Which SoundCloud would be your main? Your sidepiece?

Give Tosten Burks all the Grammys. Fake Berkeley pimp 100s may have given up the good fight, and Snoop Dogg’s son’s college decision somehow overshadows his father’s jheri curled keytar adventures with Dam-Funk, but the re-funkification of rap marches on. The latest classic for your young booty classes comes from XL’s next wonderboy, the Haitian-Canadian […]

Tosten Burks ordered the ravioli. If you’ve spent time in or near Wicker Park during the last decade-and-a-half, there’s a good chance cult DIY rapper Brian Wharton, more commonly known as Sharkula, has tried to sell you a CD or cassette. He tried to sell me one once, outside an Italian restaurant, where I had […]

Tosten Burks hates seasons. Blink twice—and we’re 21 months removed from Acid Rap, with Chance in the stratosphere, Vic on the verge, Chop in the studio with ‘Ye, Tink with Timba, Herb with Nicki, and Louie crowned future king of Canada. Still unclear, can Bennett and Mensah’s fellow piggy bankers squeeze into the frame? And […]

Tosten Burks asked Jeeves. Whether or not you think it’s a rapper’s obligation to write protest music during times of protest, Chicago’s Mick Jenkins cares not. An autumn removed from his eerie, brilliant, peanut butter loafer’d hydration PSA The Water[s], the windy city’s flyest Creflo Dollar critic didn’t take to the studio this embattled Christmas […]

Tosten Burks is often mistaken for Alec Burks and Trey Burke Apologies to Lucki Eck$, but Supa Bwe is Chicago’s weirdest Xanax addict. The eponymous debut EP from Hurt Everybody—the trio Supa helms with 18-year-old time wrinkler Carl and cloud-obliterating producer Mulatto—stabbed into the cold universe this July draped in Egyptian mythology, Joanna Newsome samples, […]

Tosten Burks can sell water to a whale 11. “Lyrics read like a random word poetry generator with access to Urban Dictionary, the auto-tuned bars sitting atop unassumingly beautiful and often Eastern-inspired production.” (i-D) 10. “A stripped-down, trap-inspired averaging of every commercial hip-hop track on your rooftop BBQ playlist this summer, and yet it’s bass-heavy […]

Tosten Burks doesn’t really like potato salad. And now, this week’s friendly reminder that whether or not you dig what fame and Los Angeles hath wrought Chance the Rapper, the rest of SAVEMONEY continues to kill it. Eschewing the Social Experiment’s analog pop blues that recall the early teen melodicism of Kids These Days (surprise, […]

Tosten Burks is more of a transignificationist than a transubstantiationist. The oft-hoodied, ever-bucket-hatted Alex Wiley dropped out of Whitney Young High School at 16, when he stopped being able to focus in class. The doctor prescribed him the highest dose of Adderall legal for a minor, but Wiley couldn’t keep his attention deficit disorder under […]

Tosten Burks is risen indeed. From the start, as Michael Anthony’s feather light tremor murks up an old Kanye ballad, as a sampled Cornell West calls President Obama a “global George Zimmerman,” THEMpeople’s Smoke Breaks IV asserts itself as a rebellious, eery refraction of Chicago. Two of the city’s icons, scarred. The tone is set. […]