Sleep is hard come by. The only time rest is allowed is well past four, maybe five AM, when Moe’s cell phone flashes the reminder: “MOE YU STILL UP? YU BOUT DAT LIFE?” and because he is bout dat life, rallies fellow area insomniacs with a click:
It’s repetitively sincere and based in a ethos that pops up over and over on his newest mixtape, Humble Hustle, like on the second track “Death is a Gaurentee”[sic] where Young Moe raps about a heart hurting from pain and an arm working the cane till well late in the morning.
Thematically this second effort isn’t too far removed from the previous Underage Pain: Young Moe is still young, still in the middle of figuring out how jaded he already is and how much longer he can keep up his wide-eyed eagerness (“They took my only dream away, they locked it for a robbery/ I always told ‘em you ain’t neva broke if you got a dream”).
His sincerity hardly ever comes off forced, at time painfully sincere like when he raps about his dad (“I love the nigga, but fuck the nigga/cause he put his hands on my motha”), but it’s obvious Moe is still working his way towards finding his voice when he appears next to stronger rappers like Trel on “Tired of Bein Broke”, where they both rap about robbing a grocery store and liquor store respectively, except that while Moe morosely reflects (“I think God gave me the wrong hand/but I’m playin’ the one that he dealt”) Trel draws out small details of his methodical thievery that read more like manual than verse (“All we need is 3 heads, 1 whip, 2 heats/driver play the lookout, read a book and don’t sleep/ and joe don’t smoke no cigarettes, that movie shit so obvious/ and i hate that. straight where the safe at” . . . “no longer than 2 minutes/ fuck the rest, we can leave that”). It’s a great song left or right but it’s clear Moe is playing foil to Trel on his own song; no shame in that though. Basshedz handle near half the production and are still trying to find the right combination of synth ticks and beeps, 808’s and built-in pop hooks, the most successful being the busy and dense collaboration with Raheem’s 368 dude Phil da Phuture, “Rollin With My 40″.
Where where you when the barkeep lost his sight? What were you tweeting and what did it give you an excuse to blog about? If one day you ever need help remembering the subtle difference between “fame” and “infamy”, just try for a second to remember something, anything, from the 2010 DMV awards . . . and then remember March. To you, me, history and google, only one of them ever happened.
And yet while the short and nasty and brutish and much publicized and oft-condemned night was how 2011 began, in the end how it began had absolutely no bearing on What It All Meant, despite whatever think-piece or reportage you might have skimmed past. Where DC rap is now, at the very end of 2011, isn’t at all really affected by what happened that night. To figure that out, you have to go a bit further back. Today’s scene isn’t as neatly divided as it was a decade ago but for the most part, DC rappers today all fall somewhere along a spectrum colored by the Coliseum, the Union, and the University.
To be fair this is a really simplified way of looking at things, but most if not all DC rapper’s influences can be traced back to somewhere between the three — go-go at the Coliseum, Freestyle Union and Howard University. Diamond District’s roots, one of DC’s better known indie groups, can be traced directly back to the Freestyle Union, just like Opus Akoben before them. Or the driving populist force that was the HU party scene in the 80s and 90s that Black Indian mentioned in an interview on the Eddie Kayne show earlier this year, propelling dudes like Fat Rodney and DC Scorpio to underground notoriety before launching into local fame at the Coliseum and Captial Centre. That kind of local barometer doesn’t really exist anymore.
It’s easy to point and tag new local blogs and websites as opportunistic and over-saturating the market with any random moe’s slapdash mixtape or being all too eager to be PR mouth pieces for whatever artist is willing to drive them traffic. New dudes with more marketing and internet-savvy get popular quickly while older artists whose catalogs rest on analog formats like CDs (!) struggle to catch up while trying not to seem like the probably-too-old-for-this-bar guy. But while well-respected and cherished by local rap natives, these are artists that hardly have wikipedia pages; forget being canonized by dudes picking up the mic in 2011. The only rapper to go in over a classic DC beat this year was French Montana! It’s a tough field to navigate for new and old, but this what the DC rap landscape looked like this year. Insular and crowded.
Diamond District sold well and were critically acclaimed among similarly minded, underground rap fans, which is to say their tour through Europe was a resounding success. Their sound though is still firmly rooted in boom-bap patterns, which in itself is already parochial. It’s good music being inserted in to a cycle of playlists of an already established aesthetic. It’s sounds familiar, it’s well-rapped and that’s fine enough.
Wale never really took hold in the district early on but was instead touted as the new wave of “gangsta killa” by blogs and press outside of DC, slowly infecting the surrounding suburbs until DC had heard his name so many times (being preceded by the MMG tag helped no doubt) that by the time he dropped Bait, no one had enough will left in them to find a reason to dislike his competent rapping over a brilliantly produced bounce beat.
And yet here we are at the end of 2011, 160,000+ Wale records sold later and DC finally has its first bonafide rap star, and this is good — not because it might convince some faceless executive somewhere that a DC rapper is a viable investment but because now future DC artists have a more substantial reference point to build around; a northern star to some, a buzzing repellent to others. And it’s already paying dividends.
2011 brought with it a new batch of rappers more concerned with having sex and fighting and dancing and making music they like when they do those things, and not as much for other rapper’s daps (though interestingly, a majority of my year’s best songs ended up being collaborations) or some altruistic coddling of a culture of elements. Until now, the fractured and factioned DC rap scene has had only its insularity to bind it together. The next fool might be someone who makes music for more than the transient DC listener.
30. Wale — That Way f/ Jeremih & Rick Ross (MMG)
29. Fatz Hollywood — Badd Intentions (YouTube)
28. Top Dolla Sweizy — Slutty Skeets f/ Oochie (Mixtape)
27. Iceberg Lo — When I Whip f/ Doug E. Doug (720)
26. Bucky Malone — Sprinkles f/ Que Delaney (Mixtape)
25. Kingpen Slim — Whippin in the Kitchen f/ Fat Trel & Phuture (Beam Up)
24. Whitefolkz — So Important f/ Boobe (TDE)
23. Ardamus — Indeed Loyalty (Internet)
22. Oddisee — Still Doing It f/ yU (Mello Music Group)
21. Phuture — Stupid Dope Moves (368)
20. Top Dolla Sweizy — Don’t Stop Clappin (Mixtape)
19. Slutty Boyz — Coming Off My Fingers f/ VH1 Young Von (DC1135)
18. Phil Ade — A Different World (368)
17. Tabi Bonney — Winner’s Parade f/ Nicole Wray (BluRoc)
16. Fat Trel — Rolling (DC1135)
15. Benji — Came First (Mixtape)
14. Uptown XO — Errrybody (Mixtape)
13. Deeboye — Round Da 44 f/ B-Man & O-Dre Da Juiceman (YouTube)
12. Pro’Verb — County f/ KT, DC Don Juan (Mixtape)
11. Fat Trel — My Silencer f/ Rated R & Young Moe (DC1135)
10. yU — Delay f/ Diamond District (Mello Music Group)
09. Rated R the Mac — Bad Bitches Only f/ Dew Baby (Midieast)
08. Black Cobain — Slow Motion f/ ST 2 Lettaz (BOA)
07. Gods’illa — Saviours & Punishers f/ Sean Price (UAU)
06. Boobe — True to This (Oy Boyz)
05. Young Moe — I Dew f/ Fat Trel (DC1135)
04. Shy Glizzy — Fast Money f/ Iceberg Lo (Mixtape)
03. Fat Trel — Bitchez Started Klokkin f/ Young Moe (DC1135)
02. Uptown XO — B.A.M.N. (Mixtape)
01. Wale — Bait f/ TCB (MMG)
Devil We Like is Trel linking back up with the same local producer that did the beat for Champagne Wishes, Boss Major, and back to the same vibe as Secrets but with even better rapping. I mean, the title alone fucks around with syntax in this kind of biblical way, and then keeps going in to some really sad, aggressive, and aggressively sad raps. He’s technically strong without being obviously technical, making rappers like Gibbs, who’s half the personality, redundant in my iTunes.
I wrote a bit more having to do with the WKYS list as well as a specific bar in the song, so check it out here if you’ve got the time.
[Guest writer Santiago Del Humo will be sporadically contributing these next few weeks to help pick up some slack around here]
XO, man. Like, really though. I mean obviously first and foremost gotta pay homage to ABthePro for laying the real smooth soul beat XO and Gordo split blunts over. But its cool as shit though cause it doesn’t open with right in to that big soul line; it opens with this really bad juju premonition, like the crescendo in a nightmare, feel me? And then it opens up and XO starts spitting this fly as shit verse about a dream he had while he fell asleep baggin up some shit. Good vibes, bruh. That Monumental II was made for Black Broadway.
Yo, hold up, hear me out I just had an epiphany, man. What if, and this is a big what if though, but what if that dark crescendo at the opening isn’t the peak of a nightmare, what if that’s life . . . like real life, and it opens up in to a beautiful dream. Yo that’d be crazy.
If someone were to ask the most popular DC rapper, whoever he may be, to list his top thirty rap albums of all time, would Questionmark Asylum even break the top twenty-five?
Looking back Questionmark’s lone major label release, the first by any DC rap act and roughly a year before “5 O’clock” started charting nationally, was an album whose style was in the middle of being muted by the more street conscious, pre-Tunnel New York rap like “Only Built 4 Cuban Linx”, “Infamous”, and “All We Got Iz Us”. In the rear-view of its 1995 release were the seminal albums from Questionmark’s contemporaries Souls of Mischief, De La, Digable Planets, and Pharcyde, so it’s no wonder that “The Album” is a largely forgotten record even by kids defining themselves by a non-existent golden era nostalgia.
Which helps explain why even the Google machine fails me when I try to find some concrete info about Questionmark and its members Digge Doms, Rosta Swan, Misstafiss and the late Ding, especially after listening closer to “The Album” and realizing that not only were Questionmark Asylum the first major DC rap group, but that they were even more likely the first major DMV rap group before anyone even thought to coin the term.
The evidence may be specious at worst, which again is hard to track down given that there’s so little info out there, but it’s hard to not be a little curious about exactly which ‘ville they talk about over and over in their biggest hit “Hey Lookaway” or how much credence to give to a youtube comment that says they went to Fairmont Heights HS together. Then the curiosity turns to interest when on “You Don’t Understand” Mistafiss says, “I thought [?] was making hits in the basement/at least me and Digge think so/but every time we represent somebody always gotta get technical”.
Anyways, “The Album” dropped and then nothing else ever did. Mistafiss and Digge Dom found a blip of success in 2000 producing two cuts for Pac-knockoff Lil’ Zane, “Money Stretch” and “Callin’ Me” off the Next Friday soundtrack and then released a forgettable “Life of a Rockstar” CD in ‘03. There was a MySpace song or two somewhere there. Let’s forget about that.
So maybe it doesn’t really matter, maybe cause time and nostalgia and talent brushed away that small detail or maybe because it wasn’t the entire group living outside city limits … it’s hard to tell. They’re hardly ever referred to as anything other than a DC group, if at all, but the issue of a regional identity that a lot of DMV artists willfully ignore is obviously one that’s been around for a while, only difference being that now artists have a catchy catchall “DMV” tag to hide behind.
I lived in DC for a while and it seemed like that was one of the markets that you guys catered to directly and did so going outside the traditional media and venues. I’m actually sitting in DC right now. I have some real good friends in DC because unlike New York and Philadelphia and a lot of those other east coast places, DC and the South is almost the same. I can relate to these DC brothers like any other east coast brothers. I don’t know if it’s in the food, the water, the grits. I don’t know what it is but they’re a whole different breed. Right now DC is our number one seller.
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