I have been digging upon the new Tribe so much. They remembered to enjoy themselves. The last 2 De La albums have been relatively joyless affairs....

Yeah, they really did drag their feet, only to give us a product that's probably not as strong as the LORD$ Never Worry tape.

But you're right. I've come to expect greatness from Rocky. I've never been able to get into A$AP Ferg, but Jesus Christ... LONG.LIVE.A$AP was such a strong record that it pretty much owned every 2013 hip-hop album with the exception of Yeezus (duh.) And 2013 was a hell of a year with strong competition from established artists and mixtape-slingin' newcomers alike. As much as I love My Name is My Name, I think Rocky's album was better. It was also better than 12 Reasons too Die, Old, Indigoism, and even Acid Rap! All this DESPITE the presence of fuckin' Skrillex and goddamn Yellawolf!

At.Long.Last.A$AP actually has a higher score on metacritic I think, but good as it was (I still LOVE "Excuse Me," one of my favorite tracks of 2015) I think there was already some sign of a growing lack of focus at that point. :(

Louder, I hope you're wrong. That it wasn't just Yams who made the A$AP of 2012/2013 such a force of nature. Rocky claims he took "time off" to learn to produce, but he was already producing on LONG.LIVE. So maybe there's hope? Hope that it wasn't just Yams and a confluence of incredible production talents (notably Clams Casino, but also Hit-Boy, Mike Dean) and awesome features (Kendrick, Santigold, Schoolboy, Danny Brown, Bronson) that were responsible for that album being able to throw down with some of the best names in the game.

But... realistically... rappers tend to come and go pretty quickly. It's not rare for an artist to seemingly start a revolution, only to end up largely forgotten half a decade later. :(

the crazy thing is that Yellawolf verse was dope! haha.

You should give Ferg another shot. Trap Lord is really really good. Probably a better album than ALLA. Maybe.

Glad you like the new Tribe. I'd definitely think your primary auditory cortex was failing to perform some essential function if you didn't. I already suspect you might be missing something upstairs on account of your attitudes toward Kanye and Illmatic, but if you like We Got it From Here... I won't worry TOO much about you.

However, I think calling the new De La Soul "joyless" is unfair and inaccurate. First of all, it's fucking De La Fucking Soul. The closest they came to "joyless" was Stakes is High, and that was and is their best album ever.
Secondly, ...And the Anonymous Nobody is a colorful and pretty exuberant victory lap of an album with robot voices, fantasy-tinged role playing, and cartoon cover art. Sure it has its serious (sometimes even dour) moments, but ... honestly, "CBGBS" sounds like it could be on the new Tribe. So I'm a little baffled by your assessment. Especially since We Got it From Here... contains plenty of gloomy sentiments about America's socio-cultural climate.

And the tape De La dropped before this, Smell the DA.I.S.Y., was more or less a remix project (croasbread with a tribute album maybe?), full of repurposed and re-recorded material. Not really fair to count it as an album. Still sounded awesome though.

Hey louder, NR: did you guys hear that Pete Rock claimed to be "in the studio" with Kanye last week? He posted a video of a soundboard playing instrumental snippets from what sounds like several different songs. Honestly I don't know what to think... only a couple of the previewed tracks have anything like a recognizable "Kanye" sound to them — mostly just jazzy, Pete Rock sounding stuff — but still. Who knows?

Video from Instagram

glad you liked the De La. The records were boring to me. joyless but not angry like Stakes is High, just meh.

Kanye has actually been in the studio with a lot of people lately. I assume he's just going through the normal process of testing the waters, but as we already know, only a few of those collabs will actually make it to Turbo Grafx. We'll see.

Wait, so... you think Turbo Grafx is still an actual thing? Fuck man, it's been like 10 months since he last mentioned it, and the original intended release date came and went 6 months ago. Haven't heard a peep about it since. In fact, the most recent reference I heard to a new album (not counting Cruel Winter, which should, but probably won't, be out soon) was when Chance talked about how Good Ass Job was still in progress, and that was like ... in July or some shit.

With Kanye you really never know. Likely he won't release anything at all until Pablo's 1st birthday. He seems to like having at least a year and a half between solo albums. And based on his history, I'd wager whatever does come out next will probably not be anything we expect. Probably won't be called Turbo Hragx or Good Ass Job... I'm even starting to wonder if Cruel Winter is actually happening as planned.

I think it would be cool if he released the additional Yeezus material that we were supposed to get 6 months after Yeezus came out (hah!). I find myself wondering about what might be in those vaults. Maybe there's a full blown Yeezus sequel. Or maybe it's just odds and ends, enough for a companion compilation a la untitled unmastered.

Or maybe he's done. I would not be surprised if he was. I've actually kinda been bracing myself for it all year. One of the reasons I went out of my way to see him live.

But in all likelihood we'll have to wait 2½ years for the next thing to drop, and when it does it will be weird and alienating and not at all what most people think they want... like all the best Kanye records. :D

So you agree Stakes is High is the fucking itness?

A tentative tracklist actually leaked a while ago and all the tracks were named after old video games. I'm still optimistic about TURBO GRAFX. Might come out sooner than we know.

The new Mos Def album is out on TIDAL.. waiting for it to hit iTunes.

I think this one is actually gonna be better than the Cole and Cudi albums, regardless of what I predicted earlier. After hearing those albums, I think they won't be that hard to beat.

Cole just sold a ton of copies (by today's standards) of that crap new album. 400,000+. Bigger opening week than The Weeknd, whose album seems to have also disappointed many.

Cudi is ok from what I've heard but not the kind of thing I'd buy. So, yeah, I'd say the new Mos is almost definitely going to be better than both. Even if it's not great.

Biggest thing about memorable hip-hop these days seems to NOT being restrictive to just hip-hop or rap sounds and styles. Kendrick does crazy sprawling jazz-inflected shit, Chance does something much closer to "pop" than "rap" and of course Kanye is always all over the goddaamn place. I pray more artists jump on board, because I feel standard hip-hop growing pretty stale. When I want to listen to R-A-P, I have 25 years' worth of music to choose from. I think it's time we enter into a "post-hip hop" era, whatever that look like.

I didn't see this. Was it leaked by Kanye, or dug up on interwebs? Either way, I think it's best to keep expectations to a minimum at least for how. TLOP's not even a year old.

False Prophets recycles a Joey Badass beat from 2011 and Deja Vu uses a Bryson Tiller beat from last year. Born Sinner had a couple of recycled beats too: Electric Relexation and The Art of Storytelling (two of hip hop's greatest classics that should be left untouched!!), and Cole didn't do ANY of these beats justice.

All of which make him a glorified blog rapper in my eyes now. He doesn't bring anything new to the table but the general public sees him as "relatable" and "real hip hop" so he's basically another Eminem.

It was posted and spread by someone on Twitter but everyone was taking it seriously so I think it might've been legit.

Fo. Sho.

I get that there's a demand (possibly even a need) for "Black excellence" music in mainstream culture these days, and that's what Cole purports to bring to the table now that he's dropped the "Baby Kanye" act and adopted a more down-to-earth, man-of-the-people kind of vibe.

But really, there is a TON of Black music out there, and most of it manages to be relevant to social concerns without sacrificing artistic merit. Look at Solange's album... it's sonically beautiful, at once minimal and sprawling, uncompromising an original. Look at Sharon Jones (RIP) and the Dap Kings. Look at D'Angelo, or Anderson .Paak. Even Betoncé is using her money and status to make music that is not only commercially viable and popular culture-defining, but also extremely high in quality, politically charged (a bit), and reverent of Black history and Black womanhood.

That's not even mentioning Kendrick. If Kendrick keeps making the kind of music he's been making, and continues speaking to the issues he's been speaking to, and committing himself to intelligent socio-political discourse, musical dexterity and expanding hip hop's narrative into more poetic and insightful places, he could end up being a Bob Dylan figure for the genre.

Fuck. J.Cole is just cashing in on trends.

Even with regard to straight up, no-nonsense R-A-P, one need look no further than Common's new album for a shining example of why this world doesn't need some jackwad like Cole, going through the motions.

Again, he's not, like, Drake bad. He's not offensive and awful in any way that can match Drake's waste of beats, rhymes, life and memes. I don't hate J.Cole. But he's probably even less capable of making enduring music than King Bitchassness Aubrey Graham himself. Drake is BY FAR the bigger herpes sore in the mouth of hip hop, but at least Drake has a curator's spirit, and occasionally makes a song that becomes part of the zeitgeist.

When I think "J. Cole," the first thing that comes to mind is that Biggie sample. I have two Cole albums, but I can't recite any of his verses. I barely remember the tracks, even the ones that I like. This is NOT how you want to be thought of... you don't want to be a presence that people only recognize in the context of the other people whose shit you ape. I can't believe 400,000 people went out and bought an album by a dude whose over arching career theme is innocuousness.

Fuck it. Whatever. Common's album is great. Should have been that popular.

Aye guys!! Chance and Jeremih just put out a surprise mixtape for Christmas:

https://soundcloud.com/chancetherapp...jeremih-chance

It's definitely a marketing gimmick man. Cole used to wear Versace and make straight party music. All of a sudden he only writes "meaningful" songs, wears a plain white T and makes sure to film himself taking bus rides around the city to seem more appealing to the common man.

technically he didn't recycle "Electric Relaxation," he just sampled Ronnie Foster's "Mystic Brew." Which others have done as well... Kanye & Consequence did for instance. I liked that Cole track... though I liked it more for Kendrick than Cole.

Oh yeah you're right but it ended up sounding too much like Electric Relexation.. and he had too much pride to give Kendrick a verse. Like cmon. The song just BEGGED for it.