“DJ Taye didn’t always dream of being a musician. “I used to want to be an astronaut,” he explains, “until my auntie told me I couldn’t do that. Like on some ‘if you go, you won’t ever make it back’ type of shit.” He laughs at the memory now, and he has no regrets about the vocation that never was. “I can just be in space in my music.”
“At his best, Tyga is the hole in the donut, surrounded by more compelling collaborators and paramours. Whether as the voice of DJ Mustard’s career-making hit Rack City, as one half of a duo with Chris Brown, or as the ex-boyfriend of Kylie Jenner, Tyga has never been quite been talented or charismatic enough to hold his own. Now, for his sixth commercial album the ex-Young Money artist has thrown something of a curveball with Kyoto – a self-described “singing album” that finds him tackling AutoTuned rap-warbling.”
“With his last two projects, Maxo Kream established himself as one of rap’s best storytellers, his trap tales heavy with gory details and delivered as bursts of semiautomatic syllables. On Punken, the 27-year-old Houston artist opens up about the world that forged him, revealing the forces and decisions that turned a young knucklehead into someone facing five to 99 for organised crime.”
Read more in Crack Magazine.
“In terms of singles, it’s been another vintage year for rap and hip-hop. Viral sensations, blockbuster loosies and album-standard mixtapes continue to dominate the conversation. As always, some artists have shone brightest on songs which aren’t entirely theirs. Here, we pick out 20 of the best guest verses of the year.”
“As hip-hop developed in the 80s and 90s, the genre became synonymous with violence, drugs, and sex. But even as rappers sought to prove their realness, it has always been understood – by the artists that make it and the fans that love it, at least – that hip-hop is a reflection and a comment on society’s ills, not the cause of them.
For many proponents of hardcore hip-hop and gangsta rap, these street-life narratives were a mix of reporting, fiction-writing, and therapy that charged American institutions like the government, police and schools with the responsibility for urban decay.
Hip-hop has always been hyperbole. But what happens when the hyperbole is pushed to extremes? What happens when lyrics about gangland murder becomes slasher flick serial killing, when chasing women becomes acts of violence, when getting high and drunk at a party becomes addiction, paranoia and psychosis?
You get horrorcore, an often maligned sub-genre that has existed for nearly as long as hip-hop itself and that specializes in the macabre, the sinister, the disgusting and the shocking. Here are 15 of the best, most important horrorcore albums, sorted chronologically to show how the genre has developed over more than a quarter century.”
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