What The Hell Just Happened in Music This Week?

Kendrick's "Control" verse took over the world. But some other stuff happened, too.

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Kendrick Lamar owned the week with his verse on Big Sean's "Control (HOF)." The VERSE HEARD 'ROUND THE WORLD had simple beginnings—a guest spot on a discarded album cut that made bold proclamations and named names, broadcast by Hot 97's Funkmaster Flex on a previously normal-seeming Monday night. Jay Electronica rhymed on the track, too. Nobody remembers that now.

It was unexpected, it was spectacular, it was a very savvy new-media play that demanded response from anyone who heard it. And that got a whole bunch of responses. Many from rappers we haven't heard from in years.

Coming on a week since, the dust seems far from settling, with new response records coming every day. Even while Earl Sweatshirt finally dropped Doris A$AP Ferg streamed Trap Lord a week early, and Lady Gaga released the first single from her forthcoming album ARTPOP

All that and more in What The Hell Just Happened in Music This Week? 

RELATED: What The Hell Just Happened in Music During The First Quarter of 2013?

Kendrick Lamar dropped a guest verse that you may have heard about.

Date: August 12

There's so much to say about it.

That it got everyone talking.

That it ended up making news on sites that otherwise know next-to-nothing about rap, news of a relatively well-known rapper calling out a bunch of other relatively well-known rappers, or that a California rapper called himself the "King of New York."

That everyone on Twitter had something to say. Like how Big Sean should've poured water all over the studio console the first time he heard that verse on his own track. Or that Jay Electronica's big comeback verse... became a footnote. If that.

Other rappers, who were doing other things when it dropped, now had things to say. Some were honored. Some were incensed. Some saw it as a challenge to rise to, others as a provocation to answer. And answer they did, from Phil Jackson to Papoose, to Riff Raff and Wale and B.o.B. and back. Some made memes. Some made "responses" on behalf of other rappers. And then there was that guy who made what is handily one of the funniest Downfall-meme videos to date, and also, maybe the funniest thing to come out of this, yet.

But if there's really one thing to say about this Kendrick verse, one truly notable takeaway besides the fact that Kendrick has needed a singular moment like this for so long, or that we all needed a singular moment like this for this summer? It's the fact that this is even notable at all, which speaks volumes about the state of rap in 2013: It's just that safe, and that sanitary, so much so that it's come to a point where a rapper bragging and calling out other rappers on record is an Earth-shaking event. It shouldn't be. It should always be this exciting. But it isn't. We can only hope this is less of an outlier, and more of a starter pistol. Also, more rap-Downfall memes. We can get down with that. —Foster Kamer

RELATED: Listen: Big Sean f/ Kendrick Lamar & Jay Electronica "Control (HOF)"

Lady Gaga Went To A Whole Lot Of Unnecessary Trouble To Promote Her New Album.

Date: August 12

The full-scale media-saturation campaign for Lady Gaga's new album ARTPOP, due in November, began in earnest this week with the release of a new single, "Applause." There was a creepy, sci-fi, Marilyn Manson-like reverse-psychology video advising people not to listen to the song or buy the album. The high-profile Twitter sessions with Cher (love tweets) and Perez Hilton (the other kind). The all-caps declaration of a very important "POP EMERGENCY." Four different covers for the fashion magazine V—with nudie pics promised inside.

But really, Lady Gaga need not go to the trouble. Not when she's got fans as supportive as hers. Like the one put an ad up on Craigslist volunteering to give a blow job to anyone who emails proof of purchase of the new single. That seems like a pretty sure-fire way to get those numbers humming. 

You can't buy marketting like that.

Dave Bry 

RELATED: Listen: Lady Gaga "Applause"

A$AP Ferg blessed the world with "Trap Lord."

Date: August 13


A week before its official release date, A$AP Ferg released the full stream of Trap Lord, and the timing couldn't be better. The project's first single, "Work," still shakes the walls in the clubs almost a year after initially coming out, thanks to the posse cut remix. Meanwhile, his latest single, "Shabba," is starting to pick up serious steam, thanks to its irresistible hook and that ridiculous video.

So now that we've heard Ferg's full-length debut, does it live up to the hype?

From first listen, it's clear that while Ferg may draw from some of the same influences that A$AP Mob head honcho, A$AP Rocky does, he is not the second coming of anyone. Sonically, Trap Lord retains a gritty aesthetic from start to finish, never straying from the street. But not just the street is his hometown New York. Ferg got guest appearances from artists from across the country: Midwest icons Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, B-Real of Cypress Hill from Cali, Atlanta's Waka Flocka Flame, and the grimy '90s-NYC representers Onyx. And it all works—all tap into Ferg's world without sounding forced.

Beyond that, more than just releasing the stream for Trap Lord, Ferg offered up an extra bonus track that didn't make the cut, a song called "Reynolds" that features Danny Brown. And it's great, too! So great, you have to wonder to wonder why it's not on the album. —Dharmic X

RELATED: Album Stream: A$AP Ferg "Trap Lord"

Chief Keef stole the show on Gucci Mane's "Darker," reminding us of how he used to rap.

Date: August 14

On Wednesday, the day before his 18th birthday, Chief Keef released Bang 2, his first mixtape since 2012's Back From the Dead. In the interim, he was signed to a major label for a reported $6 million, put out his debut album, got taller, had multiple run-ins with police, and evolved his rap style approximately 12.7 times. 

Listening to Keef's catalogue, one almost imagines the recording date of a particular verse can be pinpointed based on how exactly he rapped on it. Bang 2, for example, sounds like it was recorded fairly recently, as it feels kind of listless, formless, lazy. (It's confusing why he changed up the initially planned tracklist. Snippets of songs we heard earlier this year, like the incredible "Stop Calling Me" and "Jet Li" seem to have disappeared. (Have they been destroyed? Like how Willem Dafoe's crazy-artist character burned his canvases in To Live & Die In LA.) The tape has its fans—Danny Brown called it "hip hop punk rock gangsta rap drill shit at it's finest." But for at least some people who liked the tighter songwriting and funnier bars of Keef past ("I ain't with the drama/I can fuck your mama"), the new tape is disappointing. 

Meanwhile, also this week, Gucci Mane released a video for his song "Darker"—a track from this year's Trap House III that features Keef. Here, Keef is in a completely different zone. It feels like something of a baton pass. Gucci's first two verses are well-written, he flips through a variety of flows, and there are some clever moments. But, much as it's been for the past few years, it's a little too much of Gucci doing paint-by-numbers Gucci. He's not failing in any specific, concrete way; his shortcomings are more abstract. Since he fell from his bid to become a crossover pop star and doubled-down on appealing to his street audience, there's less of a sense that his art is on some kind of upward arc. His raps floats by. You know what to expect on a new Gucci verse at this point. Two or three years ago, his mind seemed like an inexhaustable resource of new ideas. But that time has passed. Keef's verse, though, is a gripping scene-stealer. Whenever this one was recorded, there's a thunderous vitality and effortless, ruthless confidence: "Bitch we the Black Disciples so our blood a lil darker/I'm rollin' in that beemer, Big Guwop in his Charger/And we racing down your block like we ain't ridin' forgiatos/Disrespect So Icy, Brick Squad we gon' drop you." —David Drake

RELATED: Video: Gucci Mane f/ Chief Keef "Darker"

Eminem dropped new music and it sounded like old Eminem, but not the old Eminem we wish it sounded like.

Date: August 14

All year, we've been hearing that Eminem was going to drop a new album. But we haven't heard too much new material from him. This week, we finally got a new full length song, "Survival." No word on whether it'll actually be on his upcoming album, however we can report that it was used in the trailer for Call of Duty: Ghosts, and will appear on that video game's soundtrack. We can also report that song is rock tinged and has a "stadium-status" sound (Em even says "I ain't deflate enough, last chance to make this whole stadium erupt") which makes it sound like a song from Recovery.

It's a bit disappointing to see Eminem settle into that groove rather than try to push the boundaries of his music. Over the course of his career, as most artists do, he has found a formula that works (The "funny" single, the "angry" single, the "serious" single...) and has stuck to it to diminishing returns. (Even as it's yielded plenty of great moments along the way.) Coming off the massive pop success of 2010's Recovery and 2011's Bad Meets Evil reunion, it'd be a great time for Em to get back into something really ambitious and experimental. (Remember how different-from-anything-else-we'd-ever-heard "Lose Yourself" sounded?) Here's hoping, against hope perhaps, for something more like that. —Insanul Ahmed

RELATED: Listen: Eminem "Survival"

Prince started tweeting and was immediately awesome at it.

Date: August 14

Prince has always been more in touch with some powerful, celestial force than the rest of us—and, wherever that mystic force resides, the frantic impermanence of the Internet never really touched it. Despite his groundbreaking use of the Internet in terms of his online fan community and subscription services, Prince is famously private and wary of social-media. (A Good luck finding his songs on YouTube.) So it came as quite a surprise earlier this year, when the drummer of his new power-trio back-up band was allowed to set up a Twitter account under the handle 3rd Eye Girl. And this week, when His Royal Badness himself started sending out his own tweets, well, it's a cause for great celebration.

Long a master of idiosyncratic spelling and a prophet of a distinct worldview, Prince is made for Twitter. And his first forays did not disappoint. From offering a perspective on his salad seasoning preferences, to embracing Prince memes and posting a "#selfie" that was just a puff of smoke. (Was this the single greatest selfie ever in the history of selfies? It says here, "yes.") He also promoted his upcoming projects, hyping Janelle Monae, on whose album he's slated to appear, and premiering snippets of two new tracks, "Groovy Potential" and "Breakfast Can Wait." He asked Jay-Z for a week of shows at the Barclay's Center. Best of all, though, Prince has jumped right into Twitter's conversational spirit, dishing out advice to fans, answering peoples' questions and occasionally making fun of the people mentioning him. Prince may have once said the Internet was "over." But clearly, this is a sign o' the times (sorry.) The Internet is just beginning. And it just got funkier. —Kyle Kramer

RELATED: Did Prince Just Start Tweeting Tonight?

Dear SZA, you make good music and maybe we should hang out?

Date: August 15

On Thursday, the 23-year-old New Jersey native who records beautiful bedroom R&B under the name of SZA signed with L.A.-based rap label Top Dawg Entertainment—home of another artist who was in the news this week. Why should you care? Well, during a week dominated by conversations about the likely size of the biggest swinging dicks in rap, it's no small thing to turn your attention to a woman. SZA isn't a rapper, so this isn't the same as wondering about how Nicki Minaj fits into the debate raging among bloggers and the guy who last shaved Papoose's head (sidebar: has anyone ever seen his hair?) but still. And seriously, how is Kendrick not gonna mention Nicki? Talk about an opportunity wasted. That sucked.

SZA announced that she had signed with the label via Twitter, and a subsequent YouTube video found the singer in a TDE hoodie with her song "Castles" serving as the score for her coronation. About that "bedroom R&B" description—that wasn't about sex. Though SZA's singing voice is often hushed in a way that suggests late-night whisperings of sweet nothings into ears, just listen to the lyrics. She's singing about how her underwear doesn't match. This is a bedroom door shut because you're shy, because you want to be alone with the weirdness of your own changing feelings about life. That line about her underwear, and how it irks her mom—that's also such a particular young woman's moment. "Tell me it gets easier for me," she sings over busy swirls of '80s-sounding synths and very 2013 808s.

More of this, please. —Ross Scarano

RELATED: TDE Announces The Debut of Their New Signee SZA

Doris leaked this week and we thought things about it.

Date: August 15

On "Chum," the first single from Doris, the debut studio album from Odd Future's Earl Sweatshirt, rap's favorite prodigal child genius said, "These Complex fuck niggas done track me down/Just to be the guys that did it, like, 'I like attention...'" Now, he wasn't wrong in saying that. But it's more like he was half-right. Yes, we solved 2011's big mystery: "Where's Earl?" But it wasn't because we wanted attention. Or, not all because of that. See, we considered Earl to be one of the best albums of 2010, and Earl is obviously one of the most gifted lyricists to hit the hip-hop world in the last five years. Our finding the answer to the question Tyler had printed up on all those t-shirts (which, that's our defense to the attacks from that camp: Who likes attention? Who made this a story?) pened wasn't greedy. The game needs Earl.

I say all of that to say that when Doris leaked, a wave of emotions hit. An immediate "fuck yeah!" shouted loud, but underneath there was a jittery anxiousness. It's been three years since we had a full album from Earl; this is his first since returning from his Samoan boarding school; he's readjusting to life and his newfound fame. We knew he had a lot to get off of his chest. This year's question was, how would he construct his lyrics? Earl mentioned that people who loved "epaR" from his first album would probably not like Doris. And with his lower-voice and beats from The Neptunes, The Alchemist, the work with Flying Lotus and Mac Miller, there was a whole new and tantalizing sense of mystery hanging over this .zip file.

Fuck it. You know the history, and probably have some expectations about this post itself. So: did Doris deliver?

In short, it depends. Earl was right: if the OFWGKTA/666/murder-fantasy side of his earlier work (work that was done when he was 16, mind you) is what you were hoping for, you'll be saddened to learn that there's not much of that in evidence. There are flourishes, but this album tips more towards introspection. As if Earl found a solid group of low-key, understated beats to let him carefully expound upon a (19-year-old's) lifetime of pent-up emotions: his father's leaving and coming to grips with that, and the pressures of living up to expectations. But it's usually not so explicit. It's a morose album, but often more in tone and lyrical specificity. there's plenty of good old fashioned word-salad, too—abstract expressionism in rap form. The kind that doesn't yield its meaning easily. "What the fuck is he talking about?" many people will say.

It's just different. And that's okay. If Earl was focussed on the bloody anarchy raging inside a disturbed 16-year-old's Dorisis the flipside, the burned out rhymer casting out the demons and focusing on self-repair, with the world as his audience. It's also lyrically dense, even it doesn't feel like there's much glue holding these songs together. And when Earl drops an album that maintains an MF DOOM vibe throughout (which, in all fairness, makes sense for a young rap practioner—as much as it must sound weird to his fans), it's hard to gauge what this says about his career.

It's great to see that Earl got RZA out of whatever honey-dipped blunt smoking den he was chilling in to flip a beat and chant about fucking the freckles off some chick's face, but you're also left wondering exactly going on. There's not a whole lot of glue holding stuff together here. Strangely, "Burgundy" starts with Earl's homey Vince Staples telling him that we don't want to hear him talk about his life. But the tracks where he does speak on his life ("Chum," "Sunday," and "Burgundy") are actually the best tracks on the album. Earl might be the closest thing we have to Eminem in terms of content. Any fool can tell that Earl's got lyrics for eons, but the tracks that have the most impact are the ones that feature the youngster looking inward instead of going off on intricately-spit tangents. We love those detours, but with so much REAL LIFE having been lived by Earl in the last few years, we might have expected a soul-bearing opus, detailing all he has been going through and how he overcame it.

That brings us back to the problem, though: expectations. Fuck expectations. If Doris is the emotional regurgitation of an extremely tumultuous past few years, a fragile individual trying to find his place in a world he found himself awkwardly thrust into. Fame can be a bitch, it seems, especially when you just want to make music. So instead of another Illmatic, we have a new Doris. And it's damn good, because it let us know that Earl is going to be just fine. He's not lost a step when it comes to the pen, and right now he's feeling his way through this "rap career" shit, figuring out who he's making music for. He's young enough to make mistakes, and smart enough to learn from them. That's not to say this album is a misstep; it's not. It's just one to let soak in over a while—numerous listens, a week, a month, a year. Don't let your expectations cloud your judgement. At least not so quickly. —khal

RELATED: I Don't Care for Earl Sweatshirt's Album. It Is Not My Double Cup of Tea.
RELATED: Frank Ocean Takes Shots at Chris Brown on Earl Sweatshirt's "Sunday."

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