215 Magazine reps their hometown all day, everyday. They are doing it big for the upcoming Roots Picnic @ Penn’s Landing by giving away several get-away packages to folks that put their names on their mailing list. Itsoweezee.
215 Magazine is about the culture that emanates from one of America’s oldest and greatest cities. The art, the music, the nightlife, the cuisine, and most importantly the people that come from there and spread their influence all around the globe. Occasionally the mag even features folks who aren’t from Philly but have madd love for the city of brotherly love. People like me.
My advice to you is to get in the cipher with 215 Mag and possibly win your weekend get-away tix.
I will mos def be in Philly that weekend also so maybe you won’t mind spending some QT with your homie DP.
For several years this weblog has existed I have tried to explain that the essence of rap could be described by using a mathematical formula. Rap is a hyper-evolved level of communication using music, melody and mnemonic devices. This is why it is loved all across the globe. The greatest achievement of the human species is our ability to communicate on the highest level with speech. If we only had body movements and yelling we would have never have invented Twitter.
I think that the highest level of rap artistry is contained in the artists that frequently use polysyllabic words. The complex compound words can contain several meaning all at once based on the root of the word and the context it is delivered. The artist commonly considered to be the best rapper of all time was the master of injecting his rhyme speech with polysyllabic words. These phrases bent and stretched his rhymes well past the verse they were spoken in and put them into the stratosphere as some of the most used quotes spoken in the Hip-Hop culture.
The most important word to an emcee is polysyllabic – microphone.
‘Nuff said.
Eminem’s latest album ‘Relapse’ is fantastic for it’s graphic gory content. This album is part of the great history of epic entertaining horror-core productions. This album is rap’s ‘Nightmare On Elm Street’. It is horrific, disgusting, profane, satirical and brilliant all at the same time. Lyrically, I consider this to be on a classic level. If the beats by Dr. Dre were swapped out for some of the dark production of DOOM, or more appropriately RZA, this album would be a certified classic. This drop though is to discuss the lyrical eminence of Eminem. A reader stated that this album was garbage. I don’t believe that reader listened to this album or if he did his ability to judge art is negligible.
This album is the VAN GOGH of rap music. The fact that Eminem even referred to himself as VAN G adds to his lyrical prowess. The heartbroken madman who has gleefully crossed the line into insanity is vividly painted in story format as well as open form rap braggadocio. I asked the reader to offer an album that contained better lyrics than ‘Relapse’. His offering was Lil’ Wayne’s ‘The Carter II’. That should already tip you off to the fact that this reader is a da-dunn da-dunt. Lil’ Wayne’s ‘The Carter II’ is actually Wayne’s best album. As I scanned over the album looking for a track to do a cross-reference comparison to I looked for songs that had similar lengths to the unusually long tracks posted on ‘Relapse’. I decided to use the track ghost-written by Juelz Santana called Tha’ Mobb.
As a repayment for Santana’s skills on this song I believe Wayne introduced Juelz to syrup.
Wayne uses 853 words in this song. Thirty(30) are polysyllabic. The longest being promethezine clocking in a strong twelve(12) letters. The key number in all of these stats though is the percentage of polysyllabic words to the entire composition. Wayne’s final numbers were 3.5169/1000. That is the percantage of polysyllabic words his verses would contain per 1000 words. Big Daddy Kane averages about the same. Kane is loved and feared, but no one, not even Kane himself, calls him the greatest rapper alive. Hyperbole lives and his name is Lil’ Wayne.
The Eminem song I used is the comically violent 3am. This song had the same run time as Lil’ Wayne’s Tha’ Mobb (5mins 21sec). Eminem uses only 769 total words but forty-eight(48) of them are the 3+ syllable variety. The longest polysyllabic word in this murderous rap rampage was the thirteen(13) letter hallucinogens. Eminem was obviously on something extra to have the mind to craft this masterpiece. The average percentage of polysyllabic words per 1000 for Eminem is 6.2418 and approaching twice that of Lil’ Wayne. My point in all of this is to illustrate that the Relapse album is far from garbage no matter how you look at rap music. It merits your highest consideration for the lyrical content contained therein. And at the end of the day, instead of flow and swagger, shouldn’t lyrics matter most in RAP music?
BTW, Rakim Allah’s percentage on ‘Microphone Fiend’ was 7.272 and this is why we call him the G.O.A.T.
Additional background reading for those of you just tuning in to Dallas Penn…
RAFI KAM told me the story of how he created an avatar of me for his Nintendo Wii gaming system because his son is a big fan of mine.
*Thanks EDDIE*
RAFI KAM is singlehandedly doing what NONE of the programmers in the gaming industrial complex are capable of or care to do for that matter. RAFI is giving people of color heroic possibilities within the gaming culture.
If RAFI can do this why can’t the industry recognize and address the need to make the characters of their games, and by extension those playing them more inclusive? It isn’t just a color issue either but a gender issue as well. The representation of women in video games was proactive only as far as getting Lara Croft to be naked.
People like to play games, but people LOVE to play games where they can also relate to the avatar, gliph, first person shooter or whatever is represented on the screen. This is the message that CELESTINE ARNOLD delivers at a PSFK conference. Check it out…
I thought a lot this weekend about what it really meant for me to be listed in Vibe magazine’s article on the top 50 Hip-Hop weblogs. I am grateful for the honor even though I bristle at the notion of being a “Hip-Hop” weblog. For the overwhelming majority of people out here “Hip-Hop” means rap music, and rap music only.
I wonder what it should mean sometimes. For better or for worse Hip-Hop was an outgrowth of American society’s response to the poor after the wave of civil rights achievements, post-Vietnam protests and the constriction of the U.S. economy. The poor were still second class citizens left to fend for themselves with whatever they could find in the smoldering vacant lots. Bits and pieces were cobbled together in order for the poor to validate that they too were part of the American fabric. A megaphone made out of a curled up newspaper was used to tell the whole world that they existed.
The world heard them. The world took their voice and their graphic art and their fashion style and everything that made the poor so damn cool and so fucking irrepressible and put it all inside a package that could be put on a shelf and sold. The poor people then in the Bronx and Brooklyn are still the poor people now. What I mean to say is that in thirty years of the artistic movement called Hip-Hop being disseminated across the globe we have done little to nothing to stem the reason for it’s creation. In fact, we have prA’li exacerbated the need for it’s rebirth.
Vibe magazine gave me a soundbite platform and I did with it what I thought was I could. As I checked my stats and back end data I see that there were no big changes in the IP trends that usually come here to DP.com on the regulack.
For the fourth year in a row Nah’Right has been in the top 3 referral spot. Shouts to Eskay, n8 and Dre for keeping the lights on here at DP and at so many other sites as well I’m sure. Concrete Loop comes in second. CL, Nah’Raight and Crunktastical were basically the leading referrers to this site for the life of this blog. Big shouts to Angel.La and Fresh for having my back all these years. Bossip is in the third spot and I wonder why I haven’t made any contact with them. They are consistently sending traffic here since they launched their site. The fourth spot on my referral list ahead of Vibe’s traffic was from 2DopeBoyz. 2DBZ def holds me down with the videos I post on YouTube and Meka hooks me up on .mp3s I may have missed during the week. The final spot in my own top 5 referral list is The Shoe Game. TSG runs all the Sneaker Fiends Unite! videos that we pass them and is directly responsible for putting my sneaker beef with Lil’ Bow Weezle on the minds of many kicks collectors.
If you want five websites that document what the masses consider to be Hip-Hop then you won’t miss a beat with the five(6) I just mentioned and they all sent traffic to DP.com greater than the bump I caught from the one-time posting of the Vibe.com article. I’m not trying to throw Vibe under the bus either. They definitely do their thing to their audience. I definitely do my thing to mine. If our paths cross in the future I won’t feel any kind of way, but for my internets money I am running with the people that I came to the party with. Even though that sexy chick is flirting with me word on the streets is that she is giving brothers the clap.
They weren’t one of my top referrers this month but I need to shout Passion Of The Weiss for sending their traffic my way. Between Jeff, Sacha, Dan Love and Zilla POTW is building an all-star squad of dudes ready to take OhWord’s spot in the sentimental mind’s of rap purists and nerdists. Someone call up Soderberg. These dudes could be as good as the 1980’s Boston Celtics. And even whiter.
My homey the Underwriter has been grinding for the ThrilList camp and their newsdesk in the ‘A’. Think of ThrilList as a CraigsList for night life and going out. ThrilList is one of the handful of true arbiters of F.R.E.S.H. This is what they do. It isn’t the only thing they do because they are throwing a party tomorrow night.
I hope this drop gives some of y’all in the ‘A’ the chance to fall through the spot. Just give the name ‘Mike Jordan’ to anyone who is asking why you came through. That is the magic password for a Tuesday night obama in the capital of the new South.
