"Have Discipline" - Rahim Samad

A baffling piece of work. Rahim Samad is clearly a hardcore hip hop head and he brings a very West Coast x 90's Vintage flow: technically precise, multisyllable sequencing, poetic braggadocialist propaganda. It's also 90's Vintage in the sense of being three consecutive verses of, politely, rappitty rap-ass rapping.

Dude can spit, but why, tho? Exponentially ramping up the confusion levels is the video itself, a gritty and basic rap template that is interspersed with footage of Yasser Arafat, IDF airstrikes, and dead kids in Gaza. This is probably a clever gimmick to get more video views, and it definitely worked on me. I wound up watching this three times trying to determine if, at any point in three verses, dude actually referenced the Middle East.

I came away with more respect for his mechanics -- he maps out flow patterns superbly -- and a sense that Rahim Samad could have written a dozen more verses over this beat that would have been more or less precisely the same. There's definitely standout lines, but his work is primarily filler. And despite referencing Knight Rider, American Psycho, and the obligatory shoutout to Lent, at no point does dude actually reference the Middle East.

I don't get it either. Shouts to having real scratch hooks in 2014, though...more of that, please.