The Beastie Boys

• Wikipedia - Beastie Boys
• It's weird thinking that Ice Cube and the whole gangsta rap movement was kind of born out of the violent/punk attitude of the Beastie Boys.
  •  ← I suspect that if three white guys that looked like this tried to start a rap group now about being violent, the concept would get laughed at.

geohot / tomcr00se

• General info
  • It seems that he's rapping over free beats rather than ones he created.
• The good
  • Overall, he is actually not bad.
  • He has problems in his writing and delivery, but he also is much better than most professional raps at trying to say something new.
  • He's good at actually sounding earnest in his performances, although some might say it borders being on melodramatic / too self-serious.
    • 'it was called the cold war...' - 3:30
• The bad
  • His lyrics often don't reinforce the beat but instead rely on the accompaniment to maintain the listener's sense of what the beat is.
    • For example, it seems like at times he has too many pauses in his rap.
    • He'll also do the common thing of forcing too many syllables into a given span of time, which makes the syllables no longer follow the beat.
  • It seems like he doesn't always enunciate as clearly as is possible.
    • Examples:
      • it was called the cold war because russia is cold
        • 0:21 - 'when' in 'when pokemon cards taught me how to hustle'
        • ''romances' in 'it was called the cold war because russia is cold'
• Songs
  • 5AM in Silicon Valley
    • Lyrics
      • I got the house to myself, I can finely rap alone.
        Back in Jersey for the holidays, I don't think I can call it home.
        Started a company this year, this is straight from the Valley Throne:
        it sucks.
        The only voice left at the party is tellin' me that I shoulda known:
        'You're 27 and never grown, and what ya think: you get to the top and you're less alone?'
        'All the pressures and stresses and headaches, you wake up and feel great?'
        Nah–you stagnate, and flip a shit when your Uber's three minutes late.
        Can you still make fun of fat people when your BMI is overweight?
        I sorta feel like I'm outta place.
        A year goes by, you look around, you're down in the shitter.
        So down you can't be fucked if they call you a quitter.
        A loser, a little bitch who didn't deliver
        by the type of guy who comments and gets triggered.
        If that's the test then I didn't prepare.
        Lookin' kinda stupid, standin' in my underwear.
        Should I rock Chris and be never scared? Or leave there for somewhere
        Is this feeling just here? Or is it–
        Everywhere from the ass of my chair shit-talkin', I lost a girl I love this year.
        Now I date myself like I'm crip-walkin'.
        (...)
    • Good
      • He doesn't make good use of the intro period, where you can talk while the listener gets used to the accompaniment.
      • The quality of the recording of his voice is pretty good. It may not be capturing the bass of his voice as much as it could be.
      • ~1:20 - He does a gradually-increasing tone on a particular line.
      • The accompaniment he chose seems like a good choice for the mood his lyrics seems to be going for.
    • Bad
      • He repeats the same kind of rhythm for three lines in a row at the beginning, but they don't feel connected enough to make it sound like a unified whole.
      • He jumps between different topics in a way that's jarring.
  • it was called the cold war because russia is cold
    • Bad
      • He's out-of-tune when he sings the chorus, the mic quality is bad, his voice doesn't seem as prominent as it should be relative to the accompaniment, and he doesn't seem to have spent any time cleaning it up in his audio software. (2:29)
      • It seems like he doesn't always enunciate as clearly as is possible.
        • Examples:
          • it was called the cold war because russia is cold
            • 0:21 - 'when' in 'when pokemon cards taught me how to hustle'
            • ''romances' in 'it was called the cold war because russia is cold'
  • i'm disgusted by this place i should leave
    • The lyrics:
      • I guess I rolled over, I've grown up and I'm mostly sober
        Childhood's over and so's my hope for closure
        Taylor Swift–I'll never get to hold her.
        Adulthood is a pale of shift that it's your job to deal with,
        it'll have you on your knees quick.
        Try 'n say you're excited, but don't just think it, feel it. Can you let(?) the years slip?
        Why not? 'Cuz you're all grown up. But when you ask (???) it's 'cuz you're all grown up.
        Bunch of fascists, smashin' the pleasure-centers of animals
        with the universal human right to be happy–hold on to your right to feel crappy.
        Straight talka, jay-walka, move through the streets like a New-Yorka
        Blue(?) blacka(?) to(?) blocks(?) that's Chewbacca with a huge cock.
        It's all cool except it's not true. Breakthroughs. Grab soma and take two(?)
        It's a bad omen, it feels like a war's comin', and most of our brave new world is fake news.
    • Good
      • The title helps the listener understand that the main idea of the song seems to be that geo is 'disgusted'.
    • Bad
      • The lyrics are mostly impossible to decipher, and may actually be meaningless.
        • "I guess I rolled over" - "Rolled over" isn't an idiom I'm familiar with.
        • "Childhood's over and so's my hope for closure" - Closure about what?
      • Different aspects of the song seem to be working against each other w/r/t the emotion they seem to be trying to create.
        • The song's accompaniment and his tone of voice suggest that the song should make you feel sad with/for him, but then he says something ridiculous like suggesting that one thing he's sad about is that he isn't going to be able to fulfill his dream of dating Taylor Swift.
      • The title of the song suggests that there's a "place" that he may be able to "leave", but then the actual song seems to be talking about adulthood(?). So the title is obscure as well.

Kendrick Lamar

HUMBLE

• Who dat nigga thinkin' that he frontin' on Man-Man? (Man-Man)
  Get the fuck off my stage, I'm the Sandman (Sandman)
  Get the fuck off my dick, that ain't right
  I make a play fucking up your whole life
  
  These lines are not good...they sound like high school stuff.

• If I kill a nigga, it won't be the alcohol, ayy
  I'm the realest nigga after all
  
  That last line is not good.

• It isn't clear to me who he's talking to in this song. At one point it sounds like he's talking to a lady he likes, but then it seems like he may have switched to talking to his competitors.

Nas

Illmatic

• Related book: Born to Use Mics: Reading Nas's Illmatic
• General thoughts
  
  • The good
    • The main attraction of his rapping style, as far as I can tell, is that he has one (or more!) internal rhyme(s) on nearly _every_single_line_ without it sounding like complete gibberish, which is obviously an incredible accomplishment.
    • He's also able to make his lyrics sound dramatic / not ridiculous.
    • His flow is also–while not perfect (see "The bad" below)–overall undeniably very good, maybe even 'excellent' when compared against later artists, with the caveat that this is a different style of rapping with different constraints that he's holding himself to.
    • He doesn't have all of his rhymes at the end of the line and the same rhythm on a significant percentage of his lines, which was a big problem with earlier rap.
    • He also doesn't skimp on the lyrics the way some other rappers will, filling the time with repetitions of the chorus or variations on the beat/melody. All of his songs have a lot of original lyrics.
  • The bad
    • Illmatic seems pretty hyped, and it may have been revolutionary at the time it was released, but I don't think it holds up when compared to Biggie's / Tupac's / Eminem's best albums/songs.
    • He will sometimes pause in the middle of a sentence, which is something less-good rappers are known to do and really hurts my feeling of immersion into the lyrics.
    • He will sometimes flip his sentence-structure, which makes it harder to understand, similar to when he pauses in the middle of a sentence.
    • His producer(s) clearly aren't as good as Biggie's / Eminem's / Tupac's. He often doesn't have fun / interesting melodies. "The World is Yours",  "Memory Lane", "Represent", and "It Ain't Hard to Tell" are exceptions.
    • He doesn't alternate long (1/8th-note) and normal (1/16th-note) durations on his vowels the way Biggie / Tupac / Eminem do. So it sounds less varied.
    • He uses words / phrases that are hard to understand:
      • "Visualizin' the realism of life and actuality"
        • This is by someone else rapping a verse on one of Nas's songs, but the verse was written in Nas's style.
      • "Beef with housin' police, release scriptures that's maybe Hitler's" ← What does "scriptures that's maybe Hitler's" mean?
    • I think he's so focused on getting internal rhymes that it forces him to use awkward sentence construction, which makes it harder to follow what he's saying. IIRC Eminem has the same issue in his internal-rhyme-heavy songs.
    • He has a LOT of references/slang in his rhymes, which make it harder to follow than Biggie / Tupac / Eminem lyrics, even though those guys also use slang / references.
      • "Before a blunt, I take out my fronts" ← OK, in hindsight, I guess 'fronts' refers to his grill.
      • "That's like Malcolm X, catchin the Jungle Fever"
      • "I'll pull a number like a pager"
      • "I'm an ace when I face the bass"
      • "40-side is the place that is giving me grace"
      • "Nas will catch wreck"
      • "And told my little man that I'm a go cyprose" ← Even urbandictionary doesn't know what 'cyprose' means.
    • It's hard to say what a lot of his songs are about.
    • He doesn't have any skits or other things to mix up the flow of his album and give his listeners' brains a breather between songs.
    • A few too many references to Moet (IMO) in the second half of the album.
• Song-specific thoughts
  • The World Is Yours
    • The flow, rhymes, chorus, and melody/beat on this are sick.
    • But it's still hard to understand the ideas he's actually conveying with his words.
  • Halftime
    • Forgettable :/
    • He says "slaaave ships" in exactly the same way that Biggie would 5 months later on "Ready to Die". He also then rhymes it with "clips", which is what Biggie ended up doing.
    • On my second listen, with the lyrics in front of me for both the first and second listen, I ended up with the impression that the main idea of this song is "I'm a great rapper".
    • This song also has a sample that I'm sure I've heard on another song, and I feel it was most likely a Biggie song (which was almost certainly released after this song). It may have been a commonly-used sample. You can hear it looping from 2:41 to 3:01. It sounds to me like a trumpet.
  • Memory Lane
    • Good loop/melody/beat.
  • One Love
    • This song actually has an easy-to-follow concept: someone writing a series of letters to their very-close friend / partner-in-crime in prison.
    • I think the first verse of this song may be my favorite verse of the album.
    • I think this may be my favorite song on the album, despite it not having the most 'fun' / catchy beat / melody / sample.
  • One Time 4 Your Mind
    • I can't say what this song is supposed to be about.
  • Represent
    • This has a good loop/melody/beat. I immediately recognized it; this may be the most popular song on the album.
    • The concept is somewhat easy to understand: it's about his behavior in his hood.
  • It Ain't Hard To Tell
    • This has one of the better loops/melodies on the album.
    • He somewhat-weirdly combines a downplayed/quiet sample of the most-memorable portion of Michael Jackson's "Human Nature" with another very-prominent "DA-da-da-da-da" sample.
    • Can't say what the concept of this song is beyond "I'm a good rapper", and I had to reread the lyrics to be sure of that much.