Young Thug and Bloody Jay – Black Portland
Do you like rap music? Of course you do, you clicked a link on Twitter/Facebook/the BroBible Homepage telling you that you could learn about some rap music you should be listening to, and now you are here. By now, you have (probably, hopefully, please Jesus Christ) heard of Young Thug. Recently, he put out a tape called Black Portland with his fellow Atlanta rapper Bloody Jay. While the majority of interest/praise is probably going to go to Thug, in no small part because he is amazing and Kanye West danced to one of his songs, you shouldn’t discount Bloody Jay in the least. Together, the pair smashes up the conventions of of-the-moment southern rap and reinvent them in their own psychedelic, fucked-up image. Listening to these guys spit gives you the type of motivation to break down a wall and then turn the bricks from said wall into a castle dedicated to your own awesomeness. Listen to it, or die.
DJ Moondawg Presents – We Invented the Bop
If you haven’t heard of boppin, you might as well get into it now. It’s the latest generation of supremely interesting music coming from the streets of Chicago, a sort of evolution of the pitch-black drill made famous by guys like Chief Keef and King Louie, but where drill looks into the night and sees only death, bop music manages to find hope. It helps that bop comes with its own deliriously fun-to-watch and hilariously-difficult-to-replicate dance that I recommend you do not attempt to replicate.
This is its soundtrack. Curated by Chicago heavyweight DJ Moondawg, We Invented the Bop is only the tip of the iceberg—for more advance bop music studies, I recommend DJ Nate’s Dope n’ Music tape, as well as Sicko Mobb’s Super Saiyan, Vol. 1. You’re welcome, bro internet.
Rocko – Lingo 4 Dummies
Rocko is next in the line of once-and-Future-affiliated Atlanta kings whose mixtapes you should inhale with the glee of a dude who’s been trapped in the horrifying void of outer space inhaling oxygen for the first time in days. He is also famous for “U.O.E.N.O.,” with its JESUS-CHRIST-PLEASE-DON’T-RAP-ABOUT-THAT Rick Ross verse. As evidenced by Lingo, his Wordplay tape, and his Gift of Gab series, Rocko really, really, really likes word games, employing a slow, steady flow to foreground his cleverness. I once saw him in Atlanta at a club with R. Kelly. If you read this and just discovered Rocko, please buy me this shirt.
Giraffage/The-Dream – Love/Hate Remixes
As a music writer, it’s your job to hate everything. Which is why it’s super dope when something like this stumbles through your ears. Giraffage is a producer-bro from San Francisco who decided to remix the entirety of The-Dream’s unheralded classic of a first album, Love/Hate. He employs a light touch, adding stabs as necessary but letting the songs stand on their own as indelible beautiful perfect and real documents of life and love that you can fuck to.
Stream it below.
Hell Rell – The Meyer Lansky Project
This is an extreme #latepass and I was almost about to try to convince you to fuck with Jerome LOL’s Deleted/Fool EP (which you should definitely still fuck with), but then Hell Rell, the unsung hero of the Dipset Dynasty, took to Instagram to announce he was opening… a house painting business. This brings so many questions that I’m just begging to have answered. Like, why does Hell Rell want to paint houses? Will you get a discount if he paints everything purple? Will the house painting business go platinum? The answers to these questions don’t actually matter, but what does matter is you pay a visit to Ruger Rell’s supremely underrated Meyer Lansky Project, which dropped with, like, zero fanfare last August. Just because you slept the first time doesn’t mean you should sleep forever, though.
Drew Millard is Features Editor for Vice’s music channel, Noisey. Follow him on Twitter and find his first BroBible column here.