Michael Hampton lived the dream of many a teenage shredder: One night he was showing off his chops at a house party, nailing the solo to Funkadelic’s “Maggot Brain,” and the next the 17-year-old guitar phenom was on tour with the band, playing that same solo to crowds of thousands each night with the funkiest traveling circus around. It’s close to a superhero origin story, and Hampton eventually earned the nickname Kidd Funkadelic from his bandmates.

Hampton proudly followed Hendrix into outer space, powered by screeching rocket fuel distortion, all while wearing elaborate outfits. Hampton’s guitar left burn marks on some of Parliament-Funkadelic’s finest tracks: “One Nation Under A Groove,” “Flash Light,” “Aqua Boogie,” “(Not Just) Knee Deep,” and many more.

The Kidd still performs with George Clinton’s current iteration of P-Funk, Hampton has recently revived his solo career in collaboration with producer Joe Nicolo and a cast of accomplished funk-fusion players. Last year’s Into the Public Domain was a collection of jams showcasing Hampton’s still formidable fingerwork. King Kong, released on July 31, is a funk opera retelling of the American myth that incorporates spoken word, surf guitar, and birdsong. Nicolo’s label Sound Mind Records promises more “mini-albums” and a full-length in the near future.

I spoke to Michael Hampton on the phone from his home in Morrisville, PA in April about prototype gear, one-string songs, and watching the Mothership take off.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Did you start playing guitar when you were growing up in the Cleveland area?

I was always interested. I played around with a lot of things, like trying to be into sports and all. I gained more of an interest when I was visiting my uncle in Silver Springs, Maryland. Then I was playing with this guy that lived a couple doors down, and his cheap guitar, and we’d always mess around when I was back in Cleveland, “Get Ready” on one string, you know, “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” on one string. It would only be like three strings on the guitar, so you try to play a little representation of the tune on that string. And then later on, I got a little notebook, I had a little toy piano, and I just started messing around with mostly single string, little stuff I could pick up on my own. And I had a teacher, John DiFiore, he used to teach guitar at DiFiore’s music when it was there on the west side of Cleveland, and I had lessons with him for about three months.

I went to John Marshall High School, and they had a stage band, and nobody really was trying to be a stage band. And I was like, “they didn’t have a guitar, it’s okay.” So I used to study the chord charts in my free time in high school, and then played in the stage band. Yeah, I just kept, you know, knocking around on the guitar, and playing with my friends, and, you know, try to put together a group here. There wasn’t many people playing, so I’d wind up on saxophone or playing the drums, you know, messing around, you know, and it’d only be for a little bit, because there was no real place to practice.

A lot of people in the neighborhood did request, they asked me to play something, and I borrowed a record from them, or an album or something, and sit with it for a minute, and invite them over and play along with the track. After a while, I got a little better.

I kept playing, and ran into a guy at Sparks, he was older than us, and he knew the group [P-Funk] was coming to town. They used to throw little house parties when they came to town. He basically walked my cousin and I into the Public Hall in Cleveland. I think it was Bloodstone and Funkadelic, “Standing on the Verge” was Funkadelic’s hit at the time.

At the time I was studying “Maggot Brain” and “Standing on the Verge,” and just trying to play whatever I could. They came to the after party, they saw me play “Maggot Brain.” It wasn’t like an audition or anything like that, and I didn’t know they were there at the time.

So, you were just at a party, showing off a little bit.

Versatile, virtuoso, or whatever. It was dark, and our amps were in the living room. Everything’s sitting on the floor, little pieces of equipment that I had. All of that just for a 9-volt, but it worked.

Didn’t start any fires.

But, yeah, I didn’t know they were there. So, later on, Tiki Fullwood, one of the original drummers, gave me a call. They were doing a show at the Capitol Center in Landover, Maryland, and they flew me in. I used to just play the one song, “Maggot Brain,” and then step to the side. I started touring after that. I had just got my driving license not too long ago, just before I got out of high school so I was driving the van.

I heard there was another guy, I don’t know what his name was, that they were considering, but something happened, like he had a bad acid trip or something.

That’s pretty incredible. What other stuff were you playing? I heard you mention Satisfaction, I assume Hendrix was in rotation, but what other music were you playing along to in those early days?

Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway,” “Smoke on the Water,” “Frankenstein,” “Hocus Pocus,” those guys, that was obscene, still never really got it down to this day, a lot of different things. I went through I don’t know how many wa-wa pedals, playing along with Shaft. “Engine Engine No. 9,” “ Slippin’ in the Darkness,” Chairmen of the Board, Rare Earth, Pink Floyd, “Summer Breeze,” by the Isleys. Some Ohio Players songs, there was a lot of them with effects that I couldn’t really afford that I was hearing in records. “Chameleon.” If it was on the radio and it was popular, I was probably trying to play it.

You said the band called you for one gig, and then they asked you to join up on tour and everything. How soon after that were you actually hitting the studio to record with everyone?

I don’t know for sure the exact time it went in, but it was maybe a year or two. It might have been that same year, but I know “Stretch It Out,” I played on “I’d Rather Be With You” for Bootsy’s Rubber Band, and “Be My Beach” on the Funkadelic album. Those sessions I did the same day, but they went on different albums, and I didn’t know that’s how it was working. You just go in and start recording, and I didn’t know how quick they went to press from the time that I recorded it, but things were happening pretty fast.

Was that intimidating at all, being 17 years old when you first joined up with them and playing with this big group and getting on records?

I don’t think I knew what the word intimidating was. I was so happy to be out, and it’s a lot of freedom, and I probably was not as intimidated because, I mean, I was smoking herb. You just kind of plug up, and you keep playing and jamming around, and they may hear something or somebody gets an idea for something, and then you start recording on track. We would record ‘til we couldn’t record no more, go back to the hotel, then get back up, go back across the street.

I’d just practice my skills, and whatever I could pick up from other players. And if they tell me to play it like that, I’m looking at their hands. I didn’t know anything about intonating the guitar, or nothing like that. Just tune it up, and that’s all I could do. I go with a lot of flows, you know. I’m just bouncing off of stuff, man, like a pinball or some shit. And then when it’s time to go to work, that’s all I do. Just grind it out.

It seems like you’ve been very busy. You got the new album out, and there’s more music coming out later this year.

Yeah, that’s it. I’m going to intertwine. If I get some things going on with my personal endeavor and then the group, all these things start kind of coming at the same time. I’m definitely trying to prepare myself for bouncing from one to the other if I can, but at some point, I know my body’s going to be like, no, man.

You played on so many classics of the early P-Funk days: “Flash Light” and “One Nation Under A Groove” and “Knee Deep,” just to name a few. Do you have any favorite performances of yours from those days or favorite stories from touring?

There was one time that the Mothership was going back up, and the drummer had a thing that pulled back the lever for the spaceship and George would come out of the spaceship. So somehow it got tied around one of the cymbals, so when the ship started going up, the whole drum kit started going up too. That was kind of deep, it looked like it was actually being beamed up. The aliens are going to take the drum set away. There was a giant skull that used to be out there, and there was enough room to just kind of kick back in that thing.

As far as the songs, when we did the rehearsal at the airplane hangar, the live “Cosmic Slop,” live “Maggot Brain.” The “Knee Deep” solo was recorded at United Sound. It was interesting because they put the amp, I think it was a Fender Twin, in the vocal booth and sealed it off. They had this microphone that fit on the glass of the doors for the sound booth, and you cut the amp all the way up. The B.C. Richards guitar had two preamps and it had ten strings. After a while, I tuned the strings in something like a perfect fifth, and so that was interesting to hear how it came out, because I had no idea the solo was going to be that far out. I played through the whole song, but that’s what that edited down to.

It’s not one of the hits or whatever, but “Copy Cat,” I played on that. “Never Buy Texas From A Cowboy,” that was crazy, because it was a little Korg keyboard type thing they had rigged it where you can just plug your guitar into it, and that’s what I did. That’s how it came up, before they had all these guitar synthesizers.

I’m glad you brought up the Brides. You had a relationship with Dawn Silva for some time during that era?

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. That was, man, yep, it was a relationship. Yeah, I was young and dumb, or whatever I was. I found out, being on the road, I guess it’s kind of a rule of sorts, as far as some people’s rules, that you know, being on tour and then having a relationship is not… It was a relationship, trying to navigate being, basically, you should be, what do you call that? Where you can’t be possessive, whatever, you know, it’s just that type of thing. It’s got to be unconditional.

For the most part, it was pretty sweet, you know? I don’t think too many people could blame me for being in a relationship with Dawn, she was fantastic.

I think at one point, I just smashed one of my guitars. I think that’s the first time I’ve had that happen. It’s that smash that it don’t come back from, bro. Yeah. You can’t take that to the luthier. But we’re still cool, man.

She’s said in interviews that you guys definitely had a volatile relationship at times, but you’ve made up and are on good terms. I was wondering if you’d kept in touch with her or really anybody else from the group from the ‘70s and ‘80s.

No, it’s hard to... I’m still trying to just dive into Facebook and all that. And as much as I’d like to, I just haven’t had the time. I keep in touch. If somebody reaches out, I’m all open. But if I reach out to one person, it’s just so many people. I feel like I’ve got to reach out to everybody at the same time, so I haven’t quite put that list together yet.

What is your pedalboard like nowadays? What kind of gear are you playing with?

When I’m out with Funkadelic, they have the Mesa Boogie Rectifiers. We’ve got some Texas Instruments, they’ve got an Octave Divider pedal that they make, and there’s another... Man, I’m just bad at gear, you know, the names and stuff.

But I’m going to tell you, I do like to have the whammy for the force, and just to be able to change the octaves and stuff like that. If I had just the basics, it would be a wah, a nice echo, and a nice distortion, maybe a chorus of some kind, and a harmonizer, would be the way I go. But the guitars, I’ve been kicking around.

I got an SG-ish, you know the shape, and that’s got a nice hot double, triple, pickup in it. It’s pretty hot. But I really love a lot of different guitars. I wish I could switch them out. Like the B.C. Rich, I still have that, but I’d like to get another, like a newer version of it. I don’t even think that the company is making guitars anymore. But as far as a one-of-a-kind type of axe, I think that would be it. Somebody told me something, they thought I was one of the first people with a left-handed strap neck on a right-handed body, or something. I just was trying to mimic what Hendrix’s guitar looked like when he flipped it upside down. But yeah, I really like that look, the Randy Rhoads V.

Yeah, I’m a collector, if I can afford it. As far as the gear, it’s like whatever I can get my hands on. And then this guy, Phillip, he came up with something, I got the prototype with me, and it’s pretty amazing.

A prototype pedal?

It’s a little 3-in-1, it’s gated, it’s really nasty. I don’t know what does what, it hasn’t been marked or nothing. You play too, right?

Yeah, I just bought a nice new Telecaster, so I’m waiting to get it back from the shop with its strap locks on, so I can really get into it this weekend.

I remember dropping the guitar, as a matter of fact, it was a B.C. Rich, and it hit flat, and that’s before I put the strap locks on. I picked it up so, so fast, like it didn’t hit.

I love Teles too, definitely one of those that should be in the collection. The pickups be tripping me out, like, one of the old ones, the Deluxe had those huge pickups in them, and I think it was semi-hollow.

I got one with a chambered body, so it’s nice and light.

Oh, cool, there you go. Chambered body’s the way to go, I can feel my back feeling better right now.

Two months removed from the release of their dizzyingly accomplished Critical Thot, sha ray and DJ Haram are reissuing the collaborative LP in an extended edition, with three remixes. The updated versions of “Shole Ain’t” and “Low End Skeeza” feature BBYMUTHA and work by Archangel, respectively; right now that duo is joining Haram and sha ray on tour. But today we’re highlighting the “Boudoir” remix, which features a scintillating turn from ELUCID. “You never left,” the Armand Hammer emcee raps. “You never really do.”

“A lot of the response around Critical Thot centered around how my delivery meshed with DJ Haram’s eccentric production,” sha ray tells POW. “I would say the exact same for a rapper like ELUCID, which made for an easy decision when looking for a feature for ‘Boudoir.’ The textures and mood his performance brings to this track really deepen the atmosphere that makes this one of my favorites of the record.”

In June, sha ray and DJ Haram created a POW-exclusive mix, which can be heard here. Critical Thot [Extended Edition] is available on all streaming platforms and can be purchased via Backwoodz Studioz.

The next-to-last moments are embalmed. Mike Tyson struts into the MGM to the rumble of “Let’z Get It On,” the anthem that 2Pac recorded specifically for the bout. Makaveli sits ringside, a third rail draped in orange silk and Armani denim, surrounded by Suge Knight and Death Row’s most imposing henchmen.

In 109 seconds, Iron Mike incinerates Bruce Seldon to win the WBA belt. The crowd boos, shocked by the short duration. Some allege the fix was in. None of it matters to Pac, high off the fight and the multi-platinum domination of All Eyez On Me—and maybe weed, Alizé, and Hennessy. It’s September 7, 1996. He’s 25 years old. Out on bail. For all the afterlife premonitions of the music, he feels untouchable.

In the backstage arteries of the arena, Pac shouts euphorically, “We back!!” He throws mini-uppercuts, Guerra shirt almost fully unbuttoned, Euphanasia chain dangling, looking for a target to direct his adrenaline rush. “When Tyson gets in the ring he knocks motherfuckers out! That’s what 2Pac gonna do!”

The BET cameras catch him for comment:

“Y’all see that? 50 punches! I counted it!” 2Pac crows. “Everybody that goes to jail, they come out and got good luck!”

Suge prods Pac out toward the gaming floor. We next spot him as a jumbled blur on surveillance footage: He punches and tackles Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson, a member of the South Side Compton Crips, who allegedly stole a Death Row medallion from an entourage member a few months ago. In hush puppies, Pac stomps him out in full view of the stunned gamblers and boxing fans. The whole crew joins in. Then the cameras capture a horde of onlookers zombie-staggering after Pac and Suge, out of the casino, toward Las Vegas Boulevard.

Pac pops up next at the Luxor, the ersatz tomb of the pharaohs where he’s booked a suite. Slipping on a green Nike basketball jersey, he tells his fiancée Kidada Jones—daughter of Quincy—about the brawl with the Crips. For safety reasons, she stays in the room. Outside, shaky ‘90s Camcorders catch a crush of fans milling around him while he waits for Suge to swoop him in his black 1996 BMW 750iL.

Everyone knows where they’re going. Pac name-checked the final destination in his Tyson tribute that boomed over the Grand Garden Arena’s loudspeakers:

Aight this ain’t goin’ last long, y’all know how Tyson do it
So what, we gon’ watch him beat this boy silly
And then we all go party at 66-deuce, mob style

After a brief detour to Knight’s mansion on the city outskirts, the caravan again takes off toward Club 662, the venue owned by Suge, named after the telephone keypad initials that spell “Mob.” Suge takes the wheel. Pac rides shotgun. Around 11 p.m., a bike cop pulls them over for loud music and missing plates. After finding the plates in the trunk, he lets them go.

There is one last image, taken by a film student, capturing the two of them at a red light. Suge locked in, clad in outlandish Versace, staring dead ahead. Pac unsmiling, the window all the way down, staring straight into the flash.

The light flips green. The cars pull forward and turn right onto East Flamingo Road. From there, everything goes dark.

Thirty years later, Duane “Keffe D” Davis will stand trial for murder with a deadly weapon—with the intent to promote, further or assist a criminal gang. Opening statements begin Monday morning, August 17, at the downtown Las Vegas Regional Justice Center. The alleged motive is a matter of Occam’s razor: Davis was Anderson’s uncle, a reputed shot caller of the set. According to the prosecutors and Davis’s own admissions—which he now claims were made for money and sheer entertainment value—Keffe D procured the gun and handed it to his nephew to seek retaliation for the MGM beating.

“We live in a more skeptical world than ever before,” says Michael Sanft, the defense attorney for Keffe D. “I don’t think because someone just says something, we treat it as the gospel truth. It’s one thing to say something on camera or in a book, it’s another to prove that it’s true.”

Sanft is speaking in response to a question about Keffe D’s confessions in his 2019 autobiography, Compton Street Legend—as well as interviews on BET, VladTV, and the Art of Dialogue. These clips have been viewed millions of times and became a veritable cottage industry for the 63-year-old grandfather, who repeatedly boasted about his close ties to Sean Combs and the millions of dollars that he once made running a transcontinental drug ring.

Sanft doesn’t dispute that Keffe D’s memoir places his client in the white Cadillac that allegedly fired on Shakur. His argument hinges on what can actually be proved.

“We can’t jump to the conclusion that he was in the car,” Sanft says. “Why? Because he said it? Well, how can you prove that?”

After Sanft and I speak, Keffe D gives a final pre-trial interview to a local Las Vegas TV news station, claiming that he wasn’t even in Vegas the night of the murder.

Hovering above the proceedings are the allegations that Puffy offered Davis a million dollars to wipe out Suge “Big CEO” Knight and 2Pac. Despite this long-standing speculation, the prosecution’s theory claims that the most infamous unsolved mystery in music history was primarily a matter of Compton Crips seeking vengeance for a humiliating attack from only a few hours earlier. But the three-decade odyssey from murder to trial has been astonishingly complex.

At the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, 15 years after 2Pac’s death, Barack Obama equated Donald Trump’s birther falsehoods to conspiracy theories about what really went down in Las Vegas. But while the public couldn’t agree on one coherent explanation, the streets rendered their own verdict within days of Pac’s death. In a ten-day shooting war between the Pirus and South Side Crips, at least three were believed to have been killed and another 11 wounded. For the prosecution, this is some of the most damning circumstantial evidence that Keffe D and company were behind the slaying.

About three weeks after 2Pac’s demise, more than 300 officers drawn from 11 law enforcement agencies descended on the greater Compton area, in an attempt to obtain more information about the murder and the subsequent killings. During the October ’96 raid, the police seized a fantastic quantity of rifles, handguns, and machine pistols, $17,000 in cash, and two pounds each of coke, meth, and weed. Twenty-three arrests were made, including Anderson. But no one was willing to talk about the only crime that mattered. Anderson was set free.

To further complicate matters, Anderson testified in defense of Suge Knight at a November ’96 probation violation hearing connected to the Death Row honcho’s role in the MGM brawl. According to Anderson, Knight was a “peacemaker,” the only one attempting to break up the melee. No one bought it. The judge revoked Knight’s probation, sentencing him to five years in prison, and effectively ending the Death Row dynasty. In that same month, Yaki Kadafi of the Outlawz—the only person who publicly claimed to be able to identify the shooter—was murdered in a New Jersey housing project.

Back in Compton, Anderson was suddenly flush with cash from a benefactor Keffe D later identified as Knight, whom Davis says paid Anderson $60,000 for the testimony. With the cash, Baby Lane opened up a lavish recording studio for his fledgling rap imprint, Success Records. From what I can gather, they only released the 1999 label compilation, Platinum Heat, featuring a cameo from Gangsta Dresta of “Real Muthaphukkin’ G’s” fame. The record dropped after Anderson was killed in a 1998 shootout at a local car wash, an incident deemed unrelated to 2Pac’s murder.

That is, if you even believed 2Pac was dead at all. Millions didn’t. 2Pac sightings became the new Elvis sightings. He was said to be alive in Cuba, or sub-Saharan Africa, or maybe hiding in plain sight, which explained the practically unlimited posthumous recordings. The rumors compounded due to the unusual circumstances surrounding his death. With a large crowd gathered in front of UMC, Afeni Shakur quickly directed the corpse to be ferried out the back.

The autopsy was conducted before his death was even announced. The only photographic evidence of 2Pac’s death came from a homicide detective who snapped a Polaroid of him lying on the coroner’s table, which he later sold to the Daily Mail. Within hours, the mortician cremated him. To college dorm room theoreticians, the compressed sequence seemed like a cover-up; they chronically noted that Pac was shot seven times (it was four), died seven days afterwards (it was actually six), and had already subtitled his next album, The 7 Day Theory.

There was no funeral. No adulatory city-crossing corteges in L.A. or the Bay. No gravesite for pilgrims to visit and bump “How Long Will They Mourn Me.” For the next two decades, convoluted theories flourished. In 2015, Vice asked me to figure out which hypothesis seemed most viable. I kept hearing the same phrase used to explain the lack of an arrest: “politics at the highest level.”

No one stated the paradox more succinctly than Chris Rock: “2Pac was gunned down on the Las Vegas Strip after a Mike Tyson fight. How many witnesses do you need to see some shit before you arrest somebody? More people saw 2Pac get shot than the last episode of Seinfeld.”

If you’ve ever smoked weed and rappelled down a 3 a.m. YouTube rabbit hole, you’re likely familiar with some explanations. Plenty believed that Suge Knight and his attorney, David Kenner, masterminded an intricate plot to kill 2Pac to stop him from leaving Death Row. Others fulminated that the FBI assassinated 2Pac as part of a modern-day COINTELPRO to eliminate Black radical rappers. Russell Poole, the former LAPD detective, had become convinced of a scheme between Suge Knight’s estranged wife, Sharitha, and Reggie Wright Jr., the head of Death Row security, to take out both 2Pac and Suge, and thus assume control of the label. According to Poole, one of the three shooters was Lil Half Dead (of “Lil Half Dead put his dick on her head” fame), who allegedly hated 2Pac for stealing “Brenda’s Got A Baby” from him.

As crazy as Poole’s thesis seemed, it was impossible to dismiss him outright. Until severe disputes with the LAPD brass forced him into early retirement, Poole was widely regarded as an honest and rigorous investigator. He was instrumental in uncovering the Rampart Scandal, and for many years, his theory that corrupt police officers David Mack and Rafael Perez had helped murder Biggie was considered the most credible explanation. But a decade and a half of simmering in the minutiae and dead ends of the Biggie and Pac cases had left him prone to believing almost anything—to the point where I had to write emails to Lil Half Dead asking if he was willing to comment on the accusation that he had shot 2Pac as part of a Macbeth-like coup to seize Death Row. He never returned my emails, rightfully so.

After the story ran in June 2015, Poole kept calling at all hours of the day and night. On the surface, he didn’t seem particularly unhinged or illogical. It was more that he had assumed an Ahabish monomania to solve cases that had long consumed his waking life. And he had decided that I was the right journalist to help him uncover the truth. I didn’t exactly agree with his thesis, but he was personable and smart, and I was susceptible to the flattery. Then, about two months later, Poole dropped dead of a heart attack at the L.A. Sheriff’s homicide bureau. He was there to interview a captain for a new book he was writing about the Biggie murder. Another victim of the curse.

Most theories pointed back to Orlando Anderson and the white Cadillac full of South Side Crips. In 2002, Los Angeles Times investigative reporter Chuck Philips published an exposé that alleged that Biggie was in Vegas, and offered a million dollars to the Crips to shoot Pac with Wallace’s .40 Glock. The reporting was widely discredited after Biggie’s family produced receipts and studio logs placing him on the East Coast the night of the killing. Still, it’s hard not to listen to “Long Kiss Goodnight,” released six months after 2Pac’s death, without hearing all the subliminals aimed at his West Coast rival (Biggie sneering about his “team in the Marine Blue,” Puffy’s “the shit that y’all done started is never gonna stop!” outro rant).

Six years later, Philips was forced to retract a major story about 2Pac’s 1994 Quad Studios shooting after it was discovered that his reporting relied on forgeries from a jailhouse con man. He resigned from the paper the following year. One more would-be code cracker down.

Combs was never very far away from these suppositions. In his 2011 book, Murder Rap, retired LAPD detective Greg Kading revealed the results of a federal task force into Biggie’s murder, which had been formed as a result of Voletta Wallace’s federal wrongful-death suit. Using Poole’s claims as evidence, Wallace alleged that LAPD officers were involved and the department covered it up. Fearful that the lawsuit would potentially bankrupt the city of Los Angeles, Kading has said that his mandate was to solve the crime once and for all.

Early in the investigation, he deduced that the killings of both rappers were somehow intertwined. But by then, a decade after the shootings, many of the suspects and witnesses were either dead, unwilling to talk, or hampered by faulty memories. His breakthrough only arrived after he built a federal narcotics case against Keffe D. Facing potential life imprisonment, Kading struck a bargain with Davis, whom he suspected may have had something to do with Biggie’s death.

“That wasn’t us,” Keffe D said, according to Kading. “But what I do know will blow your fucking mind.”

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James Yancey spent much of his grievously short career working with gliders and groovers. His electromagnetic grayscale felt natural below the weightlessness of Q-Tip, Badu, and Baatin. But the Delicious days wouldn’t last forever, because Dilla waged holy war against stillness. The Stones Throw work threw punch-drunk drums at manic synths, as sampling turned into some kind of summoning. He no longer needed the aliens. He needed The Dragon.

The partnership started in 1996 but found its turbo engine on the other side of a new millennium. The first posthumous Dilla album begins with Busta growling at us to “evacuate the fuckin’ premises,” before the beat drop imagines what a shermed-out hornet would feel like. Who else to find Jay Dee’s hidden spaces and animate the quantum realm? Who else to juggle swords between Bus a Bus’ fire breathing? The rapper said that Dilla entrusted him with more than 300 beats before his death in 2006. At least three of them have been put to use here.

“Spazzz” serves as the official announcement for Dillagence 2, due later this month. The original Dillagence from almost two decades ago was hosted on Mick Boogie’s website and mostly boosted by forum crate-diggers. This sequel gets more of a formal push from The Conglomerate and a budget from Empire. It should be well worth our interest if this single is any indication.

Most beat switches feel wholly unearned these days. As usual, the binary stars of cheapness feel responsible for what’s become either a theme park corkscrew or a reverse-engineered social media moment. But “Spazzz” is how it’s done right, as textures of restlessness and modes of storytelling. The time signature changes challenge the rapper without pandering to the audience. Together, we go from dusty stilt walks to neon torpedo blast to hurdles in a cavern.

The flow is lurching and unpredictable as always. In a meaningful rejection of modernity, both CC Sabathia and Ochocinco are mentioned in the opening verse. Busta Rhymes snarling through the phrase “gas guzzler” is everything we thought it would be. Somewhere, the Dillatron glows in polyrhythm. Dillagence 2 is out on Aug. 25.

Bernadette Price, “Trust in God” f/ Terror Van Poo

The children of late rap stars take on such unique responsibilities when they choose to rap themselves. Both Young Dirty Bastard and Chris Rivers look and sound like their famous fathers—Rivers has spoken on the anxieties that come with it. Artist and WNBA player Flau’jae Johnson, daughter of the slain Camoflauge, was once taunted with her dad’s music after a loss. Fan bases can be aggressively parasocial, with little or no regard for surviving family. Nostalgia creates unreasonable demands and unfulfilled expectations.

Bernadette Price is a new wrinkle to that strange pride and mournfulness. She’s the widow of Sean Price, the god-tier emcee that passed in 2015. She now assumes the legacy of her husband’s life at large, plus his trademarks as a performer—the slow, suede combat delivery, the blackberry brandy and cheese Timbs. Bernadette twists up the Brownsville brusqueness in her own style, which includes grenades in her purse. “Pop pellets in your little ass, weak ass chest,” she deadpans in a Decepticonz jersey. Terror Van Poo is a capable rapper with a less-than-good rap name. The bottle-clanking “Trust in God” is produced by Stu Bangas and fittingly put out through Duck Down Music. A full-length called Kissing the Ground for Sinners out now.

Alyssa, “Humpty Dumpty”

While no one gets to be just Roxanne, a good mononym goes a long way for women in rap. Eve became a First Lady with nary a “Mrs.” involved. Shawnna showed up and instantly shared a stage with Mariah Carey. It’s nice work if you can get it, and Alyssa can get it. It doesn’t matter that Latto’s first name is Alyssa. Nor does it matter that Alyssa Milano had bars on the Who’s the Boss? mixtape that we just made up. This is the one and true Alyssa now.

Miami’s cloud-surfing princess burns bridges and turns tables on “Humpty Dumpty.” The vocal stacks slush together for a lean hook, but she toggles her bag between double-time and stutter step to build out two likable verses. Beatsbynyce lays a warm overcast sky for her to cruise. “My patience is low, it’s scraping the floor” is undeniable. Are eggs still historically expensive right now? Throwing a carton at the camera is a flex either way.

Eddy Baker, “DavidLynch” f/ BONES

A snippet with staying power, in which the former Raider Klan bannerman says that he’s “shooting shit like David Lynch.” Well, hold on there. Do his weapons pop out shrunken elder couples that make opps go insane? Is this what the second half of Eraserhead is about? Wouldn’t Ben Horne absolutely float on some 808 phonk? The BONES hook wraps around Lyson’s restrained piano roll, and the whole thing gets submerged in black Gatorade.

Da$H, “Dog Day Afternoon”

I did something of a wellness check/salute to Da$H in my June Rap-Up. The public hadn’t heard from him in a while, and New Jersey’s dark lord looked like he was going through it when he popped up in the background of a local music video. He promptly flicks ashes over all that on “Dog Day Afternoon,” 100 seconds of stairwell sermon produced by Zoomo. He sounds crispy again, golden soul with blue-brown grime. “Everybody listen when I’m spittin’, like the school announcements.” Evergreen. Welcome back.

I have a spreadsheet where I’ve logged every artist I’ve seen perform live. It has over 1,500 entries to date, and within each cell is a story. Most are resonant for a readership of one: when I saw Paul McCartney with my dad in 2016, when I promoted early-career shows for Alex G, Mitski, and Phoebe Bridgers in college. A few recall my personal brushes with history: Frank Ocean’s hallowed FYF 2017 performance to his cursed Coachella 2022 appearance, or when I attended the final Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young show.

I’ve kept this record since my first ever concert (Blink-182’s reunion tour with Weezer and Taking Back Sunday, a pop-punk christening courtesy of my elder sister’s influence), and have appreciated the milestones I’ve recorded since—including celebrating my 1,000th show (Bad Bunny at Coachella, for which my friends caught side eye by popping sparklers when the set began). At our wedding, and my wife and I labeling the tables after shows we’ve attended together.

I’m not alone in this urge to atomize life into individual data points. In the early 2000s, last.fm accrued a dedicated user base who wanted to “scrobble” every song they listened to into an archive. The motivation to imbue what we consume with a documented significance has since extended to books (Goodreads), movies (Letterboxd), and even fitness (Strava). Cataloguing is a self-reinforcing practice, in which you generate for yourself an extra dopamine hit not just from experiencing the media, but adding it to your collection. The larger your backlog, the more you want to keep accumulating.

A full 11.5 percent of the performances I’ve seen live have come from Outside Lands, my hometown music festival that I’ve nearly attended every year since 2013. It’s become an annual anchor which helps me orient the progression of time, a tradition during which I see both many of my favorite people and several artists. I’m also eager to include in my accounting. For this year’s iteration, I had been looking forward to re-upping a few names on the existing list (Clipse, Geese, Tinashe) and including a few first-timers (Momma, Dijon, JADE). I made playlists studying for the lineup, swapped recommendations with friends, and done all the things I’d long built a culture around the festival throughout my 20s.

As it happens, life pumped the brakes. I suddenly needed to cancel for the rest of the month attending a good friend’s wedding in Virginia, a group trip to Philadelphia, and most of Outside Lands, save for Saturday.

Although a disappointment, I took it as an opportunity to conduct a natural experiment. I used the limitations placed upon me to experience my perennial music festival in a new light, one increasingly engaged with by audiences tapped into the world of popular music. On Friday afternoon, during the time I should have been scanning my wristband and walking onto Polo Field, I instead found myself logging onto the Amazon Music platform for the first time. I was going to see Outside Lands from the vantage that many others around the country do: the livestream.

Prior to the 1990s, you almost always had to actually be in the room to experience live music. The exceptions were usually grand spectacles, like Elvis’s groundbreaking satellite-broadcast “Aloha from Hawaii” in ‘73 or the marathon length Live Aid broadcast in ‘85. The appetite for at-home concert viewing was subsequently commercialized by pay-per-view stadium shows from mega acts like the Rolling Stones and Backstreet Boys. The accessibility of these experiences broadened for both audiences and artists with the emergence of live internet video in the new millennium, which was primarily used for broadcasting global news events but was simultaneously experimented with by the OG jam band platform nugs and the emerging festival behemoth Coachella.

The game changed in 2011, when Coachella partnered with YouTube to stream the weekend across three channels—creating for the first time two prominent but distinct audiences, one in the desert and one at home. It also democratized the medium, giving professional video direction to not just the headliners, but the underground upstarts further down the lineup. The livestream would become increasingly popular over the years, reaching over 200 counties and 40 million views by 2018. In 2023, all six of the festival’s primary stages became available to stream on YouTube, alongside other artist-curated content between sets. New to this year, you could now multiview several stages at once, most in 4k, all for free. Following Coachella’s lead and success, most major festivals have invested in livestream infrastructure and partnerships of their own: Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza on Hulu, Rolling Loud on Twitch, Head in the Clouds on TikTok Live.

I’d tapped into a few such streams over the years, primarily Coachella’s, initially to stay up to see the Outkast reunion from my freshman dorm room while my roommates avoided my screen light from their bunk beds. For fans around the world who don’t live in a priority stop for their favorite artist’s touring routes or lack the means for tickets and travel to attend a destination festival, this format has become key to their relationship with live music. Yet as the livestream has grown more ubiquitous, my interest in them has dwindled proportionally; the last thing I need is another reason to have reality mediated by a screen.

The distance between “live” music and the subsequent short-form clips uploaded to Instagram has shrunk so far to be negligible. When every experience is so instantaneously available, what’s the rush to see anything in real time? Yet people from around the world tap into these streams each year; even friends whom I attend Weekend One of Coachella with watch the subsequent weekend from their living room. A fear of missing out surely drives plenty of that viewing activity, whether a longing to stand in the present audience’s shoes, or to simply be part of the online chatter.

I maintained my initial skepticism on Friday, beginning my virtual festival journey at the main stage Lands End for rising indie pop star and soon-to-be Olivia Rodrigo opener Grace Ives’s set. The crowd looked thin, a classic result for the first performance of any festival, in which a newer artist is given simultaneously a career-making opportunity and is trotted out as a sacrificial lamb. I leaned into my laptop, wanting to be on grass, dancing harder than the only lightly curious puffer jacket adorned populace giving little energy back to songs as anthemic as “Avalanche” and “Trouble.” I recognized that emotion as a narcissism of the digital age, that the only thing that would enhance the reality I was tuning into was my own involvement.

The immediate benefit I had to concede to the livestream was the far better sound mixing, more balanced and clean than the boominess of early day festival sets. I noticed that I felt like an auditor, nodding when things seemed to be going right and armchair coaching anytime I noticed limitations, a dispossessed engagement that differed from how I would have responded in person. That instinct was less intense watching Die Spitz, another Olivia Rodrigo opener (hats off to these savvy small font bookings by the promoters), throughout which I texted adulatory observations to my friend there on the ground. The Austin punks devoured the Sutro stage, and I felt a cautious pride seeing them break into the mainstream the way they have, including now with the promotional reach of big tech.

Another clear plus for virtual attendance was the instantaneous speed of travel, allowing me to flip around between acts on different stages without having to spend an anxious ten minutes in transit, as the enjoyment of one set fades and the enjoyment for another has yet to begin. On the other hand, I never had to fully commit to what I was watching either. Rather than engage with each performance on its own terms, I could just switch to the other channel, or frankly any other entertainment option within arms reach (my current watch of Season 4 of The Wire, continuing to stack hours on Persona 3 on my Nintendo Switch, the dark temptation of the algorithmic scroll).

When I was able to stay locked into just the livestream instead of any of my other browser windows, shuffling between cameras capturing the real life happening not far from my doorstep felt like a reverse panopticon, in which I was a prisoner with 360 degree coverage of the freedom held by others around me. That feeling was compounded by my Instagram and Reddit feeds pushing festival content that I had previously appreciated but now enviously tried to flick past. I rubbernecked on folks griping about intense security, massive lines for the Soma dance stage, and the horde of teens that seemed to have invaded this year.

Even those complaints induced more FOMO than having the live window into the festival solved, and checking notifications about the fest was a constant temptation I had to fight throughout the day. I felt a similar tension on the stream as I generally do living through this age, in which turning to my screen to stave my anxiety of being left behind made me more unmoored. All the while, I remained at a distance from the sets playing on my TV, and couldn’t help but find my attention stray. For several chunks of every performance I passively watched while doing dishes and folding laundry.

I was most locked in on Friday during the headlining set for Charli xcx’s, fresh off another milestone album astutely capturing the meta-commentary of our attention economy, as well as a headline-generating Lollapalooza show the week prior. Yet the stream’s shaky cam strobe lights made me slightly nauseous, and while I could appreciate the achievement of her elevated stage show, it felt odd taking it in with so much sustained focus rather than ephemerally via the drops hitting my body and the crowd screaming the lyrics alongside me. Things I loved in past Charli shows I attended frustrated me more virtually, from when I caught the backing track doing the heavy lifting to her letting guest verses run without engagement. I was pushed to form immediate takes about the show that I would never so rashly declare in-person, the internet doing what the internet has long proven itself made for.

Yet the moments of brilliance shone through the screen, such as “Pink Diamond” from How I’m Feeling Now finally getting the on-stage shine it long deserved, or the cold stare Charli held on the camera as the David Cronenberg monologue from the album hypnotized the crowd. Following a medley from Brat retreading the highlights from those shows, she fronted a band complete with a scene-appropriate tattered shirt, and ran through a deliriously messy barrage of hyperpop-ified new wave. Her renditions of “2007” and “Camera” was the most jealous I’d been of the audience all day, watching our most compelling pop star stick the landing of a bold rebrand.

Witnessing but not being present for that performance made me itch to get into the crowds that the camera operators kept cutting away to, putting some extra oomph in my step in my walk through Golden Gate Park on my way to the festival entrance Saturday afternoon. As I arrived to the sounds of Audrey Humbert (aka Gracie Abrams’ MVP songwriter) singing beyond the gates, it felt oddly similar to the experience of watching the livestream yesterday—being on the outside listening in.

I walked past the South GA entrance, absolutely slammed with people. It was interesting to corroborate the online reactions with the in person experience: security was indeed intense! There were way too many teens this year!! But there’s no livestream equivalent to the feeling of entering the grounds for the first time, the endorphin rush of possibility opening up ahead of your day. Logging on doesn’t have quite the same effect.

The increased visual sharing of festival performances has meant an adaptation of the stage show for the social media era. From set designs to choreography, pop stars in particular have bowed to the demands of the content machine, reaping from the Faustian bargain a double-edged level of devotion from fans. My wife has been engrossed by videos from Lollapalooza of Zara Larson, our moment’s underdog starlet having burst out of the “Khia Asylum,” from her newly trademarked viral dance breaks to her Y2K couture. Many touring acts structure their shows to include repeated bits that go viral on social media and can be recycled into new content at each stop—think Sabrina Carpenter local variations on her “Nonsense” outro or her arresting a famous audience member each night.

At this year’s Coachella, Carpenter’s expensive production, which featured cinematic celebrity cameos and award show-esque stage pieces, was catered more to the millions watching passively at home eager to share and comment than the thousands in person who actually paid to see her. The massive LED video walls that fans in the desert stared at, manned by teams in master control rooms to optimize the edits, were testament the importance of the almighty stream, and gave a better vantage and value than looking at the singer directly. Once you recognize how live shows have been reimagined for these times, it’s hard to see past the Matrix.

There is a reasonable economic argument to the reorienting of these stage shows for our second screens, particularly given the going rate of concert tickets. And in a moment in which most artists interact with fans primarily through digital marketing content, it’s nice that this pivot to video is actually focused on the music. Yet something you can’t get from a livestream are the spontaneous moments in between sets—what sits off the broadcast schedule, such as the people watching, the collective participation, or seeing anyone performing at the smaller stages like Soma or Duboce Triangle where some of the best sets take place.

You also don’t enjoy the within-set moments that happen off-stage that really define going to a festival, like when the XX played “Loud Places” to a sea of bubbles launched from the front rows as the stage lights hit Golden Gate Park’s eucalyptus and pine trees in a cascading golden hue. Or when the Strokes played their unexpected Gen Z anthem “The Adults are Talking” and I watched as everyone in the back of the crowd began hopping around like fools, including the staff at the food tents and the volunteers by the waste bins.

Yet by Sunday I was almost relieved to be returning to my couch, the reality of my life catching back up to me. While there is no substitute for the immersive escape of a three day music festival, I appreciated that I could still participate however much at a distance in a weekend I would have had to otherwise miss. On its own terms, I recognized the value the livestream provided in offering me a taste of artists I wouldn’t have otherwise dedicated corporeal time to. Baby Keem delivered a more engaging closing set than I thought he had in him, and I expect I’ll be checking out more of North Carolina rapper sosocamo in the future. I also confirmed some artists I assumed were bullshit were indeed so (Empire of the Sun is goofy empty calories, Not for Radio is not for me).

That’s the thing about a multigenre music festival, the juxtaposition of various offerings reduces your choice anxiety for picking and choosing amongst local shows for bands on the road, efficiently knocking several out all at once. The tradeoff, however, is that the choice you make to attend a show is what imbues it with meaning—that you and everyone else have to dedicate your time, money, and body to be part of a shared moment. The internet has made it possible to see everything everywhere all at once, which makes being anywhere at all less significant.

Ultimately, I realized the biggest drawback to my livestream participation was that I approached it alone. For any festival, what matters more than any individual name on the lineup is the world you build around the music. Whether at Coachella or “Couchella,” whoever’s scheduled next onstage matters less than the people I get to enjoy the performance alongside.

As Sunday wrapped up, I settled in with my wife to our usual positions at home to watch a band we both bonded over at the start of our relationship perform one of their beloved old albums in full. I cracked open a sparkling water, put my hand in hers, and laughed as we joked about a 50-year-old man reliving the devastating emotions he immortalized as pop music during his 20s. I wouldn’t be able to count this moment on my spreadsheet, but it’s a memory I’ll hold onto all the same.

A few minutes after I hang up the phone I realize I forgot to ask Open Mike Eagle about fate. As suggested by its title, DOOMED!, his long-awaited collaborative album with Kenny Segal, plays with the idea of relationships that end in every splinter of space-time: silent car rides and petty arguments looping ad infinitum. On one song, he prays to a higher power for the strength to stop checking his ex’s social media pages; God, presumably, bumps her Stories higher in the algorithm.

But DOOMED! is not really about the cosmic. In fact, the very ordinariness of its scenes are the source of both its tragedy and comedy: arguments over the color of a rental car, single-seat reservations to see late-period Wes Anderson. In the 20 years Mike and Kenny (the alternative here is “Eagle and Segal”) have spent mutating the post-Project Blowed underground rap ecosystem, the seemingly banal life experiences have accreted, to the point where nominally civil text exchanges can be imbued with—or seen for their—Gothic stakes.

DOOMED!, which is out at midnight tonight, is being issued by Backwoodz Studioz, the label co-founded by billy woods and which has become a hub for inventive, independent rap in New York and beyond. “I tend to be so off in my own corner of the world doing my own thing that I don’t always get an opportunity to see where I fit in the overall constellation of all the shit going on,” Mike tells me. With this album, he resituates himself at the center of that universe—and probably several others, too.

I think we imagine these big life events as something we’ll go through once. But you did the divorce album [2020’s Anime, Trauma and Divorce] and then now it’s like, “No, what is breaking up though?”

Yeah, I certainly wasn’t planning on enduring another breakup. I certainly thought that the original breakup album would be the only one that I ever had to make [laughs]. I just find myself in a place where I have begun to look at my work as a place to have my feelings. When these big life events happen, I’ve just gotten really used to dealing with it in that specific way.

Was there a point earlier in your career when a voice in your head would say, “Sure, some shit’s going on in my life, but now I need to set that aside, compartmentalize it, and go write raps?”

Oh, yeah. Yes. Every album before [Anime, Trauma, Divorce]. There was always shit going on. I never thought of my music as a place to deal with super personal shit before. My thesis was always looking outward at the world—societal ills and satire—and I wanted to point at other things and say, “Hey, look at that. That’s weird.” And I never even thought about really putting my shit in there. Or it was a case where I’d make songs that were about me and I’d take them off the album.

Was that to protect your privacy, the privacy of others? Or did you find yourself worrying about whether an audience would find it interesting?

To me, I think it was really more about the colors I’m painting with. And if I whiplash from talking about a bunch of genre shit or a bunch of racial shit or a bunch of sociological shit, if I whiplash to something very personal—that I’m not even really going to get into details about, some inscrutable, suddenly personal thing—I’m like, “Is that helping the record? Or is this interrupting the record?” And that was the mindset I was in. It was like those songs always felt like they were from a different movie.

Well then, what switches over in your brain to make you comfortable releasing those songs?

The truth at the center of that transition was, first of all, me having a therapist that’s actually a good match for me and my problems. Because I had a lot of therapists that weren’t that.

I mean, you rap about therapy breakups on the new album.

Right. It’s a simple thing, but it was something my therapist literally reminded me of one day: I have a tool. You know what I’m saying? Most people don’t have an outlet. They don’t have an arena. They don’t have a forum to deal with stuff that’s difficult. The things that are hard to find words for, the conversations that are hard to have in life, most people just don’t have a way to deal with that. And I had one built in and I wasn’t using it.

But most people’s therapeutic exercises aren’t subsequently released to the public.

So the divorce album was a lot tougher than this one. And I think a lot of that had to do with the fact that it was the first time that I was doing something like that. And I did feel myself put out there in a way that was unprecedented. The most difficult thing really was being able to have a distance from the work in terms of criticism. That was the real hard part. Because as you start putting out music, you go from being very, very sensitive about everything each person says to having a professional distance—you have a way to navigate that emotionally. When I put out that record, it was like going back to square one on sensitivity. And I think that was the hardest part to wrap my head, around because I wasn’t able to anticipate it. And by the time I was deeply in my feelings of it and very uncomfortable, it was way too late to think about it.

Did you find yourself specifically bothered by reviews of that record?

Yes, absolutely. Yes, yes, yes. Because the operational difference psychologically was, previously, if you had criticisms of my work, it was just my work. And it’s like, OK, great. It was never made for everybody to like, so whatever. I don’t like it, but it’s fine. That was the first time I felt like if somebody was criticizing that project, they were criticizing me as a person, because my personhood was on display. So it was a lot harder to have that distance.

This is your first full-length album with Kenny Segal, but you’ve been close with him forever.

We’ve just always been in the same circles for so long and have crossed over a bunch of different ways, not only with the collaborations on my albums. I was working with Project Blowed on the label side when they put out his Ken Can Cook album. So I was doing executive production and behind the scenes stuff for that. We used to work together at a nonprofit here in L.A. called JUiCE. I think that might’ve been when we first met. So this is going back to ‘07, ‘06. We’ve known each other a very, very long time. And it is certainly at the point now where, from JUiCE to Project Blowed to Low End Theory, me and Kenny are uniquely situated to look around the landscape and be like, “Oh yeah, we’re like a couple of the last ones standing.” We’ve seen so many scenes go. There have been so many shows that I’ve been at and Kenny’s been at, and me and him just end up talking. There’s a shorthand, there’s a familiarity with each other. We’ve had the collaborations through the years too that always seem to go well. So the groundwork just seemed like it was pretty well laid, even though this is not the way I typically like to work.

Meaning with a single producer? Why do you not typically like that?

I think what it really comes down to is that I like to have a lot of control and I don’t like to have a lot of conversations. I’m very much a dictator when it comes to my creative output. And it’s been hardened by my experiences in film and television and stuff like that, where those things are soooo collaborative. And it always makes me run back to this music shit where I don’t have to answer to nobody. I get to make all my decisions. I get to execute my vision exactly how I want to execute it. And so the level of sharing that has to happen when you do this type of record, it’s not as comfortable for me. And how that ends up manifesting itself is I’ll get to a point in a project where I want some other beats on it. I want some different flavors on it, or I want to make the kind of move that would break the thing.

One version of this is you link up with a producer, you guys settle on a group name, and then you can be like, “Well, this is a fundamentally different thing. He has equal control.” But this says Open Mike Eagle on the cover.

It does. I think Kenny, because he’s been around so long and done so many of these projects, he’s uniquely suited to understand that there is a degree to which, even though we are co-conspirators on this project, once it’s out, if there’s criticism or people who have bad shit to say about it, it’s going to come back on me first. As the rapper, there is some positioning thing that happens in the world where these don’t end up being equal. You don’t share the blame or the criticism equally.

Now, I imagine, given you’re talking about the dictatorial tendencies, the process on a writing and recording level probably didn’t change that much for you from how you would do a multi-producer album, right? Did you record this at Kenny’s studio?

Nope, it didn’t change at all. I record everything at home and send it over to whoever my co-conspirators are. But because this was a collaborative album, there were more iterations on songs than usual. Because I’m writing something, demoing it, sending him even the demo vocals to start iterating on the beat. And so there’s a lot more back-and-forth development like that, track-per-track, than on one of my usual albums.

I remember hitting play on the album for the first time and thinking, of the flow on [opener] “Out to Lunch,” “God, this is so confident.” Because it’s an interesting flow that really highlights all the things happening in the writing, but it’s understated. I think a lot of artists would think “I have to come in harder, more ostentatious.”

That’s a trap, Paul.

It is, but is this a situation where you’re working from cadence first?

It’s a per-song basis kind of thing, but I also think about where I’m meeting this project in the course of my own journey with my own style. If you look at stylistically what I was doing on Anime, Trauma and Divorce… different things start to happen around the Component System album. You can hear me trying to find other ways to play with cadence.

How would you describe that evolution?

I think the simplest way to put it—and this may not be a very clear answer—the simplest way to put it is to try to find cadence that is still satisfying to me, but more interesting. To get away, get off of the sort of four/four grid that I’ve been working in, that I grew up on. It’s always been the most satisfying or entertaining cadence, but just wanting to find some way to move past it that’s not completely sacrificing rhythm. I don’t want to be the person with the cadence so unpredictable that it feels like spoken-word poetry. I like rap rhythm and cadence. I like that. But I could also recognize inside myself a desire to find more interesting ways to play with the beat.

On a very mechanical level, looking for these new cadences, looking for these rhythms, is this you walking and driving around to beats? Are you turning the mic on to do this? How does it actually happen?

I think a lot of this has just developed in making Component System, making another triumph of ghetto engineering, making these Previous Industries records. Previous Industries, the way we record is like a rap bootcamp. We’re getting together every week and writing. So it’s like—

Oh, you’re writing in person together?

Oh, for Previous Industries, absolutely. Every song we’ve ever made, we’ve all written together in the same room. And so that’s an album and a half and we’re wrapping up another one. It wasn’t the case of me being like, “Oh, consciously, let me try to find a different pocket here.” I’m already on that. And so when I’m hearing these beats and I’m starting to write, I’m already into these new ways of kicking off a verse or new ways to string together the multisyllabic rhymes. That is still the foundation of what is satisfying to me about writing rap. But it’s like I already got these different ways to hang them on a beat.

Briefly, on a recording-at-home level, what are you actually recording on and into? Is it Logic, ProTools? What kind of mic are you using?

I do everything at Ableton. So I produce in Ableton, I record in Ableton, I perform with Ableton. That’s just where I’m at these days. It’s everything fucking Ableton. Okay. I got a real expensive Neumann microphone. I got a really nice Focusrite preamp, just big studio quality. I’ve been doing a home recording game for so long, it’s like I know what the essential sorts of pieces are for what I do. And making sure, that to the degree that I can, the room sounds decent. Those are the main focuses.

The other professional aspect I’m interested in is, obviously you’ve been streaming a lot. Are there psychic demands of that? Because even if you control the topics—you’re not being interviewed per se—your face and your brain is out there on display a huge percentage of the time compared to the average person.

On one hand, I don’t know the answer to the psychic cost of it. I feel like the real cost will be revealed long-term. And also recognize this, Paul: Every day when a person livestreams is a roll of the dice on whether or not they’re going to say something that fucks their entire lives up. There’s no net and it’s a tightrope walk every time. Now, I have built an audience, a community that knows where I’m coming from. I don’t think anybody’s waiting for me to fuck up or nothing like that. But that is essentially what the job is, is to be entertaining or educational, whatever it is, and not shoot yourself in the fucking foot. And the gun is right there in your head. What I’m saying?

I liked when you were going through that Pitchfork list and adding your personal lens on these big canonical records: I was at school downstate at this time and actually what people liked was X, Y, or Z, or This song was big even though it didn’t chart. I always find that really interesting on a historical level, an askance angle on a popular thing.

I did that and I like adding that because I’m a big fan of context generally. I think historical context from people who were there I think is really important, and I think it gets lost in a lot of this. So I think that’s the cool thing about being able to turn on a microphone and a camera, just talk about this shit is that sometimes there is a perspective that somebody like me can bring. Maybe it’s not what you think I would be interested in, but I had life experiences based around some of this music.

To that point, as we sit here on whatever it is today—July 30th, 2026—what is your favorite rap album of all time?

I mean, it’s still Midnight Marauders.

Well, I appreciate that because I have always been a Marauders guy and I’ve always been told I’m wrong.

I’ve been having this argument for 30 years [laughs]. You know what I’m saying? And I found that there’s some analogues now, like the two Pete Rock and CL Smooth records—some people live and die by the first one, some people like myself think the second one is a lot better. And what it really is, is right around that time, and between ‘91 and ‘93, it’s like the technology changed and the mixing capabilities of engineers changed. So now you could get these high quality, smooth sounds, and it wasn’t just all about the banging drums. I think the ‘91 thing, people were really, really hung up on the big dusty drums and the upright basses and shit. The thing people mean when they say raw. It’s usually upright bass and big ass drums. And all of a sudden in ‘93, you’re able to filter out so many frequencies of samples to get, oh, you can get just this pretty-ass Rhodes on top of everything. And I like the fucking pretty Rhodes! That’s my shit. So the ‘93 shit’s always going to be superior to me because that’s the sound I like. But I think that a lot of people who prefer the ‘91 shit, their preference is that raw thing.

Well then, if you can try to step back from the moment, is there something technologically happening now that you really appreciate in rap production?

Well, I think with production, the really interesting thing now, people tend to encapsulate it with the term “drumless.” And sometimes it’s literally drumless. Sometimes what it means is that the way a beat is constructed, the snare is a lot quieter than it used to be. And it gives the whole beat a different feel. It gives a rapper a different bed to lay across when the snare isn’t taking up all the space. And I don’t always love music like that because I think whole albums of it can get kind of same-sounding. But there’s a lot of experimenting with using other sounds as the drum sound. And I think Madlib started a lot of that. Even Timbaland was doing a lot of that back in the day. But I feel like that’s where the real experimentation is happening right now: volume, drum sounds, and throwing the rule book out when it comes to that shit I think is really cool.

There’s always going to be a war around that because there’s people who want to protect what they believe to be the spirit of hip-hop. And it is so based on when you came into this and started enjoying it and a person’s ability to keep finding interesting things in what’s happening now. And it don’t mean you got to like everything. I don’t like everything. But I do see it as a constant evolution.

Photographs are relics, but we tend to think of video differently: as surveillance, a transparent lens, a perpetual present. Bino Rideaux doesn’t have the luxury of seeing it that way. Speaking to POW founder Jeff Weiss, the 33-year-old rapper from South Central cites the music video for his 2015 single “100 Days 100 Nights” as proof of just how much things can change, and just how many people get left behind. “It’s a lot of faces in there that I ain’t seen in years,” he says, noting the numerous funerals and incarcerations that now blot out the younger visages in the footage. But music is one of the ways people can be remembered, celebrated, frozen in time.

This week, Bino is the conduit for remembering one of Los Angeles’s modern musical heroes, Nipsey Hussle, who was murdered in March 2019. Nipsey was a mentor to Bino, and in 2017 the pair released a joint mixtape, the pointed No Pressure. Shortly after, they returned to the studio to make the follow-up, PROLIFIC, an album that is glossier and more melodic, but retains the predecessor’s edge and credibility.

PROLIFIC was mostly finished—even down to the sequencing and artwork—before Nipsey’s death. But for more than seven years, the team overseeing his estate (chiefly his brother, Blacc Sam), has been judicious about releasing anything from the vaults. Finally, they decided, the time was right to let the world hear what this duo, perfect complements and counterweights to one another, had done together.

Watch the video above to hear Bino speak about the way his family fostered his talent, writing his first rap to a Nelly beat, and the influence Nipsey had on him, in this life and beyond.

At the end of the day, it’s all body music. Inasmuch as anything as broad as dance music can be “about” something, maybe it’s about the way a speaker stack rattles the ribcage. That certainly seems to be the case for this column, which—purely inadvertently—focuses on live sets. Objekt and Move D turned up at this year’s Freerotation and charred the dancefloors, albeit with different tinder: one with slow-and-heavy club tools, the other via comparatively skippy house and techno. Simisea went deep on Ricardo Villalobos for a head-spinning live recording, and Brian Leeds’ latest mix as Loidis sees the Brooklyn DJ building worlds out of kick drums and hi-hats, stretching tech-house into all sorts of territories along the way. For their Melbourne Deepcast entry, dance-music duo Very Much Romance turned in two hours of sandblasted rave tools. Live from Horst Festival 2026, Dave Huismans threaded the needle between funk, house, and techno, adobeprincess looked towards the stars, and Yu Su put together a whip-cracking set of techno tracks.

Elsewhere, Brooklyn fixture SAIA soundtracked a sunrise with a million shades of post-post-hardcore stylings and Minneapolis mainstay Jamila put together an hour of techno rollers in a way that recalls her home base. deep creep went all in on slinky nu-school rave cuts for her RA mix, while Mendel went for something decidedly old-school in comparison, all dusty keyboards and busted-DAW house records. Nicolas Lutz’s Dekmantel set sees a long-form DJ going tight, rocketing between heavy and wild-eyed club sounds with ease. Lastly, Camu and Marylou offered two very different visions of what “listening music” could be. The former cooked up an hour of skin-crawling ambient music, drone, and techno; the latter, vertiginous drone and dub that slowly turns to a car-crash of folk musics and field recordings.

Here are some of the best DJ sets July had to offer.

adobeprincess, Horst Festival 2026 // Yu Su, Horst Festival 2026 // Dave Huismans, Horst Festival 2026

In part of a March 2026 interview with DJ Mag, adobeprincess got talking about ‘90s West-Coast dance music, describing some particular favorites as “magical and psychedelic.” That sort of language could easily stretch to plenty of club culture, of course—there’s wizardry everywhere if you’re curious enough—but it’s tempting to make it out as a Rosetta Stone for her work, too. When she’s behind the decks, whether she’s playing rip-roaring drum-and-bass, starlit house music, or tough-as-nails techno, her work is nearly always playful and exploratory, the sound of a dancefloor coated in a thin layer of stardust. That’s true with Horst Festival 2026, too, and it may just be her strongest recording to date. As the set runs on, adobeprincess gradually moves from tracky techno tools to wild-eyed breaks, bridging the styles by way of early-aughts IDM, but this one’s less about any particular genre peacocking than it is about an ineffable sense of joy. Here, adobeprincess laces heads-down club sounds with neon, making something perfectly calibrated for the stargazers in the audience.

Elsewhere at the same festival, Yu Su, a one-of-one London producer and DJ whose material splits the difference between floor-fillers and deep-listening material, went all in on something far more particular, to consistently winning results. Her turn at the Horst decks sees the selector looking towards minimal, loopy, and sprightly techno, tracking four-fours to the sky and back down to earth again and again. The most impressive thing about the set, then, is just how many variations on a theme she finds: at turns minimal, spooked, riotous, jazzy, retrofuturistic, sludgy, hypnotic, and joyfully messy, it’s a light-speed journey through a highly particular vortex, with Yu Su’s careful piloting keeping the whole thing steady throughout. Calling any of it straight-up would be a bit of a misnomer—it’s too playful and sly for that—but it’s certainly not showy, either; instead, this is a veteran celebrating no-shit dancefloor material for two showstopping hours.

But why not call it a hat trick? Dave Huismans, who, under a grab-bag of aliases, has been slamming dancefloors for many of the past twenty-five years, hit the “Dark Skies” stage at Horst with an unashamedly sunny performance, ripping through a mile of records along the way. At first, the Utrecht DJ focuses on funked-up house records, all piano soli and ebullient horn sections and lushly laid vocal harmonies. It’s the kind of mix that could go on forever, and for the better—but it doesn’t, and that’s for the best. The real trick of Horst Festival comes in watching how Huismans gradually turns up the heat, folding in broken beat, chopped-and-scattered hardcore, heavyweight Detroit material, and livewire electro into the mix until the whole thing’s positively hair-raising. Even then, though, he never loses that original sense of Devil-may-care joy. Never mind the forays into skin-crawling dub records or mile-a-minute techno—this one’s about stuffing the amplifiers with grins and sunlight.

Camu, Hardcore Chillout 022 // Marylou, Mostra

Ambient music gets a bad—or at least incomplete—rap. Never mind Eno’s oft-repeated origin point: A healthy strain in contemporary ambient and low-BPM music is less sonic wallpaper than it is aural swamp, with each new tone acting as another layer of muck. This is music that’s nominally low-key but, in practice, awfully confrontational. Or, as the Hardcore Chillout Soundcloud page puts it: it’s for “when chilling hurts.” On Hardcore Chillout 022, Madrid DJ Camu builds the kind of deep-listening set you feel in your bones a few days later: World-weary drone, dislocated field recordings, stomach-churning modern classical, purgatorial jazz, molasses-quick ambience. It’s a real slow burner, both structurally and emotionally—it takes a while for 022 to get going, but, eventually, it turns into a real blood-curdler, with each passing rhythm only deepening the malaise. This may be nominally ambient music, but it’s far from relaxed; this is downtempo imagined as a world of dares.

Marylou, who in May turned in one of this year’s finest offerings to date, expanded further on this idea, turning in two hours of hair-raising “listening music” that feels like ingesting a mouthful of smog. The set opens with a curious binary: lighter-than-air, DJ Healer-style synth blurs paired alongside purgatorial bass, neither pushing too hard against the other. It is both beautiful and queasy, and that disorientation seems to be the point. Marylou spends the rest of the mix straddling that line, even threatening to go into some straight-up dance music, eventually—only to crumple the timeline in a remarkable fashion, going from dub to devotional musics without missing a beat. Slowly, the set does start to find its feet, but the picture never turns clearer: techno starts to sound like folk music, and free-jazz drums start to emerge in the field recordings—or are those the birds? That initial confusion never fully lifts, and that’s for the best.

deep creep, RA.1047 // Simisea, Simisea’s Minimalicious Villalobos Focus Set

Is deep creep one of the best DJs in New York? Probably, but she probably wouldn’t say as much. That’s the fun of it: her material is consistently playful, left-of-center, and understated, more likely to bob or weave than hit square in the gut. RA.1047, a long-overdue entry in a long-running mix series, sees the pi pi pi founder winking behind the decks yet again, keeping things at a low simmer for a bubbly and vivacious eighty minutes. In his write-up on RA.1047, Michelangelo Matos danced around calling this “minimal,” so we’ll do something similar here: This is carefully calibrated dance music of the highest order, all heavyweight bass and crisp claps dancing around each other while keyboards sparkle overhead. But it’s so much more, too. RA.1047 livewire techno; it’s creak-and-rattle tech-house; it’s techno as imagined by a band of Max Roach devotees; it’s Ibizan rave tools as imagined by De School devotees. Beyond all that, though, it’s a killer floor-focused set in a career packed with them.

There must be something in the water, though. Simisea, another critical New York selector, went deep on perhaps the best-known name in minimalism over at the SLINK club night—and, again, he found so much more than just that idea. The Minimalicious Villalobos Focus Set is precisely what it promises, to be sure, but in going so long on a single name, it can’t help but expose his sheer range. Here, it’s slinky jazz-funk belters; there, it’s click-and-rattle minimal-techno sample flips; elsewhere, it’s creeped-out spoken-word, or it’s shepherd-tone freakouts, or ‘80s pop classics as heard from the bottom of a miles-deep well. For all the styles and sounds on display, it’s all clearly the work of the same producer: it’s sly and specific in equal measure, with hyper-crisp drum programming offering the foundation for a million carefully calibrated jokes and rug-pulls. It helps that Simisea mixes it all with an appropriate level of care, letting blends run long and stretching grooves out for as long as the floor can bear. Villalobos is an out-and-out legend at this point, of course, and this is as great a primer as you’re likely to get.

Jamila, Carbon Sound // Loidis, Sustain Release 2025

In the interview accompanying her Carbon Sound mix, Jamila puts it straight. “I think DJing is very vulnerable,” the Minneapolis DJ says. “And it’s kind of cringe [...] It’s like, ‘Hey guys, I like this song, and I hope you like it too.’” That focus—on vulnerability and collective joy—betrays her approach to the dancefloor; a great Jamila set is floor-forward, focused on the unique elation that comes once there’s enough sweat. Carbon Sound, then, is blessedly more of the same: An hour of techno tools with a skip in their step, of four-fours and ping-ponging synth lines and vocal samples laid just so. It’s not “minimal,” exactly, but it’s unabashedly function-first dance music, the kind of stuff liable to go off on any properly calibrated soundsystem. Scan around and you’ll find all manner of highlights—a creeped-out industrial stomper here, a post-Prince machine-funk cut there, the hand-drum whirlwind that closes out the session—but no particular track feels like the point. Instead, Carbon Sound is about something far more elemental: The art of keeping a dancefloor moving, one “cringe” at a time.

If one hour isn’t enough for you, why not run it back for three more? Brian Leeds—a.k.a. Huerco S., a.k.a. Autobouncer620, a.k.a. Pendant, a.k.a. Loidis, and on and on—has been shedding his skin for years at this point, but, as Loidis, he seems to have hit a groove. His best sets under the handle feel like a lucid-dream take on Beatport, all tech-house grooves purpose-built for soundsystem lifers. On Sustain Release 2025, Leeds goes deep on that vision yet again, tunneling ever deeper into the decks with low-slung rhythms that promise eternities. As with the Jamila set, no particular cut seems to be of unusual importance; this is music for the long haul, not for the peacockers. But this one goes wider, slipping into almost-amapiano, early-aughts IDM, disco-house belters, spiderwebbing synth workouts, and plenty more besides. Since he pivoted back to 4/4 records as Loidis, Leeds seems to have struck a kind of dancefloor gold, and Sustain Release 2025 shows that he’s found a rich vein indeed.

Move D, Freerotation 2026 // Objekt, Freerotation 2026: Year of the Sandworm

Freerotation, a members-only festival in Wales, has earned a mythic reputation: This is one for the heads, for the freaks, for the lifelong ravers. (It should come as little surprise that one of this century’s finest mixes is from those very halls.) If these two sets are to go by, 2026’s edition was no different. In his recording from the festival, Heidelberg DJ Move D reaches into his crates and pulls out an armful of rave artillery, By and large, he leans towards no-nonsense house and techno tools, but it’s rarely so simple: he’s liable to slide into a bit of shuffle-and-skip two-step on a moment’s notice, and he spends the set teetering between starlit club records and something far more abyssal, balancing bright-eyed synths with menacing sub-bass throughout. The set’s hardly showy, but it is immaculately engineered and clearly intended for wide-eyed ravers—on those metrics, it’s a smashing success.

Objekt, on the other hand, aimed for an entirely different target. In the liner notes for his Freerotation mix, the Berlin DJ put it plainly: in the midst of a heatwave, “Sloooow seemed like the only reasonable choice.” That’s for the best: he’s at his best when he’s working with tracks that are sludgy, playful, and a bit out-there. So it is on Year of the Sandworm, which finds the selector trudging between a hundred shades of bass weight: vertiginous dubstep, zero-BPM sort-of-electro, headspinning electro, hard-drum freakouts. As the set runs on, he finds his way towards some kind of apex, whose hardcore freakouts and MC firebreathing recall the heights of his Essential Mix—but even that high wears off, and, given a few minutes, he’s back in the muck. Normally, to hear someone go this slow and heavy you’ve got to camp out in Portland, so catching Hertz doing it on the other side of the world is a real treat. Year of the Sandworm, put bluntly, is an extremely particular vein of DJing pulled off at a world-class level.

Nicolas Lutz, Dekmantel Mix 513

When Nicolas Lutz has been in this column in the past, it’s been for his long-form sets—ten hours here, six hours there. That’s no coincidence. He’s at his best when he gets time to go long, blending slowly and building his way towards some kind of delirium. So Dekmantel Mix 513, which runs a comparatively scant two hours, might arrive as a bit of a shock: If the appeal of his world-building lies in its breadth, why cut the map short? But the set, joyously enough, lands instead as a speed-run of sorts through his style. Here, Lutz mixes hot and quick, cranking things up fast and leaning into rave-ready tools throughout. What’s most striking, then, is the sheer weight of this thing. It never quite gets into, gabber or breakcore, say, but it’s plenty hefty nevertheless: Lutz moves between new-beat slammers, breakbeat belters, sludgy trance, and skin-scorching acid with ease, diving down a million blind alleys and pulling up just as many shades of club-ready elation.

Mendel, MDC.328 // Very Much Romance, MDC.329

The Melbourne Deepcast is reliably great, to be sure, but it’s best in the summer. (The hemispherical irony isn’t lost, but bear with it.) The finest MDC sets tend to be playful, loose, and stuffed with joy, the kind of recordings that wouldn’t mind a million-dollar soundsystem but that would work just fine at a backyard barbeque. If that’s the criteria, then the podcast’s crew pulled off a killer one-two in June. First, there’s Mandel’s entry. Here, the Berlin DJ pulls together ninety minutes of house-music rollers. It’s wonderfully tactile stuff, full of hand-drums and kicks and hi-hats dancing around each other while lo-fi synths noodle along in the background, and it helps that Mandel blends like a seasoned veteran, teasing out rhythms within rhythms while keeping things elegant. This one’s for the beach-towel crowd—its biggest fault, in truth, is that it doesn’t run longer.

Two weeks later, the next Deepcast looked across the globe and found something a touch tougher. Very Much Romance—“Humble legends of the Bay Area underground,” per the liner notes—hand in a live session for their offering. The two-hour slammer is jumpy and a bit pugnacious, matching the kind of sweat you’d look for on a great night out. By and large, the duo zero in on blissed-out house cuts and airy breakbeats, gradually ramping things up until it turns to an out-and-out swelterer. Eventually, that means looking towards 2-step scorchers, screwface garage, piano-house screamers, and all manner of Ibizan beachside classics. In sum, MDC.329 isn’t exactly reinventing the wheel, but who cares when it spins this well? This is rave-music historiography executed to a tee.

SAIA, Honcho Podcast Series 143

How would you soundtrack a sunrise? It’s tempting, perhaps, to lean towards slow-and-low sounds, towards jazz or minimal techno or ambient music. But, as the sun rose on Ridgewood in April, Brooklyn DJ SAIA opted for dubstep. Honcho Podcast Series 143, ripped from the Nowadays decks from 6-9 a.m., isn’t the sound of a dancefloor coming to life, exactly—the party had been going for nine hours at that point—but it is the sound of a club flooding with sunlight. SAIA spends the session backflipping between vintage-flavored rave tools and new-school screamers, giving equal space to progressive house, chopped-and-slammed R&B, confetti-blasted trance, and old-school house rollers. From the jump, SAIA makes it clear they’re less interested in genre or ideology than in sheer momentum; they weave between styles and histories but rarely let the energy lag for long. That said, the closing—where, after two hours and change of zig-zags and rug pulls, SAIA finds their way back to disco and old-school house tracks—feels like some kind of homecoming: one possible origin point, perhaps, for the open-hearted joy they’d been blending with all morning.

It’s the last night of Ankith Woods’s first-ever tour. The show is over, the venue emptying. The bartender wipes down her domain. A stripper sits on a stool, texting idly. A handful of young rappers mill around the merch booth. In New England Patriots pajama pants and a Rolling Stones t-shirt, Ankith surveys his wares: black crop tops that say “Soulless” and t-shirts that say “Why The Fuck They Make Plan B’s If I Can’t Bust In It.”

The 22-year-old rapper from suburban Michigan has just finished a four-date run through his hometown Detroit, New York, L.A., and, tonight, Chicago. His set at Subterranean was so wild and uncategorizable that I do what Ankith says on his first viral song, “Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter,” and spend too much on a t-shirt “because I’m an idiot.” The merch endorses a message I support: “It’s Dumb As Hell That Dave’s Hot Chicken Charge You For A Fountain Drink That Should Be Part of the Combo.” I put it on over my sweatshirt, and Ankith tells me my fit looks ten times better.

I find myself here, wearing this silly t-shirt, for the same reason I presume the rest of the hodgepodge crowd came out on a Sunday night: Ankith Woods entered my algorithm.

The first @ankithwoods reel you’re served might seem like a joke. Who is this Indian-American Midwestern kid talking about being strapped up like an Iranian and having blues and yellows like a Ukrainian? Why do I keep flicking through his “Proving I Can Rap On Every Genre” series? And why does he sound so good rapping over bagpipes?

The more you like and share, the quicker you’ll learn that Ankith is far from a meme account. He’s a funny writer and smart promoter with a clear-eyed vision for his creative future. He’ll pummel you with braggadocious punchlines then uppercut himself with brutal self-effacing vulnerability. He’ll talk about drugs and sex and then about calling his mom and crying at a Lana Del Rey concert.

Ankith says the Midwest, so far, has been his primary demographic. He’s the type of rapper that might baffle the rest of the country but makes perfect sense in the eccentric creative hotbed of his home state. “There’s no song structure [in Michigan],” he tells me. “The lack of structure is the structure.” There are shades of Teejayx6 in his scam rap flow, BabyTron in his casual absurdity, Rio da Yung OG in his imagery, Danny Brown in his genre deconstruction, and even Eminem in his self-aware humor. And yet, like 03 Greedo’s spiritual cousin, he cites Lana Del Rey and Future as his primary influences.

Like and share enough Ankith Woods posts, and a radicalized fandom emerges. Enough to see the posts about the local show, show up at it, and scream “FUCK DAVE’S HOT CHICKEN” in gleeful unison with likeminded strangers.

In our post-show interview, which you can watch in the documentary above, I ask Ankith about the difference between amassing an online following and fostering live in-person events. He says he thinks of them as two different skills. He simply wants to be the best at both. Still, he has a lyric about feeling empty after getting two million TikTok views, and tells me his show in Detroit at the start of this tour “felt better than any views [he] ever got.”

Rapping since high school and throughout college, Ankith has attained relative success on the internet, and his digital grind is now starting to have tangible effect in the real world. Last year, he opened for Rio da Yung OG. At a fan meetup before he opened for Skrilla, a guy named Brody the Bagpiper brought his titular instrument just to play it for Ankith. Impressed, Ankith told Brody to join him onstage in 30 minutes. The clip went viral, and now Brody the Bagpiper has been onstage at every stop of the tour. Their song together is a clear crowd favorite. The phones come out. The cycle between the digital world and the physical one repeats. The marathon continues.

It was about two years ago when Earl Sweatshirt, asked who he’d been listening to, shouted out a young, hungry Cletus Strap. The fellow L.A. rapper feels like one of Earl’s stylistic descendants: relaxed in delivery but precise on the page, keeping his writing dense without ever sounding overworked. From the moment Earl gave him that co-sign, a collaboration felt inevitable.

The first voice on “nonchalnct” actually belongs to Khameelah “staHHr” El, who introduces herself as a French producer called Bon. She opens the track with a comic rant about rappers—their reckless physicality, their weed smoke, their Grabba, particularly in the presence of real adults. Eventually, though, she caves, takes a hit, and briefly understands the appeal of rapper weed before snapping back to her original conclusion: “Rappers suck.”

It’s a sentiment you hear from plenty of rappers now, especially the kind who proudly insist they are not rappers at all. They position themselves as word grifters, language scammers, digital hustlers—people who understand how to work a computer but not necessarily how to honor an art form with a deep and serious lineage. In this vein, rap becomes a vehicle for moving ephemeral bullshit to media-illiterate, and sometimes literally illiterate, audiences.

That is what makes Cletus Strap refreshing. He sounds like someone who actually enjoys rap as a form: its cadences, its compression, the strange little turns of phrase that can make a bar linger. On “nonchalant,” when he says “rappers suck,” Cletus may be talking about the self-centered nature of performers in general. But it also lands as a rejection of rappers who treat the medium less like an art and more like a hustle.

The beat provides a near-perfect lo-fi California canvas for both Cletus and Earl to explain themselves. “We don’t gotta wait for the rain to go and cry/You were trying to hold that shit against me until I die,” Cletus raps, sounding wounded but unbothered, an emotional contradiction that suits the song’s title. Earl lends the track with a reminder to keep your metaphorical blades sharp. In an era when so many rappers seem determined to prove staHHr right, it’s reassuring to hear the underground still turning out oddballs like Cletus Strap, and to have them embraced by the ones that came before them.

D’Leesa, “Digital Girl”

This summer, I’ve kept returning to the DIY world of Atlanta singer D’Leesa. Her videos look like they were made in her bedroom because, more or less, they are. So is everything else: the writing, the performing, the mixing, the mastering. You get the picture. She does the whole shit. “Digital Girl” is my favorite of her recent releases. It’s funny that someone I have only ever encountered through a screen can feel so tangible—like the kind of person you might run into on an ordinary afternoon, if you are lucky enough to live in a city where chance encounters still make up part of daily life.

SOB x RBE, “Ten Summers”

SOB x RBE came out of North Vallejo in 2016 sounding less like a rap group than a pressure system. Yhung T.O., DaBoii, Slimmy B, and Lul G had the kind of chemistry that does not need a committee meeting to explain itself: four young rappers with different voices, all of them moving like somebody had already told them the city was theirs. Their name—Strictly Only Brothers x Real Boi Entertainment—was cumbersome in the way local legends often are. The music was not. They even earned a spot on the Kendrick-curated Black Panther soundtrack.

Then the machine stalled. Individual careers, tensions, and the usual centrifugal force that pulls young groups apart took over. SOB x RBE’s last run together came to feel almost too brief in retrospect: an eruption, a label deal, national attention, then silence. That silence lasted seven years.

“Ten Summers” is the return, sans Lul G, who was sentenced to more than 20 years in prison in 2023 stemming from a shooting that left one person dead in 2019. His presence is sorely missed, but the group seems to mostly work without him there for the time being. DaBoii is the group member who made the most noise as a solo artist in the years since the group’s breakup, with the biggest artistic losses going to Yhung T.O. and Slimmy B, who both seemed to have turned into feature artists in the wake of the groups split.

The track works as an announcement of the group’s return, but by no means does it promise a return of the same chemistry or quality that made the original SOB x RBE era so special in 2016. It’s an OK song that leaves me excited for what’s to come, but I’m not expecting much. Even the video is a nod to their early days, harkening back to “Paramedic!” on an iPhone screen, and bringing E-40 in for a cameo, tying their return to both their breakout moment and the Bay lineage that always surrounded them.

fakemink, “Love Is A Dog From Hell”

fakemink has officially gone from a star in the London underground to all-but mainstream act who’s blown up twice over at this point. He’s released an official debut on a number of loosies over the past few months. The debut has a couple great songs, but isn’t perfect. I wonder what a perfect album from an artist like fakemink looks like? Since he’s always best consumed when you stumble upon him through YouTube or Tiktok. “Love Is A Dog From Hell,” feels like a return to form for me. It’s the less-glossy fakemink from before he entered album mode, albeit with an overly-wrought little reminiscent of his debut, The Boy Who Cried Terrified.

Doreen C. Broadnax was born on June 2, 1965 in the Van Dyke Housing Projects in Brownsville, Brooklyn. At the time, Brownsville was a predominantly Black and Puerto Rican neighborhood, as many of the white residents had fled during to New York’s public housing development in the 1950s. Broadnax was in the middle, with a white mother and a Black father, a situation she described as pushing her to look towards the streets in search of a more homogenous community. By the time she was a teenager, hip-hop culture was exploding in the streets through park jams, DJ battles, and breakdancing, something she found solace in as a burgeoning dancer herself. Emcees like MC Sha-Rock of Funky Four + 1, Pebblee Poo of The Smoke-A-Trons and Kool Herc’s Herculord Crew, and Dimples D became her north stars, and proof that hip-hop was a unisex sport.

Rapping found Doreen in the walls of her project building. One day in 1983, two neighborhood girls by the name of City Slim and Mo Ski were banging homemade beats onto the hallway walls. She joined in and was quickly invited to the group, and thus, The Playgirls were born, and Doreen was rechristened as Sparky D. The trio didn’t waste any time, quickly cutting their teeth in New York’s battle culture and clashing across boroughs with anybody that wanted the smoke.

At the time, Harlem rap superstar Kurtis Blow was in the midst of working on the Penitentiary III soundtrack, and reached out to fellow rapper/producer Duane “Spyder D” Hughes to help search for a female group to add to the soundtrack. Spyder put the word out and got put on to The Playgirls through a Brooklyn producer. The girls visited Spyder at Power Plays Studios in Long Island, where he was immediately struck by their talent. “I told the girls I wanted to sign them, and I wasn’t really sure what [Kurtis Blow] was doing, but I was not going to give Kurt these girls,” Spyder recalled to Unkut in 2013. “Kurt and I were friends, but we were rivals as well. Nobody had offered me any money for the soundtrack, so I signed the girls and brought them into the studio.”

That session made Spyder D The Playgirls’ producer, and was also the beginning of a romance. Sparky and City Slim had both slid Spyder their numbers, but it was Sparky he called, a choice he described as causing dissension amongst the group. That romance came with perks; at 18 Sparky became Spyder’s A&R, and by 1984 when The Playgirls began to fall apart, a stage was already set for Sparky to be a star.

New Year’s Eve of that year would prove to be one of the most consequential days of Sparky D’s life, and subsequently the history of hip-hop as an artform. At home, the newly coupled Sparky and Spyder were listening to Mr. Magic and Marley Marl spin on WBLS’ Rap Attack, when Magic premiered a new record right at the stroke of midnight. Blaring through the speakers was a squeaky but determined fourteen year old Queens girl by the name of Roxanne Shanté, spitting viciously over a Marley Marl beat on a song titled “Roxanne’s Revenge.” Shanté was aiming back at a Brooklyn Crew that included Sparky’s former classmate Shaun Fequiere, now known as Kangol Kid of UTFO.

He wears a Kangol, and that is cute
But he ain’t got money, and he ain’t got no loot
And every time that I see him, he’s always a-beggin’
And all the other girls that he’s always tryin’ to leggin’
Every time that I see him, he says a rhyme
But, compared to me, they’re weak compared to mine

“UTFO were our boys,” Spyder D recalled. “You gotta take her for their honor!”. The duo wrote a response record the next day, and on January 2nd, “Sparky’s Turn (Roxanne You’re Through)” went to tape. Spyder brought the first mix to Tony Humphries, a club DJ for KISS-FM who premiered it on his show that Friday night. The diss caused widespread commotion in the streets of New York, enough to catch the attention of TaharQa and Tunde Ra Aleem, a pair of twins that got their musical chops playing alongside Jimi Hendrix in the 60’s, and now ran NIA Records. They cut a deal with Spyder to remix the record, adding production flavor and the sub-hook that gave the song its sub-title: “Roxanne, you’re through!”

The remixed version was cut the following week, and by that Friday 10,000 copies were pressed to accommodate for the massive buzz brewing around the burgeoning Roxanne Wars. “Three days later,” as Sparky says, “I became gold.”

What followed was a Roxanne Industrial Complex of sorts. Shante retorted with a flurry of her own records, lobbing shots at Sparky, UTFO, a sea of Roxanne clones, and what had become a swarm of opportunistic emcees. By mid-1985, estimates of between thirty to a hundred answer records had flooded the market. Fictional versions of Roxanne’s parents, brothers, sisters, her doctor, and more all popped up in mythologized disses coming from every corner of New York and beyond, many from artists whose only contribution to music was their part in the battle. A majority of these tracks predicated less around Shante herself and more around an idea; after all, “Roxanne Roxanne” was never a real woman in the first place. DJ Red Alert and DJ Marley Marl had chosen their sides in the battle; Red Alert repping Sparky D on KISS-FM, and Marl repping Shante on rival station WBLS. The two DJs, already radiowave gods at that point, taunted each other on air, and fanned the flames that were igniting all over the city.

After a flurry of tracks, a fatigue began to set in around the city. By mid-1985, a group called The East Coast Crew put a de facto end to The Roxanne Wars with a ceasefire record titled “The Final Word - No More Roxanne (Please)” that essentially ended the beef dead in the water, at least on wax - A real, tangible friction still remained between Shante and Sparky.

The relationship between the rivals remained tumultuous, but human. Despite several verbal and physical altercations, Sparky and Shante went on tour to capitalize off the notoriety of their diss records, with precautions in place to ensure minimal friction. This culminated in an onstage battle in Raleigh-Durnham, North Carolina, hyped as a Frazier-vs-Ali-esque clash that had lines wrapped around the corner. The girls went head to head in an astonishing display of off-the-dome snapping, lyrical exercises, and brutal diss renditions. The show was so successful it spawned a collaborative EP, “Roxanne Shante vs Sparky Dee: Round 1,” that saw the two foes trading diss records in what became hip-hop’s first on wax battle compilation.

Things slowly mended between Roxanne and Sparky, and they eventually became lifelong friends. But Sparky’s battles weren’t done. Post-beef, she released a string of releases, most notably her sole studio album, 1988’s “This Is Sparky-D’s World,” released on B-Boy Records. Success was limited, and her life slowly began to unravel. Her relationship with Spyder D ended just a year later, and she soon fell victim to crack cocaine, an addiction she struggled with for nearly two decades. In 1998, she married a fellow addict in what became a horrifically abusive relationship that at one point left her with a head full of stitches. Lost, she turned to God in moments of hopelessness, praying for safety and protection from the enthralls of drugs. These prayers and restored faith led her to leave her husband and flee to Atlanta, where she was quickly reborn as an Apostolic Pentecostal and got clean from drugs.

In the 2000s, Sparky founded Treasure Ministries, a faith-based organization where she spread The Word and leaned into gospel rap. She kept a day job as an EMT/CNA, and in 2007, her sacred turn paid off with a Gospel Choice Award for her song “This Is For The Church.”

Since The Roxanne Wars, battles have become responsible for some of the biggest moments in hip-hop, and popular culture at large. They have propelled rappers into God emcees, and cast others into forgotten shadows (Where is Ja?). Not a day goes by on Twitter where I don’t see digital bullet fragments from 2024’s Kendrick Lamar and Drake battle. “Ether” has become a verb. The Roxanne Wars was the first recorded rap beef of it’s scale, and 40 years later, the impact of two teenage girls from New York still reverberates through our everyday culture.

Last month, Jay-Z performed a trio of sold-out shows at Yankee Stadium in celebration of the 30th and 25th anniversaries of Reasonable Doubt and The Blueprint, respectively. Of the litany of guest performers Jay brought out, perhaps most important was Nas; his once heated rival turned friend who joined him on night one for a medley of “Dead Presidents,” “The World Is Yours,” and “NY State Of Mind.” The first of those records is famously built around a sampled Nas vocal, one of the original timbers in their beef. As I watched the duo trade verses through a pixelated TikTok live, I couldn’t help but think of the parallels between Jay-Hova and God’s Son, and Sparky D and Roxanne Shante; two pairs of competitors in the longstanding Brooklyn vs Queens conflict, once engaged in verbal clashes of seismic proportions that forever shifted the culture of hip-hop.

Jay-Z’s trio of shows were about flowers, for himself but also for the slew of collaborators that helped propel him to heights few emcees could ever dream of. I think about the emcees, like Sparky D, whose legacy should also be a bouquet of accolades, remembrance, and the near-deification reserved for the lucky few able to achieve cultural ubiquity. Nas himself reflected this sentiment on his recent track “Bouquet (To The Ladies),” giving flowers to everyone from Doechii to Sparky D herself. Still, and not to the discredit of Nas, it never feels like quite enough. Sylvia Robinson pressed hip-hop’s first hit records, MC Sha-Rock built a template that every woman with a microphone after her drew from. The Sequence showed women’s strength in numbers, Princess Loko, Gangsta Boo, and La Chat proved Memphis had something to say. From hip-hop’s inception, women have contributed to the genre’s prototypes.

At Yankee Stadium and through blurry livestreams, millions worldwide joined hip-hop’s motherland in celebrating The Blueprint. I wonder when we’ll celebrate the blueprints that sparked it all.

Released in November 1992, “Nuthin’ But a ‘G’ Thang” became G-funk’s immediate and international sensation. But for as many people, places and things as it put on the world’s stage—Compton, Long Beach, Death Row, Dre, Snoop—there were also threads it left dangling. Who would’ve thought, when Snoop told us to chill ‘til the next episode, we’d have to almost all the way to a new millennium to get it. And even then, we’d be given something that traded whiny synths and deep bassline for something popper. Us G-funk diehards are still waiting for the original to be released from the vaults in CDQ.

Then there’s Snoop’s passing line (“Perfection is perfected, so I’ma let ‘em understand”), somehow a footnote in a song that is anything but. The line references a little-known Long Beach collective called Perfection that kicked off around 1986. Headlined by Filipino DJ Glaze, who enlisted some of his junior high and high school pals, Perfection started performing at L.A. haunts like The Roxy and Good Life Cafe, where Jurassic 5 and other legends got their start.

A collective about ten members strong, Perfection eventually brought in the most popular LBC rapper at the time, which in the late 1980s was not one Calvin Broadus but Shawn Antoine Ivy, aka Domino, best known for hits like “Sweet Potato Pie,” with thumping DJ Battlecat production. Glaze tells me that Domino eventually defected from Perfection, leaving a young Snoop to collaborate with the group on the diss track “Let Em Understand Perfection,” circa 1991: “This is the year for Perfection, my motherfuckin homies, to put their shit on the map and finally get their fucking snaps,” Snoop declares in the opening verse. A year later, he doubled down with that additional quip on “‘G’ Thang.” But besides a handful of other early ‘90s songs eventually released on The Lost Tapez (2004), that was the end of their artistic partnership.

“I didn’t know Snoop was gonna blow that big…. I don’t think anyone knew. If I knew that, I’d still be with Snoop,” Glaze tells me with a laugh.

Glaze describes those early days of West Coast hip-hop as an arms race. Raw talent like Snoop’s mattered for sure, but it was also about who was able to snag the latest MPC3000 and master it the fastest. And while Snoop and Warren could turn to Dre for mentorship and advice, Glaze laments that his own version of a mentor, KDAY L.A.’s longtime maestro, Tony G, didn’t emerge until ‘94.

By that time, Perfection had retooled as Foesum, made up of Glaze, MNMsta, and the late T-Dubb, who passed away in 2024. Thirty years ago, in fall 1996, they released their seminal album Perfection on Penalty Records/Tommy Boy, a G-funk classic whose original pressings still fetch hundreds of dollars on eBay. If you want to know how high Foesum were flying that year, start with “Listen to the Sound,“ a Kool and the Gang and Isley Brothers mash-up that ranks among the finest uses of synths in hip-hop history. Then move to the smooth and contemplative “In the Wind,” featuring crooner Bo-Roc from The Dove Shack'; round it out with “Ultimate Collaboration” and “Who Got Ya Back,” which show the more lyrical side of the group.

Foesum released several albums thereafter, always staying loyal to that original ‘90s sound that too many others left behind. That loyalty found its audience overseas, particularly in Asia and Europe. In 2025, some four decades after they began, Foesum released Two Thousand Twenty Foesum.

I connected with Glaze, where he spoke with me about the vibrant early days in the West Coast scene, what it meant to be a brown pioneer in hip-hop, the particular strain of G-funk Foesum developed, and how they leveraged eBay and Amazon to ride a second wave of popularity abroad long after the subgenre’s commercial peak.

I’d love to hear a little bit about the beginning. How did you get started in hip-hop in those early days?

I started DJing back in, what was it, like ‘86? I was in ninth grade. We had artists and stuff come to the school. We would pay a dollar or 75 cents to go check out this DJ. And so we would be there and everyone would be dancing, but I would just be watching the DJ and listening to the music.

There’s a group called Boo-Yaa T.R.I.B.E, a Samoan rap group that came to perform. And there were a lot of shows going on around town where we would see people like Mix Master Spade, N.W.A, and Eazy-E. So we used to see all these groups perform.

We were mainly DJs, and we only really played hip-hop, along with scratch music—“Planet Rock,” “It’s Time”—stuff like that. We were like KDAY [radio] fanatics and then that’s when we decided, you know what, we can make our own music.

We bought a Roland 808 drum machine in Hollywood or Universal City for like 500 bucks and we all pieced up to save for that. We asked around like, “Who’s the dopest rapper in Long Beach?” And at the time, everybody said it was Domino. So he came into our group and we treated him as kind of the main MC. T-Dubb was related to The Twinz and so they used to rap, too. And Snoop happened to be best friends with the Twinz, so that was kind of our relation with Snoop.

We performed at this place called The Good Life and at the time were messing with a producer named DJ Hardtop. He had some groups he was working with including Freestyle Fellowship, Volume 10, the dude who did “Pistol Grip Pump,” and also Unity Committee, which would end up being Jurassic Five. We released a compilation album and it had a lot of those guys and everyone eventually kind of went big to some extent. We actually got Snoop to perform with us at the Good Life, too.

Do you have any memories of the first time you met Snoop?

I met him one time at Poly High [Long Beach Polytechnic High School]. He was there freestyling and stuff. Then there was a time The Twinz brought him to my house to record, just to get him on tape. And at the time, I really didn’t even have anything great to record him on. So I just had him stand in my room and just freestyle on the microphone. My plan was that I would have him rap to an instrumental and then maybe try to put the beat together after the fact. The first time I had met him, I didn’t think that Snoop rapped all that great. I thought he was cool. He had some styles, some dope lyrics. And he did the singing type stuff.

“Lodi Dodi.”

Yeah, that kind of thing. At the time, he was using a lot of slang in Long Beach that we weren’t even familiar with. So he was creating his own style, basically. And we were kind of learning from him too.I still felt my group was better and that Domino was even more polished. This was like ‘89, 1990. There was another rapper coming out of Long Beach that came directly out of VIP Records. His name was Radio and his producer was DJ Slice. He, out of everybody, was amazing.

Remember, it wasn’t just about how good you were. It was also about what kind of record you could make, what was the quality like. Is it going to be a record that could compete and be on the radio? The dude Radio, he had a full studio, drum machines and all that. So I think they were further along. But that was back in 1990-91.

So take me back to that time. What was going on at that time when you recorded “Let Them Understand Perfection?”

So like I said, we were working with Domino. At the time, a lot of the New Jack Swing stuff was starting to come in with Teddy Riley. So I feel like Domino was trying to do more of that. His plan was that he would do his own thing and then come back for us. We weren’t really happy about that. It felt like he was leaving us. So that’s why we wrote that song. And then we had Snoop narrate that song for us.

The beat was from a Grover Washington song [“Knucklehead”], right? Then there’s King T’s record, [“Played Like a Piano.”] And so we had told him, can you flip this? Our producer, DJ Hardtop, was kind of an R&B guy. It was almost like going into a studio with someone who only does classical music. It was too clean, lots of reverb. That’s why, if you listen to that song, it sounds a little crazy, even though it’s dope.

What expectations did you have coming out with that song? Did you think it was going to maybe put you guys on the map?

Nah, not at all. I always knew we had good lyrics and that we were good rappers. But we had no idea how far we would go. Our goal was just to put out our record. I didn’t know Snoop was going to blow that big. I don’t think anyone knew that.

So Snoop kind of went his own way. He was already with Warren G. They started recording their demos, and then that’s how that whole story with Dr. Dre started. I think that eventually was always going to happen because of the relation with Warren. Not to take anything from Warren, Warren was dope. He kind of got a lot of insight from Dr. Dre as far as what to use and how to put stuff together. Unfortunately, we didn’t get that. I didn’t have a mentor like that until I eventually met Tony G who showed me how to use a drum machine. He showed me how to use the SP-1200. He showed me how to use a MPC3000. So that really came later, maybe ‘93 or ‘94.

So, fast forward a little bit to 1996 and Perfection. How did your first full record come about?

As soon as I learned how to use the drum machine, it was kind of on and poppin’. I used to go through records like crazy. I think at the time I had like 25 crates of records. And I would just dig in and find little pieces of samples and loops and break beats.

Then we were able to come up with our own sound and style. But we had a lot of influence from, of course Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, Warren G, and QDIII. Those are all the producers that I looked up to, and I love their music even till today. You know, all of that G-funk and West Coast hip-hop, that’s kind of what we wanted to be. We wanted to be known as one of the greats from the West Coast.

How do you think your particular G-funk sound is different than a Dre or a Warren G? Were there any particular kind of notes you were trying to hit with your own style?

So if you listen to our first album, we don’t stay in one lane. There are some groups where they’ll do a rough song, music that gives you an adrenaline rush like Xzibit or Tha Dogg Pound. But then there’s the mellow side of it, kind of like Bone Thugz. 2Pac, he does both. He can do a “Dear Mama” or a “Keep Ya Head Up” and then he can do a “Hit ‘Em Up,” just kill everybody. So that’s kind of what we are. I feel like we try to cover all bases because there’s different sides to us.

We don’t walk out of the house and act a certain way every day. But at the same time, it doesn’t mean you can just come up and disrespect and act like we won’t do anything. We grew up in the neighborhood just like everybody else. And that’s what our music is, it’s all the different aspects of just living in L.A. You can enjoy yourself and have fun, but at the same time you gotta be on the lookout, because you never know when something can pop off.

What about some of your guests featured? I’ve spoken to Nanci Fletcher several times for stories and we even met up in New York. I didn’t even know she was singing on “Whowouldofevathought.” And then of course there’s Bo-Roc.

It was funny, I had met her because I was DJing for Domino. We ended up touring and we did a few shows, BET and MTV. And she was a dancer, so that’s how I met her. And I didn’t know that she was like the one of the main singers for Dr. Dre. When I found out I was like, “oh man, this is crazy, like fate.” We had to use her because she sings so beautiful.

As far as Bo-Roc, T-Tubb had a really good relationship with Bo-Roc. And we knew The Dove Shack from being with Warren G and the Twinz. He sang on both albums. And the song he did on the Twinz’ Conversation, “Journey Wit Me.”

Yeah, man, that bass guitar is crazy.

To me, man, that is one of the dopest records ever. I know a lot of people love Nate and stuff but Bo-Roc has always had his own style. To me, it’s like a smoky cigar. When you sing, it just makes you feel like you’re in a little hideaway, a speakeasy or something.

I just wish that he got the props that he deserves because he’s such a great singer. That’s why we used him.

I totally agree. So one thing about you guys is that you’ve continued to put out music well beyond the height of the G-funk era. Why did you guys keep going with it, even once the huge spotlight had kind of moved on?

We’ve always been kind of self-contained and independent on our own. That’s the thing that kind of cursed us in the beginning, but also benefits us too because we’re not having to rely 100 percent on a particular producer, label, or artist. So we didn’t get blessed with people who could get us to that next level. But at the same time, we know the process of recording ourselves, putting a record out, putting an album out, learning how to promote it, doing our own merchandise, distributing it, getting it out to the internet and overseas.

One thing that was cool is that your music was so popular in Japan and Europe. I remember in college in the mid-2000s a lot of the stuff I got from you was from there. Can you talk a little bit about why it spread so far?

You have to remember that in those countries, all that music is considered an import to them. We would get hit up from Taiwan. We would get up from Poland. So they have to work a little harder to try to find it, to try to get it. And I feel like for those countries, it kind of puts us at a more even level with everybody else. It leaves it to the listener to determine what’s good and what’s not, rather than a radio station that’s programming you and saying, “this is dope.”

Can you talk a little bit about being a brown pioneer in West Coast hip-hop and sort of the legacy of that?

I mean, I never looked at it like that. Because where I grew up, it was pretty diverse. Mnmsta is Black and Mexican. We grew up with a lot of Latinos, Samoans, white people, and Asians. But it just so happened that my friends were Black. They introduced me to soul music, to R&B and it was life-changing for me. So the color thing was never really there. Because if you like the same music I like, we’re brothers already.

We had a Japanese dude on our street who also loved a lot of the funk stuff. So he introduced me to Zapp and Prince. T-Dubb and his brother introduced me to Morris Day and the Time, Rick James, Teena Marie, George Clinton.

We used to just be on our bikes in our neighborhood, and someone would have a radio, and we would be listening to all that old school music. So that kind of became the backdrop to what we did. We loved how that music sounded and how it made us feel. And so that’s kind of what we put in our music.

1. Drive 250 miles east from Rack City and you’ll come across a newly constructed data center. Were you to travel in the vicinity of this hulking industrial complex during July of 2026, you might have heard a faint hum emanating from these six acres’ worth of hastily constructed sheet metal. Past its barbed wires and amphetamine-hopped security detail, supercomupters hidden deep in the Nevada desert were working their ways through increasingly duplicative prompts: “Tyga+80s vibe,” “Tyga+throwback synth vibe,” “Tyga+Vice City singing,” “Tyga ballad synthwave,” “Tyga+Torey Lanez Alone at Prom+The Weeknd vibes.” Upon receiving its final prompt—“Make a Tyga album in the style of Fenix Flexin’s ‘RUBBERZ’”—the machine eased itself into a whisper, faced with the functionally effortless task of artificially generating a copy of an artificially generated song. The result, an LP called $TARFACE and attributed to the human hip-hop artist Tyga, might aptly be described as the most banal, cynical, and uninspired collection of recorded music I have ever heard, but to discuss this album in these terms would be to misuse the commonly held notion of the phrase “recorded music.” It would be more honest, then, to say that Tyga’s $TARFACE is the worst full-length artificial generation I have ever heard. $TARFACE contains across its ten overtly computer-generated songs neither a trace of humanity nor an interesting idea. It merits discussion only insofar as it poses the question of whether it will be the last full-length artificial generation I hear.
   

2. It’s a tale as old as time: with technological advancement comes fearful reaction. Luddites smashed industrial textile-processing machines, the radio threatened our literacy, and television rotted our brains until our phones turned us into slobbering cattle. One day the Lumière brothers are inventing tales of audiences stirred into a panic at the sight of an incoming train, and the next you’re competing against ticket-buying bots to see Travis Scott sing the story of a great warrior in IMAX. The unsexy answer, which typically happens to be the correct one, is that new technologies reshape their users and subjects in ways both to be harmful and helpful, though it is difficult in the moment to parse which is which. But then I’d be remiss to overlook Kubrick’s warning: The first thing that we do with new tools is use them to beat the shit out of each other.

3. It’s entirely possible that you, the reader, are unaware that Tyga has released a new album, much less that this album, $TARFACE, is meant to introduce a Miami Vice-inspired alter ego for the man who once boasted of having your grandmother on his dick. The only people who have heard, much less written a single word about this album are those who have been paid to do so; the only two things that distinguish me from the mercenary internet aggregator class as it relates to this release are that I will be paid not by Tyga’s label but by the readers of POW Magazine and that I will be paid the least of anyone who has listened to $TARFACE. Point being: You’re not supposed to know that $TARFACE exists. Or, at least: You’re not supposed to know that $TARFACE exists yet. $TARFACE was not generated with you, a human being, in mind. The first overtly A.I.-generated album attached to an ostensibly mainstream artist takes the data-dump approach to rap music in the era of streaming to its logical conclusion. If the current modus operandi of releasing music involves floating a bloated, incoherent record into the world, allowing invested early listeners to determine which, if any, tracks are worth pressing play on multiple times and prompting the perceptive streaming algorithms to foist those songs onto legions of more disinvested, passive audiences, then $TARFACE imagines a process through which the human work of early tastemaking is offshored to bot-run stream farms. You are not supposed to press play on $TARFACE. Rather, bots are supposed to stream songs from $TARFACE enough times for those one or two of those songs to reach escape velocity such that you begin hearing them on Instagram Reels, with your friends on a rented boat, at the gas station where you buy your vape and your overpriced, branded sparkling water. Such is the operative logic of artificial intelligence, which in the name of streamlining the human experience relies, above all else, on the narcoticizing effect of familiarity.
   

4. The history of recorded music is itself, definitionally, a history of technologies. The album, such as it is, derives its form from the physical limitations of a 12 inch vinyl; it is only through repeated practice and critical consensus that something as structurally arbitrary as a haiku comes to represent seriousness. Listening to guitar music meant hearing the recorded sounds of a band’s instruments roughly as they were played in a room until it meant hearing how the band’s instruments should have sounded as they were played in a room. Imagine, if you will, where we’d be without 808s. All of which is to say that artificial intelligence is a new technology that I, like many with whom I share a set of political beliefs, reflexively find odious, and yet I cannot with any confidence discount the possibility that musicians will use, or have already used, artificial intelligence as a tool with which to make genuinely valuable, moving music. But if artificial intelligence is compatible with musical flourishing, such compatibility is not evident throughout Tyga’s $TARFACE.
   

5. I’m old enough to remember when my favorite songs were by a man who, if the popular conversation was any indication, was singlehandedly destroying the musical tradition as we knew it. When you are a snot-nosed, sweaty kid dancing to “Kiss Kiss,” the question of whether or not T-Pain is an artist or a cynical opportunist is about as interesting to you as “Yellow Submarine.” Where autotune’s critics erred is in their thinking that this technology was being used to pass off bad singing as melodic when Pain and his hangers-on (Kanye West included) were in fact using vocal modulation to denaturalize their performance; that T-Pain has spent the better part of a decade on a stripped-back, chops-proving circuit speaks only to failures of the public imagination. And so, a postulate: the extent to which new technologies can contribute productively to the practice of recorded music is directly determined by the degree to which humans can dominate them. All of which begs the question of whether artificial intelligence could generate lyrics that attempted to rhyme “mansion” with “Wisconsin.”

6. As Alphonse Pierre writes in Pitchfork, A.I. is already inescapable in hip-hop; I feel comfortable hypothesizing that its reach transcends genre classifications. In so diagnosing, Pierre quotes an underground videographer who notes that A.I. usage is ubiquitous in backend work; for every music video in which a rapper briefly metamorphizes into Charlie Kirk, there are ten for which A.I. was used to streamline workflow and automate tedious tasks. For a listening public whose only identifiable recourse against the overnight A.I. revolution is to speculate whether or not a song or video “is A.I.,” this ubiquity poses an ontological dilemma. What makes music, well, A.I.?
   

7. I have heard artificial intelligence used interestingly in music exactly twice in my life. The first was part of the reclusive blog darling Jai Paul’s first, abortive foray into the public eye after his leaked 2013 record permanently mutated pop music’s genetics. In 2019, Paul shared a link to a collaboration he had undertaken with the artificial intelligence engine “Bronze” to generate an infinitely iterative remix of his single, “Jasmine.” With each play, the engine would rearrange the track’s stems to dream a unique, endless version of Paul’s sub-aquatic ballad. I recall losing entire afternoons to the pursuit of chasing the song’s perfect rendition; it was three years before OpenAI had released ChatGPT to the public, and the first word I thought of when I heard the letters “A.I.” was “practice.” The second was the night before Tyler, The Creator released his surprise, government-mandated dance album DON’T TAP THE GLASS. I clicked on a video that purported to be the record’s lead single and instead encountered 90 seconds of what was by now called “A.I. slop.” Imagine the guy from Sleep Token singing over a beat they use to announce the lineup for Ultra, but he’s just repeating the words “don’t tap the glass.” It was, as I’d learn the next morning, both catchier and more subversive than any song on the actual record.
   

8. I’ve realized, as I listen through $TARFACE against my better judgment, that I was hasty to write off its prospect as an interesting text. Across $TARFACE, an album that unintentionally recalls vaporwave’s ear for locating horrifying melancholy within nostalgia for the ostensibly saccharine hits of yesteryear, one hears a computer attempt to approximate humanity. You see, computers learn to sing much how they learn to write: from how we have done it in the past. On $TARFACE, a computer tries, such as it does, to approximate the emotions that have inspired great songwriting. But a song about, say, a person who has used the narrator as a tool, then abandoned said narrator when they no longer fit into their vision for a good life sounds differently when written by a human being. What I mean to say is that it is difficult to hear a computer sing “look at you now / check out the view now / everything is gone / now you’re alone,” as it does on “Tyga’s” “GAVE U RACKS,” without feeling the weight of inhabiting a world governed by machines trained on the emotions of scorned lovers.

9. At our current historical juncture, A.I. music can be identified in much the same way that the United States Supreme Court infamously defined obscene content: you know it when you hear it. There is, however, no reason to think that this will always be the case. Perhaps the most odious effect of platforms like Suno (aside, of course, from their theft from working musicians) is that they have created conditions under which we now encounter recorded music with paranoia. Until recently, A.I. music was presented as a novelty gimmick, from virtual popstars to A.I.-generated Drake songs. Such “music” recalled vape cloud tricks–tasteless, meant for men in unfathomably dirty living rooms, and ultimately harmless. I once rode in the backseat of an Uber as my driver played an A.I. rendering of Travis Scott’s UTOPIA. A.I. Travis Scott proclaimed that a woman just wanted his money and his dick, my driver harmonized in the background, and I realized, at 4:35am, that this man knew the words. But as the mode of disclosed, “type beat” fantasizing has given way to covert-yet-omnipresent artificially-generated music, A.I.-pessimistic listeners are increasingly asked to approach new music with suspicion. Take Fenix Flexin’s “RUBBERZ,” the dreadful crossover hit of the summer that imagines The Smiths fronted by Chet Holmgren. Across the countless debates of whether or not “RUBBERZ” is the work of humans or computers, partisans have pointed to both the track’s structure and lyrical delivery as smoking guns. A human, the argument goes, would not have made this decision. It’s the form of this argument, more than anything else, that illustrates the stymying effects of artificial intelligence on human creativity. All of my favorite music is the result of decisions that no human would have made up until that point. To concede idiosyncrasy is to concede the future.
   

10. But not just idiosyncrasy. Throughout his career, Tyga has exemplified a laziness so complete as to become transcendent. I have historically loved Tyga’s music precisely because of how little it asked of me. In a real sense, Tyga’s cynical $TARMAN gambit is meant to undermine the conditions within which another Tyga might come into being. It would be impossible, in 2026, to hear a rapper rhyme “she’s watching that Oxygen, I’m watching ESPN” as does Tyga on “Bedrock” without entertaining a suspicion that such a line were A.I.-generated. That, too, is a loss.
    

11. During his standup set, Rap World’s Jack Bensinger tells what has become my favorite joke of the year. As he discusses his membership in the San Diego Subwoofer Community Facebook group, he shares that the group’s banner photo has recently been changed to a “really cool graphic.” A member of the group comments asking whether the image is A.I., and the person who made the image responds “fuck yeah it is, let me know if you need anything!”
    

12. As A.I. models grow more sophisticated, A.I.-generated music will sound increasingly naturalistic. There is a version of the future that mirrors Flexin and Tyga’s low-effort gambits to serve as human salesmen for songs that neither they nor any human being ever wrote or performed. The more likely timeline, for my money, is the one of A.I. as ghostwriter-cum-producer, a technological coup that leaves only the world’s weed carriers safe. But even then, as now, there will be a tell: A.I. music can approximate much of what came before it, but it cannot sound new.

There’s a scene in Rosemary’s Baby where Minnie Castavet, one of the film’s villains, played by Ruth Gordon, sits on her bed while speaking on the phone. It’s a strange shot, taken from just beyond the doorframe, angled so that only Gordon’s back is visible. The moment radiates a muted but potent menace, suggesting all manner of unsettling notions lurking just out of view. When describing its effect, cinematographer William Fraker, initially skeptical of Roman Polanski’s insistence on framing the take this way, recalls how audiences would lean to the right in their seats, straining to see into the room and assuage their unease. But it doesn’t work; you can’t see beyond the door, leaving you with the nagging suspicion that some secrets may never be revealed.

Though he tells me he’s never seen the movie when I bring it up, Harlem rapper Errol Holden relates to the way Polanski and Fraker kept the threat of danger both peripheral and palpable. On “Visvim Vandal,” the first song on his 2025 breakout record, Mulberry Silk Road, Holden’s verse fades out before he finishes his thought. The tapering begins as he says, “Not one for provocation,” and the last audible line is “My voice…” If you strain, you can hear that he’s still rhyming, and you may be tempted to boost the volume to catch a few more words. It’s a quietly harrowing way to begin an album, hinting that no matter how brutal Errol’s writing is—earlier in the track, he calmly declares how he’ll “make your whole world wheelchair accessible” and mentions the ubiquity of spent vials in a Harlem playground—there’s always something we’ll never be able to access. It’s a trick he repeats throughout his intense and unflinching catalog, leading us further into his world, his torchlight making shadows dance in the corners.

His story is one of those music industry miracles that seem impossible these days. After a lifetime of hustling (“Even with police presence/My crack spot went unmolested,” he raps on “Sister Pamela”), he up and quit one day, opting instead to dedicate his life to music in his late 30s. He’d been writing raps since childhood and recording throughout his adulthood, though mostly as a hobbyist, penning songs for passion instead of survival. “I would only go to the studio a few times a month,” he recalls. “I would write some sort of music every day, but it wasn’t at the forefront of my existence at the time.” Just after he left the streets for good, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, offering an opportunity amidst tragedy. Holden scraped together the funds for studio sessions here and there, tracking as many songs as he could with each visit. Eventually, he had enough to compile an album, which he sent to a select few through Instagram DMs. As word of mouth grew and his bank account steadied itself, Holden connected with talent manager Mike Heron, who introduced him to a world of industry connections. In only a few short years, he’d gone from social media inboxes to deals with Mass Appeal and Roc Nation.

Holden burst onto the greater rap landscape in 2022 with Joe Frog, his fifth proper album but first available on streaming services. It was an incredibly accomplished debut that felt like being sideswiped by a truck, with Holden reporting from corners and alleyways, holding direct, unblinking eye contact while always scanning the periphery for any perceived threat. Joe Frog marked the beginning of a highly visible period of prolificacy, with Holden releasing multiple albums, EPs, and singles each year, all marked with spacious and skin-crawling production. His song “180 Schoolyard,” a striking, diaristic origin story, caught the ear of the late Ka, who played it for Long Island mafioso rap maestro Roc Marciano, who then reached out to Holden. Marci executive-produced Mulberry Silk Road and featured Holden—the only guest—on his excellent 2026 album 656.

When I caught up with him in June, Holden, now in his mid-forties, spoke about his life with a mixture of square-shouldered confidence and wide-eyed gratitude. The vinyl pressing of Mulberry sold out within minutes, shortly after the May release of Supreme Magnetic 2, another captivating, effortlessly listenable addition to his pantheon of trippy, diamond-edged, bullet-sweating missives. He’s quick to explain that the depth of his archive means there will be no shortage of forthcoming work, as there is a lifetime of stories to tell.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What was the catalyst to quit the streets to pursue music full-time?

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You’re supposed to understand that something bad is about to happen. The cover of Ridin’ Dirty, UGK’s third, breathtakingly expert album, shows Bun B and Pimp C peering over their shoulders from the front seat of a Suburban. The camera’s point of view is meant to be that of a would-be carjacker, and the danger runs in both directions: for two rap stars whose success had made them a target in their hometown, and for the small-time crook who’s about to realize he’s in way over his head.

And in truth, the album is about the danger that lurks at stoplights and on the fringes of dice games. At times, Bun B and Pimp C, who were 22 as Ridin’ Dirty was written and recorded, are defiant or confrontational in response to these threats: untouchable in their slabs, armed like the French Foreign Legion. But their writing deploys violence as something both knottier and more diffuse than a plot engine or the architecture for parables. It’s the air they breathe; it also has tremendous, irreversible consequences.

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