New American Songbook

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Best Hip Hop Of 2018 | NAS Dec 31, 2018

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Scrolling through the end of year “best of” lists is a great reminder of how much music I don’t listen to--the lists could just as easily be titled “music you missed”. It’s easy to become insecure-- the absence of familiar names on the list could indicate your once cool and edgy tastes becoming irrelevant. Worse, unfamiliarity with the current fashion in music could be a symptom of ossifying preferences: not just becoming out of touch, but becoming set in ways. A web search for “best hip hop 2018” returns a gajillion results, but what it will never answer is the first question: “says who?” Hip hop has always been an art that is simultaneously high- and low-brow, global and hyperlocal, punk and establishment, and, as such, comparisons should always be contextualized, certainties are always subjective and rankings rarely reflect reality. This is all to say that hip hop is vast, and the search for the best of it is unending and ultimately futile. A list of all the albums merely released

New American Songbook: 'The Miseducation Of Eunice Waymon' Dec 17, 2018

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Those close to me know that I am not a fan of the sequel or, even worse, the series, and that I consider the contemporary franchising of narrative a cultural malady of the same sort as the uselessly iterative paintings of Thomas Kincaid, or the entirety of the Oriental Trading Company catalog. It’s just capitalist overproduction and we’d be far better without it. So you’d think it might follow that the recent release of "The Miseducation of Eunice Waymon" would be easy for me to dismiss. The album, by producer Amerigo Gazaway, is a mashup of songs by Fugees emcee and hip hop legend Lauryn Hill, and the jazz and soul icon Nina Simone — nothing new here, just repackaged, right? Wrong. Sewn together with clips from interviews with each musician, the album elevates them to new heights, putting them in conversation with each other and making it sound like the collaboration was always meant to be. Gazaway is a master at this, with several mashup albums already in his catalog, but this is

New American Songbook: Mick Jenkins' 'Pieces Of A Man' Dec 03, 2018

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Chicago emcee Mick Jenkins has been at the top of my favorite list since his debut release, "Water[s]." He’s a highly competent rapper and musician, but more importantly, he’s a fantastic writer. His latest release, called "Pieces of a Man," is maybe his most literary composition. He takes the title from a Gil-Scott Heron piece and, in case you didn’t catch that association, he includes two skits of spoken word work, complete with a backing jazz band, just to make it a little more obvious. "Pieces of a Man" continues Jenkins’ style of interweaving profound introspection with trenchant observations, and sometimes reprimands, of society. He’s trying to grow, to find his spot beyond the bare minimum of survival. Where many people may not relate to common hip hop themes of a particular kind of street life, Jenkins’ strategy relies on articulating universal interior dramas that underlie his specific external situation. You can dig it, is what I’m saying. Jenkins is an expert at constructing

Vince Staples, 'FM!' | NAS Nov 19, 2018

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The new album from Vince Staples, ‘FM!’, picks up pretty much where he left off three albums ago with ‘Summertime ‘06’. Back then, summer was a malevolent season, at times even Lovecraftian--the heat of the season was an alien occupation, inspiring desperate acts. On ‘FM!’, a kind of truce has been achieved. Summertime and its corresponding themes aren’t quite as hostile, and while Staples’ narrative continues to brilliantly interweave abject tragedy with humor and moments of credible humanity, he seems like he’s having a little more fun, even if qualified. Fittingly, the album begins with the premise that because it feels like summertime all the time, we should behave as if it were summertime all of the time. ‘FM!’ isn’t quite a manifesto for the age beyond our current slow-motion climate change apocalypse, but it does convey a sense of global-warming-chic that will only become more common as the deserts grow and the seas begin to boil off. The album was released right around the

New American Songbook: 'The Hate U Give' Falls Short Nov 05, 2018

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The debut novel from Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give , takes its title from an extemporaneous monologue delivered by rap icon Tupac Shakur. In it, he expands his interpretation of gangsta rap’s main trope: the criminal and revolutionary identity he calls ‘thug life’. As he sees it, thug life is a response to the inherent racism and classism of American politics and culture. The novel explores this concept over the course of the plot, which centers on a police shooting witnessed by the protagonist, a young black woman named Starr. The book most resembles the events in Ferguson, Missouri, after the killing of Michael Brown, but the book’s city, Garden Heights, is fictional-- which is to say, this resembles what happens everywhere so much so that we don’t need to imagine a specific city at all. The novel avoids becoming a polemic by situating the bulk of the conflict and driving action in Starr’s interior experience. The story is really about how this particular young woman navigates the

Hip Hop From A Different Angle | NAS Oct 22, 2018

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The Chicago emcee Noname says that she writes lullaby raps, but maybe that’s a Midwest-humble way of saying that her music is deadly, just at a lower volume. Her first album, Telefone , played like a summer afternoon hanging out with your best friend; on Room 25 , her recently-released follow up album, much of the sound has stayed consistent, but the tone is more grim and sharply political in parts. Noname avoids digging too deep into politics, largely through her skill as an orator, but she’s also helped by the distinctive instrumentation of her band, which relies on R&B chords, wandering keyboard lines and introspective melodies. It’s not groundbreaking, but it is a different sound than the highly produced hip hop that dominates the genre. It’s extremely easy to go adrift with Noname as she follows her own trains of thought, and it’s wonderful, too.

NAS | 'Black Star' At Twenty Oct 08, 2018

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Twenty years ago, Talib Kweli and Mos Def released ‘Black Star’, an album that was as much monumental celebration of everything hip hop as it was a signal achievement of an era on its way out. That era, the Golden Age of hip hop, gets dated from the late eighties to the mid to late nineties, and was a time of incredible diversity in hip hop: gangsta rap aired alongside conscious hip hop; Outkast had a couple of hit songs, but so did the Fresh Prince. There seemed to be room for everybody. What makes ‘Black Star’ stand out, even twenty years later, is it’s intentional historicity. You can feel a certain amount of de Tocqueville and certainly Whitman in the observational and literary skill from each of the emcees, but that’s not quite right. Better is how the album evokes--and often quotes--James Baldwin, Angela Davis and Toni Morrison to craft a vision of hip hop and America that gives it the curious, and rare, quality of being in its time, but not of it.

New American Songbook: Quantum Imagery In Latest From Homeboy Sandman Sep 24, 2018

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The philosopher Timothy Morton has observed that poetic imagery, like light, is delivered in discrete, quantized packets, one after the other after the other. There are convenient coincidences along with this: our eyes see at a certain number of frames per second, our ears can only hear so much at any given moment. There are both limitations to our perception of reality, and to the communication of reality itself.

New American Songbook: Nu Africa Sep 10, 2018

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The West, and America specifically, has a long-standing problem of confusing the vast and diverse continent of Africa for a homogeneous country called Africa. There are, of course, reasons for this, many of them racist, but some are more literary. African American narrative has often used “Africa” as a device to indicate and imagine both an inspirational past and aspirational future, and in hip hop there are many notable examples of this: Nas’ “If I Ruled the World”, for one, and more recently, the fantastic 2017 track from southern rapper CyHi the Prynce called “Nu Africa.” I first heard this song a few weeks ago, just after President Trump tweeted a racist canard about eminent white genocide in South Africa. Like so many things in America, our greatest aspirations always seem to carry with them the stain of a bleak and unforgivable past. My pairing of CyHi’s song and Trump’s tweet isn’t arbitrary: the dark double of positivist diasporic imagination is the racist paranoiac fantasy of

New American Songbook | Brand Expansion Aug 27, 2018

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The emcee Action Bronson recently released a cookbook — I can’t say the real title in polite company, but let’s just say that it’s the less kid-friendly version of “Holy moly, that’s delicious.” While Bronson makes his figurative bread and butter in music, a large part of his persona as an emcee is regaling his audience with as many tales of his culinary exploits as with other similarly Bacchanalian pursuits.

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