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Image via Kevin Abstract
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 Hayze Rascoe
Hayze Rascoe – Syringe Sonnets EP
This week, Virginia rapper and recent P&P favorite DP sent me a very simple email. The subject was, “LISTEN”; the body read, “My dawg from out here just dropped this tape. thank me later.”
I thanked him almost immediately.
Virginia rapper Hayze Rascoe’s Syringe Sonnets EP is like a throwback rap fever dream—Boot Camp Clik on whatever drugs RZA was doing when he and Prince Paul conceived the Gravediggaz. Succinct and lo-fi, packed with excellent, effortless rapping at every turn, Syringe Sonnets is a project for people who like Roc Marciano, but don’t need rap to focus purely on crime tales.
So, in the words of DP: LISTEN.
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Image via Kevin Abstract
Kevin Abstract’s video for “Drugs” further explores hip-hop in the age of the Internet
Since Dom McLennon released his ambitious, decidedly messy THESIS, a fixation on the culture of the Internet has visibly arisen from the Connecticut rapper’s Alive Since Forever crew.
Most recently and cleverly, ASF member Kevin Abstract’s website used Tumblr and a simulated representation of Apple’s OS X (created by talented designer Alessio Atzeni) to craft an unusual interactive experience, as much a piece of art worth pondering as a way to access Kevin’s existing content. It’s humorous (you’re prompted to enter a password when you first load up the page, the weather icon leads to drakeweather.com) and symbolic, fascinating and comical in its Inception-like use of the Internet to represent a desktop set up that allows you to access the Internet and a series of programs (all while really staying on the same Internet and, subsequently, causing my brain to hurt thinking about the layers).
The site can be taken at face value as a charming navigational tool in the place of a stock artist page, or it can be looked at as something larger, a piece of a perspective on Internet culture—humor and signifiers—moving beyond awkwardly raps that try to make Instagramming sound cool.
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Image via Kevin Abstract
Currently, a trip to Kevin’s website puts his new video for “Drugs” front and center.
In its curious way, the video for “Drugs” runs counter to the expectations of a video so clearly influenced by Tumblr culture: During its 8 minute run time, very little happens. A mouse-clicker belonging to an unknown user opens up a video in Quicktime, resulting in Kevin performing “Drugs,” his strongest song to date, with his ASF crew inside a grocery store. Like the site that houses it, there’s an opportunity to read deeper commentary into “Drugs.” There’s also a chance to watch a talented young rapper perform his most fully-realized musical statement—enough to hold attention in itself.
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Image via Starchild
This two year old EP by Dev Hynes collaborator Starchild deserves more than 14,000 plays on Soundcloud
An internet paradox: Often the things we expect to explode online because of specific, targeted reasons simply fizzle into the ether, waiting to be discovered.
New York’s Starchild works with both Solange Knowles and Dev Hynes (we’ve featured him before on Hynes’ cover of Lemonade’s “Neptune”). He makes synth-pop-inspired alternative rap. He sings. He’s got a keen aesthetic sense. On paper, he’s an internet all star. Yet the buzz you might expect hasn’t followed from these elements.
I can’t recall precisely how I came across Starchild’s Night Music EP—I believe it was via a Soundcloud channel I follow that reblogs various music from all corners of the digital music locker. That is one of the Internet’s many small joys: The discovery of something old and wonderful that truly is discovery (at the time of this post, Night Music‘s five songs have 14,552 plays collectively).
Sonically, Night Music draws its influence almost entirely from the 1980s, pulling spirit from proto-deep house and the sound of groups like Zapp and Roger, creating a nostalgic platform for Starchild to rap and sing about women and nights out.
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Image via Just Chris
Just Chris – “Upton O’Good [Freestyle]”
Another entry taken from the inbox.
London rapper Just Chris has been sending me music since February. I have been telling Chris that his music wasn’t post-worthy since February. My feedback was, more often than not, cut from the same cloth as my initial response to the 19-year-old rapper:
“In general, I think as a rapper you could work on your energy–it’s a bit flat and even throughout. That can be used to your advantage, but it seems like there isn’t a lot of differentiation between bars in terms of their emotional charge.“
To Chris’ eternal credit, he didn’t let my constant rejection deter him from continuing to send music. Each email saw improvement, but never break through.
His most recent brought on the unexpected: A “freestyle” over a simple, looped Marvin Gaye sample. Still in need of a dose of energy and occasionally falling into questionable puns and wordplay, Chris sounds sharp and clever on the whole, highly capable of stringing together stream of consciousness rhymes.
Now for the next trick: constructing a full song that also harnesses Chris’ rapping ability with a bit more spark (as Chris promised in a recent email: “will definitely take on board what you said about my energy”).
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Image via Sean Quincy Munro
Fore – “What I Need” (Ft. Gazelle and SkyRoyal)
Brooklyn rapper Fore’s “What I Need” is, essentially, a rap song about a girl—one with an excellent beat and a solid display of rapping, but a rap song about a girl nonetheless. As Fore puts it, “What I Need” is “about the sometimes compulsive nature of partying; when you’re not just going out to have fun, but because it’s a part of who you’ve become.”
Few rap songs about girls or the compulsive nature of partying that I know of come with bizarre, data-moshed websites like FORE’s http://whvt.in/eed/:
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Image via FORE
The experience of watching certain words turn the dog background image into MMA fighters, familiar memes, and general psychedelia gives “What I Need” an added layer of meaning—perhaps the sort so important to a song’s character that its memory becomes engrained in each listen that takes place away from the “proper” listening experience of watching a dog morph into Charles Ramsey.
