SONG OF THE DAY: Godless

 

Been in need of new hip hop. Not new releases that are known, because that shit is always the same. Somehow we have this entire big ass world with hip hop having reached every far flung culture there is, and yet it’s the same little slices of shit we get served and everybody is talking about. I don’t know at this point if popular culture influences the filter bubble or the filter bubble influences pop culture – that post-digital chicken and egg dilemma. But I know if I say “tell me some new shit” nobody tells me new shit. You gotta go excavating and digging and tapping on shit outside of your filter bubble you wouldn’t expect but you might like, hoping to see the recommended shit beneath that to link a second skipped stone across the algorithms of maybe that. I want that whole fucking scene, whole genre, bubbling up somewhere like Mongolia or Malaysia or Madagascar or Montana, who the fuck knows? Shit, it might be an hour away in Carolina, but nobody heard of it yet, even though all of a sudden it's 7 new artists who have like 20 releases over the past decade. That’s what I need.

I’ve fiended through Bambu’s catalog the past few years, even though he’d been around forever. I think I might’ve remembered him from his old days as freestyle-ish rapper West Coast version during the Rawkus uprising period, but I might just be making that memory up in my own head to act like I was always down. Whiteboys into hip hop do that shit. But I do know I seen this Baton Rouge rapper Marcel P. Black play at a local hip hop festival I was part of organizing for, and I loved Marcel, so followed his ass on social medias. And as he was hyping up a bandcamp project he was about to release, he hyped up Bambu as a must-hear favorite. So I went to go hear it. That shit blew me away, whatever first album I went to. And he had a whole fuckin’ catalog. Sharpest Tool In The Shed came out last year, felt like a tease because I was fiendin’ for like a triple album, but artists ain’t artists full-time, and they’ve got jobs and families and lives and bills and the crushing immensity of living in late capitalist era America (if they’re from here). Shit was great though. I love some fuckin’ Bambu, and in the long line of rappers whose words have had thick influences on my brain thinkings, Bambu’s probably held that title belt (made of pyrite and cardboard) the past few years.