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.

Joyner Lucas - "I'm Not Racist"

When you start off your video with a heavyset white man in a fake MAGA hat dropping a dozen n-bombs into the camera, it's pretty obvious we're dealing with a Serious Artistic Statement. This is a subgenre that tends to suck, but Mr. Lucas really delivered the goods here, spraying shots in all directions. He operates on so many simultaneous levels of caricature it approaches art.

The hype for Joyner Lucas is hard to avoid anywhere in New England, even the Outer Sticks I reside in. Despite that, I didn't know for a fact that he was black until about a minute into this video -- his grievances against other black men are just too articulated. Nobody wearing a real MAGA hat could muster such a cutting, knowing argument...not even Malik Obama, since he's actually a white guy running a (shitty) parody account on Twitter.

Now, most Trump supporters think Steve Jobs died of Gay AIDS, and Jewish physicists don't really resonate with that demographic. Joyner Lucas has a much higher opinion of white people than actual white people do, but this doesn't really dilute his big moment at all. He's grabbing so many third rails at once, the sheer juice powers past little details like that. Again, this is a Serious Artistic Statement.

As such, it bangs. This is a song that could have taken hundreds of wrong turns, but Lucas never lets go of the raw urgency and honesty of the opening barrage. More than that, his writing is tightly cut, a conversational jazz piece that camouflages the intricacy of his rhyme schemes.

As a career move, this reaches further and costs less than a Quavo hook or a Nicki Minaj feature. JUST SAY SOMETHING REAL. Everyone wants to be famous, but yet few self-professed artists are willing to put their dick on the line quite like this.

The secret sauce, of course, is nihilism. You see it in the refrains that run through both verses: the hypocrisy, the victimhood, the self-deception, the laziness -- humans in general are generally shit. America will never get over blackness or whiteness, it's true, but there's really no good reason that we should. I am all for poking these wounds in the meantime.

It's a shame he worships Eminem so much, though. Especially when he's delivering a better product than Marshall ever could have written.

Three Lil Dickys for the ambition & songwriting skills, and one more for the incredible lip-sync performance that tubby cracker puts on here. Without him, this video just wouldn't have the impact. Paul McCartney wrote a song about this with Stevie Wonder, I think.

The Doppelgangaz - "If It Wasn't For The Cloak"

I've always had a hard time getting into The Doppelgangaz and not a damn thing has changed in 2017. As much as we all want to be unique, rapping raps and making beats is nothing special. The cloaks are cool and the aesthetic is fun, but The Doppelgangaz are typical hip hop story: a rapping duo with great beats...and one good rapper.

That would be Matter Ov Fact, who goes first here. He'll never re-invent the wheel, but he'll never deliver a half-ass take, either. He is smooth, clever, confident and a world apart from the tag-along filler that EP brings to the table.

"Gangaz really out here, movin' on excursions/ never not without beer, shorties ain't no virgins" -- those are EP's opening bars here. That horseshit is unforgivable. You're an adult male human being, write like one. I want to tell myself that this dude could be funnier or better if he tried harder, but in my heart, I know that is a lie.

Every turn of his soft little sixteen here is atrocious, the work of someone who is forcing his flow patterns to fit...and doesn't read very much. Hell, it doesn't even sound like he listens to other people talk very much. Stilted and stumbling. His whole verse is Google Translated from Russian: awkward as fuck, bud.

It makes sense that these guys are huge in Europe, where dope beats are at a premium and good English is not.

Now, the video. This is a very fucking nice video, pal, a serious piece of work. Clean drone work and smooth composition. It looks great and it made me laugh at several points: I expect little else, here in the Kali Yuga.

I also dig the fact they've got Big Josh posted up smoking. Just because. (If you don't know Big Josh, well, check out "Shawty Told Me.")

All in all, this is a Two Dicky affair. As much as I want to give respect to their accomplishments and just enjoy the vibe -- and the crushing wall of glorious sound that is this beat -- I can't. The mediocrity just kills my fucking high. No love.

Deniro Farrar - "Nervous"

Deniro Farrar takes flow patterns very seriously. His verses don't deviate a single syllable for this whole song. That's not unusual for Mr. Farrar. He's almost always sharp & crisp like that.

But, you know, North Carolina. That's a sweet spot for hip hop, always has been, where Dirty South crashes up against East Coast True School heads. This is the state that gave us Supastition and Petey Pablo. I mention them because Farrar, at times, sounded like a CRISPR splice hybrid of those two exact emcees. "Nervous" is not one of those times, though. This is a good rapper getting great before our eyes -- his last two EP's are cold killer material.

The point is getting distinctive, right? Carving your own lane? Evolving your own style? I'm preaching to a dwindling congregation, but my conviction has never wavered on this. I'm not rooting for Deniro Farrar because he's "talented" -- that shit is cheap and abundant -- but because he's becoming a unique talent. I would wish the same for any of you reading this: become the monster you alone were destined to be.

The actual video is a clever low-budget triumph. Just a couple simple sets and some carefully coordinated camera work. It doesn't look like a million bucks, but it sure as shit keeps you watching. The same charisma that sells this cat onstage translates to The Youtubes: "telegenic," they used to call it.

As for the extended outro, well, I reckon he earned it.

Third time in a row I'm awarding a Three Dicky verdict. This streak is strictly accidental, but I'm none too worried about featuring some good shit for the rest of September, either.

Fred The Godson - "Intro / Let It Cook"

Fred The Godson might be operating with a handicap or three, but rapping is not one of them. Dude can spit. His grating, disinterested delivery may be an acquired taste, but his pen game is impeccable at this point. Like Conway or Pusha T, his nonchalance is camouflage, the confidence of a careful writer.

This is a breezy, stripped-down video that makes it clear he's got verses for years on deck. I know nothing about the Heatmakerz, but that's because I have no tolerance for this kind of paint-by-numbers, soul-chop fast food. The best that can be said for these beats is that they don't get in the way.

Fred is a busy man, though, following a classic NYC career path. There are better beats in his future.

It was 2011 when he was first injected into the American Dream courtesy of XXL's annual Freshman list. For perspective, the list that year included Lil' B and Kendrick Lamar. As we approach the event horizon of the Shitty Future Singularity, that amounts to a cool 20 years of cultural churn. The music industry is cruel, but surviving it must be satisfaction enough, right?

There's a hard limit on next level rhyme writing. The better you are, the more dipshits you're going to lose along the way. Guys like Big Sean and Fabolous tried to straddle both sides of that fence, and the results are too ugly to look at for long. You have to choose a fucking side.

I mention that because Fred made the right decision. There are a lot of career trajectories available after landing an XXL spot like that. Danny Brown ascended to a living god. Yelawolf devolved into a Kid Rock understudy. Takes all kinds.

Three Dickys. Fred carried this and everyone else involved had the good sense to get out of the way.

UPDATE: Yes, I have since been informed that Heatmakerz produced over 85% of the Dipset classics I grew up on. I'm leaving that line as is.

A$AP Ferg - "East Coast Remix"

"Every single time I come you niggas know I gotta do it," Busta Rhymes admits immediately. There are worse fates than making self-caricature money, of course, and Busta has always done it admirably. His chopping itself is losing precision, but his flow is still some nimble, inventive shit.

More British than Jamaican, more brand than rapper, Mr. Rhymes transcends critique, at this point. He is Snoop Dogg echelon unfuckwithable. Onward.

The biggest takeaway from "East Coast Remix" is the fact Dave East spit one of the best verses of his career on this. In the past, we have been firm and fair about his professional-grade mediocrity. Based on what he did here, though, I'm going to check his new project out now. That's unusual.

A$AP Rocky, as ever, delivers the goods on sheer flow patterns and energy. To come after that and show him up is an achievement. That said, to do all that on a track you have to share with French Montana ... must be pretty depressing. Puffy 2.0 is a consistent letdown, but also a reliable clown who can be endearing through sheer excess. This is one of those moments.

Rick Ross. This fucking guy. Despite being a photocopy of a fabricated persona, he's still one of the realest rappers out -- a fat sweaty creep who jokes about date rape and celebrates consumer nihilism better than anyone except Cardi B & Kanye West. The Trump administration will definitely gift this tubby toucher with a lucrative second act. This is America, after all.

Naturally enough, they wrap this joint up with Snoop Dogg. Everything about it is baffling - the cheap phone camera take juxtaposed against the fact Snoop actually brought some bars to the table for this one. I can't explain it either.

Overall, this was a pure slice of our current dystopia: the highs and lows, baby. Three Dickys. Well done.