Sach O never ate ham, never gave a damn. I always warm up to Kanye West singles after a while but as of yet, this one leaves me pretty cold. Lex Lugor’s beat deviates slightly from his standard fare – same old southern hi-hats now with sampled orchestral stuff instead of synthesized orchestral stuff – […]

 Sach O is the one that got away. “What I did with ‘[In My Lifetime] Volume One’ was I tried to make records. I had just made ‘Reasonable Doubt’ … it wasn’t successful in music industry terms. It was a cult classic on the streets, but it wasn’t successful in the music business and I […]

Jonah Bromwich decodes Decoded so you don’t have to. 1. I knew Marcy Projects wasn’t Mt. Holyoke before I started Decoded but three scenes from Jay’s old neighborhood really struck me. According to Jay, kids in Marcy would go up to “leaning nodders” (heroin addicts ) and push them off the benches they were sleeping […]

Perhaps the first Good Friday track since “Monster” that I can co-sign wholeheartedly. Kanye and the original Curtis have been a winning combination since before Lupe was consistently a fiasco. The biggest whore since Horus kicks a few standard Yeezy verses which have become almost formulaic.  Clever puns breaking apart familiar words (planned parenthood) and […]

So ahead of its time, its parents haven’t met yet. The long mythologized, nine and a half minute long freestyle on Stretch and Bobbito was just excavated Chilean-style, courtesy of the DJ Premier blog. Jay-Z and Big L in 1995, going in over the “Keep it Real” instrumental — better known now as the beat […]

I imagine the reference point for this was “All About the Benjamins” as re-envisioned featuring a bearded white Wisconsite troubadour. There is truth to the rumor that Jay-Z’s verse was inspired by Bon Iver’s tale of his super-spooky night singing songs at the Hollywood Forever Cemetary. This is the first thing that Kanye has released […]

The disconnect between the real world and the Internet music bubble is always striking. When I told friends that I was covering Jay-Z’s Friday night Staples Center performance, response came in two forms: “please take me,” or “I work in an office, fuck you.” Meanwhile, half the people whom I dragged to the Brainfeeder Sessions […]