Blu’s not afraid of repeating himself. Just over two years after dropping the lean and kinetic Los Angeles, a full-length collaboration with Evidence, the veteran rapper returns with LA, which pairs him with the Oakland producer Sndtrak. “When me and Ev finished making Los Angeles, I felt like I had more to say about the city,” Blu tells me the day before LA’s release. Where the former explores more metallic, industrial sounds—and where other Blu records have filtered the city through abstracted histories of its gang politics or embodiments of its physical and psychological violence—this latest effort was conceived as bright but technically demanding inversion of classic Angeleno house party sounds. That idea produces here an album that’s broadly accessible but still virtuosic; see the ingenious rhythms he uses to approach the [no sample snitching] flip on “Welcome.”
This notion, that repeated examination can yield surprising and divergent results, guided Blu on the micro level as well. “I tried to write the same verse over and over, but in a different way every time,” he explains. “If you listen to the album, there’s, say, 20 verses. If I do 20 verses, probably ten of them end with the word ‘L.A.’”
To mark the occasion, we had Blu—who grew up all around L.A. County and is one of its most enthusiastic hip-hop historians—select his ten favorite L.A. rap albums. Below, in his own words, are his picks.
