Good hip-hop

So all weekend I felt like I was going fucking insane.

I had this fucking cool beat in my head. The percussion was like nothing I had ever heard. It was like I could ALMOST hear the words that would go perfectly with it.

Hearing a good hip-hop beat in my head that doesn't exist isn't that weird for me. In fact, if you ever walk by me on the bittercold sidewalks of Chicago you will probably hear me beatboxing, humming, whistling, or rhyming. Bypassers probably assume that I'm just another crazy, but that is because they can't hear what I do.

ANYWAYS... the funny thing about the song that was relentlessly playing through my head Saturday and Sunday was that I couldn't tell what the hell the words meant.

Sometimes I will become immersed in a song that I think is my own only to realize I am humming a beat that has already been created, but the words I think of are always in English.

I wanted to forget about the song completely. But it kept playing itself through my head. So last night, even though I had a ton of studying to do, I spent at least an hour searching through every hip-hop video I had recently watched on youtube. I started with Aceyalone. No luck. Then I realized the voice I was hearing was deep, so I thought it might be Chali 2na (of Jurassic 5) but I haven't really listened to him for a month, so it had to be somebody else. I knew that the voice was not of a white rapper, so I started looking at every black rapper I have listened to recently. That was when I realized even though hip-hop is basically my life, the majority of my favorite songs are by white guys.

I had listened to some guy named "Papoose" recently, so I started searching through his shit. It was really good,! But not what I was looking for. I looked through some Talib Kweli, but it didn't take me long to realize that his voice isn't deep at all. At some point I remembered that I had heard a Snoop Dogg song on the radio last week that made me think "wow... this actually doesn't suck," so I became convinced that he was the rapper I was seeking.

Let me tell you... that dude has a lot of songs. And you know what? They ALL suck. Even gin & juice. Just because a song is a classic doesn't make it good. Snoop Dogg is one of the main cats responsible for turning hip-hop into the iced-out, pot-focused, pimp-praising, proud-to-be-stupid, gang-driven shit that it is today. After about 15 minutes of listening to his songs, I decided that if I was really obsessing over a song he wrote than I was just going insane.

But then when I woke up this morning I suddenly remembered that on Friday night I got drunk and started looking through the videos on undergroundhiphop.com. So I resumed my searching, and after only a few minutes I had finally found it!!!!

The song is by Los Nativos. It is called Atlachinolli. And a lot of it is in Spanish.


I also ran across another song I had been impressed with. It is called "So amazing" by Termanology. I didn't expect much when I first saw him. A white guy with a big shiny chain and a flat-billed cap rocked to the side. If I saw him at a party I would probably be tempted to kick him in his teeth just so he would have an excuse to get the gold grill he has been dreaming about. And the video starts with him rolling out in a clean new bimmer. "Yawn."

But then I started thinking "Holy shit. this beat is amazing. And the DJs scratching harder than a fucking cougar. Its a shame some brianless suburban poser got a hold of it." And then Termanology ripped that shit. He is a shameless self-promoter and you can tell he is arrogant as fuck (my hip-hop pet-peeve) but you really can't blame him for thinking his "flows so amazing nigga." Plus the hip-hop legend Primo is the wizard behind the curtain making his beats, so there really is a lot going for him.


Anyway, I suggest that if you like hip-hop or you just have a good taste in music in general you watch those videos. There is a whole lot more good hip-hop where that came from, though you probably haven't heard of any of it.