Best of 2007=my friends Part 6

All this blog was ever supposed to be was my favorite records. A bad habit I have is promising to make a tape for someone that I never do. Most of the songs I've written about have appeared on a mixtape, some of them have appeared on nearly ever one I've ever made. Anyway, what that means is that it's sort of superfluous for me to make any sort of year-end list. You already know what it's going to be. But! There are many reasons to have year-end lists and my favorite have always been the ones written by people that didn't spend the whole year writing about music already. So! Here are seven different lists written by people that I love. I hope you have fun reading them.



Giuseppe Catania
Sep is one of my oldest, dearest friends in the world. We met when I was playing a Mobb Deep record in Amy's dorm room, he walked by and paused, glad to finally hear rap music at college. We spent every weekend at record stores, eventually working together at Jackpot where we engaged in a good-natured but aggressive competition, writing reviews of new 12"s and those sketchy reissues. On his day off I would frantically try and hit as many records as possible, bouncing back and forth between the tiny Baltimore Club section and anything with a Queensbridge connection. When I would come back to work on Monday he would've reviewed entire bins of records, effortlessly covering the DITC crew, current radio hits, all the Rap-a-Lot warehouse find stuff and then hit up the soul section to tag all the records that got sampled by KMD. The summer before he moved to New Orleans he just went crazy, covering Ghostface's "Back Like That" with like half a sheet of paper talking about love and mourning. He also was behind the brilliant tag for Lil Wayne: "Your favorite blogger's favorite rapper". Here goes:

I moved to New Orleans about a year ago and for my job I have to drive to Baton Rouge twice a week. At first I hated the drive, pretty much cause I suck at driving and I-10 gets all treacherous with idiots and rainstorms, but then I started a ritual where I pick and listen to albums all the way through. Even if the songs start to suck, I don't let myself fast forward through them. I listen to a lot of old cds and tapes I'm already familiar with, screaming rap lyrics at the top of my lungs. I also listen to a lot of new cds. I learn the rap lyrics fast and then I scream them at the top of my lungs just like the old songs. Here're some of the albums that make the trip feel like I just got my license and am finally getting to play dirty raps out loud.

I should also mention that the car I'm driving is an '88 Camry with a blown stock system. Everything that comes out of the speakers sounds like a dub of a dub: It's like a machine that can turn the smoothest Dr. Dre production into some Tical sounding ruggedness.

Lil' Wayne "Da Drought III"

Before "DDIII" came out, I saw a Juvenile show where he threw a bunch of fliers into a crowd that showed the now infamous Wayne and Baby kiss. People were going crazy, and for a second it seemed like Weezy F. might get Ja Rule'd over the whole thing. Instead, it turns out that Wayne was on a spaceship or something, listening to "It Was Written" over and over again recording a million songs. "Sky's the Limit 2007" was an NO anthem for a second (I would turn off the car and another car would drive by playing it, or I would be in the corner store and there would be some kid wearing a 3XL Scarface t-shirt playing the cd on one of those portable DVD players). The song even sounds like the city: violent, angry, funny, and soulful. There's this part at the end of the song where the instrumental is riding out and Wayne keeps spitting these increasingly fucked scenarios ("use your head 'fore I take it off your shoulders, mail it to your mom with a dozen roses") and then mumbles, "now that's fucked up." Then, the music fades out for a second and Wayne makes like a second line trumpet and sing/scats the chorus one last time, spitting out the entire evolution of music into that one moment. Word to Gizmo.

Devin the Dude "Waiting to Inhale" and UGK "Underground Kangz"

Another thing about the car: there's no air conditioning. Once May hit, I started having to bring a change of clothes along because I was always totally soaked once I got to BR. Ethan once told me that he understood why Screw comes from Houston, 'cause of the slow traffic. That's good. It makes sense, but in my mind, Screw's it's-too-fucking-hot-to-actually-have-your-brain-work-to-comprehend-what's-being-said- at-normal-speed music. The Devin and UGK albums perfectly capture the feel of a Screw tape without the creepiness, both albums' beats and choruses are beautiful, even though the raps are on some hide-that-shit-under-your-bed shit, especially Devin's verses. Although, his rhymes are delivered so criminally smooth he might be able to get away with singing to your grandma about how his "dick is so clean, you can serve it with some lima beans" and she would still say, "that young man has a nice voice." The UGK album is a little harder to think about with the recent passing of Pimp C. My favorite track on the album, "Living this Life," seems especially ominous in retrospect, going from what was in my mind a post-prison song about heaven to some Tupac shit ("died young, oh well, I had a good life"). Of course, Bun murderizes that shit with the non-glamorous hustler life, "I'm a pawn in this neighborhood chess game/having to see a man 'bout a dog and sell him a cat."

Freeway-"Free At Last"

Freeway sounds like he hasn't really listened to a rap album since he put out "Philadelphia Freeway" four years ago. He's still rapping in that crazy rhyme pattern and his voice sounds like a wounded elephant trying to speak some kind of strange human language. He didn't get any new Just Blaze or Kanye tracks- just a bunch of producers that make beats that sound like four year old Just Blaze and Kanye tracks before they got all smoothed out by success. It's a great look though, Free knows he's not gonna be doing any HP commercials, so he just decides to rhyme as cold as he possibly can: there's this Rakim moment where he goes from biblical reference, to the jungle, to space in the span of two bars ("I am Noah, I will throw you off the damn Ark/ feed you to the fishes like spare parts, don't you dare start. Boa constrictor flow, constricting your airlines, like you outerspace with no oxygen. Tell your man, 'Halt'"). Free also drops one of the most painfully confessional rhymes this side of Fatlip about his grandparents dying. And then he rhymes, "(I cried) when I realized that they died on the wrong religion. Hope Allah forgives 'em." Even though it's been like 80 degrees for most of December, this shit brings the winter.

Will.i.am-"Heartbreaker" from "Songs about Girls"

The poor man's Justin Timberlake. This song almost makes amends for "Humps" (and makes me want to hang a little disco ball from the rear-view mirror).

PS

Someone should make a video where a kid puts a Freeway tape in his walkman and he starts rapping along while putting on his jacket and when he walks out of his house has a Freeway beard. Then his girlfriend asks to hear the tape and she ends up rapping with a Freeway beard. And then she lets a baby hear the tape until a bunch of people have Freeway beards. Then they play a baseball game against State Property.