"Dunked On" - Froggy Fresh ft. Money Maker Mike

It's hard to hate on this. Won't even try. Great beat, funny video, and best of all, this is a story anyone can relate to.

The team here at Real Yeti Rap hugely supports the running joke of having Money Making Mike prominently featured on tracks he is not even actually rapping on. Much like the modern spartan sage Frank Reynolds, we are also big fans of poop jokes -- poop is funny.

Also: Internet Rappers, something something something, thinkpiece.

"F Wit THIS" - Chris Clarke ft. Opto

Stanley Clarke's kid is a rapper? I won't lie, that hook is what got me. I had to find out, right?

The beat starts off at the blander end of the Low End Theory spectrum but starts moving around quite a bit, settling for a hugely improved stomp/head-bang pocket. This Opto cat has a perfectly pitched set of pipes for catchy hooks, but cannot write lyrics for shit. Fortunately, Chris Clarke is a way more entertaining & interesting rapper, stealing the show with a followup verse.

This was worth investigating. We'll probably have more from this mammal in the future.

Also: WEST COAST.

"This Aint Funny" - Mike Boyd ft. Classified

We recently asked for more submissions with dope low-budget videos, and despite Mick Jagger's theories, we're getting exactly what we wanted. Deal with it.



With a gently strong "Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil" influence, this backwoods horror flick shoot -- complete with token white college kid extras -- keeps it funny and fast-moving. The "fast-moving" is especially valuable for DIY rap cats on a budget. Good pacing makes wack footage into a classic feel. In the specific case of "This Aint Funny," though, most of the camerawork and cinematography is on point. I wish I knew who made this -- no credits I can find after a 6 pack of Stone IPA, at least, and I'm at least typing coherently. This definitely looks like a day-long shoot and the on-the-fly creativity is impressive here.

The song is also pretty dope. I salute Mike Boyd for sticking to his style, I'm not a fan but he's technically on point non-stop here. Classified comes smoother but neither really come off like a redneck except for the string of movie references.

The ending is a good message in 2014 -- kids need to know that peace is better than killing, and also, that it's fun and educational for everyone involved to terrorize people who you don't know, threaten them with weapons and tie them up, as long as mostly nobody gets hurt. Too much. Still, it's hard to pretend the ending here didn't call for GALLONS AND GALLONS OF BLOOD, as well as genuine, Deliverance-level male assault. They could still ride four wheelers into the sunset at the end, you know?

Clearly, the real lesson here is twofold.

First, it is a good thing for the resumes and psyches of everyone involved with this video that I did not direct it.

Second, it only takes a day off, a couple costumes, and 5-10 friends -- plus several sleepless days of constant editing -- to make a music video worth watching. Word to Timmy Schmurda.

Doug Benson, You Lucky Motherfucker

Well played, daug.

"Come Back" - Write Brothers

You're riding with the Write Brothers, first in flight. A second single from the increasingly impressive cross-coast collaboration featuring Learic (BTV) and Dante DaVinci (LAX). Tablas, firebomb synth chops, and a damn catchy hook drive the point home: this will almost definitely be the best rap project coming out of Vermont this year.



Learic honed his chops battling in Washington, DC years before he came to Vermont, but he's probably best known for his work with The Aztext, the Green Mountain State's most successful import. They've delivered four ambitious & straightforward rap albums, so Write Brothers is a sharp left turn for him sonically, with Dante DaVinci's dub reggae x Low End Theory EDM thump. It really works, too. "Come Back" has him flexing in the space between Kool G Rap and Gift of Gab, and there's some perfectly cut bars on display here.

"When the pens in my hand, your attention span tends to expand." Fuck yeah.

#CLASSIC: "Fitta Happier" - Quakers

Quakers was "a real deal masterpiece," and that's a great damn quote, because I wrote it back in 2012. A 41 track album with over 30 rappers involved? Monu-fucking-mental, mate. Portishead's Geoff Barrow worked with Aussie beatsmith Katalyst for years to hone 2012's best rap album.

I come back to this track a lot -- Guilty Simpson and MED is chemistry that always works, and this was the closest thing to a radio single on the whole project.

"Don't Stop" - Dag Savage ft. Blu

You would be forgiven for assuming this is being posted for the Blu verse. It's not, though: this Dag Savage project is pretty fucking great. I slept on it, too...inevitable in this brave new world of constant over-stimulation. Just checking new releases is a full-time job in 2014, but still, you'd think I would have jumped on a new Dirty Science project from Exile, yeah?

It's been very encouraging to see Blu so busy -- and on point -- in 2014. Things were looking pretty grim for awhile there but the man has clearly turned a corner or two since the dark days of dropping "albums" in the form of laptop demos.

The video is a sexy piece of work, too, and I especially like the white letterboxing. They clearly had a blast shooting this, which never hurts. And yeah...that Blu verse doesn't hurt, either. Dig it.

R3AL Y3TI RAP 2014

Bloggers were sucking too much; we had to get involved here.



It is impossible to stop listening to rap. Rap is repetitive bullshit, rap is endlessly creative, too. We fucking love rap. We're not mocking it. We are talking shit. This is that Real Yeti Rap.

THE INBOXXX is what we do to submissions. Not all of them. Hit YoHumpJones@gmail.com and it will at least get listened to. Parts of it will. The beginning parts.

DISPATCHES has been described as "so fucking stupid I don't know why anybody would read this hater ass dribble" by the author, Louis Mackey.

#CLASSIC is, well...nothing very creative, that's for sure. Exactly what it says on the label. We made it a hashtag because we think hashtags are dumb and obnoxious.

The rest is just dope shit we like.

"In My Blood" - Broadway Barrett

Marshall McLuhan loved black and white TV, but then he loved pretty much everything, except all the happy young people and their loud music. Today, that poor motherfucker is a counterculture hero ... proof, perhaps, that Hell is real.

Here at ®©al Y©™i ®ap, we're lifelong fans of low-fi black and white rap videos. "In My Blood" is exactly that, from a hungry Brooklyn underdog we've never heard of. He is clearly a big believer in Going In, a religious movement whose popularity has waned considerably in recent years.

Maybe you're too cool for this or it's too much of a throwback to sound fresh or your Pro Tools sterilized ears resent the audible breaths inherent in real rapping, but this cat is writing intricate flows, delivering them in one take, and it sounds damn good.

"Transitions" - Loupo

Fresh produce from the Green Mountains, courtesy of Los Angeles purveyors of fine instrumentals, Cold Busted Records. Loupo is young, hungry and dope. This album is tight, fast and impressive. That should just about cover it, yeah? Enjoy.



The styles on display here are remarkably mature for a young buck -- filthy and melancholy, which a heavy emphasis on percussive textures and jazzy layering. As long as this cat stays busy he's going to shape up into a serious threat...

"Photosynthesis" - Premrock

Perpetually perambulating performance artist Premrock has dropped another video, this time opting for that live vibe. We love that shit here. Shouts to Tony from Deep Thinka Records, an operation that is pretty much always Doing It Right and this release is no exception. The final product before you was polished by DTR fam Tim Cielinski & Madeleine Ezell.

We love to credit people because holy shit, quality audio and video content is a lot of work. Anyone putting time in for us creative shaman types who just vomit incantations all over your equipment deserves a shout out. And a pat on the f'ing back and also money.

It should be noted, albeit rude to discuss tradecraft before marks and swine, that PremRock has made a very artful move here. This dude was in Denmark getting paid for shows and shooting a video. He's got a great album and he's touring on it. It's hard to criticize too much without risking...well, the urine-tang smell of Hate. Not saying you have it in your heart, of course, just that it might sound that way.

And look that way and also smell that way.

DISPATCHES: Still Life with Vinnie Paz

I woke up this morning with a weird inclination to browse some rap videos. This is not the sort of thing I usually do. For some reason I happened upon a couple of Army of the Pharaohs tracks, a battle rap type group of somewhat well known and other relatively unknown rappers who probably have known Vinnie Paz or Vinnie Paz has thought them worthy of featuring on various songs. Fairly quickly, I found myself belting out laughing louder than I usually do on a hungover Saturday morning...

But first a bit of backstory.

I discovered Jedi Mind Tricks, Vinnie Paz’s first successful enterprise with Jus Allah and Stoupe the Enemy of Mankind, a long, long time ago on the advice of a mall Sam Goody employee who had an uncharacteristic knowledge of good underground hip hop. I think I was 13 or 14 and buzzing off of recently devouring the classic Wu Tang catalog (Enter, Swords, Cuban Linx, etc), and was thirsty for more. But what existed was lackluster, entirely unlistenable off brand Wu syndicates and weird as fuck wannabes. One fortuitous afternoon somewhere between 1998 and 2000, I happened upon Violent by Design by this cd store employee’s recommendation. They actually had the album in a mall in Akron, OH before music had gotten so easy for a 14 year-old to download that purchasing it was out of the question and before they were even really known outside of Philly. My grandparents bought it for me and I bumped it in their car on the way home. Pops was not pleased with the lyrics but I nevertheless completely fell for the undeniably perfected formula of raps and beats interspersed with eerie, cinematic and sometimes insightful voiceovers from what I would later discover were classic films or vocal samples taken from a slew of sources as random as the Undertaker's theme music.

So there’s that, I have to give Vinnie Paz a portion of the credit for that revelatory moment in my life though I was a much bigger fan of Jus Allah’s rapping because he had some of the best lines on Violent By Design. I now get that 98% of that album is priapic and ignorant nonsense, but it appealed to me at a time in my life when I perceived rapping as an action whose goal was to beat the universe into submission and to make damn well sure everyone on the planet knows you’re the best of all time. So in turn, I am also grateful for him showing me that way which was not mine.

Digression and credit aside, I found myself uproariously laughing at the ridiculousness of the lyrics in some of these AOTP videos. I probably shouldn’t be, but who really cares? I can laugh at myself and can take a joke, shit, I can take The Joke, which is the absurdity of my own existence, so I feel it necessary, or rather cannot help it, when I laugh at others who seem to take themselves so goddamn seriously; rapping about absolutely nothing but inflicting pain on the listener or the importance of their own existence. I did it for years and am probably not immune to slip up once in a while in the future. I’m okay with that because I do not ever take it seriously. The below comes from a track entitled “Bloody Tears”:

I shoot my biscuit in the air until the sky is gone
A 16 of mine murder your entire song
9M submachine is long like your entire arm
I'm a loud mouth fucka not a quiet storm
I don't believe in an afterlife so once you die you gone
Never nothin soft, everythin' a violent song
Kanye West, gay rapper, thats when lines are drawn
Qwest hit me with a beat like he Italian mob
It ain't even beef no more, its Hillshire Farm

Pretty cool, huh? Let’s examine what’s at play here: Vinnie Paz, inflated fat fuck Patton Oswalt with a set of teeth a homeless cat might sport after an episode of Bumfights, is so viciously and uncharacteristically inhuman that after he murders you for no reason he will not allow your family to mourn your passing; all the while, prefacing the entire event with his New Fucking Fact that he no longer believes in the afterlife, thus it’s all over for you, forever. But maybe we can forgive and second guess his seriousness with the beyond belief comedy that is the last line posted above. (Side note: I first heard the “Italian mob” line as “Qwest hit me with a beat like he a tired mom”) The icing on the cake of the entire song is the Castlevania sample. Genius, guys.

This video has nearly half a million views. HALF A MILLION. Someone is going to remember this in 50 years, which may be more than I can say for anything I’ve done or will do, but is that honestly how you want it all to be remembered? Vaguely clever musings on how brutal you could conceivably be to other people? And I’m not shitting on the entire culture of rap because there are plenty of people out there each doing their singular, inventive and novel thing. I will go out on the fickle limb of conjecture and state that he’s faking the fucking funk too. What are the odds that the Pazmanian Devil, the short fat kid from the Philly suburbs, packs a cannon in a taxi cab? (He says that in some other terrible song I was listening to that now I can’t track down)

Moreover, I’ve seen Vinnie Paz in interviews. He seems like a genuinely nice guy and occasionally makes dope and scholastic references in his raps. I bet that he has a whole bunch of shit he could rap about that would be interesting and insightful. Admittedly, he has a good enough grasp of wordplay and structure to be able to probably be pretty good at it. Perhaps this is a glimpse of the real Vinnie Paz in “Before the Great Collapse”:



You can’t deny that that beat is absolutely nasty and that Vinnie might be speaking from the heart. Perhaps he should do that more often and take a cue from Stoupe’s intro sample, sourced from the 1995 film, “The Addiction”:

“To face what we are in the end, we stand before the light and our true nature is revealed. Self-revelation is annihilation of self.”

THE INBOXXX: "Five O" - Reese Chubbs

Welcome to The INBOXXX, a feature that hovers between peer review and ritual sacrifice. For today's installment we've tagged in DJ Multiple Sex Partners, live from Los Angeles, CA.



DJ Multiple Sex Partners: DUMP RECORDS?

Hump Jones: ...which stands for Do U Make Paper. No question mark. Still, it's kind of bluntly catchy for a label name. And as for "Reese Chubbs"...?

DJ MSP: ...yeah, that is a big fat win of a name. It's fun to say and it looks good on paper.

HJ: This video looks fucking great, though, props to Itchy House Films.

DJ MSP: Itchy House? These guys could just make up names all day if rap doesn't work out. Do U Make Paper Brand Consulting, LTD. I agree, Itchy House has some cinema chops, this is crisp.

HJ: That opening shot on the sidewalk right as Reese Chubbs starts yelling at us is great camerawork, looks like some big boom technique. This is definitely some movie-level production value, they did a lot of shooting for this.

DJ MSP: Love this dude's flow. Screaming, yet supremely laid-back. It's not really his flow, I guess, everyone is rapping like this in 2014 if they're not rapping like Mac Miller.

HJ: Yeah, Mystikal's Kids are winning everywhere, word to Stitches.

DJ MSP: Great boom work on this chase scene in the second verse, too. So many rap videos have the sheen, the slickness, of a professional film shoot, but you don't see this kind of technique. Itchy House is dope. Also, Reese Chubbs can run surprisingly fucking fast.

HJ: A video with a plot twist.

DJ MSP: Oh, I see, that wasn't Reese Chubbs at all. Man, I like saying Reese Chubbs. REESE CHUBBS WAS NOT RUNNING. REESE CHUBBS WAS ELSEWHERE.

HJ: Reese Chubbs was lamping in a luxury sedan watching this cop cold play himself.

DJ MSP: Man, you told me we were supposed to shit on people and all, but this was overall really good.

HJ: Well, we can shit on people, the option is there. I agree, though, this was a perfectly executed trap story.

DJ MSP: Well, motherfuck Joe Budden, then. There. I said it.

"Good as Gone" - Dilated Peoples

Well, hot damn.



In a year that has seen a lot of 90's vintage underground acts resurfacing with great music, Dilated Peoples announces a new album and tour, and they're doing it on Rhymesayers. The big surprise here is Rakaa coming through and stealing the show with a sharply cut verse that shows off his considerable growth in the years since Dilated Peoples was working the summer festival circuit. If you've never checked out his 2010 solo joint Crown of Thorns it is a rewarding listen -- not a lost classic, but definitely an awesome detour.

Their new album is called Directors of Photography, but the cinema here is courtesy of Andrew Melby. The video is crisp, clever, and gorgeously framed work. Rhymesayers stays winning, and this is good for us all.

Aretha: The Beat Tape

Project management is a huge, vast, tremendous pain in the ass. Even assembling a modestly mediocre piece of work is still a piece of work, especially when you're coordinating a collaboration involving more than ten people. So doing all that and doing it well is a rare feat. Kinda like this beat tape here.

Only a few of the names here are new to the jaded, unspeakably sophisticated team here at Real Yeti Rap, but I've gotta say: I never would have thought to assemble this roster, especially for this particular project. It takes rare vision to see something like this before it even existed. Aretha: The Beat Tape is a diverse portfolio of approaches to the artform, and all of them work cohesively.



TL;DR - Fuck, this was good..

Mello Music Group - Mandalas Vol 1 & 2

A strong contender for Best Rap Project of 2014, at this point. This absurdly over-stuffed collection is a testament to the roster Michael Tolle has built.



"An embarrassment of riches." MMG's output in 2014 has been nothing short of absurd: Apollo Brown, L'Orange, Open Mike Eagle...an almost unfair level of bi-coastal consolidation of talent.



It must not go without comment that the cover art is gorgeous work. That's Matt Andres and you should hire him. Soon.

KNife - "Iconoclast" - The Whole Album

Happy Jesus Founding America Day. The Georgia-based rap phenom KNife has released a new album today, and taken the rather unusual but highly appreciated step of putting the whole thing up on YouTube.

In related news, holy fuck this dude is a good rapper. Production here manages to meander all over the map yet still feel like a cohesive album, probably thanks to a short, All Killer No Filler runtime. This is flames: experimental but never irrelevant, serious but never boring, and risk-taking without face-planting. "Iconoclast" is an achievement.

...which can be downloaded here. Do that there.

Apollo Brown - Cellophane Cypher

Props to Ras Kass for sitting down with a bunch of young, hungry spitters. Great cipher here over a recent Apollo Brown beat, "Thirty Eight." Apparently Ras Kass has an album in the works with Mello Music Group, which will feature production from L'Orange, Oddisee and Apollo Brown, so...that's good news, right?

Damn right it is.

"The Eighth Tower" - Algorhythms

When I was fresh out of High School, rare books were still hard to find. Jacques Vallee's Passport to Magonia was prohibitively expensive, and his Invisible College was just plain vanished. Now they're both back in mundane paperback print, just in time for a new generation of utterly illiterate iPad mouthbreathers to ignore them.

Even more rare, though, were the Occult tomes that were barely 'in print' to begin with -- one of which was "War in Heaven" by Kyle Griffiths. Thanks to the tireless archival work of the Biblioteca Pleyades, the whole thing is archived online. I tracked down "War in Heaven" at around the same time I finally got ahold of James Shelby Downard's "King Kill 33," which was simply a photocopy of his original typed manuscript, and Kerry Thornley's rambling "Confessions." The Downard turned out to be a disappointment, more poetry than anything else. I'm still thinking over Thornley's book years later. Kyle Griffiths, however, did lasting damage to my psyche.

I could ramble for days, but let's inject some meat solution into the mix:

Chapter Six: In The Eighth Tower (1975), Keel concluded that UFO contact reports had a common origin with certain very intense religious and occult experiences, such as visitations from gods, angels, or demons. He postulated that the cause of all these events is a natural phenomenon, which he names the “Superspectrum.”

Keel’s Superspectrum seems to be based loosely on Jung’s concept that the human race possesses a “collective unconscious,” but he carries the idea much further than Jung did. Jung had conceived of the collective unconscious only as a body of information stored in the subconscious minds of many different individuals that causes all of them to think or behave in similar ways.

Keel carries this concept much further, and postulates that the Superspectrum involves specialized forms of matter and energy unknown to present-day science. He borrows concepts from occultism and coins scientific-sounding new terms to describe them. His Superspectrum simply seems to be another way of saying “influence by spiritual beings and psychic powers.”

However, he doesn’t conclude that the Superspectrum is a being or group of beings, as the occultists usually do with their concepts of gods, demons, and spirits. Instead, it is simply a kind of natural phenomenon with a “computer-like intelligence.”



EELRIJUE is being finalized this month, and all of the themes we baked into that cosmic casserole are coming back to haunt us. I mean that in a perfectly literal sense: our lives are haunted by a cast of characters that is barely even humanoid. Be careful what you make songs about, kids...