De La Soul has been making records longer than many of you have been alive and they’re still shitting on your collective rap lives.
It’s not parody when it’s accurate.
Busta with the candor, knowledge and maturity trifecta. Enjoyable interview.
“Brooklyn’s gonna go BONKERS!” - yasiin bey
Mos Def, 1992.
on this day in 1991
A Beginner’s Guide to Kev Brown’s Music. — MTV Hive
internet rappers: How To Be An Internet Rapper →
A step-by-step guide.
- Rap. You do not have to do this extremely well or even moderately good but if you can, it helps.
- Name yourself after a gangster. A real gangster from the 20s and 30s preferably. What? You thought Machine Gun Kelly, French Montana, Rick Ross, Scarface, Gotti, Gambino, and Lex Diamond were original? If you don’t come up with anything you can always use your real name. That’s working great for Kendrick and Drake.
- Start a Tumblr. This is a very imperative step and the success of your internet rap stardom depends on this! On your tumblr, post mainly random photos that are not related to your music at all.
- Tag irresponsibly. Title your songs in very SEO unfriendly ways that include symbols like $,!,@ or revert to Greek spelling. This way, if your songs ever become popular it will be hard to find them on the internet and even harder to get them to trend properly on Twitter.
- Talk shit about all the blogs. Don’t fear that sharing your real feelings about rap media will get you barred from them and shun your publicity efforts. They will post about you anyway, eventually.
- Develop multiple personalities. Is your rap persona all over the place? Does it hold street credibility or any other form of credibility? Who cares?! None of that matters. The most important thing right now is getting fans and the more fans you can relate to, the better. Just look at Nicki Minaj’s success.
- Feature Everybody. Rap isn’t about the music. It’s about the other rappers you know.
- Have a catchy ad-lib. It can be your own name a la 2Chainz or aggressive grunts a la Rick Ross. Whatever it is, make it simple and catchy.
- Be an oxymoron. You are a rapper. You do not ever have to make sense. Ever.
- Dress weird and call it style. It’s working for everybody else so it has to work for you too.
"Ultimately, though, Trap is a fiction—a false umbrella-genre that attempts to unite two disparate styles of music with distinct audiences, to crowbar a particular evolution of club music into hip-hop’s lineage, and to grant it credibility under the guise of respecting the pioneers."
Complex looks at the latest rap trope to get sucked into the pop culture blender. Same shit, new era.
The science of sampling, circa 1988.
