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Helluvastate is Tay Sean (of the Cloud Nice crew) and TH (of State Of The Artist). Get hip now before your friends do. This joint is dope and you can expect the entire mixtape to be, too. I can’t say any more than the homie Joe Gustav (of Posted In The Parking Lot and SSG Music) said in his excellent piece on SSG. Get with that here. And get with the free single by downloading below.
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Hip-hop industry rule #5,080: freely downloadable albums, mixtapes and singles are to be of equal (or greater) quality as the music consumers pay for.
This has been a rap maxim since the mid-aughts, when artist-friendly grassroots websites like 2DopeBoyz and DatPiff took the place of record label distribution deals. It’s an adage that has allowed for the rapid burgeoning of underground hip-hop scenes just like the one in our fair city. Making beats and rhymes and then distributing them freely to millions on the internet is the modern-day equivalent of singing into your hairbrush and dancing around in front of a mirror. (Okay, bad example for hip-hop, but you get the idea.)
Mad Rad has evolved into Seattle’s most disruptive force in live music. Ask anyone who has worked security at the six Capitol Hill clubs from which the crew was temporarily banned in January of last year–or local multimedia authority Chase Jarvis, whose dinner spread the foursome nearly ruined during its performance turn at his Songs for Eating and Drinking event. At some point in the last two years, every major music venue in the city has been knocked on its ear as a result of Mad Rad’s antics, welcomed or not. The group has evolved into the easiest band to love or hate, depending on your tolerance level for the asinine. On its way to becoming King of Disruption, Mad Rad has also burgeoned a local following that borders on the rabid and created some of the most dynamic pop music Seattle has ever seen.
Photo from The Stranger
Candidt’s Sweatsuit & Churchshoes, one of the Northwest region’s most expansive-sounding hip-hop albums of recent memory (read the SSG Music album review, here), achieved something the majority of contemporary rap albums fail to do: successfully construct a bridge from hip-hop’s past to its present day. Candidt rooted his 21-track salute deep in his old school sensibilities, but also managed to freshen up the West Coast sound with his left-of-center flow and versatile production choices.
The original version of “The Youth Die Young” (the title track from Mad Rad’s forthcoming album of the same name, streaming, here) is a whimsical but not totally innocent paean to the joys of youth. It’s a celebratory but dubious anthem for the internet generation. There’s a cautionary tale lurking somewhere in the track that belies its upbeat vibe, as if describing a slightly aged Ferris Bueller who’s come to the sudden and harsh realization that the world doesn’t revolve around him. “The Youth Die Young” is actually quite a mature song for Mad Rad, perhaps a sign that the crew is evolving beyond its sophomoric antics of past days. Whatever. The most important aspect of the song is that it gets your ass to moving.
Mat Wisner, of local electro-pop crew Viper Creek Club, has something tricky up his sleeve. Make that a few tricky somethings. If you’ve been following VCC’s blog (get hip, here), you’ll already be familiar with the series of hip-hop remixes Mat has been putting down for local 206 crews. What started with a gritty re-imagining of Fresh Espresso’s “The Lazerbeams” has morphed into a miniature monster: a half dozen or so exclusive remixes in which Town rap gets VCC’s special electro-pop treatment.
The two best Seattle hip-hop albums of 2010 are region-specific. Def Dee and Language Arts’ Gravity is cloned from the DNA of mid-90’s New York City boom-bap. It’s a perfectly-penned love note to a definitive sound and era when millions of hip-hop heads came of age. The second album, Candidt’s Sweatsuit & Churchshoes, is a refreshing exercise in West Coast b-boy funk. The main complaint with Gravity may be it doesn’t bring innovation to its source material, yet the same can’t be said about Sweatsuit & Churchshoes. Candidt’s sprawling 21-track workout manages to find fresh ideas within a variety of West Coast sounds that came before it. It has one foot in Old School History Class and one foot in the New School hallway; its breadth of modification and manner in which the two schools are bridged are the album’s greatest attributes.
A SEATTLE HIP-HOP BLOG 