Chief Keef has always been the breakout star of the GBE clique, but not far behind is his longtime righthand Lil Reese. Reesie has been popping up on Keef’s tracks for over a year, and when Keef needed a third verse for what would be his biggest hit to date “I Don’t Like,” he tossed the alley straight to Reese to produce the most controversial rap song of the year. He even got a remix of his own when Rick Ross and Drake laid verses over his Def Jam debut single “Us.” Reese distills even further Keef’s minimalist verses, stripping his menace down to the bone marrow. His song titles are all one word, mostly one syllable—“Beef,” “Us” “Savage.” Compared to Keef’s veiling dreads and Fredo’s piercing smoked-out gaze, Reese looks soft, the least likely to have that thang on him. He’s the pretty boy of the crew–the Juelz Santana to Keef’s Cam–often letting a smirk or two slide during his verses. His strongest track is “Traffic”: a pulsing manifesto anchored by the promise “we ain’t really with that talkin, bitch we bout that action.”  The video production is worlds ahead of the stripped down visuals for “Bang” and “I Don’t Like” that got Keef signed—in “Traffic,” Keef and Reese speed around Englewood in a white Jag fresh from the dealership. The bitches are badder, the fits are crispier, and even Twista pops up for an “I’m still in these Chitown streets” look.  But even crazier than the track itself are the lyrics’ foreshadowing of events that would follow just a few weeks later.

“He not bout that life, man catch him in traffic,” Reese threatens repeatedly, a few weeks before rival rapper Lil Jojo confronted him outside his home with a camera: the two taunted each other from passenger seats, in traffic. Eventually, Jojo was shot from a vehicle while riding his bike through the street in Reese’s neighborhood. Later in the track, Keef spits “pistols get to clappin, niggas get to laughin.” Soon, he’d set off a firestorm of debate after tweeting “LMAO” when news broke that Lil Jojo had been shot. Jojo had tweets of his own, though, provoking the gridlock when he tweeted “Just Caught @LilReese300 N Traffic His Daddy tryna talk It Out #NoTalkin #Bricksquad.” Rappers have been getting caught slipping at the light since Big and Pac, but the fierce reality of Jojo’s death is magnified when considering “Traffic.” In one of his earliest interviews, Keef commented that he’d “rather just say what’s going on right now. Real talk, you know? Like, what’s going on.” There was no mythologizing Jojo’s death with illuminati theories or crooked record execs or a conflict over a girl: it was flat and transparent. He talked shit about Reese and the Black Disciples, and then he got killed. The incident represents a new era of gang violence in inner cities, where social media and D.I.Y videos are the new red or blue bandana, and hashtags are more lethal than hand gestures.

The running joke in gangsta rap’s golden age was the “studio thug.” All across the early 2000s, 50 Cent and Jadakiss and Ja Rule and Cam’ron and Fat Joe and Nas and Jay-Z all took turns accusing each other of talking all that shit in the booth but never really being in these streets. 50 took the crown as Most Thuggish, and had the bullet wounds to prove it—now, he sells energy shots. Jay-Z once boasted of toting guns to the Grammy’s—now, he’s sprawled out on the hardwood of his new basketball stadium. And the self-professed God of Rap is squeaky clean Kanye West—the only Top Ten rapper that even kinda sorta talks about committing crimes anymore is Rick Ross, who’s background as a C.O. slapped a permanent “No Authenticity Required” sticker on gangsta rap’s jewel-case.

Since then, the country got used to what gangstas looked like on BET: brooding, flashy, violent, but still isolated, far away, and harmless. No matter how many cars and guns one crammed in their video, you could be sure there was a legally liable label on the other side of the camera. Nothing bad was actually going to happen. When 50 rhymed “I’ll ride by and blow your brains out,” it was a song before it was a threat, with a slick Dr. Dre beat constructed from pre-recorded gunshot sound effects. G-Unit wasn’t a gang, they were a record label (hilarious award show scuffles aside) And most significantly, as the rapper on television went from drug dealing murderer to avant-garde businessman, a digital revolution occurred that capsized the flow of content between, races, classes and cultures.

As hip-hop’s marketing and touring efforts shifted toward the sure money of corporate offices and college campuses, poor young black kids filled a void of relatable mainstream media with social media: WSHH exploded as the most-visited hip-hop website, Black Twitter controlled trending topics every night, facebook was flooded with ads selling Air Jordans. Instead of selling tapes out of car trunks, the entrepreneurial blasted datpiff links and promised #FOLLOWBACKS. This kind of web experience is inherently local, based around tight community circles where everyone pretty much knows each other (or at least of each other). Gangs and drug culture logged in as well: dopeboys have abandoned landmark corners and move weight over BBM, and crews plot on each other in broad-day over facebook. If someone got jumped, instead of telling your friends about it later, you filmed it and showed it to them. Thus, those homemade rap music videos aren’t just kids trying to get deals—they’re public service announcements, to be taken literally by those niggas from the other side of town. In this way, a track like Reese’s “Beef” is a threat before it’s a song. The hook is a war cry, a slogan, a commercial.  “Traffic” didn’t ordain Jojo’s death, but it reveals that in their eyes it wasn’t remarkable, or surprising, or uncommon. It was what was “what’s going on right now. Real talk, you now? Like, what’s going on.”

This isn’t just happening in Chicago. Here in New York, the NYPD led major investigations on facebook and twitter, leading to a crackdown involving hyper-local Brownsville sets like Wave Gang and Hoodstarz that’d been warring for months. Later, members of Crown Height’s notorious Brower Gang were indicted in a series of home invasions. Both stories made the rounds through mainstream media with the air of an ironic feel-good piece: the NYPD was celebrated for catching the “morons” and “idiots” that bragged about their crimes on social media—some stories pointed to the celebratory rap cyphers that the crews posted as well. Folks just couldn’t understand why they’d ever post their crimes online. But one must imagine that if gang violence is occurring as openly as these tweets and videos suggest, than these are neighborhoods that cops aren’t bothering to come to in the first place. It’s easy to send a friend request; it’s scarier to walk a beat.

What social media promises to any user—a college kid, a gang member, a blogger, a rapper—is fame, notoriety, respect. Getting a bunch of views on the rap video you made with your crew carries the same social clout for a 17-year-old as getting a bunch of retweets on a clever joke or double-digit likes on a quality selfie. Social media has now, for the first time, removed the buffer between the evils of the inner city and the eyes of the curious public. Now, just like every other genre, there’s no need for a label to package and distribute gangsta rap. Keef, Reese, and his cohorts are so polarizing and so urgent because America has never seen anything like them. Rap fans are used to seeing an interpretation. Chief Keef is a fact. That’s why he and his crew continue to connect with people that have grown up in his isolated, far away world, whether record labels and magazines and the pillars of mainstream culture and commerce embrace him or not.

Imagine having to physically defend yourself every day. Not because of a rap song on the radio, but because when you step outside there will probably be someone waiting who wants to hurt you or take something from you. Your parents won’t protect you, your teachers can’t protect you, and the law doesn’t protect you. The only people that care enough about you to risk their well-being for yours are your best friends. So you never leave their side. You let other people know you’ll never leave their side by getting it tatted on your arm. You share your first drinks with them, you play pranks with them, you grow up with them. Try to imagine your best friend saving your life. On multiple occasions. These are the kinds of bonds that seem worth dying over, and in the worst cases, feel worth killing over. Chief Keef, Lil Reese, and the bloodshed in Chicago are the culmination of years of cultural abandonment and constant confrontation, and whether it’s difficult to stomach or not, they are what’s going on right now.

The CDs are pressed, the numbers are projected, and the verdicts are in: Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter IV has hit like a Funk Flex bomb and is slated to be one of the highest selling rap albums of the summer. It was a lay-up—Wayne was to return from Rikers to a rap game kept warm for him by protégés Nicki and Drake, snatch up some beats from eager producers, maybe pay them, and craft a classic the likes of which we hadn’t heard from him in years. Instead, surprisingly, Wayne has delivered an hour or so of one-liners and hashtag punchlines that aren’t really about anything. And after an astronomical rise to stardom, a year-long prison stint, a well-documented drug dependency, and even a few new babies, the goblin should have a lot more to talk about. Wayne’s either being tight-lipped or airheaded about the challenges of his past few years, and his failure to address them on this latest project is a sobering comment not only on his growth as an artist, but his ability to reconcile his real life against the one his fans demand of him.

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Kendrick Lamar boasts an element that most of his fellow freshmen ignore: urgency. He sounds like he’d be rhyming even if no one were listening—a commendable trait amidst the swarm of “I’m not a rapper, I just happen to rap” caricatures that currently dominate blogspots and Billboard. Kendrick’s urgency is the fuel behind Section.80, the latest release from the Dr. Dre-cosigned Compton native on his TDE imprint, and he produces an engaging, dense, and gloomy comment on a generation’s identity crisis and the complex social and historical factors that have contributed to it. With its lofty concepts, baroque production, and striking allusions, Section.80 quickly establishes itself as a transcription of an era, and a young man’s frantic race to get it all on paper.

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No one makes partying sound less fun than Drake. For the Young Money cash crop, hitting the club means fierce stares from competitors, vapid advances from gold-diggers, and woozy blackouts from getting too crossfaded. Since his major label debut, Drizzy has made art of the indefinable grey between the euphoric climax of a night on the town and the awkward pregames and hasty comedowns that surround it on either side. Even more subtly, Drake employs this bell curve as a metaphor for the broader highs and lows of fame, wealth, and love. A recent trio of leaks from his upcoming sophomore effort Take Care find Drake musing on the ironies of contemporary young adulthood: an insatiable materialism coupled with a dismal global economy, a nihilist rebellion against growing old while demanding respect from elders and peers, and a difficulty expressing love amid a romanticizing of casual sex. Drake is widely criticized by rap stalwarts for being too emotional, but the feelings he’s engaging with aren’t just his own—they’re the swirling conflicts that a generation of “emerging adults” are facing every day, and are trying to forget about every night.

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…To OnlineClasses.net. The good folks at what appears to be a website for taking classes online think The Interludes is one of the Top 50 Hip-Hop Blogs on these interwebs. Our first press! It’s the little things guys. Here’s what they had to say:

Classy graphics accompany intelligently written pieces on cultural movements and trends in rap and hip hop. The bloggers of the Interludes consider their posts to be social documentation of the current music climate, and each post is accompanied by a downloadable mix.

I’m glad to see our devotion to black & white pictures isn’t going unnoticed. Thanks for reading, folks! Starting this blog has opened up so much opportunity for everyone involved, and it’s still amazing to me that people sit down and read (and enjoy) what we think about hip-hop. Glad we can contribute to discussion.

While I was sitting in the backseat of my family’s Camry trying to act out the masculine caricatures I’d already absorbed from “Video Music Box,” the hip-hop world was still reeling from the death of The Notorious B.I.G. “All About The Benjamins” was the second single from Puff Daddy’s No Way Out, a debut-turned-eulogy-turned-celebration as schizophrenic and tragic and beautiful as the hustler from Brooklyn who posthumously inspired it.  On its first single, “I’ll Be Missing You,” Puffy mourns his late protégé and best friend with a Sting sample and an old Negro spiritual. It’s a ballad that critic Kelefa Sanneh cites as the beginning of “corporate rap,” or rap music that prioritizes mass appeal and financial gains over artistic merit. But what better symbol is there for corporate rap’s big bang than its larger-than-life founder rising from the dead to squeeze in one more champagne drenched ode to hundred dollar bills? Clever, vain, intricate, glossy, humorous, infectious and just mesmerizing enough to hold the attention of a 6-year-old in the family sedan: “All About The Benjamins” was corporate rap’s blueprint, and Biggie’s verse was its legend.

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A vulgar, offensive, nihilistic anarchist has exploded onto the rap scene, and he’s making some of the most interesting hip-hop heard in the past decade. Playing front man to a bizarre crew of his hometown friends, the young MC draws on his turbulent upbringing, lucid imagination, and slight penchant for murder and rape to deliver ornate narratives that equally disgust and delight. Despite bubbling under the radar for some time, his ascension to the head of conversation has been blindingly fast, catalyzed by some unforgettable media appearances and punctuated by an infectious first single and a video that’s just as awe-inspiring as he is. MTV thanks God every time he spouts another profanity-laden quotable, and parents and pundits are already sketching picket signs. Hip-hop has never seen anything like him, and fans across genres, generations, and demographics can’t get enough. He’s funny, lyrical, angry, endearing—and he even has an awesome name: Eminem.

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From The Source’s legendary “Unsigned Hype” column to the hundreds of rap blogs that litter the internets, hip-hop culture has always raced to declare who got next. It’s a fervent debate that permeates basketball courts, barbershops and record-filled basements–who’s nicer than who, who deserves what, who’s dropping when and what it’s going to mean for everyone else. Rap mag XXL has capitalized on this perpetual controversy with its “Freshman Class” series: an annual cover story that features ten or so MCs dubbed to be the most promising amongst the plethora of new acts vying for airtime and attention spans. This past Monday evening, leaked photos of the 2011 Freshman Class hit the ‘net, prompting XXL to officially release the upcoming cover and spark a firestorm of debate about their latest picks. Couple this with the brow-raising pick for Best New Artist at this year’s Grammy Awards, and contention seems higher than ever about who deserves to be called the next big thing. But for all the tweets, tallies and tantrums, it seems like the one thing the public can’t agree on isn’t who the best new artists are, but what exactly it means to be “new” in today’s music climate. And if that can even be defined, how then can we hope to define criteria for “best”? As patterns for music consumption and artists’ lifespans shift immensely, the concept of a “new artist” has taken on unprecedented fluidity, and it’s becoming apparent that discovering the next may not be as important as understanding the now.

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There are few topics more consistently represented in popular music than love. We ache for a good love song–they narrate our relationships, articulate the feelings we cannot, and crystalize memories we never want to forget. Historically, the love song has been simple, almost formulaic, either celebrating a love just found or grieving over a love long lost. Songwriters made millions by constantly finding new ways to say “I love you” or “I miss you.” After a few smash hits, however, hip-hop turned the love song formula on its head, introducing new ideas about what was fair in love and rap. Comparing two of hip-hop’s definitive love songs, LL Cool J’s “I Need Love” and Biz Markie’s “Just A Friend,” highlights why the genre’s takes on matters of the heart have been so distinct, popular, and memorable.

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It was a little weird when Apple released their onslaught of cryptic press over finally landing the rights to all of the Beatles’ music. They may have, in fact, created too much hype, as the advertisements suggested that Steve Jobs was set to announce that he had signed Lebron James, legalized marijuana, or done both. Many fans had the same reaction once the news was revealed: Doesn’t Best Buy have the White Album already? Don’t I have the White Album already?

What Apple was trying to access, however, were the deep nostalgic recesses of their older customer’s minds. They didn’t care about the seventeen year old who hasn’t paid for a song since 2002- they were reaching out to his parents, specifically the ones who screamed and cried and dated Japanese girls and altered their entire outlook on life because of four lads from Liverpool.  Beatlemania seems to be something so unique and powerful that no one in his twenties or thirties should really try to describe it. It seems, though, like the closest thing our culture has to the orgasm-aneurism hybrid that the band consistently produced is the way someone reacts today when their soul has been saved in front of a congregation of hundreds.

To Jobs and company, tapping into that religious devotion meant huge numbers on iTunes. In the opening week, they sold almost half a million albums and over two million individual tracks.  Some customers were undoubtedly first-timers, but it’s likely that the strength of those huge figures came largely from die-hard fans that ached to have a new experience with their old idols, even if it meant buying additional copies of music they’d already memorized the words to.

It was another brilliant move by the company that stays winning, but one person has actually harnessed collective nostalgia on an even larger scale. Ironically, his name is Brandon McCartney. Most of us know him as Lil B. Read the rest of this entry →