Tag: hiphop

2025 in Music

On By Luther M. SilerIn movies2 Comments

I bought 59 albums in 2025, way off of last year’s pace, which was admittedly kind of insane. Here’s the list, and then I’ll talk specifically about a few of them. This isn’t a “best of” list by any means, just some albums I find interesting.

And yes, “bought” is the right word, as I generally don’t stream music. I played around with Spotify for a bit this year and then cancelled it when they started showing ads for ICE, and I currently have a Tidal account that I’m not really using.

Let’s start with the band of the year, an award that isn’t even meaningful enough to be rendered in capital letters and which I spent no time thinking about prior to writing this sentence:

In the absence of a new Pearl Jam album this year (and I got one last year, so I can’t complain) a new Counting Crows album is about the best thing I could have asked for– and I not only got that, I got a tour, which I had tickets to. I saw two concerts this year, both in the same venue in Indianapolis; Weird Al was the other one. The Crows have still absolutely got it. There are other bands from my era that are still making music and touring, but … not all of them should be, if you know what I mean, and I think you do.

I’m only picking Problematic because the cover has his face on it, but Norman Sann was absolutely my big discovery in hiphop this year. Dude is phenomenally talented and he’s also a huge geek without really letting it take over his music– like, he’ll drop a reference to Baraka from Mortal Kombat into the middle of a verse, but Nerd Rap is a genre all to itself and this, I think, is not that. I picked up five full-length albums by this guy this year and I very much am impatiently anticipating more.

(Goes and looks, discovers a sixth album came out in September!)

So make that an even 60 for the year, then.

The Sinners soundtrack sparked a sudden and fairly intense interest in streaming Irish rage music, which has cooled a bit, but I’d never really listened to the Dropkick Murphys before this year and I should have started before now. For the People, their latest release, and The Warrior’s Code from 2005 got the most plays. I’ll pick up the rest of their catalog sooner or later but haven’t done it just yet.

I think this is the second time Olivia Rodrigo has shown up on one of these things. I still have issues with how the adults around her handled her first album, but she’s an adult now and she dropped a live album on us late in the year. Live pop isn’t completely my thing– I will never get completely used to the idea of singing over your own voice as a backup track– but there’s a ton of energy in this recording and Robert Smith randomly showing up for a couple of duets in front of a very young crowd who appears to have no idea who the hell he is is a nice touch.

Finally, I just picked up the deluxe edition of Mad Season’s Above last week, and it’s long enough that I haven’t even listened to the whole thing yet, but it’s a Goddamned crime that I had never heard of this album until recently. Do you know who Mad Season is? They released one album– this one– in 1995. They’re a supergroup: Layne Staley from Alice In Chains, Mike McCready from Pearl Jam, Barrett Martin from Screaming Trees on drums, and John Baker Saunders from The Walkabouts. The album is fifteen meaty tracks (the shortest is 4:11, and two are over seven minutes) and one of the very few concerts they did. I’m just now starting to listen to the concert. It’s a remarkable fucking project and I’m pissed that I didn’t completely internalize it in 1995 when I should have.

What did you listen to this year?

Solar systematic reach for celestials

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

I dunno what the headline means either, but a new Atmosphere album just came out and I’m listening to it and that lyric from “Neptune” stood out for some reason(*). I have been playing Silksong for several hours, hating most of it, and I still stand by my thorough review from the other day. The game’s fucking masochistic; it’s not fun-hard, it’s bang your head against the wall until the pain stops hard, and I can’t explain why I’m still playing the fucking thing. I’m not relaxed when I’m playing, I’m stressed out and angry, and that’s … not only kind of shockingly immature for a motherfucker who is going to be fifty in less than a year, it’s also not really a good use for leisure time? Like, there are other things I could be doing. There are even any number of other unpleasant things I could be doing that would at least result in, say, the house being cleaner or some sort of shit like that.

It is possible that I spend too much of my leisure time doing things that actively make me unhappy. I should find a therapist and have a conversation about that.

(*) Also don’t know why the album is called “Jestures,” but I’m on my first listen so it might become apparent eventually. There’s no title track.

2024 in music

On By Luther M. SilerIn Music1 Comment

I bought eighty-six albums in 2024, a number that frankly I find surprising– I wouldn’t have guessed it was that many, and it’s probably upped a bit by the number of singles I purchased this year (See: Lamar, K.) but that’s still a hell of a lot of music. This, like last year, isn’t a Best Of list and the only order it’s going to be in is rough chronological, but here are some albums that I thought were notable from this year. And, yes, “this year” means “I heard it first this year,” not “It came out this year,” although most of these are 2024 releases.

T-Pain’s live album On Top of the Covers: Live from the Sun Rose has no right to be as good as it is. I didn’t realize I was a fan of T-Pain until hearing his cover of War Pigs, which made me spend money, and this album, recorded in front of a tiny crowd and featuring lots of T-Pain just sort of chatting and screwing around with the audience, is spectacular.

Be honest: did you know the Black Crowes were still recording? Did you know that Happiness Bastards was fucking awesome? I bought this one in a state of vague shock– their last release was in 2013, and I’d not heard anything about it prior to seeing it in Itunes’ pre-order list, but any child of the nineties has no right to pass this up. It’s great.

Speaking of bands from the nineties…

I talked about Pearl Jam’s latest release, Dark Matter, quite a lot when it came out, mostly because I didn’t listen to anything else for a month. It’s their best album since Vitalogy. That is the highest of high praise. You’ll notice a lot of live albums in the list later; it’s because I needed live versions of all of the songs on this album. Album of the year, no real competition.

If you had told me at any point prior to its release that one of my favorite hiphop albums of the year would be by LL Cool J I would have laughed at you, but The Force is the best thing he’s released in a long, long time. I used to be a big fan of his and then kinda fell away as he left the harder-edged persona of his earlier albums away (and focused on acting instead of rapping) but this reminds me of everything that he was capable of as a younger rapper, and his duet with Eminem on Murdergram Deux is one of the best songs he’s ever done, complete with the best single verse I’ve ever heard from him.

I found Kharii through TikTok, of all places, where she’s fond of freestyling straight into the camera, and her chill, slightly hippie rap vibe ended up right up my alley. Microdoses of Me is a full-length album and you’ll notice a couple of EPs in the list later as well.

This was Kendrick Lamar’s year in a lot of ways, and his unannounced drop of GNX toward the end of the year was one of the best surprises (possibly the only good surprise) of 2024. Kendrick has always been an artist who I respect more than I like, and his last full-length album kind of left me cold, but GNX is great even if it doesn’t piss on Drake enough. Mustaaaaaaaaaaaard!

Another “wait, they’re still recording?” release, and also another “not really a huge fan, just picked it up for the hell of it” release, The Cure’s new Songs of a Lost World is the most hypnotic, endlessly listenable thing I’ve heard this year. If I was trying to write a book I’d have this on constant repeat, because it just sort of worms its way into your brain and makes you focus. One thing: don’t listen to Endsong, the final track, while driving. It’ll put you in a trance and that’s a bad idea at 70 miles an hour.

They released a double album a couple of weeks ago, pairing this with a live version. Don’t bother; the live version sounds damn near exactly like the studio recording and it was really disappointing.

Okay, one more:

I don’t have the slightest recollection of what caused me to pick up Doechii’s latest album, Alligator Bites Never Heal, because previously I had only heard of her from a couple of clips on TikTok– not even any actual videos, because as far as I know she’s not on the platform, there have just been a couple of her audio clips that have gone viral. Well … thanks, whoever you are? She kind of reminds me of Kharii in that her rapping is really laid back and chill, but more slickly produced and a little bit more mainstream. They even both do the double-i thing. Either way the albums pair together really well.

Here’s the whole list. Let me know if there’s anything else you want me to talk about:

Today was a long week

On By Luther M. SilerIn Music, TeachingLeave a comment

I don’t know if you’ve ever taken 8th graders on a field trip or not. I suspect you probably haven’t. And since I was primarily responsible just for my advisory, who I love, and about four other kids who I didn’t hand-select but I might as well have, it really wasn’t a bad or stressful field trip at all. The kids behaved admirably and I was proud of them. But Jesus, trying to keep constant track of 21 people out in public all at the same time is exhausting, and once we got back to school they (entirely predictably) decided that they’d all collectively had enough of their best behavior for the day, and then actual fucking sex assault drama blew up in the 8th grade, and … yeah, I wanted to talk about LL Cool J tonight and I just don’t have the spoons.

That said, watch this, especially the verse that starts at about 58 seconds, and see if you can figure out when this motherfucker is breathing. Dude has been rapping since 1985 and I’ve never seen anything from him like this.

#REVIEW: Tupac Shakur, the Authorized Biography, by Staci Robinson

On By Luther M. SilerIn Music, Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

I’m not generally the type to gatekeep, but it’s not hard to find out whether someone is a Tupac fan or not. Ask them his birthday.

June 16th, 1971/ Mama gave birth to a hell-raising heavenly son/ See the doctor tried to smack me but I smacked him back/ my first words was thug for life, and Papa pass the Mac

That’s the first lines of Cradle to the Grave, the penultimate track from his album Thug Life, and … okay, you can be a Pac fan and not know that line right off, but I think more of us do than don’t. And I’ve taken a moment to myself on more June 16ths than not, since he passed away. Not a big thing, mind. Just a moment. But he made sure we all knew his birthday so I figure it’s worth remembering.

There have been a lot of words written about this man since his death. Take a look at Amazon; a search for “Tupac books” will provide you with half a dozen self-published books about him, mostly full of conspiracy theories, and any number of other works written by more, uh, authoritative entities. It was the words Authorized Biography on the cover that got me to pick this one up; turns out Tupac’s mother Afeni Shakur hand-picked Staci Robinson to write this book, which immediately gives it a hell of a lot more authenticity than the usual.

Part of me didn’t want to read it, to be honest. Pac is one of a very small number of people whose deaths made me cry. I don’t remember exactly where I was when I found out Kurt Cobain had killed himself. I don’t remember where I was when I found out Christopher Reeve or Stan Lee had passed. I remember where I was when I found out about Chadwick Boseman, but there were no tears. I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when I found out Tupac was gone. I wasn’t completely certain I wanted to revisit everything, to be honest.

And the thing is, it’s not going to be that difficult to write a biography of Tupac Shakur that doesn’t properly respect him, “authorized” or not. Afeni Shakur died in 2016 so it’s not as if she was around to review the manuscript. A whole lot of people he was close to are gone, as a matter of fact. And … well, let’s be real. Pac was messy. At best. He wasn’t the violent, unrepentant criminal that the news media portrayed him as, but he had a hell of a self-destructive streak that was showing itself very early in his life and that he never really got control of as an adult, particularly in his last few years. If he hadn’t been shot in Vegas in 1996, the cops would have gotten him by now. There was never a universe where Tupac Shakur lived to die of old age, and he knew it.

It was a moment, the day when I realized I’d outlived him.

This is a worthy memorial to him, I think. Robinson had access to what must have been an enormous volume of Pac’s own writings dating back to his childhood– one thing I’ve heard about him from every single person who ever knew him is that the man was never without a notebook close to hand, and could shut out the rest of the world when he got something in his head that needed to be written down. I’m not going to dig up the video right now, but Shock-G tells a great story about Pac disappearing for a while, walking around looking for him, and finding him in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet, buck naked, and writing lyrics in a notebook.

The book is stuffed full of poems and fragments of lyrics and drawings and other writings, so many that I’m pretty confident that I’d recognize Tupac’s handwriting if you put it in front of me. It’s difficult to write biographies of writers and musicians, honestly, especially when they died young– it’s easy to fall into a rhythm of and then he wrote THIS, and then he wrote THAT, and sales charts and blah blah blah, and the book ends up in a lot of ways being a history of his intellectual development as much as anything else. He could have been one of history’s greatest intellects, born at a different time and in different circumstances. Robinson talks about his voraciousness for reading and his compulsive need to write in a way that, fifteen years ago, would have put me in mind of Thomas Jefferson and nowadays can’t help but remind one of Alexander Hamilton.

I never knew that he’d gotten married while he was in jail. Never knew that he’d dated Madonna, either, which I find hilarious. And I fell down a hell of a rabbit hole this afternoon when I realized that the book never mentioned Juilliard– I knew that he’d attended, but not graduated from, the Baltimore School for the Arts, which was where he met Jada Pinkett, who became a lifelong friend, but I thought that he’d attended Juilliard at least briefly. This story turns out to be false, and I’d love to know where the hell it came from– if you search for “Tupac Shakur Juilliard” you’ll find dozens of people confidently revealing that he’d gone there, often under a full scholarship, but Juilliard doesn’t seem to know about it, and it’s not mentioned on Wikipedia, and it wasn’t mentioned in the book. Pac never graduated high school, as it turns out, although he did eventually get his GED. I know I’ve told people that he went to Juilliard. I really do wish I had a way to track down the source of that story.

If I have a criticism of the biography, it’s that the book ends as abruptly as Tupac’s life did; he dies on the literal last page, and while I don’t think Robinson had any responsibility to get into any of the rumors and wild conspiracy theories about his death, especially once The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory(*) came out posthumously, I feel like something about the police (lack of) investigation and his legacy would have been warranted. His ashes are buried in Soweto, in South Africa. I didn’t know that, and I found out from Wikipedia today, not from this book. The man has released more albums since he died than he did when he was alive; I feel like one chapter in his book after his death isn’t asking too much.

That’s what I’ve got, though. No other real criticisms, and while I wasn’t initially sure I wanted to read this, in the end I’m glad I did. I haven’t taken the time to listen through his discography in a while, and I’ve been bobbing my head to Me Against the World while I’ve been writing this. All Eyez On Me is next, and that one needs to be LOUD, so I may need an excuse to take a drive for a couple of hours. We’ll see. In the meantime, this is well worth your time and money.

(*) If you really want to gatekeep Tupac fandom, ask somebody what the actual name of this album is, as I think most people just call it “The Makaveli album,” and I admit I just typed out The 7 Day Theory and had to stare at it for a minute to figure out what I’d left out.

Some bits and bobs

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics, TeachingLeave a comment

My head’s all over the place right now, so let’s do a bullet list.

  • Indiana voted on Tuesday. The Previous Occupant managed 79% of the Republican primary vote against an opponent who dropped out two months ago. I remind you that I Know Nothing About Politics before saying this, but it’s amazing how the polls say one thing and literally every other thing about this election says another.
  • Meanwhile, I was assuming my choice for Senate would lose because Indiana would choose the white guy, and they didn’t! Not only did Valerie McCray win, she won solidly, getting about 2/3 of the vote.
  • The sex pest won his primary too, unfortunately. I am probably just going to leave State Senate blank in November. Surprisingly, there is no Republican candidate, but there is a Libertarian running, and not only is he a Libertarian, he’s an engineer, which means he’s a jackass. It is possible to be either and not be a jackass but it is not possible to be both.
  • Today was a better day at school, not least because all of my knuckleheads from yesterday were excluded from class today. Today was the Math NWEA test, too, and for all indications it looks like it … went well? Possibly quite well? I won’t know for sure until tomorrow morning because it takes 24 hours for results to be fully available to teachers but damn near every kid I talked to showed growth.
  • Meanwhile, I’m definitely taking the high school Mathematics Praxis test this summer. My boss hinted that we might have enough 8th graders taking Geometry next year to be able to make a class section out of it, and I will fight anyone who tries to take that class away from me. That means I need to get licensed to teach it, though, so there’s a test to pass and some paperwork to get done. I can take the damn thing from my house, though, which is spectacularly good news.
  • I have chosen violence, and will be wearing a shirt that just says KENDRICK to work tomorrow. I’m expecting fireworks. It’ll be fun.
  • The final meeting of my little club of gay weirdos at school was today. We had a pizza party. I thought I had ordered far too much food. They each turned out to be a million locusts wearing skin suits, and everything I ordered was gone in seconds. I’m really going to miss these kids.
  • We had a fight in the hallway toward the end of the day, and I raised my voice to such a level clearing the hallway that I was hoarse for all of fifth and sixth hour. I’m hoping I can talk tomorrow.

Okay. That sounds good. I’m gonna go read now.

#REVIEW: ON TOP OF THE COVERS: LIVE FROM THE SUN ROSE, by T-Pain

On By Luther M. SilerIn Music, ReviewsLeave a comment

This will be relatively brief, as I apparently didn’t get enough sleep last night and at 7:05 I am entirely willing to go directly to bed the minute I finish this, but after seeing a TikTok video of T-Pain performing Ozzy Osbourne’s War Pigs live, the second I found out that there was a recording available of the entire concert I jumped at it. There is apparently also a cover album with a similar playlist that is studio versions, and I wasn’t aware it existed until searching for a .jpg of the album cover just now. I don’t really know a lot about T-Pain; I thought autotune was mostly his thing and while I’m sure I’ve heard him do a ton of guest appearances in other people’s songs I don’t think I could name anything by him if you paid me. But this album is bananas good; it’s eclectic as hell, running the gamut from Journey to the Guess Who to Marvin Gaye to Chris Stapleton to, again, Ozzy, and while I’ll admit that some of the bits where he’s just chatting with the audience are kind of annoying, this motherfucker can sing, and I listened to the album like three times straight yesterday.

This is one of the best kind of live albums, too– the crowd is tiny; he refers to “a hundred and some” people at one point, and I wouldn’t even necessarily have guessed that many, but you can hear every reaction from someone in the crowd and the recording itself is really clean. It’s occasionally a little too medley-style; I’d have appreciated more than a minute and eight seconds of Luther Vandross’ Never Too Much, for example, and that’s in the middle of about five or six great songs in a row, none of which get more than about a minute and a half. But he makes up for it with sheer charisma and energy, and there are worse complaints I could have had than I want more of this. 

Don’t worry about whether you are a fan of T-Pain or not. Check out the set list (scroll down), and if you think you’ll enjoy the show, you’re probably right. 

2023 in Music

On By Luther M. SilerIn Music5 Comments

I purchased– and yes, “purchased” is the right word– 72 albums in 2023. I am an Old, and I have never taken to streaming, and so I’m still paying for all this stuff, and the fact that I got handed $200 in Apple gift cards partway through the year definitely didn’t hurt. Obviously not all of that is 2023 music, and as usual, I’m going to talk about stuff that was new to me this year. 

The usual caveat whenever I’m talking about music: I have no idea how to write coherently about music, and never have, and furthermore I still cannot understand other people when they write about music. I have seen a ton of “Best New Releases of 2023” types of lists in the last few weeks, and purchased some music based on them, and … I just don’t get it. I’m pretty convinced that you could take the actual review parts of this article, randomly swap the artist and albums’ names, and republish it, and no one would notice. So this isn’t a list of reviews, it’s not a Best Of, and it’s sure as hell not in any kind of order other than maybe reverse chronological order of when I bought them. These are just albums that I enjoyed in 2023. Maybe you’ll like them too.

And I can hear you already, going “Wait, Luther, there’s no way you didn’t have Diamonds and Pearls already!” And you’re correct! I bought it on release day when I was in high school. What came out this year is the Super Deluxe Edition of Diamonds and Pearls, by Prince and the New Power Generation, which, for all my love of Prince’s entire career, will always be my favorite iteration of him.

The physical version of this motherfucker is seven disks long. There are live versions and alternate takes and an entire concert and demos and remasters and I’m going to stop typing now because you’ve already clicked away to go spend money.

I discovered Ren in 2023; Freckled Angels is a 2016 release but Sick Boi came out this year. Sick Boi is absolutely a rap album; Freckled Angels is something else and I’m not even going to try to describe it. Ren is Irish and monumentally talented and even if you’re not generally into hiphop you might want to look into him. Good shit.

I think it might actually be illegal to write anything about music in 2023 without mentioning Guts, by Olivia Rodrigo, and, well … yeah, it deserves it. I am really proud of myself for never unleashing my feelings about Sour in this space; Rodrigo has been underage for most of her career and picking on an actual child for musical choices that most likely were made mostly by other people who didn’t have her best interests in mind (no goddammit I’m not gonna do it) is not a move I want to make. But Guts is a more mature and multidimensional piece of work in every imaginable way, and bad idea right? is a fucking banger and I no longer feel like she should be taken away from her parents. All good. We’re fine.

2023 is also the year Paramore finally clicked for me, and after spending weeks mainlining This is Why every time I got into my car I went back and picked up most of the rest of their backlist. I mean, Christ, the name of their album is half of the line this is why I don’t leave the house; it’s like it was written for me.

You may have seen Queen Omega freestyling her ass off over a Dr. Dre beat on TikTok; I did, over and over and over again, until I cracked and spent money. I don’t listen to a ton of reggae nowadays, and I listen to even less reggae that doesn’t have anyone named Marley involved with it, but Freedom Legacy was a great dip back into the genre, and I feel like I might explore what modern, hip-hop influenced reggae is doing more next year. This is a hell of a collection, though, and I’m glad I grabbed it up.

Six? Six sounds good. Here’s the rest of the list: