it takes to wind down, […]

Jonah Bromwich doesn’t order well drinks. You could be forgiven for thinking that Mr. Muthafuckin’ eXquire has changed. If you didn’t delve too deeply into Lost In Translation, you may have found it fun: loud, lewd, and full of absurdist fantasies and shots of vodka. But there was dirty, stark realism at the core of […]

No I.D. just sent Jonah Bromwich a beat tape. Self-seriousness. It’s always been Common’s Achilles heel. When he forgets to be Common, conscious rapper and spokesman for the people, he’s one of the most compelling veterans in the game. When he casts himself in that role-model mold, he becomes a caricature, the guy we make […]

Jonah Bromwich gets more props in stunts than Bruce Willis. DC Rapper yU’s new album The Earn is not about yU. It’s about Michael Willingham Jr. The braggadocious battle rapper that was has been replaced by a fully-realized portrait of a man. yU makes reference to his government name liberally on this album and there’s […]

Jonah Bromwich sold his soul to John Milton. One of the nice things about all the musical cross-pollination of the new millennium is the way that the thinning of genre boundaries emboldens artists to crossover in ways that were once considered taboo. Danny Kiranos, a former hardcore artist, embodies that sense of uninhibited exploration in […]

Jonah Bromwich remembers back in the day …And in the summer, in the evenings, we’d listen to this guy Action Bronson. He’d release tapes all year round, but I remember, they were most perfect in the summer evenings. Even if they came out in the cold weather, the sound just took you back to the […]

Jonah Bromwich prefers Douglas Brinkley. Two years ago, Lupe Fiasco released a great mixtape called Enemy of the State. It was a staccato burst of angry politics, quickfire rapping, and a well-curated selection of beats from songs as disparate as Radiohead’s “National Anthem” and Lil Wayne’s “Fireman.” The mixtape was approximately twenty-two minutes of exactly […]

Jonah Bromwich wrote his first draft of this on a smoked banana peel. It’s hard to avoid self-deprecation when you’re standing right beside incredible talent. While yU is probably the best rapper in Diamond District (and maybe even on Mello Music) the producing wizardry is usually situated in Oddisee, whose Rock Creek Park is the […]

Jonah Bromwich only fears Hanuman, the Hindu monkey god. Rick Ross shows up on the penultimate song of Pusha T’s new album, Fear of God II. His presence underscores an important distinction between Pusha and the round mound of lavish sound. You see, we all know Rick Ross never really dealt drugs. Now Rozay has […]