In other music news, the new J Stalin album, Prenuptial Agreement, is AMAZING. It’s the best hip-hop record I’ve heard in a long time, probably since The College Dropout. It’s great enough that there’s a rapper called J Stalin; it’s really icing on the cake that he produces tracks as great as, say, “Red and Blue Lights.” One thing I find interesting about the album, and probably one of the reasons I like it so much, is how much some of its synths and beats sound like grime, particularly certain Ruff Sqwad tracks or some of Target’s productions for Roll Deep. This occurred to me a little bit when I heard Philthy Rich’s recent album, but it’s really true of J Stalin. My favorite track on the album, “G in me,” is a great example of how well this grime-hyphy movement works. I guess where grime took dance music and moved towards hip-hop, J Stalin is moving in the other direction, but I’m glad they both end up in such a great place, musically.
The title of this post comes from J Stalin’s “Rockin Wit Da Best”; I hope it’s the Trotsky reference it appears to be. Also, when did people start using the expression “hot mess”? I don’t think I’d heard it six months ago, and now it’s the title of songs by Ashley Tisdale and Cobra Starship (who I was going to call “incomparably shit,” but of course their shitness is precisely comparable to that of 3OH!3), and crops up in a couple of tracks on Prenuptial Agreement and Animal.
J.R. on
Daimler on
