HOLLYWOOD HOLT | These Are the Songs That Didn’t Make the Album but Are Still Cold as Hell So Shut the Fuck Up! Vol. 1(mix tape)
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Holt seems as fed up about this as anyone—hence the mix tape These Are the Songs That Didn’t Make the Album but Are Still Cold as Hell So Shut the Fuck Up! Vol. 1. If the album is anything like this collection of outtakes, it may actually benefit from the delays: now that the novelty of seeing an MC in throwback Cazals and dookie chains has worn off, we can talk about the actual rapping instead of arguing about the clothes. Holt’s fashion sense hasn’t changed, but he seems more confident about incorporating influences from rappers who’d smack you if you called them hipsters. For “It’s On” he borrows a bit of Tupac’s singsongy cadence, which nicely offsets the twitchy backing track by Million Dollar Mano and Martin “Doc” McKinney. The minimal 808 beat on “Stylin’ on You” seems to have inspired Holt and Mano to deliver their rhymes in a laid-the-fuck-back style reminiscent of old-school rap pimps like Slick Rick and Too Short. And Holt goes in hard on Dre’s claustrophobic classic “Deep Cover”—you could try to write it off as part of the retro-hipster appropriation of 90s gangsta rap, but that would involve too many levels of irony to compute.
BLACK MATH | Phantom Power(Permanent Records)
The first 15 seconds of Architecture‘s single “Pregnant,” released as a free download through a number of music blogs, are impeccable. Rebecca Scott and Melissa Harris, both of local dream-pop band Panda Riot, combine a sparse, cavernous drumbeat, some expertly placed finger snaps (a grossly underutilized sound these days), and a minimalist echo-draped electric-piano line to create something you might hear at a burlesque joint for ghosts. Things go south, though, once the singing starts. The problem isn’t the voice itself, which is light and airy but not insubstantial; the problem is that it’s singing the lyrics to R. Kelly’s “Pregnant.” It was once possible to get a little socio-musicological frisson out of hearing a fey white indie-rock chick singing raunchy male-perspective R&B lyrics, but the joke’s been worn smooth by now. If the duo had simply ripped off Kelly’s melody and set it over their own arrangement, odds are no one would be the wiser, and this whole song would be my jam. Instead I’m left with just those 15 seconds.
