Tosten Burks found love in a Popeless place. The SaveMoney dilemma is that the crew carries the Chicago underground, but is also tasked with ending the city’s insularity. A lot of new label money depends on the successful nationalization of this burgeoning family. Chance, Vic Mensa, these guys are probably dominos, for better or for […]
| Still Adrenal: Java Starr Gets “Lost with Twista, Traxster & Yukmouth | February 27, 2013 |
Jordan Pedersen is still in love with the violin player from the “Overnight Celebrity” video. For some reason, I find that I like to scowl through my day: I try to avoid being a total dick to my coworkers, but work can be dumb, the weather in Chicago is fucking terrible, and SERIOUSLY MY LIFE […]
| Team Dope With Rockboy K9 | February 18, 2013 |
If Jordan Pedersen talked much, you’d probably think he graduated college, which he did. Prior to “Team Dope,” Rockboy K9 mostly traded in somber polemics over equally downcast beats. Whereas this one flips a comparatively breezy Mayer Hawthorne sample into the kind of dynamic obstacle course that I could see Gangsta Gibbs leaping all over. […]
| MobbDeen: Sasha Go Hard’s Third Round Knockout | February 18, 2013 |
Deen survived All-Star Weekend in Houston. One of my favorite rappers working today is Sean Price. Yes, he of the unrelenting hilarity and goonery. A little while ago on Twitter, some innocent soul asked him about his favorite female rappers or a closely related question. In pure Sean P fashion, he responded, and I’m paraphrasing […]
The new Shots Fired episode on Earwolf examines Chicago rap from Common to Chief Keef and all points in between. Because Nocando and I are Los Angeles bored and bred, we brought in Tal Rosenberg, the online editor of the Chicago Reader and Open Mike Eagle, the South Side-raised online editor of art rap. Or […]
| Surveying the New Chicago underground | February 8, 2013 |
Tosten Burks won signing day. The most annoying part about Finally Rich, aside from “Laughing to the Bank,” was the Chicago hip-hop narrative it encouraged the blog mafia to settle for. Drill this, drill that. As if the only thing this generation listened to in their youth was Gucci Mane. As if there wasn’t a […]
| Does Chicago’s Chance the Rapper Have the Juice? | February 4, 2013 |
Joshua Lerner owns every Poor Righteous Teachers cassette. Today at school, I erased the dates of January from my dry-erase calendar and put in new ones for February. I thought about the 41 homicides we saw in Chicago last month, an 11-year record. Most think the murder rate will drop with the temperature as summer […]
Jordan Pedersen briefly considered going by the handle “URL Sweatshirt.” If you’re like me, the first thing you thought when you heard Chief Keef’s “I Don’t Like” for the first time was, “This shit is from Chicago?” I grew up in Chicago – the suburbs actually, to keep it one hundred – and it didn’t […]
| Living The ‘Geti Life’ | July 31, 2012 |
The man known to Rabbinical scholars as David Cohn drops C.A.R. today on Anticon. In conjunction with its release, Anticon dropped a Soundcloud stream to “Geti Life,” my favorite song from the record. According to this track, “Geti Life” means laying next to the sweaty wife, having a huge nose like ‘that girl on Blossom,’ […]
