hip hop – Jason Toney

Ruby Ibarra sits on the NPR Tiny Desk Concert stage with her left fist raised and wearing an "I *heart* Pinays" t-shirt

July 2, 2025 / 0 Comments

Freedom is a Joyful Noise

I’m at The Regent Theater in Downtown LA to see Ruby Ibarra, the 2025 Tiny Desk Contest winner from the Bay Area, perform. Local public media stations, including LAist and KVCR, are in the building, handing out fans and making the case for public media. The Regent is packed with a classically multicultural Los Angeles crowd—this time, with a strong showing from the Filipino community. People came out to see the diminutive Pinay rapper with a big voice and even bigger presence.

Initially scheduled for June 11, the show was postponed when the mayor instituted a curfew in downtown during protests against ICE raids that are still tearing through our communities.

Ruby doesn’t mention the delay until her final song, but when she does, she doesn’t mince words. She’s a first-generation immigrant, and her music centers the Filipino immigrant experience. Before launching into “7,000 Miles,” she reminds us: “No one is illegal on stolen land!”

Everything is political.

Earlier that day, I’d been listening to We Insist 2025!—the new album from Terri Lyne Carrington and Christie Dashiell, a reimagining of Max Roach’s We Insist! One song in particular, “Joyful Noise,” features a spoken word piece that stayed with me:

And when we struggle, when times are tough, we draw strength from our ancestors.
We put away our differences and we come together.
When folks try to take away our freedoms, we don’t just let them.
We fight back!
We don’t become despondent or complacent, and we don’t drown ourselves in escapism or give up on what we know is right.
No!
Instead, we say, “I’m here and I’m not going anywhere.”
Emmett G. Price III

That’s the spirit that got me out of the house on a Tuesday. That’s what I felt in the room.

Shoulder to shoulder with my neighbors—many of them immigrants or their American-born children—we smiled, sang, and bobbed our heads as one. During Ruby’s homage to Bay Area hip-hop, we even got a little hyphy.

When opener Tish Hyman performed her song “Lucky,” that’s exactly how I felt, too.

There’s not a lot going right in my life—or in the headlines—but after a night of making joyful noise, I can at least envision a better tomorrow.

Freedom is smiling in the face of adversity because you know in the depth of your soul, just like your grandma told you, everything is going to be alright.

A hip hop concert with dancer CeSee center stage as DJ House Shoes spins records to her right and other performers mill about behind her.

April 19, 2025 / 1 Comment

Shades of madlib

The floor of The Echoplex pulses as bass pumps through the speakers. CeSee, in her black tank top and tutu, is center stage, freestyling her flowing dance moves in perfect harmony with every scratch, jab, and trick that each DJ delivers. Stacy Epps, Wildchild, and Sway Calloway hype the crowd, urging us to make noise for the performers, Los Angeles, and hip-hop.

But no one lets us forget why we’re here: to raise funds and honor the residents of Altadena, who were devastated by January’s wildfires. This Tribute and Benefit concert centers around one resident in particular: Otis Jackson Jr., the DJ, composer, producer, and rapper Madlib.

A promotional graphic for Madlib, featuring bold text that reads 'MADLIB' against a starry background. In the bottom section, there are logos for various sponsors and a QR code with the instruction to 'SCAN HERE TO DONATE.'

The last time I was at The Echoplex might have been more than a decade ago—in 2014, for a show called Ultimate Breaks and Beats. I don’t want to believe that much time has passed, but so much of these past ten years has been a blur. Even these months since the fires in January have been lost in a haze of the near-daily disasters that have defined 2025. Here I am, though, among heads of all generations, seeking fellowship through breaks and beats.

From 7 p.m. until the wee hours, a roster of beloved DJs, beatmakers, and Rhymesayers rotate through 20-30 minute sets, crafting soundscapes from Madlib’s vast catalog, including unreleased joints, deep cuts, and rare grooves. Linafornia and DJ Benji B deftly open the show. Then comes House Shoes, whose presence yanks me back to the 2000s when I was chasing turntablists across every venue in town, trying to sustain the high achieved through deft blends and scratch mastery. Shoes mixes Madlib with Dilla in an “LA to Detroit” set that awakens something long dormant in me. The Gaslamp Killer follows with his signature chaos, spinning a hard-hitting electric fusion ending with an inspired blend of Kendrick Lamar’s “Squabble Up” and its sample, Debbie Deb’s “When I Hear Music” that is our return flight to the City of Angels.

Rhythms of the Village takes the stage at the show’s midway point. The cultural hub and store are among the event’s beneficiaries. Their performance is the night’s only non-hip-hop set. Before the djembe drums and singing begin, Onochie Chukwurah—a Nigerian elder and co-founder of the Altadena center for African heritage—addresses the crowd. “Even though the fires took our business, they didn’t take our lives,” he says. The din of the crowd quiets as he commands our attention—his words and the soulful performance root us. What could have been a bathroom break becomes a balm for the soul.

A group of performers on stage at a live event, singing and engaging with the audience, with a backdrop of colorful lights. The atmosphere is lively and celebratory.

It’s 10:30, and unexpected guests are flooding the stage. Taboo and will.i.am are dapping up Miles Brown and others as Monalisa navigates her set, her laptop threatened by flying elbows and sloshing drinks. The man of the hour, though, was nowhere to be found. Wildchild tells us it’s no surprise: Madlib rarely wants the spotlight. The Beat Konducta doesn’t even own a cell phone. The show is being live-streamed on DJ Spinna’s Twitch, and we’re told he’s watching.

He’s not physically here, but his presence fills the building.

After all, he’s always performed partly in silhouette, rhyming through his animated alter ego Quasimoto. And as we move through his sonic legacy—beat by beat, sample by sample—you sense how impactful his unique point of view has been. It’s a retrospective 25 years deep. You don’t need to see him. You hear him. You feel him.

I look around and notice the gray in performers’ beards, the wrinkles on their foreheads, the stories about kids turning eighteen, and events from the previous century. I should feel my age, but that’s not the dominant emotion. Instead, I think of one of Madlib’s most transcendent projects: Shades of Blue, the 2003 album where he was granted access to the Blue Note archives and created something timeless. New recordings built from classics, made fresh for young ears.

That’s the magic Madlib and his peers have gifted us. It is timeless, communal, and everlasting.

I’m not, though. So we left The Echoplex before last call. That livestream Madlib was watching? I joined him there—from the comfort of my couch—as Nu-Mark, The Alchemist, J Rocc and others continued to guide us through sound.

As Mr. Chukwurah reminded us, coming together like this makes us better. In these layered frequencies, these echoes of jazz, hip-hop, and fellowship, we find ourselves and each other.

These are the shades of Madlib: fractured, funky, reverent, rebellious.

And Lord Quas willing, I’ll be back in the crowd again soon.

May 5, 2024 / 0 Comments

Kendrick Lamar’s West Side Rallying Cry

On my 20th spin of Not Like Us, I figured out why Kendrick Lamar‘s latest is so electrifying. The last time LA hip hop was up was Nipsey Hussle’s Victory Lap at the GRAMMYs in February of 2019. His death a couple of months later, followed by Kobe Bryant, his daughter, and several others less than a year later, turned the city and the music melancholy and insular. The pandemic would soon follow, and the LA sound has rarely found a reason to celebrate since then. You don’t take the lap when the victories are rare, fleeting, or pyrrhic.

The energy is different today. As I walked around my neighborhood with that Mustard beat blasting on repeat and Kung Fu Kenny going dumb with his South LA accent turned all the way on, I had this vision of people opening up their windows, poking their heads out, smiling, putting on their house shoes, and coming out to step to this. It’s not merely a diss record. Not Like Us is a West Coast rallying call.

The song is the fourth diss track that Lamar has released this week in his ongoing battle with Drake, though the consensus is that he won. Not Like Us includes strong bars covering the scandalous accusations many people glom onto. However, it is overwhelmingly an indictment of Drake as a culture vulture. Besides the rapping, which you always expect to get from Kendrick, the structure and vibe of the record are about showcasing what’s possible when you are of a place, people, and culture.

Not Like Us seems destined to be a national hit but it sits perfectly in a mix with Kalan.FrFr, Blxst, 03 Greedo, JasonMartin, Lil Vada, and BlueBucksClan. There’s a California timelessness to it as well. Check out these mashups with Hit ‘Em Up and No Vaseline (shout out to DJ Fred Litt).

It even reminds me of We’re All in the Same Gang.

We back outside!

Before Not Like Us came out, I saw parallels between Lamar’s strident stand for morality and authenticity and his strong beliefs about racial identity, manhood, and parenthood with those of August Wilson. I’d been reading Patti Hartigan’s biography—August Wilson: A Life—while this back-and-forth between the two rappers has been going on.

Wilson had his diss battle of sorts in the 1990s. The playwright gave an influential and controversial speech called “The Ground on Which I Stand” in 1996, hitting some third rails in the theatre community and the country. Robert Brustein, a theater critic who was rarely a fan of Wilson’s, took the opportunity to challenge his positions.

They went at each other in the press, on TV, and in speaking engagements until culminating in the equivalent of a rap battle called The Big Event. Wilson’s battle with Brustein was fairer than Kendrick Lamar vs. Drake. The playwright and critic were both about something. They cared passionately about their craft while coming from two very opposed points of view. They were both well-read, adept with words, and had real animus.

In 2024, Drake doesn’t measure up, so he lost before it began.

August Wilson, who was biracial and fair-skinned, always identified as a black man. His white father was absent and abusive, and thus, perhaps it is no surprise that much of his work centers around what it means to be Black, a man, and a father in America throughout the 20th century.

Wilson never understood hip-hop. The blues was the music that moved him. He’d have found a kindred spirit in Kendrick Lamar, though.

While a conversation between the two is not in the cards, I’ll twist my fingers into Ws and dance it out to these K.Dot hits while interrogating the lyrics like I might a signature speech in one of the plays in Wilson’s cycle.