Dot Com Dreamin'

 

As dumb plans come to fruition, we are moving this circus to a proper dot com website. As the free money era of shit corporate music journalism comes to a blood-soaked, entertaining end, it's time to step things up out here in the wilderness.

G Perico - "Troll Patrol"

 

 

 

I first heard G Perico come up in a conversation about Action Bronson. Years later, I still say they're both innocent: Bam Bam didn't bite Ghostface any more than G Perico is doing an Eazy-E impression. Both comparisons are inevitable, I get it, but I'm not signing any petitions to kick them out of the Official Real Hip Hop Academy, now or ever. Hardly anyone is here because they were invited; some clubs you have to break into. Especially if you're an Adidas-Albanian.

Unlike a majority of our modern drug rap celebrities, G Perico is exactly the retired Crip he makes himself out to be. More importantly, he's a businessman with a reliable product. His spin on G-Funk is always dope, unpredictably weird, and extremely funny. In the tradition of Suga Free, who could fuck up a grown man's life with a single bar, Perico's beefs & brags are hyper-detailed, technicolor 4K cinema. Most of the people I have hipped to his catalog didn't like him at first, the same reaction I so often see for Bruiser Wolf, Boldy James or RXKNephew. True greatness is often a system shock.

Of course, that same consistency also means that every track washes by like the one before it, right? The formula can only be so compelling, but between the charisma & the humor, "Troll Patrol" is exemplary craftsmanship. All rappers talk shit but too few of us can do it effectively. G Perico may not be internationally ranked yet, but he is a Grandmaster just the same. "If I gotta wear a rubber, I don't want it. I'm exclusive." Turn the music down and focus your ears out West to Mission Hills, and you can almost hear Jerry Heller trying to claw his way out of Eden Memorial so he can sign this kid to Ruthless.

I admire the animal purity of artists who can nail a single formula and stick to it for their entire career. At no point in the legendary saga of Ill Bill did that dude contemplate re-inventing himself. Feral genius like that doesn't need to evolve or grow in any meaningful sense, it only needs to exist like a Platonic ideal. That's the "effortless" part of mastery; the rest of us have to keep hitting the gym. Even then, maybe leave all that David Bowie shit to the pop stars & rock whores. Focus on perfecting yourself as you are.

No clue why the fuck this man is flossing in a Bruins jersey, but I do respect it. 

 

"Billion dollar brain, hundred thousand dollar chain." Lyrical-ass Official Real Hip Hop Academy rappers cringe at bars like this, but that's because they love their word games more than they love this genre. G Perico loves this genre, he loves being a rapper, and he loves living his life. It's a beautiful thing to see. Four Dickies.

 

 

Copywrite - "Turn the Page" ft. Slug

Whenever Copywrite pops back up, it's always interesting. Pete Nelson has been having one wild-ass ride through adulthood over the past...well, it's been a long time. As we lurch into the flames & bloodshed of Summer 2024, he's out running a promo camapign for The Last Supper, his new album on Man Bites Dog Records. He's been rolling with MBDR for a long time now; it's crazy to think that God Save The King dropped over a decade ago. It's even crazier to think that Copywrite, of all the motherfuckers from Ohio, got Roc Marciano and Casual on a song together. (No, really.)

Twenty years is a long time to be fighting for food in the indie rap ecosystem. During that span, Copy has been battling, primarily with himself. The punchline king of Columbus managed to avoid being reduced to someone else's punchline after his iconic knockout loss to Icon the Mic King at that one Scribble Jam way back when. (Made all the more hilarious by the fact Michael King is an extremely nice, polite dude.)

Copywrite has also been wrestling with his own legacy. While the man is justly renowned for his brutal one-liners and world class shit-talking, what really cemented his rep was "June," an RJD2-produced tribute to his dead father. The man is never more electric than when he turns his weapons on himself, and for this single, he's channeling exactly that kind of raw live-wire confessional. The content is nothing new, but the delivery is: his stutter-stop flow patterns are an undeniably impressive technical workout. It's also a 10 pound blivet bursting under the strain of 20 pounds of product.

Still, credit is due for an artist still pushing himself & exploring new facets of the artform, especially considering how many emcees from that heady Def Jux era expect to be treated as legends today for what they did in 2005. Copywrite has been out here in the fucking trenches. And to think, he could have retired like Yak Ballz to some cushy nothingburger VP sinecure at the House of Bronfman!

Speaking of retirement, we've got another phoned-in feature from Slug, whose past decade has been a living experiment in monetized dad rap. He decided to cut his part for the video dressed up like Terry Richardson, which is resonant. Like Nas or Big Boi, Sean Daley is one of the few rappers who can sell out big rooms packed full of 2-3 generations worth of stage eyes. He's a happily married dad now, but the reality-distorting effects of Atmosphere's whitebread success story will continue to be felt for years to come. (Just consider the fact that "Slug is my favourite rapper of all time after Tupac" is an actual, existing sentence.) 

Atmosphere tours on performing The Hits, but their actual album output over the past decade has been something else entirely, more experimental than ever. It's often boring as fuck, too. Few rappers have the economy of power to sustain the kind of exacting minimalism that makes Ka or Mach-Hommy work. It's not just the flat delivery, though: Slug's pen game has notably suffered every damn time I've heard him in the past five years. He was always a "first draft bars" kind of rapper, wandering through broken metaphors, sounding like a great drunken freestyle in some kitchen at 3 am. He also built that into a brand that's still moving merch to this day.

It's good to see Pete Nelson doing good. For all his justified angst & rap-hands mania, the man has a life, a dog, and some semblance of peace. He has surely earned it all. This here music video, though? It's just awkward, bud. It would have been a stronger song without the feature. Two Dickies.

LNDN DRGS - "Heathrow Bound"

 

Los Angeles is a weird fucking country. When Roman Polanski was making Chinatown, he spent his weekends filming orgies at his house, entertaining a steady stream of seekers, dreamers, dealers, fixers, hustlers & pimps. Worst of all, of course, were the actors, directors & producers he called friends. Decades later, things have only gotten worse: you'd be lucky to survive the orgies they have now. LA has always been a place for monsters to make it big, a place where anyone willing to get with the program can get ahead fast.

That program, of course, is organized crime. Mob money, sex trafficking, family dynasties and drug distribution do not exist "beneath" the glitz and glamour out in the California sun. There is no fig leaf, no pretext of legitimate governance, none of that Wall Street Judeo-Christian bullshit about respectable families or good politicians. The grim, meat-hook realities are all on billboard display over Sunset Boulevard.

Like most LA residents, Jay Worthy is a work of fiction in progress. Nothing has changed much since he was bullshitting Jeff Weiss back in 2019. This is a self-made man with Compton clout, no specifics needed: "You gotta do your history, but when you do, you learn that I’m official and not to be played with." After all, who gives a fuck? This is the entertainment business, a house of cards built on frauds co-signing frauds. Oh, and laundering money.

Critiquing Lil' Jeffrey Sidhoo as if the dude was some kind of rich poseur is missing the point. How do you think all those wealthy families got rich? It's not all patents & mineral rights up in the small circles of that Top One Percent. Further, even if ol' boy came from the most blue-blooded of velvet loafers & crisp khakis, that's got nothing to do with what happens in LA any given weekend. Rich men from good families get into trouble with drugs and guns all the time. Just ask Hunter Biden.

If you want rock-solid G-Funk rap product on demand, ask Jay Worthy. Rap losers bitch about his success being "bought" -- like a consistent, quality catalog is some shit you can just buy. The rich know better! Worthy's main asset has always been his taste. It's definitely not his rhymes; few emcees out today sound as bored with their own shit. Christ, he makes Larry June sound like Lil Fame. But his devotion to Los Angeles street music is the foundation of his success. Every connection, every album, is downstream of his informed love for the genre. To me, that's hard to hate.

It's also hard to like when it's this fucking lazy. Production bumps, sure, but it damn well better. This is just an under-cooked verse with an extended outro and a whole lot of gorgeous high-end vehicles. This video looks great and means nothing. It doesn't matter whether or not Jay Worthy is authentic, what matters is that he is boring. One Dickie.

 

Ghostface Killah - "Set The Tone (Guns & Roses)"

Pretty Toney is a wizard of pure chaos. He's given the game some of the finest LPs we will ever study, but even them classics were full of curveballs. It's hard to make a case that his catalog is all classics at this point, and that's coming from a big fan of Ghostdini's weirdo excesses. I managed to avoid the hype cycle on this one; all I needed to know was that it was finally coming. Right on schedule, it's May 10th, 2024 and we've all woken up to a new album from Ghostface Killah.

And, once again: pure fucking chaos. Seeing Fat Joe or Jim Jones on the tracklist makes sense, but how Ja Rule wound up here seems like an important scoop for actual music journalists to pursue. Is that poor midget bastard still working through contractual obligations to UMG decades later? If so, he deserves it. I don't hate humanity enough to say we deserve him, but his Cam'Ron imitation here was a better showing than I expected. Props, little dude!

The most striking surprise on Set The Tone is how squarely Bulletproof Wallets the opening salvo was, right on down to "Pair of Hammers." a slow, grimy banger with Method Man. When Raekwon rolls out to rock some uptempo pimp funk followed by a single with Nas? It would be reasonable to expect an album full of throwback filth like this. If you were dealing with someone else.

Not that it goes weird right away. Ghost's hook game is god tier on "No Face," which Kanye West kills, no question. An album of Ghost and Ye trading technicolor braggadocio would probably echo for decades. That slams into the classic reggae remix of "Champion Sound," then the 90's chill of "Cape Fear," and all is right again with the world. His team-up with AZ on "Locked In" is equally triumphant shit, a slice of 00's radio-rap heaven and one of the best songs here.

The album takes a hard left with "Plan B," which could be the funniest and least appropriate R&B joint Pretty Toney's ever done. Where 2Chainz makes Top 40 trap operas funny with his verse, Ghostdini imbues his unhinged energy into the entire track. These are Frank Zappa grade parodies of form, and he's only doing it to pop off many dozens of hilarious jokes, too. All told, this joint is way more Fishscale than Ironman. The whole second half is club songs of various regional flavors, many of them hilarious, some of them excellent.

This joint also turns out to be more of a prequel than a statement. Track 18: "Yo, what's really good. I want to thank everybody for coming out tonight. That was the album." Then he announces "Supreme Clientele 2...Indiana Tone and the Temple of Goons or something like that." So much for all the expert Podcast-Americans who insisted this album was mostly tracks from the forever-awaited Purple Tape sequel. Get fucked, nerds.

Everything wraps on a speaker-folding club single with Remy Ma, and in retrospect, all this chaos makes sense. A hot mess of self-indulgence, self-mastery and hungry intensity, Set the Tone (Guns & Roses) is another cinematic, psychedelic head trip from Wu-Tang's Finest. 

Larger than life even past the age of 50, Ghostface Killah dropped the most important album of the month, re-centering New York City with a summer worth of anthem joints. Like Christopher Nolan's film Tenet, the artistry is too perfected for me to complain about plot points from the cheap seats. There is only one accurate verdict here. Five Dickies.

NF - "MOTTO"

 

When Lou Mackey sent me this video, I assumed that was a recommendation. As it turns out, he was actually asking me to stop for a moment so that he could use my boots & pantslegs to scrape some dogshit off his shoes. 

Prior to pressing play, I thought that NF might have evolved into something interesting & new. The kid has been an anomaly for a long time, a high-charting "Christian" rapper whose faith has always been curiously absent from his actual albums. Nonetheless, the boy moves units in an era where most major artists are faking streams. He has mustered a successful, touring career with almost zero mention from Our Extremely Online Rap Discourse.

Every Christian worships in their own way, but allow me to throw some stones. Brothers & Sisters: If you spend some time listening to NF, you'll find his relationship with the almighty provides him with no purpose, no answers, no comfort, and no validation. For this, he turns to the same crass materialism as his secular competition, song after song. Pride goeth before a hit single, and greed will never go out of style here in America.

"I just want to sign a record deal," he half-sings in the same studied poses G-Eazy and Post Malone trained in, "maybe buy a house up in the hills." That's off "When I Grow Up," another flawlessly done music video that spotlights NF's major assets. He is a hyperactive freak, a class clown goofball & a natural actor. He's also got so much social anxiety you have to wonder if the kid buried bodies somewhere shallow. 

He is a perfect pop product, an everyman who always wants to win, but never feels like all his winning is enough. That's why he's so relentlessly relatable: an affluent adult child, more free than most human beings in history could imagine, yet haunted by voices in his own head, paralyzed by nothing remotely real. He's just like us!

Any reasonable person would expect a turn, a twist, some sign of self-awareness that every single second of this song & video are a Disney Channel awkward rendition of Marshall Mathers karaoke. Nothing like that happens, but I must credit the man with being a better dancer than his idol. NF makes the most of his OCD mania on camera, throwing himself into his takes, doing his goofy little stunts. That charm is killed dead by how depressing it all is, though: the sets, the extras, the time, the money, all of it so this boring dude could make his dream version of "The Real Slim Shady." That shit was stupid the first time, too.

NF is at the height of his long, cynical career, and this is really all he's got. Real Yeti Rap is not buying. I consider "MOTTO" to be closer to "Do The Bartman" grade novelty songs than any kind of actual white rap music on par with Haystak or Vanilla Ice. Zero Dickies.

Nickelus F - "Tectonics"

 

 

I'm old enough to remember when Nickelus F lost that battle to Shellz. He was a teenage wunderkind Unsigned Hype, way back when my people (Rural-Cracker Americans) were still taking The Source seriously enough to steal copies off the magazine racks. Hell, I even had friends who would tear out pages and hang them on their walls. Everybody wanted to be Eminem and nobody was addicted to prescription opiates yet. It was a hell of a time to be alive. After that, of course, music journalism got killed by free blogs & autistic trolls, and now you're all stuck in here with me.

Certain industry plants may be getting a lot of press in recent weeks, but for a cultural institution of Real Yeti Rap's magnitude & heft? None of that dogshit noise exists. Nobody who buys verses is part of the conversation. Dope ghostwriters are, though, and it's great to see artists like Nickelus F (or Quentin Miller) getting their due after decades in the trenches. Doing the actual work. Paying a lot of wasted dues, too. Whether it's New York, Los Angeles or Nashville, none of those motherfuckers love you, and they have been bleeding talent to death for a hundred years now. And almost all of it is legal.

"Look: I found my way, went from Soundcloud to paid from mixtapes in all the gas stations around the way." This is a technician who knows better than to be too rigid with the rhymes. The real hypnosis is delivering all that signal casually, conversationally, and he walks that high wire end to end here. Like the late great Fred the Godson, his delivery is careful camouflage. There are deliberate drops in the bar schemes, sudden turns into new pockets, and repetitions that almost sound like mistakes. And all of it is perfect.

Most of those Unsigned Hype artists never amounted to shit. Which isn't to say they never made great music, just that this business is a cold, cruel graveyard. Promising careers get destroyed every day, and often for no real reason; just clipped in the crossfire between vanity, money, and nepotism hires.

That's just The Business, though. Sure, they dominate the discourse, shape the history, and own most of the master recordings, but that's only ever just The Business. The Genre is something else altogether. Something bigger, too. Saigon just dropped a video for "Stocking Cap" back in February. Ghostface has a new LP about to drop, Supastition is repping North Carolina in high style again, and Blu is sounding better than ever. I could go on for many, many thousands of words. Christ Almighty, even Buck 65 is back from the deep stacks and dropping a legendary run of new material.

These are glorious days for The Genre, the increasingly global temple of hip hop exploring this infinite canvas, all collaborating & competing. We're all going to win, too. Four Dickies. 

Cookin Soul & Raz Fresco - "Snakes & Ladders"

Cookin Soul is a reliable brand and a long, weird story. Originally a Blog Era duo devoted to cornball novelty mashup mixtapes, these days it's a one man band delivering nothing but soulfood-ass beats. In a business where consistency matters, Big Size keeps his product staggeringly on-brand.

Raz Fresco has made himself a legend off nothing but talent, work ethic, and a fundamentalist devotion to The Culture. His particular schism is extremely 90's, distinctly New York, and steeped in the street gematria of Five-Percent Nation mathematics. These are all good things. Inevitably, these labyrinths of referential wordplay can feel rote, almost paint-by-numbers, but the kid carries that raw, original flaming fire in his heart. He is always on point.

"Snakes & Ladders" is exactly that. Sure, Main Source shout-outs and acronym games may sound decades old, but fuck, what a great decade that was. More importantly, this beat is an absolutely perfect slice of melodic filth, all vibrating in tune with one of the best bass chops I've heard from anyone in 2024. 

Fresco floats over this like a professional should, nimble with the flow patterns but never getting handcuffed to his own rhyme schemes. No question, he's delivered better verses in the past year. (Tons of them, in fact, often alongside artists like Estee Nack who force everyone else in the room to put in 110%.) But this is still 99th percentile performance, especially by the remedial standards of contemporary "rappers."

Press play and let this one run, bud. There isn't a single second out of place here; the beat, the verses and the video are a single organism, breathing as one. This is a pure signal from the high holy frontiers of the true school underground. Four Dickies.

Lil Uzi Vert - "Pink Tape"

I was told by a cool dozen of my Online Rap Friends™ that I should check out the new Lil Uzi Vert LP. An admirably bold stance to take, considering how fucking stupid you sound simply saying his name. I was told this wasn't exactly a great album, but it was very "interesting." That word, it kept coming up. Yet although I feel personally wronged, by all of you, I must concede it's vague enough to be factual: this is a very interesting album.

The music, of course, is trash. Lil Uzi Vert has always been at the emo-rap forefront of fetal alcohol collateral damage, trying desperately to communicate a feeling, a vibe. Raised by television sets and handheld screens, they don't even know that humankind already has a rich heritage of shared technology to communicate feelings, one older than any nation on earth, older than history itself. It's called songwriting. That doesn't happen much here.

When the dirt dog god Russell Tyrone Jones was freestyling first-take impressionist art, he was channeling actual genius, not to mention riding the waves of Led Zeppelin amounts of intoxicants. Lil Uzi Vert? He's just kind of trying things out. If you're reading this: great job. You should keep experimenting. In private, for at least a decade, before you burden us with anything else.

What's interesting, then, is how any of this happened at all. Even coming from the post-Generation X wasteland of feral 80's Babies, we were still very much shaped by Our Parents Music, still fluent in decades of worth of eras, genres and fads. There were certain standards. There is a lineage from Pink Floyd to Radiohead, from Prince to D'Angelo, from Detroit house to eurotechno trash. Decades later, it would appear that eurotechno trash somehow won the war, flattening all that culture into an endless loop of major key EDM trap garbage playing in every gas station convenience store in America. Verily, all of these people must die.

The great thing about multiple generations of brain-damaged consumers is, you can sell them anything. The downside of that is, anyone can sell them anything, so in the past two decades the megacorporations who control entertainment have been having a hard time. Despite all their pretensions of data-driven decision making, it's mighty hard to miss the fact most of their products are failures. 

 

Part of that is because the music business was created by organized crime to launder money. Part of that is because their "data" is mostly their own bullshit numbers. Anyone who thinks 4Batz or Chance the Rappers happen organically is retarded -- not in some cruel, pejorative sense, but as an objective medical diagnosis.

An oral history accounting of how all this goofy horseshit was "written," tracked & recorded would be very interesting, too. Thanks to Rick Rubin and Young Guru, being a recording engineer can seem like a glamorous gig until you make the mistake of actually getting involved. Those poor bastards suffer, and suffer mightily. I pray that everyone involved with this was a fan, but I also know better.

The most awkward thing about the industry is how much you all have to lie about each other, to pretend that a Taylor Swift is somehow operating at the same level as a Lana Del Ray, or that Beyonce Knowles-Carter can muster the vision or depth of Erykah Badu-3000. Constant, "the floor is lava" style delusional word games. It wears you down. The drugs don't help, but neither does going sober. You join the Illuminati, you cash out with enough money for your llama farm, or you die, young & dumb.

To me, one of the most fascinating thought experiments is "Imposter Syndrome." I struggle to imagine what it would be like, how it would feel to doubt myself. In this, me and Lil Uzi Vert are blood brothers, the same glorious species of stupid. Past that, I hear only the stress fractures of a small engine being pushed past all limits, seconds away from that eternal sunshine. Everyone who enabled that inevitable death has sinned before God, but I hope I'm wrong; I hope that he lives to be a wealthy old gremlin freak, like Flava Flav.

Gillian Welch nailed it: "People often ask me to talk about my songs. Whatever I have to say about the song, kinda made it into the song." Lil Uzi Vert is a pathological extrovert who loves making music and has nothing, nothing at all, to say. Zero Dickies.

Jump Back & Kiss Myself

For awhile there, we had a great run. Real Yeti Rap was a reliable, respected resource for pure petrochemical grade slander. 

In an underground every bit as boring as the music industry success stories they resent, there are endless targets in perpetual view around here. People caught feelings. Extremely entertaining feelings. Rappers, perhaps the dumbest motherfuckers in the English speaking world, deserve to suffer the slings & arrows. And we are very much here to serve.

We also gave props due to dope shit. That policy will continue. We respect our elders (if they can spit) and we support young talent. When we press play, we seldom expect to hear anything even decent, but when it turns out to be a cat like Avenue, it's always a blessing. Keep 'em coming.

But mostly, Real Yeti Rap is about the purifying properties of fire. We love rap music on a cellular level. And it is because we love rap music that we want most of you to stop trying. Nobody benefits from your exertions, not even you. Helping a suffering struggle rapper realize they are destined for greatness in real estate, retail or hospitality is a victory for the culture. Every time.