This has to be one of the most endearing manifestations of a rap beef ever. Peedi has a few tracks out in which he freestyles discontent over Jay beats, but this one hits harder by being genuinely touching. The video plays like an abandoned projector reeling from memorial fragments of a bygone era. It's funny because Jay Z and Peedi obviously grew up in different hoods but their mutual mining of street weaved nostalgia leads them to the same school of hard knocks. Peedi, with kids in tow, bikes towards the camera with a graffiti typeset bounced on by a sing-a-long ball. Apparently Jay had set up one-on-ones to discuss the future of daf jam/roc a fella and instead sent over an A 'n' R rep to Philly to shitcan Peedi, Beans AND Freeway. Thus, the kids in tow is less a "remember these streets you abandoned via private jet," but "the entire region you took under your wing and then dropped from the nest." Peedi claims his new Amalgam Digital distribution set up for a Night in the Life is ideal, so maybe they'll have an awkward encounter at an airport lounge some day soon. Does anyone know where the guitar comes from, i've been searching through Queen songs for the last hour and can't find it!
G-Side - Speed of Sound (produced by Block Beataz)
http://www.thefader.com/articles/2008/10/3/freeload-g-side-speed-of-sound
This is, like, the most perfect aural realization of some euphoric physical dissociation from the material world. Head nesting in the clouds, these rappers enunciate every syllable slowly, the beat subtly resting beneath them, in complete contradiction of their flow charts and the supposed titular trajectory. Nothing about their flow suggests they're breaking any barriers, but quite possibly they've broken one and now they're simulating floating in the aether. NASA's lost contact, they've made contact, through a handball richochet with alien satellites our ear canals are picking up on transmuted static. My tear ducts cry India when this comes on.
G-Side- on everything
http://www.myspace.com/gside74
Wow, okay, aside from Stop Tha Violence, which is either harsh sarcasm or has nothing to do with its title, pretty much every song hits like speed of sound. Apparently G-Side is Stephen Harris aka ST 2 Lettaz and David Williams aka Yung Clova whose backstories go beyond those of hood figgas or drug dealers caught up in the game with a story to unload over some fresh beats. Their stories have that institutional neglect the Wire's naturalist plot mechanics strived for demystifying. By the time they met at the Boys and Girls Club in Athens, Alabama, one had been through foster care and straight up homelessness while the other got stuck with drug abuse in the family unit. So yeah, I'm white and my only point of reference is Dookie and Michael, but apparently their mission statement is to hit up the wishbones of their listeners with empathetic dustbins, sweeping up everyone's miserable past in a semantically sweetened street sweep.
Paper Route Records
“I ain’t going to lie, sometimes I hate the fuck out of Huntsville,” Money Addict says. “Any time you dig a hole and you stuck in some shit, you just want to breathe and be somewhere else.” - from the profile in The Fader.
http://www.myspace.com/paperrouteenterprise
Okay, here lies pretty much the most emotionally vulnerable - scratch that, hard front pulverizing sound factory I've been on a tour of recently. I mention the aural aspect because it completely transforms the words from spiteful slugs and bitch dumping in a song like Soul Glo into a window seat take off reflection. Which is weird, because while all their music seems to suggest transcending place, the crew apparently have no interest in leaving their spot in Alabama, spending their days myspacing, chess playing and breaking studio walls down like they're setting off in the NASA space shuttles grounded in a nearby park.
The Urb article makes note of the screw connection, but this is kind of like if screw left the vocals alone, creating a genuinely disorienting disconnect between the words and their propulsive engine. Instead of feeling down though that rift between the two is this unusually pleasurable zone of free-floating moonshine. Despite it's assurance that I should sit back and relax I'm so excited right now I might need to call NASA to calm me down.
(click to enlarge!)
Further reading -
http://www.urb.com/features/429/HoodHeadlinazNewJackpotCity.php
http://www.thefader.com/features/2008/9/16/fader-51-paper-route-recordz-feature
