I've never been to a Plies concert. I must assume that fans at a Plies concert are there specifically to risk injury to themselves and/or otherwise. That's hardly an invitation to toss your headliner from the stage, however. Vicious shenanigans like this are why me and Earl Sweatshirt don't bother to leave our respective apartments. Shouts out to my satellite speakers.
Justin Charity is a writer for Complex. Follow him @brothernumpsa.
iSHi f/ Pusha T "Push It"
Released: March 13, 2015
Pusha isn't rapping about much on "Push It," but iSHi's drums are rabid, and the milky goth swag of the music video impresses the cortex. Kanye West has turned Pusha T into an art gallery trapper, and lifestyle-wise that's for the best, I suppose. "Push It" is no "Lunch Money," though it's obviously an approximation.
JR & PH7 and Chuuwee "Florin Light Rail"
Released: March 24, 2015
Whole tape amazing, down to the Jiggaman tribute flow on the outro. JR & PH7 sparkle maximally on these beats, and Chuuwee maps every nook, cranny, and bus line of his city with the pen. A young man straps Sacramento to his back, and carries.
Myami "Soldier"
Released: March 29, 2015
Everyone who's overheard me blasting this song in my headphones or on my bedroom speakers has asked me who this is. It's Myami, with a "y." I'm just as unfamiliar and enamored as you are. Shouts out to the animal kingdom for getting word of her to me.
Chief Keef "Need It"
Released: April 1, 2015
An abundance of starry synths and piano pulses, and Keef's most focused songwriting in quite a while. These are trap beats, of course, yet songs like "Haten," "Wet," and "Need It" exist at the far brink of hip-hop's genre definition; if anyone is "post-rap," it's not Kendrick Lamar, it's marble-mouthed space cadets like Future and Keef. Almighty DP is, ahem, accessible even for those of us who aren't locally (or otherwise) immersed in Chicago's drill scene on the daily, so it's worth a listen if you haven't checked in on this kid for the past year or so, before he ejected from Interscope.
BeatKing "Color Money"
Released: April 4, 2014
From the man who brought you "Ebola Freestyle (2014)," here we have BeatKing's remix of his own "Stopped" to include an immediately timely verse clowning Plies for getting body-slammed by a fan at a concert in Tallahassee this past weekend. "Security was gonna help you fight..............but then they stopped!" SMH @ all involved.