Tag: rap (page 1 of 1)

Illustration of a melting snowman tipped sideways out of an upside-down ice cream cone. The snowman has a mustache and a deadpan expression. A Santa hat sits knocked off to the side. Drawn in loose black line art on a white background.
May 29, 2026 / 0 Comments

Make Them Care

I tried. I really did. It’s been two weeks since Drake’s ICEMAN came out, and after giving the album a few fair listens, I can acknowledge the bops and his skill as a rhyme slinger when he’s properly motivated. And while there are many things he’s trying to make the audience do on his most important release since the early part of his career, the one thing he couldn’t do is make me care. He acknowledges early on in “Make Them Cry,” the introductory track, that he should be maturing. He says “40” is pressing him to dig deeper, but over the next seventeen songs, he doesn’t do that. Instead, before he even gets to the end of this opening salvo, he reverts to his toxic masculinity and tendency towards ruminating over transactional relationships. 

In the last six months, I’ve been buoyed by fresh music from De La Soul, Nas, and Conway the Machine that showcase points of view that have matured with age. Each artist acknowledges how life has affected them while still delivering the boom-bap in their own unique ways. In between spins of ICEMAN, I’ve found Conway’s You Can’t Kill God With Bullets to be a palate cleanser. The East Coast rapper whose face doesn’t move tells an incredible story of loss and grief that runs in parallel with his success in hip hop and business, all while elevating his lyricism and delivering the motivational hustler anthems he and his upstate New York compatriots are known for. 

De La Soul’s Cabin in the Sky is primarily a beautiful eulogy for Dave “Trugoy the Dove” Jalicoeur, a seminal member of the trio who passed away in 2023. This is the group’s first release since his untimely death, and it never sways far from reckoning with his absence, celebrating his life, and honoring his spirit with what is ultimately an uplifting collection that fits right in with their long discography filled with records that have reflected where they have been at each stage of their life.

Nas’s collaboration with DJ Premier, Light-Years, has remained in rotation since its release, particularly his collaboration with AZ, “My Story, Your Story.” What I have appreciated about Nas’s most recent bodies of work is that you can feel his status as an elder statesman without him having to depart from the style of rapping with which he came onto the scene over 30 years ago. You don’t have to change what makes you you to show growth. Just don’t hide who you are, and we will connect with it on wax.

At some point in a long musical career, you should want to trade disposable hits for substance, especially after your crown has been tarnished and your character has been questioned but that seems beyond Drake.

Losing the 2024 beef with Kendrick Lamar gives him an opportunity ripe for showcasing emotional work, and I give him credit for acknowledging his defeat, but what he goes for on this album isn’t reflection or even resurrection but revenge. “Make Them Pay” is the strongest song on the album, with rhyme schemes and flows that are effective flips and rebuttals of those two-year-old bars from Lamar. None of those directed at Dot land more than a glancing blow, but those aimed at people to whom he has real relationships and affection sting. There’s genuine sentiment behind the clever barbs for Lebron James, J. Cole, and DJ Khaled. Ultimately, though, there’s little meat on the bone. He comes across as an internet reply guy, self-satisfied with finding the perfect meme or attempting to ratio the Original Poster over interrogating his own role in the situation.

Maybe the problem, though, is that Drake is more of a character to be portrayed than who Aubrey Graham is as a person. We don’t know that guy. We only get to know “the boy,” a nearly 40-year-old man-child who can’t believe that these transactional relationships he’s been in may be emotionless arrangements for the other parties as well, be they women he’s dated, collaborators, or famous friends. Is the real man, Aubrey, the kind of person who thinks shouting out Adin Ross and Samuel Bankman-Fried in 2026 is a flex? That’s the kind of person whose album cover gets adopted by Trump’s White House for feeling MAGA-coded. For every time I get amused by a punchline or the way something is delivered, there’s another where I just shake my head at the incredulity. Being a memelord at this big age is not the move.

We almost get to something approaching self-reflection on “Firm Friends,” ICEMAN’s penultimate track. Over a stripped-down Conductor Williams production dominated by slow-tempo piano strikes, Drake’s rhymes glide over the song, earning the popular compliment of modern hip-hop fans, “He’s talking, bro!” And he is. He talks directly to individuals, institutions, and, perhaps, even himself as he explains where his head is at right now and how he plans to operate in the future. At one point, he threatens to turn “The Boy” into “The Man,” but worries that people won’t understand. 

And that’s where he loses me again. If you’re truly the greatest rapper alive as you continuously claim, that’s what you’re supposed to make us do.

Understand.

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.