I started taking hip hop seriously in September of 2013. Maybe someday I’ll speak more on why I wasn’t taking it seriously before. That year was a bit of a renaissance for me; I found myself trying genres I had never considered before just for the hell of it. Industrial in the “old school”, “neofolk”, and “electro-” flavors. Female-fronted pop. Death metal. Post-rock. Black metal. Shoegaze. Breakcore. Delta blues. Psytrance. You see, I had always been a classic rock / new wave / post-punk / college rock guy growing up. Things can change if you care enough to make it happen. Remember that shit.

Arguably, hip hop was the biggest departure. I’m not a lyrics-minded music listener! I don’t respond well to poetry! I can’t relate with gangster shit! I didn’t grow up in a big city! Blah blah blah. I got over myself and here’s where I started:

Death Grips

Someday I’ll go see the big scary screaming shirtless tattooed man live, and then I’ll have reached the highest plane of enlightenment.

My first real, deliberate, open-minded encounter with hip hop was with Death Grips. As with anything else, I tend to enjoy the weirder, aggressive, atypical bands that skirt the confines of their respective genres before I ease myself into the more common, obvious, meat-and-potatoes bands. In 2013, when the coconut fell on top of my head and I finally explored the enormous and varied genre, Death Grips was just about the weirdest, most aggressive, and most atypical hip hop group there was at the time. That fact is still true in 2021, actually. And if you really, really, REALLY want to split hairs here, Death Grips isn’t even a hip hop group in the first place! I don’t believe they are; fucking fight me. They’re a hardcore rave rock band.

Everything about this group appealed to me. MC Ride (Stefan Burnett) and Zach Hill, these two seem to operate on a completely different plane of existence. Look up any interview on Youtube, they project this sizzling intensity that is completely unnecessary. It’s visceral. It’s admirable. It’s in their hyperactive, confrontational, belligerent music.

Exmilitary, their mixtape, was my first exposure to Death Grips’ caustic, obnoxious catalog, and it’s still my personal favorite. I have a lot of really pleasant autumn 2013 mental snapshots tied into those 48-minutes, and it’s going to take something truly incredible to topple it off my pedestal. Your Wu-Tangs and your Ice Cubes and your Kanyes and your Kendricks and your P-Diddies and your Snoop Doggies can all suck a lemon.

Eminem

No! Not that! Anything but the middle fingers! I feel thoroughly owned!

If Death Grips was my first deliberate encounter with hip hop, then Eminem was my first forced-upon encounter with hip hop! And then it took me 13 years to recover! I grew up in the Detroit area, and I was in middle school when Marshall Mathers was beginning his rise to prominence. I have little frame of reference for how huge this guy actually was in the early ’00s for the rest of the country, or even the world, but in my Detroit suburb he was everything to all the 13-year-old creepy, white, immature edgelords. And that’s because Mathers himself was a creepy, white, immature edgelord. He was a kindred spirit to many, and I knew a lot of really angry pre-teens who sympathized with every exaggerated feeling that Mathers put to tape as Eminem. Needless to say, I found it off-putting. To this day, Eminem’s music transports me right back to 7th grade like nothing else can. It’s not a good feeling.

My sister loved him and would play his stuff in her car. A high school friend idolized him and made up a story about running into him at the mall and sharing a cry together (seriously). Even my parents liked “Cleanin’ Out My Closet”.

Then the inevitable fall happened in the late ’00s, but Eminem continues pumping out critically panned albums to this day. It took me a while to circle back to Eminem once I got into the genre proper, but right now I’m sticking with his three-peat run of classics: The Slim Shady LP, The Marshall Mathers LP, and The Eminem Show. And even if these three records overwhelm my synapses with memories of ages 11 – 14, I can honestly find quite a lot to enjoy about each one. You can’t knock his unparalleled showmanship, that’s for sure. I’d love to see what Eminem slipping into self-parody sounds like, so eventually I’ll hit up his later career. With much gusto.

Other Quick Thoughts

Yo Mike Patton, if I outgrew you at 34 years old, what’s your excuse?

-Bands that sound like Mr. Bungle are still around and they still drop albums that sound like Mr. Bungle. 2021 sees new releases by French band 6:33 and Australian band Twelve Foot Ninja, and it’s like…I’m a little bit over this type of sound? I’m at the point in my life where my head is already filled with enough weirdo funky avant-garde metal to make room for any new or unheard versions. Did I grow up?

–The War On Drugs? Just like their last two albums, the newest release I Don’t Live Here Anymore is pretty hyped right now. There are only a few of their songs that I find indispensable (my favorite is “Under the Pressure”, the opener of 2014’s Lost in the Dream), but I often feel that I wish I liked them more than I do. As usual, I’ll keep an open mind with this new one, but, come on, the War On Drugs is spring and summer music. Dropping at the end of October? That’s fuckin’ insanity.

-Two months until the end of the year. My list of 2021 releases has now officially topped 400+ albums and there’s no fucking way I’m going to have time to listen to everything that has piqued my interest. 2021 albums will certainly spillover into 2022 for a month or two in my Newer Release Roundups, and I’m probably going to tack an extra update onto each week for quite a few weeks. Maybe Sundays? That would make the most sense. This blog has helped me tremendously with keeping up with new music. I’d be just another cranky “this was a bad year for new releases” kind of guy otherwise. We all have those friends. They suck.

And that’s a wrap! Thanks for “reading”.