Nocando’s new video for “Hollywood”. Starring: balloon animals, souvenir shops, cigarettes, derelicts, beehive hairdos, noir-sunshine dialectics, Ripley’s Believe it Or Not, Elmo, the Low End Theory, Frank the Bouncer, doleful reggae, hoodies, popcorn, Union Station, cheap champagne, Pistol McFly, Sierra Nevada, and rap music. Nathaniel West and Weiss approved. Says James McCall, a.k.a. Gold Roger:  […]

I will probably scream until I’m Blu in the face that the Hellfyre Club deserve a fraction of the attention that other LA rappers receive. But it’s cool. I am as tired as you of rap writers getting agog that people will pay for Wale records but won’t support their personal favorite subterraneans (mine is […]

Duke Westlake, one fourth of E. Super, may just be the most overlooked producer in the greater Low End Theory constellation. Over the last two years, he’s steadily built a local rep producing for Mike Eagle, Nocando, Dumbfoundead, and others. But over the last six months, it seems that everything he’s been dropping is moody […]

Video budget breakdown for Flash Bang Grenada’s “Moisturizer”: $3,211 for Aloe Fresh Hydrating lotion. $32 for Nocando’s tennis racket. $17 for the Bjorn Borg/Richie Tanenbaum costume. Cooking dance lessons: gratis. All day long on Twitter, Busdriver has been releasing the unofficial liner notes to 10 Haters. He claims “10 HATERS actually is the ultimate recession […]

Jonah Bromwich thinks you’re not bi-polar, but more like Amy Poehler. “Put in work, son.” “Do work, son.” These expressions have become ubiquitous mantras over the last few years. We say these things casually–to friends looking to score, to siblings with job interviews. They’ve become synonyms for “good luck.” When you say things casually, they […]

In previous episodes, Open Mike Eagle has been extolled for being one of the most incisive writers in rap. Self-aware and satirical, the Chicago-born LA-based rapper doesn’t shout out James Baldwin to sound smart. He does it because he understands too well that the “world in which he was born is nothing less than a […]

Bong Rips and B.A.R.S. Like ice cream sandwiches and cornbread (kept separate), there is nothing wrong with that. We’ve heard it a hundred times. Rapper likes weed, rapper has swag, rapper is from Mars. These cliches are as calcified as coal. As someone who has incinerated enough smoke to acquire an ineradicable weirdness, even I […]

There’s been a rash of recent articles heralding the rise of “weird rappers.” From my perspective, it’s a bizarre generalization  considering that other than maybe the last half-decade, hip-hop has always been weird.  The only reason why it stopped being strange was that corporate pressure forced rappers to conform to bland thug-trap stereotypes, resulting in […]