Fader

For a long time we were lamenting the dearth of lady rappers in our social consciousness and then BOOM, they were everywhere, and we became stoked. We have been TiVo'ing Miss Rap Supreme on el regular, and when Lil Mama can get a video in heavy-ro that looks like it was filmed in Boot Camp Click era Brooklyn, wearing a hoodie on a rooftop no less, we know something is hella hella RIGHT. Some of our fave-faves are Bmore's Get 'Em Mamis, who are some of the realest chicks we ever interviewed (FADER 53!) They are dropping a new mix every week this summer with freestyles over the hottest classic female MC's (whoever says "femcees" first gets a shank in the eye) tracks. The first two? Salt n Pepa's "Push It" and MC Lyte's "10% Dis," obvs our request is that Yo-Yo's "You Can't Play with My Yo-Yo" is next, considering it is literally one FADER staffer's favorite song of all time, and is played at least once a week on her iPod, but usually more than that because she likes to put it on repeat it is so awesome. But anyway. Power to the chicas.


Download: Get Em Mamis, "Push It"


Download: Get Em Mamis, "10% Dis"

Just as we were posting the triumphant return of Maino last week Enuff dropped this into his Friday afternoon slot on Hot 97 and the office went slightly bananas, partially due to the song and partially due to writing drink reviews for the magazine. And just as we were about to put its piano-plinking knock up, dudes started jamming "Road to the Riches" across the hall. It's like an episode of Rap Lost in here. Get "Getaway" and some other GTA IV goodies over on Xclusives Zone and don't feel too bad for the pilfering. That game made half a billion dollars already.


Download: Maino, "Getaway Driver"

See, this is what we miss most about Dipset. We don't even have to explain what's going on here. Coogi cardigans and Swag Splashes. Pure entertainment. Courtesy of SmackTube via Smarten Up Nas.

Oh shit. 106 & Park is gonna talk about our new issue, FADER 54 (the ICON issue) TODAY after they play the flashback joint, which is Fabolous' awesome "Breathe." Tune in at 6 PM Eastern TODAY. SIDEBAR: How is "Breathe" a flashback joint?

We had a mental debate with ourselves over whether or not to post this, but then we decided we should because we've never been ones to keep Akon from the people. At this point, DJ Khaled has almost single handedly resurrected the large posse cut, overdone it and then destroyed it. BUT! Like clockwork, as we're approaching summer he's getting ready to drop another album that will probably make us continue to envision Miami as one huge production line of smiling rappers stacking money from a conveyor belt on a yacht. Also in this vision DJ Khaled would be the foreman of the whole operation and he'd be a really unfair boss but as long as you were getting money he'd be cool.


Download: Akon, Ace Hood, Trick Daddy, Boosie, Lil Wayne, Plies & Rick Ross, "Out Here Grindin'"

DJ Mr Singh has been throwing parties at Django's in Atlanta for a hot minute now, helping import Washington DC go-go music to the A by pairing the likes of Killer Mike and Sleepy Brown with live go-go bands. We even sponsored one. Y'know, because we are regional pop culture fetishists. And LOVERS OF MUSIC. This Friday (5/9), Singh continues his hot streak of pairing FADER faves with cranking live percussion by inviting the unbreakable DG Yola to take the stage backed by the XO Band. How ill is their congo-ed out version of "Ain't Gon Let Up" from the rehearsal sesh?!? Flyer after the jump. more...

To celebrate Busta's return from the depths of whisper and/or mumble rap, we broke out a bunch of songs from his post-LONS, pre-thuggery days like the 8-minute "Flipmode Squad Meets Def Squad" posse cut where everyone (including Redman and Busta) raps like they are in a computer game from 1997. We sorta have a soft spot for rappers in the '90s that were willing to get weird on a song (we see you Cella Dwellas!) so Busta's performance on that as well as on "Head Banger" is a welcome return to over the top sounding like a cartoon lion Bussa Bus. Also, he references like four heavy metal bands in a couple seconds, and raps like he did on this which we feel is very notable for some reason, probably because we listened to that song for half of one summer. Is Alfamega a thing yet? He sounds like a slightly less grimy Bumpy Knuckles.


Download: Alfamega f. Busta Rhymes, "Head Bang"

Other than "Iron Man sequel", "hadron collider," and "jam", the buzzwords in FADER HQ these days are Pour Les Filles. Cuizinier's new mixtape comes out in less than a week and we are gassed (Wait, are we gonna have to pay for this thing?). We put up "Quand Tu Maimes" from it a couple weeks ago and RCRD LBL just put up another teaser with guest spots from the Rock Brothers, Spank and Pase. It's a sassy homage to Sesame Street and profanity—two things which remind us of our childhood.


Download: Cuizinier f. Spank Rock & Pase Rock, "Lettre F"

If you've paid any attention to Atlanta over the last decade and a half, you might get the feeling there are a lot of guys down in the A like Bohagon—dudes whose raps you could listen to all day, who enter your orbit once a season, but there's just never enough time to champion them all. But Bohagon finally has a solo album coming out someday soon, and this single illustrates exactly why we decided to put him in FADER #53. Read that after the jump and uh set a Google alert for "bohagon who am i?" for the album release.


Download: Bohagon, "Been Gettin Money"
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When TVT Records shut down this year, our honest first response was But what about Dude N Nem? For the Dude dudes to get signed by what was a leftfield-but-focused label gave us hope that their album would get a great push and much deserved attention (And maybe what? Ying Yang-level commercial success?). So now that that deal's done, we're left to monitoring YouTube for random fan videos of hidden Dude N Nem gems like "Get Away!" (above) with cut-up footage of bootleg Godzilla. And then there's "Believe", which after last night, Obama fans can do a little more, but doesn't do much to make us believe in the reality of a Dude N Nem album anytime soon. Steve Gottlieb, holler at us, and we will sell that joint out of our bike baskets.

When Sean Kingston and JR Rotem graverobbed Ben E King's "Stand By Me" last year for the ringtone garbation of "Beautiful Girls," this entire office held out hope that one day someone would come along to do new school doo-wop the right way. Fortunately for the 13th floor (also: Earth!) ATL dandies Dukes of DaVille and our beloved ONP came through in the clutch with a bittersweet sock-hop anthem right on time for Summer '08. Somebody Google us a drive-in in the tri-state area thats still open so we can cruise over on Saturday afternoon and bump the shit out of this. We'll settle for a halfway decent Stewart's.

Noz put up "Welcome Back" yesterday and lamented Roscoe's lost album Hazardous Life, and while we commiserate with him on that one, there's no doubt that because of the internet we do not have to suffer Star Trak's bad track record in silence. The other newish song on Roscoe's MySpace is just as good, if not better, than "Welcome Back", so we're giving you that too. "Story Joint" is, wildly enough, a storytelling minor masterpiece with Roscoe rapping like the James Joyce of North Philadelphia. So crazy and so good and maybe a reason to, oh we don't know, LET THE DUDE PUT A RECORD OUT.


Download: Roscoe P Coldchain, "Story Joint"


Download: Roscoe P Coldchain, "Welcome Back" (from Cocaine Blunts)

Nelly's comeback clip has been kicking around for a month or two, but we just saw it laaaaaaaate last night on cable and it gave us nightmares. Since this video first aired, Nelly has released a fake hyphy song and Fergie has leaked (wocka wocka!) the theme to that despicable Sex And The City movie, yet neither of those scale the same heights of bummeritude as Polow Da Don DJing in the first fifteen seconds. It's not the pretend scratching (everybody does it), or even the product placement for Dr Dre's headphone line (can't knock team spirit), it's the simple fact that "Party People" forces us to imagine being in a club where Da Don is hypothetically DJing. And. That. Sucks. Have you ever SEEN a famous music person commandeer the decks in real life? Shit's about as fun as tooth surgery. Jermaine Dupri (or Lil Jon or Pete Wentz or Nick Cannon-Carey), somewhere in Las Vegas where they have waterfalls in the bathroom, cueing up "Sweet Child O Mine" on an iPod, times infinity. It's an incontrovertibly true fact of truth! But Polow! You make songs we actually want to hear when we go out! You're better than this! Yet our hero is doomed to one day break our hearts (he wears rhinestoned tattoo shirts, it's more or less predestined), and we have the Band-Aid faced St Lunatic to thank for such a sad 5am realization. Where was sweet, sweet Tylenol PM when we needed her most?!?

The last time we had an in-depth look at Ol' Dirty Bastard's life, it was the VH1 special about what he was doing after being released from jail. He was subdued and seemed depressed and was working on a still not technically released album. Apparently ODB's brother has been working on a documentary about his life, interviewing everyone from Ghostface to the most third string of third string Wu affiliates. It remains to be seen how well-made this thing actually is, but any insight into the weirdest dude in rap is always welcome.

It's kind of disorienting these days to hear Wayne not disoriented. On this true duet from Bun's II Trill, debuted on Nah Right, Wayne and Bun split the vocal duties in half and surprisingly, on his first verse at least, Wayne sounds almost as calm and collected as Bun. We're not saying that's good or bad, it's just that sometimes we need to be reminded that Wayne is not certifiably insane. And then there's Wayne's last verse.


Download: Bun B f. Lil Wayne, "Damn I'm Cold"

There's something really comforting about this—almost like it should sit in the middle of Khaled's next album or something. From Drumma Boy's pretty standard (but still appealing) scary southern Halloween beat to Jeezy's total Young Dro flow jacking (actually a good look), to Kanye's haunting overuse of the vocoder, it doesn't blow us away as the rumored first single from his third album, but also we're listening to it for the sixth time so maybe it actually does blow us away and we don't even realize it yet. DUDES what if this is the first rap song that makes us love it subliminally?


Download: Young Jeezy f. Kanye West, "Put On"

Goobers stay making music video dedications to Barack these days, so though we usually watch once and move on to more important matters (watching the candidates), we had to put this one up since it's by Taz of Sa-Ra and has cameos from half the people we've put in the magazine in the last 5 years. Okay maybe not that many but A LOT. It also is claimed to be Taz's first solo single and kinda sounds like an A-Trak/Crookers remix of "Today Was A Good Day."

In many ways Izza Kizza binds the nuttiest, speediest strains of Eminem and Luda into absurd and humorous raps that we can't get enough of. In other ways Izza Kizza makes us worry that he is insane and might show up to the office wearing disemboweled teddy bears. As long as he has an outlet in music, though, we're not gonna worry too much about it. "Here I Iz!" is labeled as coming from Mr. Next Year, his debut album on Timbaland's Mosley Music Group the tentative title for his upcoming mixtape with Nick Catchdubs.


Download: Izza Kizza, "Here I Iz!"

It's been a particularly rough few years for the three then-rising stars of F35's New York Rap feature. Stack Bundles was killed last June, Papoose got dropped from his million-dollar major label deal (and has been making more noise with his prison nupitals than with any actual music as of late), and Maino—our personal favorite of the bunch—has simply been AWOL, emerging every so often with a signing rumor or internet banger only to sink back into the fog of BK rap anonymity just as quickly. So you can imagine our collective elation to hear Maino over a classic Jimmy Spicer breakbeat on his new single "Hi Hater." Yes, an actual single! On the radio! It hit NYC airwaves last week at the same moment as our long-delayed springtime, and the backstory can't help but make "Hi Hater" feel even more triumphant. "You see me!" You're gotdamn right we do.


Download: Maino, "Hi Hater"