I once said that one of the keys of good hip hop is its intertextuality. Elmatic is a mixtape from (unsigned?) Elzhi out of Detroit; is a remake(-ish) of Nas’ Illmatic, itself a classic; and also talks about “coming up in the game” in the shadow of Eminem.

The album is good, but the more of that intertextuality you get the better it is.

Click through the image to the XXL Magazine download page.

I wonder what hip hop film looks like? Spike Lee meters light differently from other directors — light meters are typically calibrated to white skin so almost every time you see a film or photograph you’re supporting a racist standard — but that’s political, not about a hip hop cultural aesthetic. It would have to be more pomo, probably involving appropriated footage (though maybe that’s too literal).

Marshall McLuhan wrote that media are inherently violent (the telephone amputates your voice) and that a search for individual identity often manifests itself in a bit of the good old ultra-violence: “[people] have to kill to know if they’re real or if the other guy’s real.”

Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence.

So now I can finally answer the question of why I — and presumably lots of other white (ie, nonmarginalized suburban) fans — like hip hop. It’s not just an interface with “the other”, though it is that. It’s a dark mirror through which we can find our own identity — or maybe our internal perceived lack of identity calls out to, craves, the violence in the music as a kind of self-definition: I don’t stomp faces, but boy do I have faces I’d like to stomp.

My fantasy life is needlessly over-violent, and I do feel marginalized by my utter, bland lack of marginalization. Maybe conservative social politics helps create the countercultural forces it rages against. You can clearly see that, for example, in the Reganomics-Gangsta-Rap-Dan-Quayle cycle of hip hop in the 80s and 90s.

Plus, nothing jazzes you for a business meeting like murder music. Note that 50′s Many Men is entirely set during the course of a boardroom meeting.

Here’s Vdot’s SonReal’s big track Who Am I:

Straight Vancouver culture, doop. Caught him on tour in TO this weekend. Google “The Lightyear Mixtape” — I copped a hardcopy in the crowd, but it’s hometown is Online.

There aren’t enough “Books” tag-entries!

I just finished The 50th Law by Robert Greene and 50 Cent. It’s a well-done sequel to The 48 Laws of Power in that it doesn’t require reading the previous edition, but the work has more dimensionality if you have.

I’ll break The 50th Law into two guiding principles (call them laws 49 and 50) that round out the previous 48 to an even half-century:

49. Constantly change and improve. Comfort and security are dangerous illusions because they kill the desire for, and fun found in, adventure.
50. Death is the source of beauty — the sublime. Existential stoicism is a better response to this than nihilism: everyone dies, you might as well spend your time being awesome.

The book is heavily illustrated with examples from the criminal underworld and entertainment business in which 50 Cent matured and eventually rose to power. These illuminations are intercut with example personalities from business, politics, history, war, science, and the arts.

Yes, a shameless self promoter writing a book about why you should be a shameless self promoter deserves some incredulity. That said, the book advises arguing with every book you read, all meta-styles. I also wonder to what extent the criminality detailed in the book is fictionalized — how many scams can, or will, a dedicated hustler actually admit to?

Those caveats in mind it’s a great read (or listen — I audiobook’d it — Fiddy reads bits).

Dubstep was like the hottest thing ever back in 2009. Since I’m oldschool (read: missed the boat), I’ve been trying to get into it lately.* I need purely instrumental music to be quite high tempo to keep my interest, so besides forementioned beatboxing, I haven’t really found anything that grabs me.

Part of my problem might be that my computer speakers fell off the back of a truck and since dubstep is all sub-bass, you need the best subwoofer money can buy. Or maybe I shouldn’t be listening to it sober?

An interesting development was the release last year of Cashmere Agency Presents Mr Grustle & Tha Russian Dubstep LA Embrace The Renaissance Vol. 1 Mixed by Plastician, which is hip-hop artists rapping over previously recorded dubstep tracks (or something like that). It yielded this fun single (contains NSFW language):

Apparently Snoop’s personal interest was quite influential. The current leading edge of “bass” music is this hip-hop/dubstep crossover (speaking of rapping over interesting instrumentals…), which I’ve heard called “street bass” or “post-dubstep”.

* Truth be told, I just want to be able to wear a t-shirt that says “Wobble Wobble”.

Via Ryley a couple of weeks back, here’s The Notorious xx on SoundCloud:

(A mashup of Biggie and The xx)

SoundCloud rules! Embeddable tracks and the ability to add visual comment-tags to the soundwave — which also embed! AND FULLY-TAGGED-AND-ARTED MP3 DOWNLOAD LINKS.

Sweeeet!

It just doesn’t seem to move to the next track without the window/tab being activated. Oh well, that’s like Pandora used to be — it’s still like 9/10.

Via BB:

[mp3]

One of my buddies from way back in the day, Mike Lin, recently launched B-Rhymes, a half/oblique/slant rhyme dictionary, to much acclaim. On Monday it hit metafilter and was picked up by nerdcore hip hop superstar MC Frontalot on his Twitter feed:

A slanted rhyme dictionary that makes your rap writing lots easier (but won’t help you w/ musical theater writing): http://www.b-rhymes.com/

Mike used to work for local a company that uses software to do genetic research (his academic background is in both Computer Science and Chemistry), and the B-Rhymes dictionary is a cross-pollination of DNA sequence alignment algorithms, linguistics, and cloud computing.

I’ve been privy to Mike’s behind-the-scenes development cycle and I chatted with him to get the facts straight for this article. I guess that means this is our site’s first interview!

Here’s the chat log, edited and tagged:

Jack: What flavor of algorithms does B-Rhymes use? DNA sequencing or something? What’s the buzz word?

Michael: It’s loosely inspired by DNA sequence alignment algorithms, where different nucleotides lining up get different scores because the rates of mutations from one nucleotide to another aren’t random.

Jack: And you built the database using Amazon’s cloud?

Michael: Yeah, everything is pre-calculated using an Amazon high compute node.

Jack: The dictionary was generated using a genetic algorithm?

Michael: No, this is the opposite — It’s an algorithm applied to genetics

Jack: So what’s this about mutations?

Michael: Oh. The point of aligning DNA like this is to determine how likely it is that these two sequences have a common ancestor. So trying to find the same gene in people as, say, mice. It’ll be different because of mutation, but similar because they have common ancestry.

Jack: So you’re looking for similar things with sounds in words?

Michael: Yeah, instead of nucleotides you have phonemes, sounds, and instead of likelihood of mutation, you have likelihood of those two sounds rhyming.

Jack: That’s why it’s kind of rough? It’s more like a list of words that might rhyme?

Michael: Sort of. It just rates consonance. Sometimes that’s not enough. The big fix I need to do is make it skip words where the last consonant doesn’t rhyme, but the rest does, so it gets a high score, but people say it doesn’t rhyme.

Jack: You used the Amazon cloud to run these algorithms on the whole dictionary?

Michael: Yeah, so 40k x 40k. That’s how many words are in the dictionary.

Jack: Each word compared to each word, gotcha.

Michael: It took about a day on Amazon versus 10 days the last time I did it on my laptop.

Jack: It’d be cool to allow people to star-rank matches. So you preserve the algorithmic rankings, but allow a search on what people think are better.

Michael: Yeah, that’d take some work to scale though.

Jack: Then the more people use the app the better it’d get.

Michael: It’s really fast right now because the web server doesn’t have to do much.

Jack: Also you’d probably need to make it regional — Aussies will rhyme things differently than Canadians.

Michael: Yeah, take accents into account. It’d be interesting to find an algorithm for different accents. If it’s a direct mapping you wouldn’t have to write too much code.

Jack: Why “B-Rhymes” — does that have a meaning?

Michael: Like, B-list celebrities.

Jack: Oh, I gotcha.

Michael: It’s short, but some people don’t seem to get it…

Jack: I was thinking it might relate to rhyme schemes being given as ABAB, eg. Like, “secondary rhymes”.

Michael: Hahah. People seem to think it means Busta-Rhymes.

Mike’s working on an iPhone App that’s coming along nicely (the mobile version of the site is here). You can follow Mike’s progress on the B-Rhymes blog here and on his personal blog here (Mike’s also a member of MPF’s audience).

This is a really sweet project; I’m looking forward to seeing how it develops and what kind of stuff Mike gets up to in future! Very exciting.

This is just a straight-up repost. Die Antwoord rules (and so does their site):

[Also Jack Parow (no relation):]

Wu-Tang vs. The Beatles. If you missed (or loved) The Grey Album you might want to peep this:

DJ Tom Caruana comes with 2010′s first online underground megahit mashup. Google around — it ain’t hard to find — or hit me up for linkage (thx Yams).