The black and white flyers advertising Mykki Blanco’s performance are simple. “MYKKI BLANCO,” they announce in bold capitals, along with the time and location: April 4, 2013 / Terrace Club.
The world of contemporary poetry has a startling new voice—and it is one that sounds a lot like an MC. This voice is that of Michael Robbins, who had his first poem chosen by Paul Muldoon to be published in the New Yorker just last year, and who this past year published his first collection of poems, Alien Vs. Predator.
Lord forgive me things I don’t understand. I don’t get Kendrick Lamar. I like to pretend I do. I guess what I don’t understand is my relationship with his music, and what I imagine is his relationship with me as his listener, and, most importantly, his relationship with himself.
During the Grammy Awards this year, international artists Adele, Gotye, Mumford and Sons and Paul McCartney won some of the most prestigious awards. In fact, Adele’s 21 was the best selling album of 2012 and Gotye’s “Somebody that I Used to Know” was the year’s most popular single.
I was wearing fresh white high-top Converse sneakers, untouched by the inevitability of unclean, unsacred journeys to come. A slight gap between the crisp canvas shoe and the hem of my tight, black, and somewhat shiny floral trousers exposed a thin dimension of my pasty leg. Tucked in to my pants, which I’d purchased in “the city,” infinitely adding to their fashionable credibility in the suburban, small-town view of my image, was a comfortable white, cotton t-shirt.
Chief Keef is an 18 year old (though his age often contested) rapper from Chicago. He is best known for his songs “I Don’t Like”—with the notorious refrain “that’s that shit I don’t like”—and “Love Sosa”; these two songs respectively have 25 and 30 million views on YouTube; many of his other songs, like “3Hunna” and “Bang,” have millions of views as well.
In the middle of the night, Drake released a yearning slow-jam called “Girls Love Beyoncé.” It plods forward, and Drake sings unsteadily over a codeine-soaked sample of the Destiny’s Child classic “Say My Name.” He laments what fame has done to his love life and ability to connect with women, so the subject matter doesn’t veer far away from Drake’s usual meditations on his fame-induced trust issues.
I got 99 problems, and all of ’em’s being happy,” bursts out Tyler Okonma—better known by his stage name Tyler, the Creator—on “Pigs,” one of the many disturbing looks inside the mind of this 22 year-old rapper on his new album Wolf. The pop-culture riff with a demented personal twist is Tyler’s signature move, and one that somehow keeps the listeners coming back for more.
Azealia Banks might just be the long awaited solution, or revolution, concerning misogyny in rap. The opening line of her hit, “212,” “Hey, I can be the answer,” is perhaps her subtle recognition of her position at the helm of constructive feminism in hip-hop. For years women have been voicing their frustration with the portrayal of females in hip-hop, and rightly so.
As I walked back from precept on Wednesday something about the sickening humidity reminded me of a song my sister and I shared last July. And though I knew the two-day heat-wave to be cruel and short-lived, still I was lulled into summertime nostalgia by the eighty-degree April breeze.
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The next song is very, very deep, but if I want to translate it, it’s fuck the police.” So Da Arabian Mc’s (DAM) introduced one of their final songs on Thursday.
