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Image via Innovator Concepts
5 On It is a feature that looks at five of the best under-the-radar rap findings from the past week, highlighting new or recently discovered artists, or interesting obscurities.
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Image via Innovator Concepts
Innovator Con. – “Glorious”
Last week, two crews (Orlando’s Weirdos Forever Forever Weirdos and Baltimore’s 9BMC) served as further reminders of strength in numbers. This week, Los Angeles-based Innovator Con. hit my inbox with an understated announcement:
“We are a collective of musicians who write and produce our own music, create our own original art, and direct our own visuals.”
The group’s first single “Glorious” far over-delivers on reserved promise, a display of weird, interwoven rapping paired with an impressively polished video. At the moment, outside of Chicago crew Pivot Gang’s “Jimmy,” I can’t recall another recent song where multiple rappers trade bars rather than verses–and even “Jimmy” isn’t quite as complicated and woozily acrobatic as “Glorious.” The rapping largely comprises abstract bragging, but many of the lines make up for that in their cleverness and animated, sharp delivery.
It’s an exciting introduction to a collective that seemingly has much to offer in the way of creation. The group’s website provides greater insight than their initial email into Innovator Co.’ almost start-up like vision of art:
“Innovator Co is a creative collective comprised of musicians, fine artists, videographers, writers and engineers. We operate under the DIOS model, meaning we do it ourselves. Everything with the Innovator name attached to it is created in house by a team of professionals who have years of experience.
Though Innovator specializes and is heavily rooted in the arts, we aren’t bound to the production of music, fine art and literature. Simply put, we make stuff. We make good stuff. And we’re open to making good stuff with other people who want to make good stuff, too.”
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Image via Ness Rhyme
Ness Rhyme – “Little Star”
New York rap’s fragmentation is, by 2014, tired news. A scene splintered, seeking some sort of character, New York hip-hop has “mattered” in fits and spurts since its commercial stranglehold faded in the early 2000s, ceding its throne and looming sonic shadow to the south. As a result, many rappers born in New York no longer sound like “New York” rappers (some listeners will see that as a negative, others as a sign of rap’s continued evolution).
In spite of splintering—or perhaps because of it—the city still produces its share of interesting rappers, typically those who refract a particular strand of New York attitude through any number of different influences and sounds.
Ness Rhyme’s “Little Star” uses a thoroughly modern, hypnotic beat as the foundation for the Brooklyn rapper’s display of Big Apple bravado (as well as nods to some of the city’s current higher-profile up-and-comers in style). Charismatic and casually proficient, Ness molds what might otherwise be run of the mill rhymes (excepting several clever couplets: one in the first verse flips rappers’ expensive tastes in favor of the city’s favored uniform of Timberlands with any outfit) into an entertaining four and a half minutes. Proof of at least some pulse in New York’s rap scene and a sign that a certain spirit still exists in the city’s hip-hop consciousness.
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Image via Nell
Nell – “You Don’t Know Bout Me”
When considering great technical rapping, flashy displays typically come to mind (Kendrick Lamar on “Rigamortus,” Eminem in his early 2000s heyday, Tech N9ne and Twista on almost every song in their catalogs, to name a limited, but representative few). It’s rarer that we celebrate the subtle instances of great rapping from sources we wouldn’t expect (Gunplay is a constant provider of this sort of rapping, particularly on songs like “Bible On The Dash”).
Raider Klan member Nell raps deceptively well, finding rhythmic pockets and sounds in beats to bounce his words off of. The end result feels loosely born of Bone Thugs-n-Harmony (Nell’s “Murda Miami” freestyle, in particular, feels in places like it warps the influence of Bone Thugs through the darkening prism of early Three 6 Mafia), a steady display of technique that’s never overtly showy.
In other words: Nell can rap.
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Image via Devious
Devious ft. Fiend – “In The Morning, In The Evening”
Fiend is one of rap’s great underutilized talents, a former No Limit soldier who has deftly morphed the aesthetic that Curren$y perfected on the Pilot Talk albums into a late career artistic rebirth under the nickname International Jones.
On loose track “In The Morning, In The Evening,” Fiend joins fellow New Orleans rap veteran Devious to craft excellent, world-weary slice-of-life rap in the tradition of Devin the Dude (the chorus–”Up in the morning/Late in the morning/It’s cold and I’m yawning/Somebody was bleeding”–does more to encapsulate the bone-chilling randomness of the world than most so-called “conscious” rap).
There’s much that could be said about the lineage of these sorts of songs, New Orleans as a city, and Fiend as an example of rare maintenance of skill and creativity over the course of a multi-decade career. For another day. For now, listen to “In The Morning, In The Evening.”
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Image via Xavier Lee
Xavier Lee – “Damn”
There should be a SoundCloud channel or a radio station or a deserted island somewhere for people who love lo-fi dark rap with southern influences that doesn’t really care too much for structure and gives a damn about what commercial music sounds like.
Xavier Lee and I would be hanging out on that island, probably listening to “Damn” and trying to figure out how we were going to survive on a desert island. But also enjoying “Damn.” So that’d probably make up for impending death.
