Out of My Head: Five Songs I Listened to This Weekend

R.I.P, Chinx.

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Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

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Last night, the Billboard Music Awards were a comedy of bad taste, red carpet doppelgangers, O.D./O.G. Chrissy Teigen, and gratuitous censorship of genius, truth, and love. Predictably so. 

While pop music was having its night, New York was recoiling from the murder of Coke Boys rapper Chinx on Sunday in Jamaica, Queens. We keep losing unsung rappers to insatiable violence in 2015, and I feel some kind of way about it. All we have now are these songs.

Justin Charity is a staff writer for Complex. Follow him @brothernumpsa.

Chinx "Couple N***as"

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Released: April 29, 2014

Gangsta rappers are sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, too. And while Eric Diep has written our eulogy of Coke Boys rapper Chinx, whom a shooter gunned down this weekend in Jamaica, Queens, let me leave you with a song, "Couple Niggas," and its music video, in which Chinx gushes over Onyx and LL Cool J, for the love of his borough.

Ty Money "Sibley Talkin"/"Viet Cong"

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Released: May 5, 2015

Ty Money's Cinco de Money is the most fun I've had listening to a mixtape since Bricc Baby Shitro's Nasty Dealer, which, granted, dropped a month ago. I'm squeezing two Cinco songs into a single entry here because they're best heard as a single, extended boast: "Got a pedi-mani, bitches say I'm bougie." He's a mediator, too: "Think about it: if everybody beefing, who gon scrape the Foreman?"

Kamasi Washington "The Magnificent Seven"

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Released: May 5, 2015

A three-hour spree of contemporary jazz? Say it ain't lit!

Fortunately, Kamasi Washington's The Epic opens with several bangs and, like a muscled Camaro, sustains its momentum through every curve and turn. Washington's "The Magnificent Seven" features much of the album's most vibrant drumming and piano work; the song is not to be confused with John Sturges' posse Western or else the Clash's ludicrous (in a good way) Sandinista! single of the same name. 

Boosie Badazz f/ PJ "All I Know"

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Released: May 12, 2015

You tell me Boosie fell off. You tell me Boosie squandered his post-prison virality and buzz. Meanwhile, Boosie is finna beat out Meek Mill for hottest street rap album of the year. Atlantic Records the real MVP. 

Popcaan "Unruly Prayer"

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Released: May 15, 2015

Approximately 20 NYC-based people tried to persuade me last year that the Popcaan album wasn't a strip of drying paint, but I wasn't having it. "Unruly Prayer," however, is the bright, solemn-yet-optomistic, Afro-poppiest sort of dancehall that's designed for a billion-dollar marketing blitz to promote the latest Olympics. I like it. The music video features Drake and his 30-odd semi-anonymous OVO goons loitering inarticulately, if you're into that sort of thing.

(Speaking of doppelgangers, is that Chief Keef's stuntin-double at 1:42, or is it the man himself?)

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