2020 - HipHop

Daily Discussion Thread 04/16/2020
Throwback Write-Up #4: Devin the Dude - Waitin' to Inhale
[FRESH ALBUM] Westside Gunn - Pray For Paris
[FRESH ALBUM] DaBaby - Blame it on Baby
[FRESH] Playboi Carti - @ MEH
[FRESH ALBUM] dvsn - A Muse In Her Feelings
[FRESH] 21 Savage - Secret (Ft. Summer Walker)
[FRESH] Desiigner - Survivor
[FRESH VIDEO] Joey Bada$$, Curren$y, Guapdad 4000 - Rona Raps 5
[FRESH] Lucki - Faith
LIL UZI VERT & PLAYBOI CARTI "LEFT RIGHT" (Prod. By Don Cannon, DJ Spinz, Maaly Raw)
[FRESH] Lil Tecca - Out of Love (feat. Internet Money)
[FRESH VIDEO] ZillaKami x SosMula - DRAINO ft. Denzel Curry
[FRESH ALBUM] Don Toliver - Heaven Or Hell (CHOPNOTSLOP REMIX)
[FRESH ALBUM] Tech N9ne - ENTERFEAR
(FRESH) Jonathan leandoer96 (Yung Lean) - Evil
[Fresh Album] R.A. The Rugged Man - All My Heroes Are Dead
[FRESH ALBUM] Buddy & Kent Jamz - Janktape Vol. 1
[FRESH] The Kid LAROI ft. Lil Tjay - Fade Away
Westside Gunn Reveals Full Tracklist for Pray For Paris
[FRESH] Westside Gunn - $500 Ounces (ft. Freddie Gibbs & Roc Marciano)
[FRESH] Guapdad 4000 feat. Jigga Juice - Embezzle
[FRESH] Westside Gunn - George Bondo (feat. Conway The Machine & Benny The Butcher)
[FRESH ALBUM] Avantdale Bowling Club - LIVE
Tory Lanez’s Quarantine Radio Is One of Our Great Isolation Pastimes: The Canadian rapper and singer broke all kinds of Instagram Live records in the run-up to his latest project, ‘The New Toronto 3’ | The Ringer
Wesrside Gunn Pray 4 Paris Stream on Twitch DJ'd by Virgil Abloh

Daily Discussion Thread 04/16/2020

Posted: 16 Apr 2020 04:33 PM PDT

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Throwback Write-Up #4: Devin the Dude - Waitin' to Inhale

Posted: 16 Apr 2020 03:58 PM PDT

Encomium of Devin the Dude and His Album Waitin' to Inhale

It was the twentieth day of April, 2011. Devin was on stage with the whole Coughee Brothaz crew. There was a dude who sang like CeeLo Green, jumping onto the mic to sing hooks. When he wasn't singing, he was rolling up blunts. They'd pass the blunt around to everyone on stage once, then pass the blunt to the crowd. The whole venue was hotboxed. My buddy turns to me and says, "Yo, I feel like we're actually just hanging out with Devin the Dude. Like, he's up there, but I feel like we're just hanging out here, and I'm hanging with Devin the Dude."

That's the feeling I get when I listen to Waitin' to Inhale. It's so richly textured and lived-in that I feel like Devin is chilling in the room, sharing a few stories over a blunt or two.

Devin the Dude teaches a message equal parts clever and kind. Late stage capitalism has plenty of opportunities for the clever, but little patience for kindness. So, I suppose it's not surprising that Devin hasn't been given the credit he deserves for this album, or his contributions to hip hop over the course of his career. Still, he manages to haunt the culture, hovering like the smoke from a fat-ass blunt on features for spiritual descendants like Curren$y and cultural icons like Solange.

Waitin' to Inhale marks the moment that Devin the Dude fell off the mainstream radar, but it's also his highest charting album. He did the best he'd ever done, and it just wasn't enough. The singles didn't gain traction, like "Doobie Ash Tray" and "Lacville '79" had managed to do a few years earlier. While UGK dropped a number one album the same year, Devin's career fizzled. Waitin' to Inhale is his final album with Rap-A-Lot Records. After, he continued his career as an independent artist. However, poor sales don't change the fact that the product he delivered on March 20, 2007 was perfect.

A Closer Look at the Album

For starters, Waitin' to Inhale is one of the finest example of comedic hip hop. Devin the Dude successfully executes, on this album, a type of wry, observational humor that is both deeply relatable and impossible to replicate.

Here, you can find Devin the Dude worrying about how a dollar doesn't buy as much gas as it used to, but there's also a song with Bun B and Lil Wayne. He's trading verses with Andre 3000 and Snoop Dog, but they're talking about pulling all-nighters in the studio, fretting whether or not music piracy will ruin them financially.

Devin doesn't rap about all the women he has begging him for sex. On "Broccoli and Cheese", he instead raps about how he wines, dines, and romances a woman. He also builds the entire chorus of of that song around reassuring a woman that he doesn't have any STIs: "Girl this dick is so clean, it'll probably go good with your broccoli and cheese!" Devin the dude is a rascal, a picaresque hero.

He manages to take hilarious, but insensitive, set-ups and unwind them into something broadly appealing, like in "She Useta Be", a song about seeing an old high-school classmate who had gone from "elegant to elephant". The song begins as an expression of surprise, turns into a light-hearted roast, and ends with him going to her house to eat some pork chops, chicken, Stove Top Stuffin', macaroni and ham, purple hull peas, and yams. Of course, he had to hit it while he was there, the scoundrel. "She still cute," he says, in conclusion. "She just got big ankles."

He pulls off a similar magic trick on "Cutcha' Up", a love song to an underage girl with a hook that's about being patient and waiting for her to be legal. This isn't to say that his attitude or actions in the song are virtuous, just that the way he expresses himself makes it hard to be mad at the guy.

This same effect can be seen in the way he juxtaposes laid back production and a lethargic flow with violent fantasies following heartbreak on Just Because, a track that segues into the pleading "Don't Wanna Be Alone", where croons about not wanting to end up alone masturbating all the time. The track is built on a gorgeous sample from "Alone" by Ohio Players. "Doncha say goodbye unless you wanna see a grown man cry, girl!" he pleads in a sweet, surprisingly well-executed falsetto.

As the album nears it's close, he gets adventurous stylistically. "Somebody Else's Wife" features a delicate smattering of vocoder. "Nothin' to Roll With", on the other hand, is a straight-forward country ballad with 808 bones that would be perfectly at home with the current explosion of country-rap hybrids.

The album ends with "Till It's All Gone", a posse cut that feels like a freestyle session with friends in a smoked-out basement.

Devin isn't a rapid-fire rapper He sinks deep, deep into the pocket, delivering his bars with the rhythm of Dave Chappelle delivering a joke. He can also sing when it suits him. Sometimes, he sounds like he's singing in the shower, other times he's right on pitch. What ties it all together is his wit, charm, and the unmistakably Huston flavor of the production. Right before the internet irreversibly threw the flavors of every genre and region into a cultural blender, Devin delivered a record that is drenched in the rhythms and sounds of his hometown.

All of this adds up to an album that feels out of step with hip hop's direction in 2007. Even the hilarious skits that tie together the album feel anachronistic, arriving the same year as Graduation, Kanye West's first album without a single skit.

In Conclusion

Waitin' to Inhale's poor album sales, compared to other records with similarly high-profile features, is representative of a turning point in mainstream hip hop away from relatable street-level observations as it entered its imperial era. The self-deprecating charms of Devin the Dude failed to get traction in a hip-hop landscape defined by braggadocio.

Listening to this record, I vividly recall spending 45-minutes with a friend picking the seeds out of a bag of weed to roll two fat blunts. That's nothing to brag about, but in hindsight, it was a helluva way to spend an afternoon. Devin the Dude soundtracked countless experiences like that in my life, hovering in the air like a mischievous, perverted, but ultimately benevolent, uncle. If modern rap stars are superheroes, Devin the Dude is modern rap's alter ego. He didn't fake it until he made it. He kept it real until his label dropped him, and then he just kept it real some more.

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[FRESH ALBUM] Westside Gunn - Pray For Paris

Posted: 16 Apr 2020 09:00 PM PDT

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[FRESH ALBUM] DaBaby - Blame it on Baby

Posted: 16 Apr 2020 09:00 PM PDT

submitted by /u/BringBackFingering18
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[FRESH] Playboi Carti - @ MEH

Posted: 16 Apr 2020 08:59 AM PDT