US Hip Hop 486 Items

In recent years, Los Angeles rapper Blu has become one of hip hop’s most prolific artists, releasing more than a dozen acclaimed projects and building a worldwide fanbase. The gifted lyricist often joins forces with a single producer for an entire collection, leading to classic collaborative releases with Exile, Nottz, Madlib, and more. Now, Blu is back with The Blueprint, a new mixtape produced by Shafiq Husayn. Known as one third of visionary production team Sa-Ra Creative Partners, Shafiq has produced for the likes of Erykah Badu, Kanye West, Andre 3000, John Legend, Anderson Paak, Thundercat, Bilal, Ty Dolla $ign, Ice T, and many more. Dedicated to the gang culture that permeates the city they both call home, The Blueprint reflects Blu’s eternal L.A. state of mind, with Shafiq’s eclectic soundscapes providing the perfect backdrop.

Los Angeles emcee Pawz One teams up with Dutch producer Robin Da Landlord to release their new album “Sell Me A Dream: Flowstalgia”. With a collaborative mix of sharp rhymes schemes and gritty drums, Pawz One and Robin Da Landlord are here to counter the trends on "Sell Me A Dream".
After meeting on tour in Europe, Pawz One and Robin Da Landlord began working on their first single “It’s Like That”. Both the single and video were well received and the two went back to work on a full project. Their efforts blend creating a sound reminiscent of an era when style and substance were supreme.
The album is entirely produced by Robin Da Landlord and includes guest features by Prince Po of Organized Konfusion, MED and VegaMonster.
Pawz One worked with seasoned artists and producers such as Ras Kass, Termanology, Masta Ace, Domingo, DJ Rhettmatic, Madchild, Talib Kweli and more.
With a magnetic stage presence cultivated through hundreds of live performances, Pawz One has been able to tour nationally and overseas with Sean Price, Necro, El Da Sensei (Artifacts) & AG (D.I.T.C) as well various independent tours.

L'Orange & Solemn Brigham are Marlowe

"An artist afraid to overreach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong.”

Over a half-century later, the axiom remains true for hyper-kinetic hip-hop innovators, North Carolina’s L’Orange and Solemn Brigham—the hard-boiled duo behind the fun house fever dream, Marlowe.

Released on Mello Music Group, Marlowe is a triumph of ambition, a rap bricolage blending prohibition and civil rights-era samples with Asian psychedelic rock flourishes. Solemn Brigham controls the microphone like a general who can’t help but be right. His flow is a blitzkrieg. It’s an Olympian sprint, gliding over snares and kick-drums like hurdles. He’s a showman seeking revolution—resolute in his desire to strike equilibrium between awareness and entertainment.

Solemn applies the fictional protagonist’s search for the truth towards different ends. His crimes are existential yet specific, rooted in the injustices of the past and the attempt to redress them in the present. He’s an artist perennially seeking something to fight for, channeling energy from the music of the civic rights era, stealing timeless rhythms and inflection from classic funk and soul. An old soul with original ideas, tapping into the eternal reservoir of Sam Cooke to Ice Cube, Otis Redding to Chuck D, Curtis Mayfield to KRS-One.

Over the course of 17 tracks, Solemn hurls sharp darts at counterfeits trying to crack his religion, the onslaught of time, and prevaricating rappers—all while paying homage to those who paved the road for him. He bounces off the beats like a trampoline placed in a speakeasy, doubling up on the vocals, burrowing into dense cryptic tangles of slang and then stretching them out with melodic ease.

With dazzling cinematic mise en scene, L’Orange crafts a world that sounds like an old-time medicine show dropped into 90s Brooklyn, with Solemn summoning the holy spirit of Big L. Cymbals crash, drums pound, fuzzy guitars ride out, a bronze rain of horns cascade. This is gorgeous celestial dust, high-powered fuel with every syllable meticulously ordained. Marlowe cracked the case, but how they did it can only become clear under deeper investigation.

LP comes with 16 page lyric book and 7inch. Produced by Prince Paul, MF DOOM, Mark Ronson, ?uestlove and Memory Man!!
Featuring Open Mike Eagle and Masta Ace.
"If you work with words, like I do, there are a few achievements that we secretly fantasize about. Winning a Nobel Prize in literature. Having a #1 best-seller. College professors teaching our writing in their courses. But one achievement that most of us don’t even fantasize about is having an “original citation” in the Oxford English Dictionary.
The unabridged OED is the compendium of the history of English. Every time a word in common parlance was used for the first time, or in a new way, that usage and its author are recorded in the OED’s endless pages. Shakespeare’s got a bunch. Milton, too. These days, getting an original citation is like hearing the voice of God. It doesn’t happen much. But Paul Barman has one.
This is relevant to (((echo chamber))) only because it indicates the level that MC Paul Barman writes at. His rhymes are original in the sense of “no one has ever used that word like that before… but we will now.” Bring your brains. You’re gonna need them.
Not that (((echo chamber))) is hard work. It is perfectly pleasurable to bop your head along to great tracks laid down by ?uestlove and DOOM and Prince Paul, while MCPB says, “Meat keeps an enemy as a bone-deep identity. It’s the hardened shell that starts to smell. At one time, it might have guarded you well. But maladaptive strengths turn to captive feints and you become your own warden in hell.” And then in the next breath, “Would it blasphemy to ask you to shake that assphemy?”
If your ears are open, MCPB is gonna plug your brain in at voltages to which you are unaccustomed. He’s a social critic with a searing conscience that makes (“my”) comfortable bourgeois house of lies tremble with each jagged line on the PB Richter scale. Comfortable notions of being a “good” white person, blow up in the first two tracks, (((Echo Chamber))) and “YOUNGMAN Speaks on (((Race)))”. It takes MCPB just shy of three minutes to make this semi-observant Jew feel skeptical about the Ten Commandments. In ((((((Antennas)))))) he says, “we feel conflicting agendas rise and fall / what we call our identity tries to synthesize them all.” But he offers a solution, too. You’ll have to listen to the song to hear it. And at the end of the anthemic “Age War,” you’re ready to stand up, cheer, and then go join children in battle against the calcified bankrupt status quo. After all, it’s “already dead. Mentally a baby step from a deli spread.”
But, like any great poet (and MCPB is), he gets personal, too. I am certainly “a self in sheep’s clothing, a wealth of cheap loathing…” Aren’t you?
MC Paul Barman tells us, “Rest assured I’m the crested bird of nested words,” and that is no empty boast. In poetry, to rhyme both at the end of line and internally, in the middle of a line, is showing off. Which makes MCPB a crested bird indeed. There are songs, like (((Believe That))), where your eyes just go wide and you can’t believe the number of rhymes in a row that tell the truth. That much truth all placed in a row—you don’t see that anywhere. And it rhymes, on three levels at once.
MC Paul Barman is the most ambitious type of rapper. He is rhyming art. Why bother? It seems hard, and indeed the long hiatus between his albums tells us that it is. Well, MCPB has a reason: “art is the answer, the be end all... art, art and only art give solace to all this chaos and lonely hearts.”

So take some solace. (((Echo Chamber))) by MC Paul Barman is here. It’ll make your brain spin. And make you check your guts."
--- Adam Gidwitz, New York Times Bestselling & Newbery Award Winning Author

Strictly limited edition!
Only one copy per customer!
Back 2 Da Source presents another dope drop from the Source with Sham & The Professor – “The Warrior EP”, consisting of 3 unreleased tracks. Those ill tracks were secretly kept hidden by Sham and The Professor for years and those are their only 90s unreleased track. Back 2 Da Source thought it was time to put them on wax for the Hip Hop sake . If you liked “Split Personalities” LP, you gonna dig this! RIP Brotha Scratch!!

You’ll fall in love with Slum Village all over again with these
collectible 45 issues of the J Dilla produced cut “Fall In Love” first
issued on the group’s Fantastic Volume II. Classic Slum Village song and instrumental on black vinyl 7" in a custom diecut sleeve"! This is the REMIX!

Strictly limited edition!
Only one copy per customer!
Back 2 Da Source is back with another mad bomb from New York from The Speedknotz!!! Speedknotz is the collaborative hip hop project from War Bixby and Edygoldoe. This release is a hard to find record from 1998. The “Remember EP” is nothing but a classic indie 12inch containing ill tracks from start to finish. This reissue also contains the instrumentals versions as the original pressing. This release contains 9 tracks, including a bonus unreleased track from 1999!!!

Rosehardt cut his teeth as an actor at SUNY Purchase and as one half of the NYC duo Quincy Vidal before mining his past, present, and future for themes on his introspective (and ultimately defiant) solo debut. He winds his way between genres and styles with ease, sounding equally at home in setting the stage with R&B for album opener Sunday as he does weaving synth-pop choruses into Boot Camp Clik indebted hip hop on Play and Bad Song. The albums emotional and musical centerpieces bookend the record: Fall Into You is a devastating embrace of loneliness, a raw meditation on a broken heart that transitions through the stages of attachment, manipulation, emotional burden and, ultimately, blissful detachment; Goddamn concludes the LP with a searing depiction of Rosehardts religious upbringing that documents his family, his faith and his frustration with the worlds expectations that have shaped his identity as an artist, and as a man

Strictly limited edition vinyl!
Only one copy per customer!
Dope Folks’ 90th release comes from the vaults of The Beatnuts' own PSYCHO LES! Formed in 1988, 2*2*4 (2 BAD 2 BE 4 REAL) consisted of Psycho Les, JMD, Universal and cuts by Rob Swift. 2*2*4 only released one single back in 1988 ("ILL Tempo" b/w "I Don't Play") and that was it... until now!
Psycho Les has gone through his DATS to find the demos that would've made up their full-length album. This 12" features both tracks from their only official release, and 6 previously unreleased tracks! Straight from the DATS of Psycho Les, these are the only existing tracks of the group! Dope Folks did their best to clean up these raw demos to compile an 8-song historic document that kicked off the careers of Psycho Les, and Rob Swift! Limited to 350 copies (50 colored vinyl, 300 standard black) and never to be repressed. This is the BLACK VINYL version.

Bonus cuts feature production by DJ
Shadow, DJ Z Trip, and The Herbaliser.
Includes DL card for the entire album,
plus a brand new track from Lyrics
Born’s upcoming album ‘Quite A Life’
More than 20 years after its initial release, Latyrx “The
Muzapper Mixes” has stood the test of time and with
this reissue is sure to enter the pantheon of certified
Bay Area classics.
Latyrx, the duo consisting of lyricists Lyrics Born
and Lateef The Truthspeaker initially partnered
while at UC Davis in the early 90s driven by
brothers-in-beats-and-rhymes Blackalicious and DJ
Shadow. This was the earliest incarnation of the
Solesides collective. Partially by design, and partially
out of necessity, Latyrx—and the Solesides crew as a
whole—became trailblazers.
Lyrics Born Remembers, “We really wanted to
explore. New styles, new subject matter, new textures,
new vocabulary. It came down to even wanting to do
words in the English language that you had never
heard in a rap song before. It was all about pushing.”
This double LP edition features the entire A and B side
from the original Muzappers Mixes vinyl release along
with a second LP containing material not found on the
original issue including the cuts “Storm Warning”, “The
Wreckoning”, “Watch Out” and “Ocho Puntos.” As an
extra special feature, the D side rounding things out
with an untitled and unreleased bonus cut.
PRESSED ON DOUBLE-COLORED VINYL
(DISC ONE IN PURPLE / DISC TWO IN YELLOW)