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404fmdhaon · 4 years ago

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creative claims verification — superstar

summary: lyrical, composition & production claims for superstar warnings: none wc: 1880

when he steps into the studio inside bc — it feels like he’s in a state of limbo. nobody tells him frequency doesn’t relay to assimilation, and bc no longer feels like a home (despite how many hours he’s invested into the damn building). fuck it, he thinks. home is a piece where his body lays, imprints itself against the sofa and the chair. how his fingers rub the print raw of the keyboard, and how the grease of late-night eats come to smear against the mouse.

and if he’s had to guess the time he’s spent — it’s countless. an unlimited amount of hours ranging from the -ings of working on songs never released. yet, the cacophony brings resolve when nothing else speaks and jarred notes become a safe haven of comfort when he’s left alone in late hour spouts.

when his body shoves past the doors, head down and shoulders curved, he’s met with nothing more than the hellos of an empty room. the lights flicker on, and the computer monitor untouched. his personal space, pristine from the night before by the way the piles of clothes topple upon the corner of the room (laundry, he’ll do eventually), and the barren toothbrush sitting in the pocket of his desk (he’ll use it later tonight).

it comes piece by piece by the time he sits himself on the desk, fingers pressing the button on for the monitor to come to light. he’ll use ableton today in lieu of what logic gives when the groan of his voice becomes reminiscent of nothing more than a heavy sigh of another recording.

make this album a good one, it’s your only time.

another heavy sigh, and he wonders what it’s like to press rewind. not fast-forward nor the resume of the tides of life. it’s the full-on riptide, and he’s left lost at sea where the tempest storms drown him whole. perhaps then, life would be kinder — but that sort of wishful thinking’s left for when his hands already click away to a barren file and the other’s pounding away on a keyboard with no thought in mind.

call it an effect that comes off the tails of weeks on end finishing up a song. the drawl in his voice, the deep baritone husk enough to give proof he’s irrational at best. built up motivation plucked by inspiration from the track done prior — he tries it again. gives it another go, something similar but blandly different.

it all starts with the staccatos of a piano, the way they toss and jump illuminating the grin he has all goofy and lop-sided across his face (an effect of no sleep? or an effect of music itself? he couldn’t tell you.) the cacophony of the chords bring him back to the elementary days of picking up music the first time, his eyes crinkling the way they curve higher — still, to the third person view, it livens up to something somber.

the way the chords play a childhood book, and it’s a mere cry for help out in the open of an empty studio. he wonders how he can transpose it as the salve for the wounds gaping open — the harrowing feeling of loneliness now ripping stitch by stitch. and his only remedy? making the track flair with each and every embellishment of high-tone happiness, mimicking a circus imagery he crafts in his head. with the horns brought back, and the low-end percussion that adds with the ad-libs of snapping fingers. {it’s here he decides, the grand piano won’t do. he wants an electric key, borderline organ playing).

he saves it as a file — help.wav.

but there’s no one to reach out, when he puts his hand forth. nobody to shuttle his woes in the gentle pats, swaying back — fuck. when was he ever in the seat of consolation paired with desperation? there’s a heavy sigh that escapes his mouth, when he runs back to the pen and paper. the eye of the beholder, and he positions himself in the role of the talker. weaponry in a stagnant pen and paper becoming the sole therapist to house his woes.

no talk back, no judgements. the pen and paper listen when he forces the unease ripping away from his chest, and for a second — he thinks he can breathe. feels his lungs cuff up with air. surprise, he doesn’t pant. doesn’t get startled. doesn’t slip out of his skin when he thinks of the first word that comes to his mind — superstar.

the public paints knight as superstars, shining bright as the nation’s pick sitting pretty for the variable amount of years. (nobody ever tells you how lonely the top is. not when you’re surrounded by the bodies that become the walls to echo the voice you barely manage to sneak out when time calls). he writes down the things the public perception follows — a big house, a super car, money. honor. the limelight blinding his eyes to where it leaves him untouchable, ha. funny and incredulous, he doesn’t buy into it.

self-made, he taunts it further by the time he closes his eyes and pictures his own house they gawk at. the art curated in expensive taste, the aid of his managers and the bodies that never frequent it. seoul forest becoming his own little garden and now, the song shifts in subject when it becomes a boast of his own hard earning works.

it’s all money made from the years in knight. all the money funneled into the art that transforms his house into a galleria, and the richard mille watch that sits on his wrist. he laughs at how the ten year old learning the same chords would’ve billowed with stomach-hugging laughter at the sight of twenty-seven year old him living large, sitting on top. becoming the people on tv rather than the side shuffle of his father’s shadow.

(he writes all of this down. again and again. each one engraving its mark deep into the persona he’s been filled to become).

rap, hip hop. it all falls short when the stereotypes formulate the standard opinion: bad boys boasting about money. it’s a hopeless stereotype when he’s always five steps short of becoming whatever he’d imagine himself to be.

it’s pointless to keep up a lie. so, he tells the truth. writes down the sadness that plagues him, and the melancholy that clings when he’s sitting alone in the studio — a part of his heart empty, far stretched away to where material goods do harm than good.

he asks for help.

“i need somebody.”

the words feel uplifting, freeing by the time they meet the empty air. all tongue-tied and flustered, it’s the heat that rises again to flush out his cheeks. he writes it over and over, calls out for the help he won’t be met with tonight.

loneliness always a full-time burden.

and when another day brings freedom with recordings out of the way, no worry for knight behind the end of his i don’t give a fuck attitude, he ceases his comfort. comes to his own apartment, sitting down in the studio where the hard drive opens back to the state of disorder.

for that, he gives himself the benefit of the doubt — the feelings of home and comfort when he’s lounged out in a pair of sweats and the hoodie that wafts home. five pm, the leftovers in the fridge from the night before (he’ll eat that later, two am he bets.)

shit always go south, and by the time his phone rings and it’s another manager with another call — it’s the expectations coming to fill their predecessor: an early morning schedule the next day. gyujeong tosses the phone over his back — an aim straight to the sofa sitting pretty behind him, and he groans heavily back into the pillow that’s heard the brunt of his woes.

he wants to forget about it all. forget about it even if it’s just for a brief moment, and this all becomes some fucked up reverie he’s lost in. five minutes of solace, and he’ll take it for the hours of wary shoulders tossing and turning at night. (he remembers how to forget, plugs in his hard drive and pulls up help.wav).

the track plays with the recording he managed to finish the night — the effects of an all-nighter, and therapy in momentary bliss. he laughs, a pointed look tapered towards the empty screen as the demo takes over the silence. repeat, listen again. do it five more times, and he yanks away the beanie as his spine curves over the desk with fingers brushing past his lips. he knows what he sees. what he wants to salvage inside moments of sheer desperation where it’s the music that speaks louder than the voice that’s dwindled down in the past few years.

no punches tonight, just the clicks that compose the song into frame. his voice sounds breathy when it plays, he picks that up on the second verse, easily.

it’s bound to be a long night when he’s busy tuning his voice into something polished, less breathy. less gritty and rough when he wants the lyrics to speak to the masses that won’t read between the lines. it’s a reckoning all while a shame that he lays passive, using the music to speak on his behalf where his voice won’t raise higher.

and by the time his head bobs, and it sounds more coherent. smoother, and flexible with the flow of his original intentions, there’s something that still lacks: desperation. there’s no urge to pull the spotlight back onto him, just the five seconds of a voice in hopes someone reaches their hands out — all warm and soft against the cracked dryness of his own.

empathy, everyone says when you lack it, you’ll figure out the gaping void (they were right).

right inside each and every notion, and he bends over silently with his eyes on his screen and fingers edging to his temple, scratching then tapping. impatience flows back in when he files through the corner of his desk for a dusty mic that adds the hint to what he’s wanting: ad-libs.

it’s in the chorus where he wants to shout — call out for help. from anyone, for anyone. i need somebody becomes repeated, followed through when ‘anyone’ falls in his own voice in a multitude of different ways. soft, then harsh. loud and boisterous, passive and meek. what leaves the screen is nothing more than fifteen different ways for “anybody.” and “hello?”

he picks his favorite ones, the ones that breed desperation in the subtle movement of his voice. index finger and thumb against his chin, he taps patiently against the sides when satisfaction comes from a full picture. whole and somber with how the playback comes: belts of the music inside cheery chords, the addition of the horns then trumpets. fine-tuned by the base — then, it’s the lyrics that become the second hit, the punch that any sixth sense can pick up. hollowed out loneliness, and it’s a cry for help no longer seizing greatness nor the confines of things he’s collected over the years.

#fmdverification

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itslaeshorseeh · 5 years ago

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To Condorcet

They were all turning left, the cars oncoming While they in seats were listening to their tunes. The engine sound, amongst the turtles, humming, Was loudly in their ears, this day of June’s, Which all combined, were coming down to summing Up for a good one for the gnomic Runes, Which mark their hearts and mind with calendars, Of best and better of those gallant hours. Where the Columbian River flows and cuts, Gem Of the Mountains, Idaho’s Basalt Formations, their ambitious earth abuts; The light that had been strongly cast, a fault Would find for one thin ray, and then it puts Itself out; day’s revolving, too, must halt. Well-wearied travelers their speed did check, As might befit in darkest hours, one’s neck. Of all the things that haunt men with a passion, The blind discovery like of what was gemmed, Compares with that which later keeps its fashion— They sensed, that out of vastness, from there stemmed, The answer self-sufficient laying at Ashton For which they long, and flee from what condemned. They sought out sights and towns that they found rustic, On roadways leading to the russet dust, slick.

For now the cars could be seen in three miles In each direction, when their eyes were dry From lack of sleep where roads to one point files; And straight away the thoroughfare did ply One to reach the end; Auriga’s light brought smiles, Being behind, the light still did not die, But like they bore celestial wings, gave wind, So they could reach Snake River Plain, their Ind. With all these Rocky and Cascade Range Mountains, The din of suburb or the city stifles; What one could call a rat-race is all’s fountains, Give or take, gardens ripe with green and trifles; There is so much that paying eyes’ account wins, Especially what one sees changing by the eyefuls-- The patches grown, and the games over, women Who their expenses gained had as glum win.

They pared their hours with solid witticisms, Such as, that without water, by it new ones, In the form of shadows, water pipes find schisms And of the name take on just pipes; that show runs Not being trapped, to source the water’s prisms, And being caught, would percolate for due fun’s. To bathrooms, would these runs belong; digestion Is how it should end, any solid question.

But those who have the props fill up and clean, And ‘mong the qualities of bare things, it takes on A clean look when a thing of craft would lean, And glide there on as crafts on seas wake ‘pon, To show of Memory that they are Dean. Until the moment when rents come, the air makes gone A rosy hue, which all life girds, from sky To sea, and turmoil round with peace both dye. But beauty being one, a serum’s fast: Their food they found like Cream of Mushroom: Campbell’s; And flattened what had contents made to last. They found the curiosity that ambles, Which they saw as the countryside’s late past, And hoped the stray spark would not light up brambles, When off their touchstone they then ventured answer, That magic made Astolfo a good lancer. Beside the road they could imagine spears: Since strength was much in favor in a saddle Which gave a view and a good segue steers. Besides that was the rune’s puissance in battle, Which made with it, endured itself thro’ fears. These weapons thus inspire Perfection’s prattle, For which gleamed bronze-age gold, and now some truth: From Polydorus to Astolfo, myrtle’s ruth. Friendships that secret counsels lack are like, One’s instant bowl of noodles without heat, Or, chains that fall again off of one’s bike, Or, oranges that are not a seedless treat, Or, even worse, a starry student’s spike Who does not have the chops to be elite: The friends who keep each other at their word, Are like two wings of an ideal bird. At Vantage on, they talked of old loves, still hurt. They mentioned names that their hard memories tumbled, Such as Charissa who they knew a chill flirt, For whom the boys like bumble bees oft stumbled. This peaked when young, like time made Curtis Gilbert, Until suburban Exodus all humbled; Which they attempted now as in a race, To take the Void on as it took plan’s place. It happened when one least expected to, Which was the facet skies cut out for those, Large clearings that had lake reflections blue, And if one e’er came back the status quo’s, To Cherry Trees that gave Quad sections hue, The quad profuse with cherry blossom shows, If not these, then, a call for a visitor For leaving out the Grand Inquisitor.

Tsunamis pummeled Hamadōri’s Sendai When the Okhotsk plate slipped, in Fukushima— It was a cup of coffee grounds to blend dry. Pacific plates went under Iwo Jima— They went around what was the river bend high— And under the Vaughn Hubbard Bridge there gleamed a Nice spot where stopped Snake River’s affluent; Then, gone went particles with sediment. If wandering, one just needs to search life back, The point? Not the Republic, Plato’s love, I’ll save myself more wondering by a knack, It may have been the bee’s be-morse, where of The little dots they find their language’s track— Fourteen, for me has always been the grove Plus Ultra: things that God once put by stream All healed together, Raphael would dream.

What stopped our predecessors from their ruling, Must have been lack of speaking back to meter, I called upon the Fates, no-one am fooling, As from a mold, the die cast as repeater, Then always blessed by seven! ‘Tis a cruel thing, Thirteenth twin legions' lions! But O! how sweeter, ‘Tis that step over stream, that’s ne'er as neat, The Rubicon I crossed, with oaths to meet.

One stream doth separate the perfect, dusting Eternal gold, that sacred second seven! A chasm I would venture where it must sing, Aeolian harps that play, are here in heaven, How long will play our visions we are trusting? The scroll lights up and some power transferred—leaven, Since what makes these events occur is fourteen, Like Juno’s nurses, hiding what have more seen—

The thing most often missing in equation, May be the units, fourteen passed three-fifths, That's one percent of one percent's, but weighs in: Thirty-nine fiftieths by thousandths: myths That greenwood was, the coals to feet a basin. A hero sees the world by breadths and widths. Imagine, what we leave to actuaries, Being caught in their likelihoods, like faeries. Like those who heard foretold, the thirty sucklings, By backwards alpha and omega dubbed; As Saturn men gave sickles, and showed time luck brings, This New Age would have perfect crossbows flubbed, And all have wandered in the sea like ducklings, If not I with black bile spelled in, or rubbed— My luck began the same way it had ended, With just a spin-the-wheel, which just my friend did.

If Time was given Saturn’s name, and Light Named Janus, weep the Reaper, Flee the Source! More often not, Perfection will not fight With half as much this truth as its resource; But as Decay of the Omega’s quite A problem when, it seems the fire grows hoarse, More increase I am obligated muse, I’ll pay back Death two silver, Time its news. The Rower might as well be down the Charles’, At least from River Side, since that is far Away closed-off, a well that truth lets borrow this; The Rower’s coxswain is a self-same star, As all the seven; England lends to war, earls, ‘tis These apothegms like those not found to jar. The Rower a good coxswain was, for led It then the self-same spirit paths to tread. This Two-faced Janus served their Dionysus. They paths had crossed beneath the starry Cetus, By Touchet on the road, then Lowden’s crisis, Namely, the savages the French made weet fuss, A slaughterhouse, amid their guns’ devices; T’ was four days fighting, signed a treaty sheet was; These plains’ hills roll, pass by around French Corner, Grande Ronde had formed Blue Mountains which adorn her.

From the Snake River flowed Grande Ronde, to there, Where Mill Creek from the Willow Creek with Shaw creek, Formed many others, Summerville to share, And from these, Hacker Creek with Coon Creek, all meek In various forms: My Muse departs from air, And seems to use a logic that I seek; Frenchmen’s Springs Member flowed from Pendleton, And retched from earth, once ruined gentle din.

La Grande they passed, named by a Settler's mind, His name was Charles Dause; Like him, Payette, Fur-trappers were, and make towns sound refined, The front and end of their day's trail may fit, Around the tale of Baker City's find, The senator that found the mess, they hit. The boats were not enough to cross Potomac; He gave his life, for which the town's a throwback. They passed the ghost-town which had tuff from flows, The open spaces being found past hills, They went where tuff-stone quarries long repose. Volcanic rock which porous in Italian bills As tufo, which consolidated, froze, Its fineness prized, was reached by use of drills. At Weatherby, Express Ranch, between Lakes Paddock north, Lowell lower, housed some drakes. And here I take the course, themes to attend,— If stars hold what we call the storied fates, Then O’! My Muse her song her voice will bend, A lyric song that all depreciates, And still lives on, a token worn on end. To prove a point, I ‘liven rabbles’ prates; This next one they will say is a heart-breaker, The left hand Zeus holds thunder, the earth-quaker. If systems hold the processes for casts, The moral is not difficult to catch; Since fixtures in the skies eke out repasts, Still, man has in this age, no plan to hatch, But thinking opportunity still lasts For his best goals, and growing a new patch. I may say more and spin clichés retold, Where boldly gained are fortunes, hopes enfold. An octopus was secret nightmare, sealed— Sir Marinell had Ocean rear up gold, Whom shores of Cyclades had dropped a shield, Like Jove his dimmed escutcheon extolled, And by the prophecy no woman’s field Is, I was given it by all, and I foretold— There I had seen, in seven of their mix, One thing I called six hundred-sixty-six.

The rat-race and its fountains these were not; The valley pass beneath the town of Lost Blue Bucket held the tale of gold not sought, Then, Malheur from across He-Devil tossed. The hills as big as canyons here have got, Changed colors with the season, as with frost. The one regret some have when they are twenty, They finished college--Caldwell had their plenty. The foothills green, were dotted, Basin Big Sagebrush and Curleaf Mountain Mahogany, The foothills north of Boise, lit a sprig, Which they saw in the Sagebrush-covered lea. They raced their way through like the Topgear Stig, Inside their shared Landrover, had to be By Mountain Home when Rocky Bar was haunted, Then passing Cleft, the country curved as wanted.

The mountains being footing for a Hermes, Had snow untouched that nothing would remove, Until they showed his passing on their firm freeze, When snow-caps, bent, contained a watery groove. The foothills having snowmelt were one term, keys, And locked until the spring, which it made move. Once past a field of wheat, the path had taken Scene-hunting to where inclines needed break-in. The road’s Chalk Cut, they ham went through what’s Hammett, Glen’s Faery King Hight Hill-Bliss said, “Tuttle! A boon abounds abroad, big is its gamut. Reach for the Craters of the Moon by shuttle, Where there are dreams deferred there where they cram, bit By bit, the landscape with their dart-ends’ cuttle. The two accepted, filed ‘ere bad behavior, And Hagerman and Buhl passed by, depths wavier.

King Hill-Bliss’ remark they saw as artful: Since faeries feast on fresh-squeezed honey, famine Was felt by tiny peoples what by part, full Ravages so that they have less to cram in, Less honey milk on honey cakes’ dessert bowl, Which for a boon, these heroes sought the shaman, A shady friend who in his hut was suited Beyond Shoshone Falls, and not secluded. The Shaman lived in Murlaugh, on a strand. From Tuttle did the two then go to parley, The two had plans involving talks that spanned A windy plain of wild growth: groats from barley Owned by King Hill-Bliss, left by sprites of sand From Morpheus, were made to rot and gnarly. To fend off ergot, they learned fungicides Were not the answer, but to find fey guides. Scale insects they collected for their Faerie’s mana, Their sweet saps in glass jars secured, was filled, Once hands that grasped like hands to strip some fauna, Of course, a looser grip would bugs make chilled. Accretionary shapes smelled like banana, Plus like a mashed-up serving of it milled, When on the circular rim, sap fell clumped, All thanks to Sage advice, built up what’s dumped.

The honeydew filled up, like cotton white, And the scale insects seemed disturbed, and shaken; It may have been the sunlight’s cause, the light In ultraviolet spectrums that they bake-in, But Western Pines have shade, which anchored tight. From Tuttle then to Burley, pains to slaken, Just as the Murlaugh Seer said, wild food Was gathered off of trees where bugs had poo’d. The honeydew was to their tastes, a sweet. The faeries there restored what was of blight That made the rye fields like-smells secrete To cleanliness from honeydew-fed might, And, then, the sickly parts cast off the wheat Made fungi lesser seen, though once spread quite. Though question one might how the faeries, fed, Had this new problem from a source that spread? The fight had always raged, beneath our noses, When bees went home and hives retched up and built, ‘Twas with the stolen honey that one goes less For when the arbors closed their lives, ungilt. They had much better food, from nuts than roses, And being taught in magic, made pans tilt, Without them having ever left their verdure; But they were summoned by the sound of merger. The mason stamp was honey-bear-like contoured, And with a customary twist, and toss, Of which friends heard a clatter, it then sauntered Before it came down after rolling moss. So leaving food, they made like Limbert onward; It was enough, because as gloss, the sauce, To faeries seemed like stacks, and tribes as tall, And Burley was thus saved, and plumped were all. Cotterel was seen passed in distance: older And held up kettles, while Acequia held, Its tributaries, and with tears to shoulder Stood Minidoka, where its fountains swelled. Raft River taken, showed Snake River’s holder: American Falls Neeley guarded, belled By nearby Bannock ‘round the corner, bubbling Across of highway eighty six, guts doubling. A ship could have a crew with names the likes Of which the towns had: Chubbuck, Gibson, Blackfoot, And just because the way they saw it strikes Truer this way, the Indians in tracksuit, Wapello even here, past Gibson hikes Up to the shore of Firth, by Shelley’s jackboot. From Pocatello anabasis stretched, North, where in Ammon they passed plains far-fetched.

Aquila shines the Altair: Idaho Falls was where carriers shined like boyhood that Laomedeians raised to fame, did. Though Hebe was soon replaced, whose pants went splat, The Trojan Prince would goblets tend, that glow. The Mount Olympus destination that The golden eagle carried him to, twin- Peaked, seconds better, not like “lettuce-win”.

Now finally they came and found potatoes: In silos they like kernels reached the tops, And filled with earthy bodies at the Date’s close, Where they would be shipped off to all these stops, From Rexburg which a Morman’s name its fate owes. Fall River split off Henry's Fork, and drops At Ashton; land like Atargatis eastern. The two Three Tetons gave names which the beasts earn.

Three mountains, they were Ashur, Cadwalladr, And Maruduk, the Grand, South, and the Middle Tetons. The winged sun, battle leader sure, And Bull Calf. Instrumental to acquittal, The weapon Maruduk used in the war, Imhullu countered Tiamat’s sprayed spittle By wind of four, so arrows wind of seven Had decompressed, then Kingu caused skulls riven. Like Cetus are most sea-beasts. Take Poseidon, Who sent for sacrifice, Troyano’s fairest. Then Laomedon, Cetus quelling, tied on The cliff his daughter Hesion, when he darest, And kept his horses, not his word, when fight gone. For his last scion, Priam’s goods were rarest, Kept close in Polydorus’ hands thrusted, Until the greedy Thracians proved mistrusted. The Cliffs at Henry’s Lake not far from Ashton, Had springs by Naiads blessed, and trumpeter Swans there inhabited, the avian lashed in The arms of Leda, Queen of Sparta, her, For Zeus unlike Semele who he mashed-thin, Swan Valley tucked like Crete, a swan’s form pure, That not unlike Pleiades guided feeding, And so was Helen got by unplanned breeding. The rainbow trout caught there at mountain footsteps, Were pass-times even when the Milky Way Displayed its naval in the autumn, loot depths That only twenty feet hid by the bay, Which the Black Mountains showed in strokes by mute reps Of ripples at the borders’ interplay. The nation here went where, as if Great Plains Were like the edges of a world space drains. At Old Ranch Steakhouse were the patrons, Melson, Who was just shy of twenty, and his sage Father who was at graduation, belts in A suit and tie, asking why a steak would gauge Better cooked well-done, to the taste buds—melts in The mouth less if it is not kept off fire’s rage; The cooking not as important in the steak’s life, As blood and sauce that gleam around their lake’s knife. The diner’s wooden handrail mostly gleaming, Drew on new patrons under lanterns minds had, The waiters basked in screens, and kitchens steaming, The décor featured pioneers of kinds bad, The clattering in the kitchen that made more absent seeming, The hanging LED screens that new finds had, Of advertisements, opportunities, In flux, of mattress sales, or Moon trip’s fees. The polos on the waiters had full contrast: The intermittent light between shrubs, The age displayed, one a dimension fast, Where vehicles could make tremendous subs, Artificial intelligence unclassed. The question why we live, to have like Tubbs, The sight was clear, though far away, and hilly, And there were sales to make, by land made still free. For Papa had for just the traveler Three years before, bought him an old manual land Automobile, that from the grounds made gravel stir, With foot-wide tyres. With it had Melson planned For every place to host artistic blur, This owing to time which passes quickly, grand, As well as to traditional senses found, In taking stock poetically of ground. They paid the waiter, passed beneath the corn sheaves, Which covered door jambs, before they departed, From one another, so this had left the torn sleeves Of Modern Liberty of limbs full-hearted, The light it bore which being smoothly as morn leaves, Which made the niche bear out perfection charted; For youth was wasted if you never grew up, And Melson thought he must, for plans he drew up.

The Heritage High roof, a spacious car, Reliable though at the cost ‘tis said, That owners of this car date less by far; Was for cross-country travel, which time bred Exclusively for trips shown popular By travel agents that hid in the head, Of artists and survivalists, as one, Must suffer for their art: times pleasure shun. Art was a job collectivizing surveys, And like the minnow on a crocodile Had made the task of cleaning points, but verve pays To the fresh-forming bubble: where folks stayed a while, Not for too long, since the attractions serve days, Their share of their due fun, paid back each mile That had required their time, first sights ignored: Like when bald eagles knew from eyes that soared.

So Nature needs a spirit to take Notice. If things are seen apart, they take disguises, So are like newer revelation made to focus, So are the sites attracting crowds whose sizes, Are thinner like Odysseus’ fed Lotus- Who back home sent were, but new Trojan prizes, Were left a means of a recovery Pushed for when Melson sought discovery.

Since art is like an inspiration solid, Not being abstract, it refit its owner, Though more than complimentary, all Id, Especially these days the algorithms’ tones, sure, Make simple pages less like where a shawl slid, Less like where sunlight on floors were plants’ honer, Than an artistic muse, like landscape blogging Which was, in general, the calling for his hogging.

#pacific northwest #short poem #poems on tumblr #ottava rima #contemporarypoetrytradition

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thesinglesjukebox · 6 years ago

Video

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LIL NAS X - OLD TOWN ROAD

[6.73]

We're gonna bluuuurb til we can't no more...

Katie Gill: The problem with "Old Town Road" is that it's more interesting as a thinkpiece than an actual song. The song charting, then being excluded, from the Billboard Country Music charts opens so many questions that can't be answered in one sitting. Is this a further example of the well-documented racism in country music? Or is this just a freak accident hick-hop song that vaulted it's way out of the depths of subgenre hell? Is a twangy voice and references to horses enough to make a song "country"? Does the presence of Billy Ray Cyrus in a remix that dropped on Friday legitimize the song's credentials or just make them worse? Where was all this controversy when "Meant To Be," an honest-to-god pop song, was holding steady on the charts? There are so many questions and so many points of conversation that spring out from this song, that it's a pity "Old Town Road" itself is just okay. Everything about it screams "filler track for the SoundCloud page," from the length to the trap beats to the aggressively mediocre lyrics. The song didn't even chart on it's own merits: it charted because it's used in a TikTok meme! This is like if "We Are Number One" or "No Mercy" made their way to the top of the iTunes charts and people decided to have a conversation about the limits of genre based on those charting. I'm a little annoyed, because the conversation around "Old Town Road" is something that country music should be having... but just not around "Old Town Road." [5]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: There are essays upon essays to be written about "Old Town Road" as a prism for the racial divides that have served as undergirding for the modern American genre system since the 1930s division between "hillbilly" and "race" records. It's the perfect hunk of think-piece fodder: a simple core question -- is it country? -- that can spiral out to all corners of culture until the song itself is obscured. So let's focus on the song, instead. Because beyond all world-historical significance, "Old Town Road" fucking bangs. It's all in the bait and switch of that intro -- banjos and horns plunking away until Lil Nas X's triumphant "YEAAAH" (second this decade only to Fetty Wap) drops and the beat comes in. It's a joke until it's not -- maybe you came in from the Red Dead Redemption 2 video, or from a friend of yours talking about the hilarious country trap song, or from the artist's own Twitter, which is more Meech On Mars than Meek Mill, but no matter the source, you'll find that "Old Town Road" has its way of looping into your brain, all drawls and boasts and banjos. It's meme rap, but much like prior iterations of this joke ("Like a Farmer"), Lil Nas X fully and deeply commits -- he doesn't drop the pretense for a single line, keeping the track short enough to not outlive its welcome while still exploring its weird conceit to its fullest. Yet even in its jokey vibe there's some actual pathos -- no matter how put on, the lonesome cowboy sorrow of Lil Nas X's declaration that he'll "ride till [he] can't no more" feels genuine. "Old Town Road" is everything at once, the implosion of late teens culture into one undeniable moment. [10]

David Moore: So here's a true gem of a novelty song -- a phrase I use with both intention and respect; I grew up in a Dementoid household -- that could launch a thousand thinkpieces about hip-hop, country, class, the object and subject of jokes, whether to call something a joke at all, you name it. But what I keep returning to is the economy of it, its simplicity, how there is so much in so little, the way that someone on the outside can grok things inaccessible to the insiders, maybe by accident or by studious observation and a fresh perspective, the way music can be a multiverse, characters from one world complicating or clarifying or confusing the limits of another in a mutually provocative way. I'm not a backstory guy, which is to say I'm not a research guy, which is to say I'm either intuitive or lazy or both, so I don't have any clue where this came from, but I know magic when I hear it, I know what it sounds like when you discover, or simply stumble into by accident, the path beyond the bounds of territory you presumed exhausted, territory that can always get bigger, always invite whole new parties to the party. It's a real party party; you can get in. [10]

Katherine St Asaph: "Old Town Road" is the "Starships" of 2019: a song that objectively is not great, but will be called great for the understandable reason that liking or disliking it now unavoidably entails choosing the right or wrong side. This tends to lead to hand-waving freakoutery about critics not talking about the music, man, but once The Discourse is out in the world, it becomes a real and critical part of the song's existence; not talking about Billboard punting "Old Town Road" would be like talking about "Not Ready to Make Nice" as an workaday country song. The problem is not quite as simple as "the Billboard charts don't want black artists," an argument with historical precedent but now doomed to fail: clearly, people like Kane Brown and Darius Rucker and Mickey Guyton (who's left off lists like this, somehow) have hits. It's more about respectability politics. Traditionalists hate the idea of memes, social media, and perceived line-cutting, all of which means they'll hate a song born not of the Nashville and former-fraternity-bro scene, but via TikTok and stan Twitter. But what they really, really hate is rap and anything that sounds like a gateway to rap; like if they tolerate this Cardi B will be next. Country radio, for the past decade or two, has been pop radio with all the blatant rap signifiers removed; its songs aren't about cowboys or horses but suburban WASP life. Of course, double standards abound. Talking about lean is out; talking about bingeing beer is fine. "Bull riding and boobies" isn't OK because it's from a guy called Lil Nas X -- I honestly think people would whine less if this exact song was credited to "Montero Hill" -- but "I got a girl, her name's Sheila, she goes batshit on tequila" is OK because it's from a guy called Jake Owen, and "Look What God Gave Her" is OK because it hides its ogling of boobies behind plausibly deniable God talk. Fortunately "Old Town Road" is better than "Starships" -- the NIN sample is inspired, and the hook is evocative and sticky. (It fucks with authenticity politics, too -- Lil Nas X wrote his own song, but the big corporate country artists often don't.) Its main problem is that it's slight: a meme that doesn't overstay past the punchline, a song that never quite gets to song size. [5]

Thomas Inskeep: Sampling Nine Inch Nails' "34 Ghosts IV" to (help) create a western motif is hands-down brilliant, so huge thumbs-up for that. Lyrically, this is pretty empty, a bunch of western clichés strung together -- but then again, the same can be said of plenty of Big & Rich songs. Split the score down the middle, accordingly. [5]

Scott Mildenhall: But surely this is how country music should sound? Lil Nas X has performed alchemy in combining two generic styles into something inspiring, flipping the meaning of "pony and trap" on its head. The mechanical sound of trap is rusted into the mechanical sound of fixing a combine, or at least pretending that is something you might do, and such performance is fun for all the family. Well, unless you're an American farming family tired of stereotypes anyway. [7]

Stephen Eisermann: Non country (trap) beat with subtle country instrumentation? Sounds like much of country radio, only way better! [7]

Nortey Dowuona: A burning, humming bass girds under sticklike banjos as Lil Nas X rides into town to water his horse and head back out onto the open road. [5]

Alex Clifton: I spent the weekend re-enacting this scene from Easy A with this song, so it's safe to say I like it. I especially love the "horse"/"Porsche" line, which is unexpected and amazing. [7]

Alfred Soto: The usual genre conversations threaten to smother analysis. If Lil Nas X can use trap drums, then why can't Sam Hunt use loops? Silly. (Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes: "The Constitution is what the judges say it is"). The Kanye allusion ("Y'all can't tell me nuthin'") works extra-diagetically. An assemblage of modest, discrete charms held together by a solid performance at its center -- nothing more. I await the Future-Frank Liddell collab. [5]

Edward Okulicz: It's affectionate and actually quite deferential in its treatment of its parent genres. Crossovers like this have been hinted at, and gestured towards in the other direction quite a bit of late (country artists affecting hip-hop, less so the latter), and the two genres have more in common than the caricatures of the sorts of people who are supposed to listen to them do. Of course, I mean those genres as they exist today, and not in the warped imaginations of purists. You can see why kids have latched on, and it's easy to snarl at Big Chart for sticking their oar in. The kids are right; artists control the means of production and radio and chart compilers can accept that they aren't the tastemakers, and attempts to force their tastes down other people's throats will lead to a backlash. This is not a brilliant song but it's a picture of one of many potential musical futures and, at two minutes, the perfect length too. The right response is to smile, and "Old Town Road" makes it easy to smile -- it's an earworm. Sure, it doesn't give me the same immediate feeling of fuck!!! this is the best that I got when I first heard that version of Bubba Sparxxx's "Comin' Round" but country music survived "Honey, I'm Good" and it will survive this. It might well thrive. [6]

Joshua Copperman: I recently found out that I have a moderate Vitamin D deficiency, but looking up the song everyone was talking about and hearing this basically confirmed that I should go outside more often. There are definitely things to talk about: it's the logical conclusion to "I listen to everything except country and rap" jokes when the inverse has taken over the Hot 100, and it's a song that's set to hit number one because everyone is incredulous that it exists at all -- with a Billy Ray Cyrus remix to boot. The conversations about what makes a song "country" are all fascinating, but it's hard to fully enjoy pieces about something that, as an actual song, is so fundamentally empty. The Nine Inch Nails sample is interesting, but like everything else, more intriguing in theory than execution. This will wind up on every site's "best of 2019" lists, and then in ten years people will snark on how a song with "My life is a movie/Bullridin' and boobies" was so critically acclaimed. As a meme/discourse lightning rod, it's an [8], as a how-to guide for late-2010s fame, it's a [10], but there's little appeal in a vacuum. Adding a bonus point, because music has never existed in a vacuum anyway. [5]

Taylor Alatorre: Remember when the internet was still described as a realm of lawless and limitless potential, when open source could be touted as revolutionary praxis and "free flow of information" was a sacred utterance? Now one of the key political questions is whether private companies should be doing more to banish online rulebreakers or whether the federal government should step in to delimit what those rules are. Whichever side ends up winning, it's clear that the wide open spaces of the Frontier Internet are rapidly facing enclosure. Montero Hill learned this the hard way when his @nasmaraj account was suspended by Twitter as part of its crackdown against spam-based virality. While Tweetdeckers are nobody's martyrs, it's a minor tragedy every time an account with that many followers and that much influence gets shunted off to the broken-link stacks of the Wayback Machine. Rules must be laid down, but their enforcement always entails loss -- the bittersweet triumph of civilization over nature that forms the backbone of every classic Western. Maybe Hill/nasmaraj/Lil Nas X had this loss in mind when writing the jauntily defiant lyrics of "Old Town Road." Maybe he was just riding the microtrends of the moment like he was before. Still, this particular microtrend -- the reappropriation of cowboy imagery by non-white Americans -- feels too weighty to be reduced to mere aesthetics. Turner's Frontier Thesis may have been racially blinkered to the extreme, but the myths and yearnings it spawned can never die; they just get democratized. So it makes sense that young Americans, even those who don't know who John Wayne is, would subconsciously reach out for the rural, the rustic, the rugged and free, just as we feel the global frontiers closing all around us. Our foreign policy elites hold endless panel talks about "maintaining power projection" and "winning the AI race," but most normal people don't care about that stuff. We're all secretly waiting for China to take over like in our cyberpunk stories, so we can drop all the pressures of being the Indispensable Nation and just feast off our legacy like post-imperial Britain. And what is that legacy? It's rock, it's country, it's hip hop, it's "Wrangler on my booty," it's all the vulgar mongrelisms that force our post-ironic white nationalists to adopt Old Europe as their lodestar. In short, it's "Old Town Road." We're gonna ride this horse 'til we can't no more, we're gonna reify these myths 'til we can't no more, because when the empire is gone, the myths are all we have. (Oh, and the Billy Ray remix is a [10]. Obviously.) [9]

Jonathan Bradley: People suppose that genre exists to delineate a set of sounds, and while it does do that, it depends even more on its ability to build, define, and speak for communities. The question of whether "Old Town Road" is a country song or not is in some ways easily resolved: country music showed no interest in Lil Nas X -- or at least not until Billy Ray Cyrus noticed an opportune moment to complicate expectations and grab headlines -- and so Lil Nas X's song was not country. Even taking into account its sound and subject matter, his hit is best understood as a burlesque on country music, one that parodies and exaggerates the genre's motifs and themes for heightened effect. The kids on TikTok, who turned the long-gone lonesome blues of the song's tumbleweed hook into viral content, understand this intuitively: they use the incongruity that clarifies at the beat drop as an opportunity to engage in caricature and costume. And while Lil Nas X, a huckster and a trendspotter before he was a pop star, has been happy to embrace the yee-haw mantle that has been bestowed upon him, his song is a familiar rap exercise in play and extended metaphor. The Shop Boyz did much the same thing with "Party Like a Rock Star" and it would be obtuse to suppose that was a rock song. And yet, as the country historian Bill C. Malone has written, country since its inception has attracted fans "because of its presumed Southern traits, whether romantically or negatively expressed"; there has always been a bit of schtick to this sound. I wondered when we reviewed Trixie Mattel whether country is, on some level, intrinsically camp, and it's tough to declare definitively that Lil Nas X's bold hick strokes are that much more stylized than Jake Owen's performance of small town ordinariness. And just as a country music based on cohesive community rather than sound has found itself broad enough to encompass northern hair metal, Auto-Tuned club stomps, and Ludacris, the gate-keeping involved in keeping Lil Nas X out begins to look suspicious. After all, the first song to debut on Billboard's Most Played Juke Box Folk Records chart, the predecessor to today's Hot Country Songs, was "Pistol Packin' Mama," a hillbilly goof by the decidedly uncountry combination of Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters. As Malone has written, "While the commercial fraternity thought mainly of profits, the recording men, radio executives, publicists, promoters, ad men, sponsors, and booking agents who dealt with folk music also readily manipulated public perceptions in order to sell their products." One of the ways they did that was to tap into already mythological figures of American individualism like the cowboy, who is, after all, a creature of the west and not the South. "The respective visions of cowboy and western life drew far more from popular culture and myth ... than they did from reality," Malone writes of the early country singers who embraced cowboy personae; in some ways Lil Nas X's purloining of meme interest in that same culture places him within a rich country heritage. After all, when in popular entertainment has shameless self-promotion not been part of the aspirant's trade? It does matter how cultural communities react to the music made in their name, but when certain people are adjudicated not fit for club membership, it is worth asking why. Country's culture, I said recently, is "one that's implicitly but not definitely Southern, implicitly but not definitely rural, and implicitly but not definitely white," and it's easy to see how Lil Nas X doesn't fit into that. Country music's racism isn't unique to the genre -- the historical hegemonies of punk and indie rock are at least as determinedly white -- but it is particularly visible. Country is racist like the South is racist like America is racist. Lil Nas X disrupts that settlement, helping us imagine a country music that genuinely encompasses the music of the American South -- a genre that has space for "This is How We Roll" and Miranda Lambert, Lil Boosie and Young Thug, "Formation" and Juvenile, and perhaps even Norteño and banda sounds. That would be, however, not only a far different country music to what we know today, but the music of a far different America. [7]

Iris Xie: Yeet haw! Aside from the great pleasure I've had in showing this to my friends, (Me, two weeks ago: "Have you heard this country trap song???" My friends, this week: "Iris, that song you're talking about now has Billy Ray Cyrus on it??") and either slinging back and forth memey references, engaging in discussions on the state of white supremacy in the music industry while also debating about the song's merit, or hearing my friends start singing "can't nobody tell me nothing..." very quietly at any moment and I can't help but join in -- it's all been very fun. Aside from making plans to play "Old Town Road" on my next country road drive to Costco, something that's occurred to me is that this is a song boosted by the status and calamity of its metanarrative. We could always use more discussions of the double standards that Black and POC artists face in the industry when it comes to genres and participating in it, and I'm honestly glad Lil Nas X just made something that was fun and made sense to him, even if "Old Town Road" doesn't stray too much from the conventions of both trap and country, resulting in a well-balanced mashup that sounds more safe than surprising to me, but is serene in its confidence nevertheless. On the flipside of that genre-mashing, Miley wishes and is probably very jealous of her father now for hopping onto this train, lest we forget about all of her cultural appropriation attempts. But for the song itself, those long, relaxed drawls and the imagery of riding a horse to the trap beat -- why not? We live in weird times now, Black people's contributions to country music were erased, and it's kind of a relaxing song. Also, I'm a fan of the "Can't nobody tell me nothing" lyric, which has become an unintentionally defiant line in the face of all the backlash, resulting in a message to rally around. Now excuse me, as I text my friends that "I'm gonna take my horse down to the old town road." [8]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox]

#Lil Nas X #country #pop #music #music review #writing

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thoughtsmadnessandmusic-blog · 7 years ago

Text

My Top 50 Songs of 2017

Rules and disclaimers:

No more than five songs per artist, and no more than two songs from the same album/EP. Features count as a song for each named artist. I will try to link the songs to their headers where possible. For songs fifty through twenty-one there will be a short quip; the top twenty will have a more detailed discussion.

This list is subjective, as should be obvious. If you don't like this years, maybe you’ll like next years. In the interest of sharing cool tracks, I will list some honourable mentions that didn’t make the list as I heard them too late for consideration. Some songs (and their videos) contain explicit lyrics and imagery.

Honourable Mentions

Wolf Alice – Yuk Foo

Chromeo – Juice

Rina Sawayama – Alterlife

Sampha – (No One Knows Me) Like The Piano

50. Tyler, The Creator – I Ain’t Got Time

The percussion on this track, especially the first half, is just sublime. Shout out to the random shakers on the chorus.

49. Syd – All About Me

From one member of Odd Future to another, this song somehow straddles the line between chill and hard, and pulls it off.

48. T-Pain & Lil Wayne – Listen To Me

Who would have thought sampling the ‘Oompa Loompa song’ would sound so hard?

47. Belly – Man Listen

Belly makes some hype music, but his rhyming on this first verse should not go unnoticed. Quality track, with a catchy melody.

46. HAIM – Nothing’s Wrong

The “tell-t-tell me” in the background of the chorus is one of the best things to happen in music this year.

45. Kacy Hill – Hard To Love

The swell of this song, combined with a chorus that only grows larger each time you hear it, makes for 80s infused pleasure.

44. T-Pain & Lil Wayne – Heavy Chevy

This song is just so, damn, southern.

43. Kacy Hill – Arm’s Length

Kacy Hill’s vocal performance on this track is exceptional, and that chorus hits like a truck.

42. Calvin Harris – Slide (Ft. Frank Ocean & Migos)

If you had told me at the start of the year that Calvin Harris would produce some of the smoothest tracks of the year, I would have called you insane. But, here we are. I’d like to give a special shout out to that pitched up vocal sample for being everything that’s right in the world.

41. Travis Scott – Butterfly Effect

The catchy chorus here is accented perfectly by the switch up for the rap verse, which may be my favourite part of the track.

40. Vince Staples – BagBak

Vince Staple’s fusion of electronic music with hip-hop adds a constant sense of movement to a track dripping with political critique and comments on racial inequality.

39. Action Bronson – The Chairman’s Intent

Action Bronson always comes through with constant bars, flow and charisma, so throwing in a catchy refrain is just putting the cherry on top.

Highlight: “I started clapping when the chef brought the duck to the table

Uh, that shit was shining like an angel”.

38. Syd – Body

I’m not sure I fully appreciated how smooth, and sexy, this song was until I began planning this list. The whole track is coercive, and the break down after the chorus serves to let you settle in before the ride continues.

37. Raekwon – My Corner (Ft. Lil Wayne)

First and foremost, I’d like to address the fantastic snare that anchors this track. Secondly, I’d like to remind everyone that Wayne murders his feature, with a flow that just glides through rhyme after rhyme.

36. Lorde – Green Light

Yes, this song is making damn near every list, and with good reason. Lorde’s imagery is superb, and the way this song builds musically is something to behold.

35. DJ Khaled – It’s Secured (Ft. Travis Scott & Nas)

Travis Scott’s hook is phenomenal, anchoring Nas’ vivid lyricism and capitalising on the hype of the instrumental. Maybe we need Travis Scott on more Nas songs?

34. Gucci Mane – Curve (Ft. The Weeknd)

Gucci and The Weeknd suit each other so very well, creating a song that never stops flowing, and revels in its debauchery.

33. Sabrina Claudio – Unravel Me

Alright, why did I have to discover Sabrina Claudio through Spotify radio? How is this track not being plastered over every R&B fan’s Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts? If I hadn’t found this song so late in the year there’s a good chance it would have landed higher on this list. What a beautiful track.

32. Japanese Breakfast – Machinist

The first time I heard this song is by far my favourite ‘what the fuck’ moment of the year. Add a saxophone solo on top and you have a fantastic track.

31. Lady Gaga – The Cure

I can’t get this chorus out of my head and I don’t want to. Now, that may be aided by the fact that I picture Lady Gaga dancing like an 80s robot while delivering the lyrics, but I can live with that.

30. Cam’ron – D.I.A.

This is some classic Dipset, from the beat to Cam’ron’s nonchalant dismantling of every other rapper’s brag.

Highlight: “50 keys in the tub, that's a real bird bath”.

29. Stormzy – Cold

I love how dramatically hard this beat is, and Stormzy’s refrain “I've been cold the whole season, I should call my next one "Freezing"” is such an excellent, tongue in cheek, cap on the chorus.

28. Injury Reserve – Boom (X3)

Is this the hardest chorus of 2017? Yes, yes it is.

27. Future – Comin Out Strong (Ft. The Weeknd)

Honestly, at this point we need a Weeknd x Future project. The Weeknd is his usual, swaggering self, and Future comes with some surprising intensity and entertaining adlibs.

26. Stormzy – Big For Your Boots

Combine Stormzy’s raw personality on the mic with another catchy hook, and you have a track with insane replay value.

25. Rick Ross – Trap Trap Trap (Ft. Young Thug & Wale)

This song is plain hard. Rick Ross’ change up in flow and voice on his first verse hit perfectly, and Young Thug’s personality complements the track superbly. Throw in some great bars from Wale and you get one of the best trap tracks of the year.

24. N.E.R.D – Lemon (Ft. Rihanna)

The production on this track is incredible, and words can’t describe how badly I want a straight up rap album from Rihanna.

23. The Killers – Run For Cover

The lead single from ‘Wonderful Wonderful’ hits with a fantastic chorus and lyrics that attack the current (or constant) political climate. I’d be remiss to not acknowledge how much this song reminds me of “When We Were Young”, one of my favourite Killer’s tracks.

22. Young Thug & Carnage – Homie (Ft. Meek Mill)

Wait, one second, I might have to revisit my comment on the hardest chorus of 2017... Even if Young Thug does sound like the Cookie Monster.

21. Vince Staples – Big Fish (Ft. Juicy J)

I do love a Juicy J chorus, not to mention a beat with a groove like this. Place a smooth flow from Vince Staples on top and you’ve got a track that will always move your head.

20. Frank Ocean – Chanel

This song has already received accolades from many publications, and the symbolic use of the Chanel logo to frame Frank Ocean’s exploration into the duality of things is surprisingly powerful. Yes, Frank Ocean is a fantastic writer, but this track serves to demonstrate how the mainstream, both in terms of pop culture and music, can be explored and appropriated to analyse deeper social issues. More than that, the fantastic second verse where Frank Ocean belts his lungs out is one of the most cathartic moments in music this year, and serves to remind the listener of how excellent a vocalist he is.

19. HAIM – Want You Back

HAIM’s ‘Want You Back’ was one of the tracks that grew on me the most this year, it’s infectious, 80’s infused sound constantly weaving its way back into my rotation. It’s a song that builds, starting stripped back, and minimalist, before exploding into the chorus with layered vocals, percussion, and some impressively effective vocal samples. There is a certain swagger to the verses here, tying the personality of the band with the sound they create, giving the track it’s smooth movement, and self-assurance. Yes, the relationship is over, but this song is sure in its desire for it to return, and knows it will succeed.

18. A$AP Ferg – Plain Jane

This song is so very addictive. A straight up flexing anthem, ‘Plain Jane’ lands this high on the list for Ferg’s impeccable use of flow. For this kind of track to be effective it needs an MC to bring confidence, swagger, and mic presence that owns the beat and owns who they are. A$AP Ferg executes this perfectly, gliding along the beat to hit all the right points alongside the percussion, and flipping his flow just enough on the chorus to provide a catchy break. It’s a comfortable, commanding presence, accented by a hard beat that is just that bit quicker, and more rhythmically consistent, than the typical trap affair.

17. Lorde – Perfect Places

If any song on this list could be said to have captured what 2017 felt like as a year, especially how it felt for the younger generation, this was it. ‘Perfect Places’ is a masterful display of song writing, diving headfirst into the need for escape in a world that is constantly hammering at our doors. Yes, it deals with the timeless insecurity of becoming a young adult, but more than that it acknowledges the “graceless”, constant nature of it all. There is a distinct helplessness to it all, and as heroes fade what else is there to do but search for an escape? And that’s just the lyrics. The gorgeous production hits like a wall on the chorus, and the synth that accents the refrain is simply stunning. The defining moment of the track, however, is the smallest. Lorde’s mouthed, clicking trigger, where the metaphorical gun that is this song is cocked before exploding into the chorus.

16. Young Thug – Relationship (Ft. Future)

‘Relationship’ contains one of the most exactly crafted choruses of the year. Young Thug begins it, providing his trademark charisma and vocal inflections, and singing in a way that is evidently building to something. Then the beat drops and hits exactly on the first line from Future, signalling the change to more euphoric lyrics from the artist. The rhymes that follow are consistent, but it’s that rising melody that Future provides that will get stuck in your head for days. Once some solid, quotable verses are added, and this song is full of quotable lyrics, it’s back to the chorus, and back to one of the best moments in music this year.

15. PLAZA – Personal

There’s nothing like some good, autotuned debauchery. Plaza’s ‘Personal’ is a vibe; a constant, wavering scent of smoke on the air, smoke that rests deep in your lungs. It’s the taste on your lips the next morning, and the broken, bleary smile given before an early departure. Indeed, it’s the OVO sound through and through. PLAZA flows over the beat smoothly, providing a simple, catchy refrain, that epitomises the song, and the mindset of lust over reason. The song is accepting of this, acknowledging that perhaps the pursuit of carnal pleasure is not entirely good or bad, but simply feels right.

14. Drake – 4422 (Ft. Sampha)

To call this a Drake song seems disingenuous. Even if it was part of the ‘More Life’ package, this is a Sampha song, albeit one fitting of the Drake catalogue. A gorgeous vocal performance from Sampha, ‘4422’ is beautiful in its simplicity. It’s a track that resonates due to its blatant need for any amount of commitment that is not forthcoming. Why? We don’t know. No one knows, because sometimes these moments, and feelings, are inexplicable hunches. They are the twists of the stomach, when we know what feels right, and what doesn’t, but we can’t reconcile the issue and so slip into anxious turmoil. Sampha knows this, and he wants it to end, if only they could meet halfway.

13. Drake – KMT (Ft. Giggs)

I could not stop listening to ‘KMT’ this year. It’s just such an easy, catchy listen. The beat is your standard trap banger, albeit those on beat drums in the introduction are somewhat unique and build the tension excellently. For that matter, the strings themselves are catchy and tension inducing as well. At the end of the day, however, the reason this song is up so high is because it’s just so damn fun to listen to. The lyrics are quotable and often silly or over the top. The flows are catchy, yes, even the ones borrowed from other rappers. Furthermore, Giggs’ voice and adlibs suit the track perfectly, and it all builds to one of the most hype listens of the year. Trust me, if you want to have some fun, crank the speakers and just let yourself be taken away by this track.

12. Kendrick Lamar – HUMBLE.

How much really needs to be said about Kendrick’s ‘HUMBLE.’? The track that cemented Kendrick as the biggest name in rap sees him step into a lane more pop orientated, but yet still viciously lyrical. The beat, courtesy of Mike WiLL Made-It, is not quite the normal trap affair, focusing instead on a staccato piano line that in a lot of ways reminds me of the more simplistic, yet catchy, early 2000s hip-hop beats. It hits perfectly, and Kendrick steps into it with ease, diving in and out of the beat with one of his catchiest flows yet. To top it off the song is filled with quotable lines that you have no doubt seen plastered all over social media, and with good reason. This song is tongue in cheek fun, with just a hint of a more serious edge to it, and I love it.

11. Jay-Z – The Story of O.J.

The best way to experience this song is with the phenomenal video (linked in the title above) which does a remarkable job of conveying the ideas of the track. A journey into the mindset of a fiscally responsible Jay-Z, ‘The Story of O.J.’ attempts to address the need for wise financial decision making to pull people, especially those discriminated against, out of the world they find themselves in. Yet, throughout it all, Jay-Z makes it clear that no matter the success he, or others around him, might experience, they will still be seen in the same, racist light. For a song that attempts to offer hope it is a bitter taste, suggesting that although over time things will change, for now the colour of your skin will still alter people’s perception of you. All of this is delivered over an immaculate beat from No I.D., complete with an incredible sample and tight, punchy drums.

10. PLAZA – Run This

The way this track builds is nothing short of brilliant. It opens up with PLAZA lamenting his interactions with a girl, his reverb soaked voice echoing over stuttering synths. And then the hats come in, and you know those incredible kicks are about to hit. Those three, perfectly timed kicks, hitting on the start of his line like a truck. The track then builds further, the element of ambition and desire slipping into PLAZA’s vocals, the melody switches up, and further synths come in. But then the song pauses for the briefest of moments, the chorus hits, and PLAZA slips into one of the catchiest melodies of the year. It’s flawless, intoxicatingly arrogant, hype, and so very replayable.

9. Bob Dylan – Making A Liar Out Of Me (Rehearsal)

When Bob Dylan released a new bootleg series, I knew there’d be something good on there, and I wasn’t let down. ‘Making A Liar Out Of Me’ is Dylan at his poetic best, delivering line after line of vivid images and scathing critiques. Of much debate is who this song is aimed at. Is it a lost lover? A politician he had faith in? Higher ups in the church that have been abusing their position of power? God, and Dylan’s faith itself? Or, even, Dylan himself? Yes, this track comes from Dylan’s Gospel era, but it’s using that hint of Christianity to inform it’s critique, to build a pastiche of this person who has horribly let him down. I could simply paste the whole song’s lyrics here and leave you to make your own peace with the track, and in essence that is what I’ll do, but I’ll leave you with a personal highlight of mine:

“Well I say that, that ain't flesh and blood you're drinking

In the wounded empire of your fool's paradise

With a light above your head forever blinking

Turning virgins into merchandise”.

8. dvsn – Conversations In A Diner

I’m unsure how many people would have chosen the closer off dvsn’s ‘Morning After’ to land this high on their year end list, but more certainly should have. It is a beautiful end to a stunning record. The vocal performance from Daniel Daley is gentle, delicate and absolutely embodies the love he is attempting to convey. ‘Morning After’ was an album about struggling to keep a relationship going, and to capture those moments of perfection that remained, and this song is a heartfelt promise to continue trying. It’s an exceptionally mature end to the album, accented by some beautiful piano and a perfectly timed choir.

7. Jay-Z – Bam (Ft. Damian Marley)

This is straight up, uncompromising, old school, braggadocios Jay-Z. Over a beat that contains another excellent sample and fantastic drums (shouts out to No I.D. once more), Jay reminisces on the actions that lead him to where he is today. It’s an acknowledgement of the ego that allowed him to succeed, and it contains some of the most vivid images and best lines on ‘4:44’. Damian Marley’s feature is superb, fitting well with the sample, and his charisma builds off Jay’s perfectly. The highlight of the track for me is the superb transition from chorus to verse, where Jay shouts over the last line of the chorus: “Fuck all this pretty Shawn Carter shit n****, HOV”. It brings so much energy to the track and stylistically harkens back to ‘Public Service Announcement’ off ‘The Black Album’.

6. Roy Woods – Instinct (Ft. MadeinTYO)

A track that came out very late in 2016 on Roy Woods’ ‘Nocturnal’ EP (and thus qualifies for this list), I rediscovered the song when the music video dropped earlier this year. Up until that point I hadn’t realised how fantastic the drop on the first verse was, but Roy Woods going crazy in the video certainly opened my eyes. From then on this track was inescapable for me; I’d keep starting it off, listening to those intro lines from Roy Woods, and waiting for the drop. To this day, when that kick hits, and the flow switches, I can’t help but move. It’s the rhythm of this track that really leaves it sticking in my mind, from Roy’s upbeat, braggadocios lyrics and flow, to MadeinTYOs more laid back, controlled cockiness. Throw in a few more quotable, sometimes ridiculous lines (You ain’t got sauce like I got sauce”), and you easily have one of my favourite tracks of the year.

5. dvsn – Body Smile

Another gorgeous song by dvsn, ‘Body Smile’ sees Daniel Daley once more flexing his vocal chops to make up for the things he has done to break his lover’s heart. Of course, he’s not going to make up for them simply by singing, he’s going to make up for it with a night of, apparently, the most passionate, loving sex, ever conceived (no pun intended). Perhaps that is a ridiculous sentiment, but then, in an album dripping in the raw physicality of a relationship, it makes perfect sense. It’s about marrying the emotional with the physical, recognising sex as capable of being more than just enjoyable, but rather as being an honest, unhindered expression of love. That’s just the context of the song. The production itself is slow, ebbing and seductive, culminating in a stellar vocal performance on the final chorus. Then there’s the pre-chorus, which contains one of my favourite vocal melodies and rhythms of the year, with the way it slinks through each word, as if Daniel Daley is trying to skip through the wrongs, but proceeding to get more and more caught up on his mistakes. Yet, all of this song culminates in the last two lines of the chorus, where Daley stops belting, the instrumentation dies down, and we get a beautiful, seductive, pleading falsetto. It’s stripped back, raw, and honest, just as the song is supposed to be.

4. Bleachers – Don’t Take The Money

Jack Antonoff had a big year, but amongst all his writing for other artists he found time to record an exceptional pop song of his own. ‘Don’t Take The Money’ is an undeniable anthem, painting the stress of being in a relationship with vivid metaphors and a mammoth chorus. It attempts to deal with the constant anxiety that comes from being in a relationship, especially, perhaps, when it is not going so well. What if this incredible person disappears? What happens to me? What if they take the metaphorical money and run? It’s an uncertainty fuelled track that acknowledges the incredible nature of love by recognising how fragile it is. Then there is the fantastic, aching production, that grows into a huge, passionate chorus. The percussion, and use of bells, accents it all so well, and it’s the moments when the instrumentation calms that you notice just how textured it is.

3. The Killers – Tyson vs Douglas

There is so much I want to say, or feel I could say, about this song. First, I want to make it clear how great the instrumentation is. The driving guitar and dramatic synth; the way Brandon Flowers voice screams out the chorus. The sheer size and blatant anxiety of the chorus. It all feels cinematic, as if capturing that final punch and replaying it again and again. But, that’s not really the point. The point is that in front of that TV set was a generation of boys realising their heroes, and, perhaps, father figures, were not invincible. In a world that can be so absurdly masculine, they were witnessing just how fragile it all really was. And that’s not to say it’s bad, but it is a loss of innocence. A realisation that their father, or hero, is fallible, and that sometimes they will break down. They will lose. They will cry. This is a world outside of the conception of a child, and here it is happening in front of them, again and again. It’s a feeling of helplessness because it acknowledges how little control anyone can have over the world around them. In the bridge Brandon Flowers sings “you said it was nothing, but maybe you’re wrong”, because he realises it wasn’t nothing. Every boys view of the world changes when they see their hero, or father, fall, and this song perfectly captures that moment. Incredible.

2. Kendrick Lamar – DNA.

It’s so rare to see a rapper absolutely snap on a track, and on ‘DNA.’ Kendrick lets loose. A track that deals with everything that Kendrick believes makes both him who he is, and makes every other person on the planet what they are, DNA. is a vivid portrayal of the complexities of black culture and the way it is perceived. This idea is demonstrated just before the beat switch, when Kendrick samples a comment from Geraldo Rivera in which he claims that ‘this is why I say that hip hop has done more damage to young African Americans than racism in recent years’. An idea, that aside from being utterly ridiculous, serves as ammunition for a vicious final verse from Kendrick in which he berates the cheapening, and pigeonholing, of black culture, and makes it clear that who he is is something to be proud of.

1. Carly Rae Jepsen – Cut To The Feeling

‘Cut To The Feeling’ has been my number one song of the year since the day I heard it. No other song released this year is so euphoric, so infectious, so bouncy, or so downright undeniable. It provides moment after moment of highlights, and is quite possibly the best produced track of the year. The song starts simply enough, a nice, catchy clap rhythm, building to the vocals, but as soon as the vocals start, everything begins growing. The kicks come in, and Jepsen delivers some staccato vocal melodies with their assistance, before disappearing into a shuddering, building ‘oh’. An ‘Oh’ that takes us to a chorus. The chorus. The kicks hit, the synths and bass swell, and Carly Rae Jepsen sings her damn lungs out. The melody is shoutable, it’s catchy, and its rhythm matches every jump you’ll be making as you dance along. It’s the second half of the chorus that really drives it home for me, where somehow the song grows even larger, and Jepsen sings “I wanna play where you play with the angels”, hitting the word ‘angels’ in the most, well, angelic way possible. Yet, every line delivered in the song hits perfectly, so for me to even highlight them is almost unnecessary. That’s what this song does so very well, every musical aspect is in complete harmony. An outstanding effort in pop music, and without a doubt my top song of 2017.

#music #topsongs #2017

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richmegavideo · 5 years ago

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Mustard – 100 Bands (Lyrics) Ft. Quavo, 21 Savage, YG & Meek Mill

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Popping big bands when they hit the lights, damn

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Lyrics: “The LJ - Top Off Feat. Sean Bay”

[Intro: Quavo & YG] Whoop, woo! Y'all already know who I am? Right? Mustard on the beat, ho Let's go

[Chorus: Quavo] Hunnid bands (Oh, woo), hunnid bands (Oh, woo) Hunnid bands (Oh), hunnid bands (Oh, hunnid bands) Ten bands (Oh, ten bands) in the right hand (Oh, right) Ten bands (Oh, hey) in my left hand (Oh, let's go, yeah)

[Verse 1: Quavo] Make her best friend (Woo) be her hype man (Hype man) You keep going big (Woo) she wanna fight, damn (Going big) Bad bitches in my city catching flights, damn (Bad) Popping big bands when they hit the lights, damn (Cash) I pull down on your city In your city, they fuck with me (City) And these bitches fucking with me 'Cause I represent my city (Fuck with me) In the kitchen, you can witness All this cash that we gettin' (Whoop) If you started, we gon' finish Whole gang with the bidness (Here we go, bidness, bow)

[Verse 2: 21 Savage] What's a hunnid racks? I throw it real quick (Straight up) Thought it was a limp, this way this stripper do a split (Split) One nine four two, get the bad bitches lit (On god) New Chanel purse, every time she throw a fit (Straight up) Drop it to the floor, make your knees touch your toes (21!) I'm on group facetime, me and all my hoes (On god) You can send me nudes, on my mom I won't expose (Straight up) Halfback sweep, I'ma pass her to my bros (Sweet) Fake kick, I'ma let my brother catch the two point Bitches like singles, Savage always got a new joint Thought he was a gangster, but he snitching yeah, oink, oink Work too hard bitch, you can't get a coin, coin (21!)

[Verse 3: YG] Santa Claus bag, hoe sit up on you (Hoe sit) Suge Knight bag, had the shooters get up on you (Flip) You see the red Lamborghini as I hit the corner (As I hit the corner) YG got his shit together, he a business owner (Oh, oh) Popping tags, shopping bags, n***a I gotta brag (Gotta brag) The YSL don't fit, I ain't take it back (Fuck that shit) Ella Mai trippin', we do a lot of that (A lot of that) But it ain't ever 'bout a bitch, we trip to cobble Jack (Skrrt, ayy) Big bands on me drumline (Big bands) I just let the money talk, don't need no punchline I like the sunshine so I said, "Fuck the rules" (What is that?) If you 'bout a bag, holla suu whoop (Let's go!)

[Verse 4: Meek Mill] More money (More money), more bitches (More bitches) More milli's (More milli's), more riches (Yeah) Uno, dos, tres, quatro, I got four bitches And they squatting on that dick like they doin' fitness Said he looking for me, came through in the drop top (Skrrt) Spent a corner in the dorm, while the opps watch (Let's get it) I'm too rich to go through somethin' about a thot, thot (Huh) Feds grabbed you, you back home, oh you a cop, cop (Huh) This shit serious (This shit serious) (Full lyrics In Comments)

If you like “Mustard - 100 Bands feat. Quavo, 21 Savage, YG & Meek Mill” check out these other tracks:

- Rich The Kid - Ring Ring ft. Vory (Lyrics) - Rita Ora - I Want You ft. 6Lack (Lyrics) - Tory Lanez - Freaky (Lyrics) - Dwilly - 1999 (Lyrics) - Rich The Kid - World Is Yours 2 (Lyrics) - Thutmose - Romeo Is Dead (Lyrics)

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#Music #&amp #Bands #Lyrics #Meek #Mill #Mustard #Quavo #Savage

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childsound56-blog · 6 years ago

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How Meek Mill Became a Movement

News

One year after being released from prison, Meek Mill is making music, hanging with his celebrity friends, and enjoying the life of a hip-hop star. But his biggest impact might come in a different realm: criminal justice reform.

A look at the life of Meek Mill, one year out of prison. Photograph by Ahmed Klink

It’s the afternoon before Super Bowl LIII in downtown Atlanta, and the College Football Hall of Fame is hosting a party for sports-apparel giant Fanatics. This is no ho-hum affair; it’s one of the biggest throw-downs in a weekend packed with them. A DJ spins hip-hop hits for the cavernous room — decorated in a gridiron theme, complete with turf and a goal post — as a cross-section of celebrities from sports, media and entertainment streams in. You can’t grab a chicken-and-waffle skewer without bumping into someone famous: Peyton Manning and Matt Ryan near the selfie station; Jon Bon Jovi chatting with Patriots owner Robert Kraft; comedian Kevin Hart and CNN’s Van Jones and Yankees phenom Aaron Judge; and a bunch of HOFers who’ve earned one-name status — Julius, Emmitt, Montana.

There are actual models, wannabe models, and nearly $10 billion in combined net worth just between Kraft and the party’s host, Sixers co-owner and Fanatics founder Michael Rubin. Outside on the red carpet, flashbulbs pop as TV hosts pepper incoming guests with dopey questions. And no one causes a bigger scene than one of today’s headlining performers, Rubin’s pal and North Philadelphia’s own Meek Mill.

Dressed head-to-toe in black — jeans, signature “Reform”-themed Pumas, Gucci hoodie — and draped with Mr. T-level gold chains, the rapper poses with Rubin and a new friend — Clara Wu Tsai, co-owner of the Brooklyn Nets and wife of Alibaba co-founder Joseph Tsai. Meek smiles for the cameras and obliges as correspondents from Fox and Extra extend their microphones. There’s so much commotion over Meek that NFL legend Dan Marino, a victim of unfortunate timing, walks by to little fanfare.

I’ve been following Meek for weeks now, hoping to capture what it’s like for him to be in a moment that is — all hype aside — wholly unique. Consider that Meek is one of the hottest acts in hip-hop. In a few days, he’ll drop a video with nemesis-turned-friend Drake, arguably the top MC in the game. Today he’s performing with rap supernova Cardi B and about to launch a 16-city tour, which will include two sold-out nights at the Met on Broad Street. But the lyrics in a song like “Trauma” reveal the less glamorous side to Meek’s story, one that’s ironically placed him in the company of billionaires:

When they label you a felon, it’s like they telling you … not equal 11 years going to court knowing they might keep you or drive you crazy 23 hours in a cell, somebody save me.

As cultural critic and author Michael Eric Dyson sums up Meek’s music, “He’s really the poet laureate of black grief, grime and grit.”

Meek is more than a rapper — he’s become a movement. He went from battle-rapping on the streets of North Philly to prison on drug and gun charges in 2008; then, just as his star was ascending, he was sent back to jail for probation violations in 2017, nine years after his initial — and only — conviction. Meek had reached his nadir only to be lifted up with help from friends like Rubin and Jay-Z, who turned his plight into a cause célèbre and his name into a hashtag: #FreeMeekMill. His release from prison last April made national news. Now he’s in a position unlike any artist who came before him: the face of a new criminal justice reform campaign, author of a New York Times op-ed on the subject, and one of the A-list founding partners of Reform Alliance, which is aimed at changing laws (starting in Pennsylvania) and freeing one million people in five years. “A whole lot of people go to jail,” says Van Jones, who’s also Reform Alliance’s CEO. “Not just rappers — athletes, movie stars. How many have done what Meek’s doing? How many really made the commitment of money, of time, of organization?”

Here in one room, the worlds of hip-hop, Hollywood, Wall Street, sports and social consciousness form a bizarre cultural Venn diagram, with a Philly rapper standing at the center.

Now, though, Meek is about to do what comes more naturally — grab the mic and hit the stage. Rubin introduces him by harking back to the Fanatics Super Bowl fete in Minneapolis a year ago, with his hometown Birds on the verge of a title. “You know what?” Rubin announces. “We were only thinking about how to get him out of prison.” Here in one room, the worlds of hip-hop, Hollywood, Wall Street, sports and social consciousness form a bizarre cultural Venn diagram, with a Philly rapper standing at the center. Bass thumping through the speakers rattles my rib cage, and the ever-expanding Meek Mill industrial complex swirls around us both.

•

Before the doors of the Martin Luther King Jr. Rec Center open at noon on Christmas Eve, there’s already a line of kids and parents stretching across Cecil B. Moore Avenue and around the corner along 22nd Street. Inside, Meek’s throwing a holiday giveaway with support from some 20 friends, family members and employees, along with an army of volunteers. Five hundred bicycles in boxes line the gymnasium walls, and a table overflows with sneakers from Puma, one of his sponsors; a slightly edgier partner, the Philly-headquartered delivery service GoPuff, is also here, and its CEO and Meek share a bro hug. State Senator Sharif Street and City Council President Darrell Clarke are working up as much of a sweat as anyone, sliding long bike boxes across the well-worn hardwood floor to waiting kids. Clad in all black, with a woolly red ski mask in his back pocket, Meek stands in a roped-off area and gets pulled in every direction — by people he knows from the neighborhood calling to him, requests for pics, chats with his crew, and he’s keeping an eye on his seven-year-old son, Rihmeek. Amid the chaos, he laughs with his pals and stays chill.

“His involvement is significant,” says Clarke. “You see how these young people and parents love him. First thing he asked this young kid, ‘Who do you live with?’ He understands that not everyone comes from a two-parent household. His ability to carry on a conversation, give sound advice — people listen to him.”

The crowd here knows that Meek is a product of these streets, for better and for worse. He was born Robert Rihmeek Williams in South Philly; his father, Rob, was shot and killed during an attempted robbery at 31, the same age as Meek is now. Meek was five, and his mother, Kathy, says he barely spoke for a decade after that. She then moved Meek and his older sister, Nasheema, to North Philly, eventually settling at 18th and Berks, a tough stretch just blocks from the MLK rec center to the west and Temple University to the east. “He was a good kid at one point,” says Kathy, who worked three jobs to support her family. “All I had to do was give him a video game and I could go to sleep and wake up and he’s in the same position.” But without a father figure, Meek felt the burden at a young age to be the man of the house. His first run-in with the police was around sixth grade, when he showed up at school despite being suspended and was charged with trespassing; young Meek was just afraid that Kathy would miss work to watch him and had nowhere else to go. He’d eventually drop out of Strawberry Mansion High, one of the most dangerous schools in the country.

Meek broke out of his shell through rap, as if the heartbreak of his father’s murder and the crucible of the street corners where he hung out unleashed something deep inside him. Kathy helped him burn CDs of his music and watched from her window as he’d compete against other aspiring MCs, aggressively trading rhymes with their faces just inches apart. “I worried a lot,” she says about Meek’s battles. She knew, like Meek did, that the rappers and their crew were carrying guns.

His life changed one night in January 2007, when a Narcotics Field Unit raid of Meek’s cousin’s house ended with the then-19-year-old in handcuffs, his left eye swollen shut, a bandage over his right eye and a braid ripped out of his head, leaving a bald spot he still carries today. (Meek would later use his Philly PD processing photo as an album cover.) He was hit with 19 charges, convicted of seven offenses — including two felonies, drug possession and carrying a firearm without a license — and sentenced to two years in county jail with eight years of probation; he served seven months in prison before being released to house arrest. Meek wouldn’t be convicted of another crime, but his struggles with the justice system, along with his success as a rapper, had just begun.

That Meek Mill seems like a completely different person from the guy handing out Christmas presents, especially given the company he keeps now — two powerful city politicians are in this gym, along with his high-wattage Reform Alliance partners. In a photo Kathy took of her son in lockup in 2008, Meek was a beanpole, with toothpick forearms and sculpted cheekbones. The ferocity in his eyes from those rap battles had been replaced by shock and fear. Today, Meek’s six-foot-two-inch frame is full, and an aura of confidence surrounds him when he walks into a room. He’s still angry at the cops who testified against him, but not at the police as a whole; he jokes with the officers at the rec center and joins them for a selfie. When a young boy asks for a pic, then hops up on a bike box and throws his arm around Meek’s shoulder, the rapper can’t help but laugh at the kid’s moxie. “Being as though I got the platform to help out my community, why not do it?” Meek says to a TV news scrum gathered around him. “We wanted to bring our Christmas back to our old neighborhood.”

The giveaway was scheduled to end at 2 p.m., yet it’s almost three and Meek is still here, posing for a photo with the grinning volunteers. It makes sense to see him so at ease in the environment that shaped him. Next month, though, he’ll be in New York for a week he’ll describe in video-game terms as a personal “leveling up” — one that the young Robert Williams never could have imagined.

•

Meek is in Manhattan in late January to rehearse for his debut performance on Saturday Night Live. That’s a milestone in any musician’s career, but it’s not even the most significant date on his calendar this week. On this Wednesday morning, at a packed theater inside the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, he’s helping to launch Reform Alliance with a lineup that CEO Van Jones will liken to the Avengers. Along with Rubin, Kraft and Tsai, Meek is joined by billionaire businessmen Mike Novogratz and Dan Loeb as well as a guy in a gray crew-neck sweatshirt and a Yankees cap who’s best known as Jay-Z; his Roc Nation management company handles Meek. It’s been a long time since Jay-Z roamed the Marcy projects in Brooklyn, where he sold crack as a teenager. Meek’s days in the ’hood aren’t nearly so far behind him. The combined start-up investment of the Reform founders is $50 million, including $10 million from Rubin alone. (Meek hasn’t disclosed his contribution.)

Before Meek and his partners take the stage, a short film rolls, featuring story after story of ordinary people living under the “long tail” of the criminal justice system — a man who served 90 days in jail for making an illegal U-turn while on parole; another who missed a meeting with his PO because of a new job he’d started and was sent to prison; a young man who couldn’t take a job in New Jersey because his probation confined him to the five boroughs. To get a sense of the support for Reform Alliance’s mission, consider who’s here in the front rows: Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf, Attorney General Josh Shapiro, State Senator Tony Williams, district attorneys from New York and Illinois. Jones acknowledges them by name and says their presence is meaningful. “Elected officials,” he notes, “do not come to events where they do not get to speak.”

The launch of Reform Alliance in January. Photograph by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images

The founders take their seats on the stage beneath a stark black-and-white REFORM logo on a screen, and the moderator asks Jay-Z why he’s doing this. “I think the attention that Meek brought to this issue because of his celebrity and the egregiousness of the [consequences of his probation violations] … is what sparked the match for the nation,” he says. “But for me … I am from Brooklyn, and this has been a part of my life.” Rubin breaks down the math — there are 2.2 million people in jail and 4.5 million on parole. Those numbers became real to him when his friendship with Meek began courtside at Sixers games and was cemented when Meek was imprisoned last fall. “When I hear these stories that a guy like Meek needs permission to be here today or a guy needs permission to see his son … the laws are so antiquated and don’t make sense,” Rubin says. “I think you can dramatically reduce that population while keeping communities safe.”

Among Reform Alliance’s priorities is putting limits on probation in states, like Pennsylvania and New York, where it can stretch indefinitely. That issue is at the heart of Meek’s boomerang relationship with the system and the Philly judge who’s been on his case since the beginning. To this day, Meek admits having a gun and selling weed when he was a teenager but insists he never pointed his pistol at the cops the night he was arrested in 2007, using logic that’s hard to argue with — young black men don’t pull guns on police and live to tell about it. (“That’s suicide,” he’s said.) There’s also a laundry list of troubling issues with the original conviction, ranging from no physical evidence of the crack Meek was alleged to have dealt to the testimony of the arresting officer, who is among 29 cops now barred from testifying in court due to alleged misconduct. District Attorney Larry Krasner has said there is a “strong showing of likelihood of [Meek’s] conviction being reversed.” Meek’s legal team is awaiting a ruling from the state Superior Court on their request for a new trial.

Meanwhile, Meek’s probation violations kept dragging him back before Judge Genece Brinkley. In 2012, a day after reaching number two on the Billboard 200 with his debut album — featuring “Dreams and Nightmares,” the song later used by Eagles players as their Super Bowl season anthem — Meek was pulled over on the way to the airport and arrested on suspicion of marijuana possession. He passed two drug tests ordered by Brinkley, but the judge ruled he was no longer allowed to tour. (Brinkley sets the terms of Meek’s probation and has broad discretion over how to enforce them.) Meek lost nearly $1.5 million in endorsements from Puma and estimates several million more in performance fees as a result.

What followed was a series of missteps and punishments that shows that while Meek is no Boy Scout, the system is, to be generous, nonsensically unforgiving of even minor slip-ups: Meek books concerts out-of-state and gets grounded; he’s denied a request for a new parole officer and ordered to take etiquette courses after complaining about his PO on social media; he serves five additional months in jail for more unapproved travel and testing positive for Percocet, which he’d used after getting his wisdom teeth pulled. (Meek was eventually given permission to attend rehab, where, he says, he successfully kicked his pill habit.) In 2016, with then-girlfriend Nicki Minaj sitting behind him, he apologized to Brinkley for “embarrassing” the court with his behavior and angry lyrics in his songs about his case. “Early in my career,” he said, “I was caught up between money and success.” Meek’s life coach, Dyana Williams, who’s worked with rapper T.I. and singer Mary J. Blige, testified that he was a changed man. Unmoved, the judge gave him 90 days of house arrest and, worse, extended his probation for another six years. The leash first placed on him in 2008 now extends to 2022.

Meek has a knack for both finding and creating drama, which isn’t a great trait in a guy who’s being watched by a judge and TMZ. The last straws snapped with two arrests in 2017, when Meek broke up a fight in the St. Louis airport, then popped wheelies on a dirt bike with some kids in Manhattan before an appearance on The Tonight Show. The charges were dropped in both cases, but any run-in with the police is considered a probation violation. In November, after those incidents and a disputed positive drug test for Percocet, Brinkley ordered Meek back to prison for two to four years.

Her decision proved to be a flash point that Brinkley likely never anticipated. In the courtroom that day were Rubin and Roc Nation COO Desiree Perez, who both vowed to get Meek out of prison. They weren’t the only ones dumbfounded, says Brian McMonagle, one of Meek’s attorneys. He’d never seen a judge ignore a recommendation when the defense, the prosecution and the DA were all in agreement — in this case, that Meek didn’t deserve jail time. “It was one of the worst experiences I’ve ever had,” McMonagle says. “To have his life turned upside down by an unjust ruling — I was sick to my stomach.”

The #FreeMeekMill campaign launched immediately, sweeping across social media and leading to a rally at City Hall a week later with Dr. J, outspoken Eagles safety Malcolm Jenkins and rapper Rick Ross. Kevin Hart, Joel Embiid and Robert Kraft all made visits to Meek’s medium-security prison in Chester. Some less famous folks also showed their support, including Chad Dion Lassiter of the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission, who’d never met Meek before visiting him in jail. Lassiter says most of their conversations in more than a dozen visits focused on how to improve education and the criminal justice system. “I found him to be very genuine, very sincere,” says Lassiter, who gave Meek The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois and other books to keep his mind sharp. “I often left choked up with emotion because I saw he had a unique calling on his life.”

Another new friend was former Goldman Sachs exec Howard Brown, who runs a finance firm while teaching entrepreneurship at Northeast High. Brown had given Lassiter a primer on Meek’s music before they met, and in turn, Lassiter encouraged Brown to visit the rapper. “It exceeded all my expectations,” says Brown, who bonded with Meek over their kids. “He did have a genuine interest in improving the community he came from. I was skeptical at first, but I believe he has a genuine passion for prison reform.”

The efforts of Rubin and Perez paid off last April when the state Supreme Court ordered Brinkley to release Meek on bail after he’d served five months. Rubin picked Meek up from Chester in his company’s helicopter — fulfilling an actual dream Meek had in prison — and flew him to ring the opening bell at the Sixers playoff game that night. The sellout crowd erupted as the PA announcer shouted, “Welcome home!” and Meek appeared, hammer in hand and a wide grin on his face.

Today in New York, after the Reform Alliance kickoff ends, the crush of media that follows Meek into a press room speaks to the enormity of his situation. Morning-show anchor and Oprah bestie Gayle King is here, as is Lester Holt; word is that NBC News is planning a justice reform series with Meek as its centerpiece. A film crew working on a documentary for Amazon that’s scheduled to debut sometime this year hovers.

Later tonight, Meek will end up in the studio with Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz before heading directly to a Good Morning America interview with Rubin on no sleep. Two days later, he’ll perform three songs on Saturday Night Live, then fly to a vacation in Jamaica, posting clips from a strip club there of twerking booties and dollar bills flying everywhere — something you’ll likely never see on Al Sharpton’s Instagram.

Even on a far-away island, though, he’s still looking over his shoulder. Meek records a video from the side of a road where a few Jamaican cops have pulled his car over. He’s worried he’s in trouble for something, with who-knows-what consequences to follow back home. Turns out the traffic stop is just to ask for a photo.

•

This is where the situation in Atlanta gets really weird — which is saying something, given that I’m presently at a Super Bowl party and just exchanged concerned glances with former Cowboy Emmitt Smith as Meek’s security detail and surrounding photogs nearly crushed both of us. Meek performs for about 15 minutes, as does Cardi B, who says she needs to leave to visit sick kids in the hospital. (Michael Rubin also shouts her out for donating to Reform Alliance.) The viral highlight of the party turns out to be when Robert Kraft — who will soon win his sixth Super Bowl and then face solicitation charges in a Florida sex-trafficking ring — gets pushed onto the stage and dances to Cardi B’s hit song “Money.” As shots are flowing (largely thanks to Kevin Hart) and crews are growing, Meek asks if we can reschedule our planned interview. It’s clear that this is possibly the worst time in his life to get his undivided attention — he’s free from jail, cameras and the court are watching his every move, he’s trying to make up for lost time and lost money and, while he’s at it, change the American justice system and occasionally get a lap dance.

Meek Mill hanging out at the Fanatics Super Bowl party with Michael Rubin, Kevin Hart and Robert Kraft. Photograph by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images

So I find myself in a downtown Atlanta ballroom later that night, at a front-row table for Kraft’s invite-only pre-Super Bowl gala. Kraft and his girlfriend are at the table next to mine; Bon Jovi’s seated within arm’s reach over my shoulder. Uber founder Travis Kalanick sits between me and Rubin. Meek is scheduled to show up soon and say a few words; his friendship with Kraft has only deepened since his release. (When Kraft was announced as the recipient of Israel’s peace prize, Meek sent him a text that Kraft called “moving.”)

Meek arrives midway through a set by comedian David Spade and sits down at our table. He’s looking relaxed and in good spirits, with a silky black shirt unbuttoned enough to flash some chains, including a “Championships” medallion he’ll end up gifting to Kraft after his win tomorrow night. When Spade’s set ends, Rubin grabs Meek and me to retreat to a small couch in the lobby near the open bar. I’m hoping to finally get some perspective on this moment in Meek’s life. A year ago, he watched his beloved Eagles win the Super Bowl on a jailhouse TV. Tomorrow, he’ll be at the game, celebrating with his billionaire buddies, and later he’ll fly to Los Angeles for a Roc Nation Grammy party with Jay-Z. Meek tells me he texted his mom in disbelief the day after Reform Alliance’s launch. “To have that many people with powerful names and voices who come from different walks of life, it was mind-blowing — I was at that table,” he tells me, moving my recorder closer to him. “She was like, ‘Yeah, I couldn’t believe it.’”

But the interview turns out to be less of a conversation and more of a filibuster on the particulars of his case, which, in his mind, hasn’t received enough attention (aside from a deifying Rolling Stone feature that savaged Brinkley, a Dateline special, and the 692 articles mentioning Meek Mill on Philly.com, for starters). Halfway through answering my second question, about his SNL debut, he takes a hard turn.

“For people who have been following my story,” he says, “because I always get kickback about, like, me being on probation 11 years and if I deserve to go to jail or not, I just want to start from the beginning of everything. South Philadelphia, the place where my father was killed at, many of my friends were killed at. Do you have any friends that was killed by gunfire?”

“No,” I reply.

“It’s kinda normal in your world. In my world, it’s normal for 30 of your friends your age to die by gunfire.” (Fame hasn’t inoculated him against this phenomenon: Two and a half years ago, his 21-year-old cousin was fatally shot in South Philadelphia.)

From there, Meek dives deep into his case. There’s the police-brutality aspect that he thinks, fairly, gets lost in the retelling; he claims to still have scars from the handcuffs clapped on when he was arrested in the raid and says police used his head to bash in the front door of the house. There’s a neighbor who was swept up in the raid, was arrested, and is also still on probation to this day, even though Meek says she’s a law-abiding mom who used to hassle his crew for sitting around that house smoking weed.

He also wants to know why one of the cops who arrested him, Reggie Graham, is barred from testifying in court because of “alleged acts of corruption” but still insists he didn’t lie about Meek’s arrest, particularly the gun details. Meek argues that you have to be “criminal-minded” to even think about pointing a pistol at a cop, and that community pillars like Rubin wouldn’t stand with someone who possessed that mentality. He does admit to carrying an unlicensed gun that night. “I don’t regret carrying no firearm in Philadelphia,” he says. “If I didn’t, there’s probably a 99 percent chance I would be dead. Everybody I grew up with, every person you see me with at these shows, have bullet holes in them. … If you was in a neighborhood and had 16 Freddy Kruegers, 17 Jasons, 10 Michael Myers running around, you would carry a gun.”

“Why is a woman of color sitting on the bench calling me a threat to society?” Meek asks. “Why do she view me as that?”

This is a side of Meek I haven’t seen before, one that contradicts the stories from his prison visitors who were amazed by how positive he remained despite his circumstances. It also contradicts Meek’s frequent admission that he feels guilty about being the face of Reform Alliance, knowing there are so many stories like the ones in that film — and that but for the grace of God and Twitter and rich friends, he’d likely still be in jail. Yet he’s not done talking about his own situation, expressing frustration that stops short of rage; he’s simply incredulous, as though his mind, so fit from the mental gymnastics required to spit lyrics, is still trying to untangle how he ended up in a legal nightmare 12 years long and counting. How the system — and a black judge — could do him so dirty. “Why is a woman of color sitting on the bench calling me a threat to society?” he asks me. “Why do she view me as that?”

If that sounds like bullshit — hey, this guy can’t stay out of trouble, he deserves what he got — consider the distinction Van Jones makes when talking about Reform’s mission. “If you’re on probation or parole and you go jack a car, that’s a new crime for which you should be punished,” he says. “But we are talking about ‘technical violations.’ I’ve learned that no one knows what that means. We’re sending people back to prison for non-crimes.”

Meek’s sincerity about helping other people caught in the same revolving door he’s spinning through — that’s harder to question. He peppers our conversation with references to other criminal justice outrages in the news: Did I see the video of the guy who was shot in his car by a cop when he reached into his glove box, after the cop told him to reach into his glove box? Did I hear about the prison in Brooklyn where the power and heat went out for a week? He can relate, he tells me — one of his cells had a broken window, so Meek slept in every piece of clothing he had. Studies have shown that people who’ve experienced urban trauma display symptoms of PTSD. Meek agrees — he can still describe, in vivid detail, the night of the raid, or the sounds of inmates howling when he was placed in a psych ward for several days because prison officials thought his celebrity would make him a target in the general population. “Two years ago,” he says, “I swear on my mother’s soul, I used to say I’d rather die than go back to jail, because it’s been going on for so long in my life. It’s gonna ruin everything I worked for.”

There lies the great irony in the Meek Mill story. Michael Eric Dyson sees it through the lens of Scripture: “In Genesis, when Joseph was jailed, he said, ‘You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.’ His misfortune has been transformed into a powerful opportunity.” Being sent back to jail was the best thing for Meek’s career and might turn out to help millions of people, thanks to his determination and a remarkable social justice awakening buoyed by a group of wealthy superheroes who would never have otherwise united. When his Wikipedia page is complete someday, his legacy as a rapper might pale in comparison to his impact on the prison system.

Meek Mill performing at the Fanatics Super Bowl party. Photograph by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images

Rubin ends the interview by yanking Meek back inside the ballroom to say a few words. It’s an awkward moment that Meek fully recognizes — he’s interrupting a party to thank Kraft for his support. “This is about Robert Kraft, not Meek Mill,” he says, keeping it brief and begging off Jamie Foxx’s insistence that he perform “Dreams and Nightmares.” “Give it up for a gracious Meek Mill,” Foxx says, quickly pivoting. It’s a perfect read of the room by Meek, who later admits, “Why should I be screaming the N-word in front of older white people?”

The hip-hop-superstar-slash-change-agent leaves the party and heads out into the Atlanta night for a lucrative club appearance in the wee hours of the morning that requires him to stick around for an hour. I told you this was a weird scene — one that’s now just another day for a guy who’s both larger than life and one slip-up away from heading back behind bars, at least for now.

•

My last attempt to see Meek in person fails because he’s still in Atlanta, then performing at the NBA All-Star Game in Charlotte before flying to Miami for the kickoff of his tour. I’m finally able to catch him for a tightly monitored 20-plus-minute call from his hotel in North Carolina. He was at the arena for rehearsal this morning at 8:30 a.m. and found time to do an ask-me-anything chat on Twitter. Meek also did an interview for The Ellen DeGeneres Show, with a young fan who, unlike me, was probably not asking for his thoughts on Donald Trump.

This isn’t a clickbait question I’m posing. The president is a Kraft pal and in December signed the First Step Act, a sweeping bipartisan justice reform bill aimed at reducing recidivism and adjusting sentencing laws. Van Jones was among those who praised Trump for what’s been hailed as a generational initiative. But Trump also took frequent aim at Meek’s pal Colin Kaepernick and supporters like Malcolm Jenkins. Meek’s U.K.-born friend 21 Savage was jailed in Trump’s anti-immigration crackdown. More bluntly, many people view Trump as a racist. How does Meek reconcile all of that?

Simply put, he doesn’t. It’s true that he encouraged rapper Travis Scott not to perform with Maroon 5 at the Super Bowl, but only because Meek felt hip-hop always plays second fiddle in those halftime shows — headline it or don’t do it, he advised. For all the nuanced ways Meek can discuss the criminal justice system, he has no interest in the politics that shape it. “I don’t really care about none of that,” he says. “That’s like the other side of America. I come from the streets. I’m dealing with murder in my neighborhood, the drug-infested areas, people’s self-hate, everybody’s strung out on drugs. That’s really my reality. I never really paid attention to politics. I don’t think no president who’s ever been in the White House has represented what I represent.”

It’s not surprising that this newly minted activist isn’t watching C-SPAN. Meek just wants to record club bangers or take his son to Dorney Park or visit his mom in South Jersey without violating a court order. And as someone who’s on Twitter every day, Meek also knows that weighing in on Trump might backfire. “I could get caught up in an interview and say the wrong thing,” he says. “You’re talking about the president of the United States to someone from the ghetto of North Philadelphia. I don’t even know. All I know is, I’m just doing what’s right by my friends. I represent Kaepernick; I stand for what he stands for. I was beat by police before, brutalized by police, falsely accused by police. And I stand for Robert Kraft. He came to see me while I was in prison, put his face on the line, spoke well about me being as powerful as he is. I stand with Michael Rubin. I stand with Jay-Z.” (When news of Kraft’s prostitution charges surface two weeks later, the closest thing to an official statement from Meek is a cryptic tweet with three thinking-face emojis.)

In the days that follow our last conversation, Meek opens the All-Star Game and then his tour in Miami, where paps catch him on the beach with three women in very small bikinis. The role of chart-topping hip-hop star is the one he wears most comfortably, but it doesn’t mean the others — activist, ex-con, son, father, friend — are less genuine. I think back to my conversations with Lassiter and Brown about how much Meek means to the community, and also how neither of them needs anything from him. They’re in the minority — almost everyone in his orbit wants to take his time or protect it; snap a pic or get a quote; shake his hand or help him hand a backpack to a needy child.

Everyone I spoke with agrees on three things — Meek cares about criminal justice reform; he’s authentically himself; and the newfound demands of fame pale in comparison to what he’s already overcome. “What we have is a moment that turned into a movement,” Lassiter says.

Both he and Brown end our interviews excited about what’s ahead for Meek this year, which could include a new trial or a recusal that would end his legal nightmare altogether. They also separately make the same request, asking me to tell Meek to holler at them. It’s been a while since they’ve talked. Maybe he’s changed his phone number. They know he’s been busy.

Published as “Meek’s Moment” in the April 2019 issue of Philadelphia magazine.

Source: https://www.phillymag.com/news/2019/03/14/meek-mill-social-justice-reform/

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laughtrout72-blog · 6 years ago

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How Meek Mill Became a Movement

News

A look at the life of Meek Mill, one year out of prison. Photograph by Ahmed Klink

When they label you a felon, it’s like they telling you … not equal 11 years going to court knowing they might keep you or drive you crazy 23 hours in a cell, somebody save me.

As cultural critic and author Michael Eric Dyson sums up Meek’s music, “He’s really the poet laureate of black grief, grime and grit.”

Here in one room, the worlds of hip-hop, Hollywood, Wall Street, sports and social consciousness form a bizarre cultural Venn diagram, with a Philly rapper standing at the center.

•

The launch of Reform Alliance in January. Photograph by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images

•

Meek Mill hanging out at the Fanatics Super Bowl party with Michael Rubin, Kevin Hart and Robert Kraft. Photograph by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images

“No,” I reply.

“Why is a woman of color sitting on the bench calling me a threat to society?” Meek asks. “Why do she view me as that?”

Meek Mill performing at the Fanatics Super Bowl party. Photograph by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images

•

Published as “Meek’s Moment” in the April 2019 issue of Philadelphia magazine.

Source: https://www.phillymag.com/news/2019/03/14/meek-mill-social-justice-reform/

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usuallyrics-blog · 6 years ago

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Off The Corner

New Lyrics has been published on usuallyrics.com https://usuallyrics.com/lyrics/off-the-corner/

Off The Corner

(feat. Rick Ross)

[Intro: Meek Mill] M-m-m-m-a No, no, no, no, no, no These hoes, they like niggas that spend money, not talk about it If you ain’t gonna get the money then watcha gonna do? Hey!

[Hook: Meek Mill] I graduated from the streets, no diploma I made a million on that corner I mixed pedico with baking soda I made a million on that corner Going Donald Trump numbers on the corner I made a million on that corner Graduated from the streets, no diploma I made a million on that corner I made a million on that, I made a million on that I made a million on that corner

[Verse 1: Meek Mill] Young rich nigga, I flex, look at my neck Look at my bitch, look at my wrist, got these niggas upset Who you know blow a mill? Don’t even think twice, no sweat And these hoes around me? You don’t fuck, you don’t give them no check Cause ya’ll niggas lame as fuck, none of these chumps can’t hang with us All these chains getting tangled up And my clique armed and dangerous, and we’ll flame you up You get smoked mothafucker like angel dust Start the Rolls Royce with the angel up All these niggas on angels bruh, but I got stripes like a bengal does And my wrist look like the flash on Come that ho and bring that ass on So I can beat it up like you stole something Might pop a purple, go mad long like skrrt Been through your hood in a wraith, niggas is jealous, just look at your face 3-57 get put in your place, follow my lead all you niggas is late Like hold up, hold up, I done made a million on that corner I bought some coke but couldn’t deal with Arizona Them yellow diamonds looking clearer than Corona And if they act like they ain’t with it

[Hook]

[Verse 2: Rick Ross] I’m on the corner gettin’ cake I’m talkin’ like it’s 88 Givenchy all I really play Kingpin status when I swerve up on the block A nigga like you, you wouldn’t even get the cock Get my money dolo, I just need some help to count it I’m the richest nigga outta Dade-Broward County Feds know my game, they keep it raw, we all at odds Repossess my Lambo cause they wanna build a charge When they got my Chevy, got it runnin’ like it’s ‘sposed to Hit up on my niggas, let ’em know my shop reopened We rockin’ everything, till I’m right back on the top Nasdaq hustle bitch, come get your ass in stocks

[Hook]

[Outro: Rick Ross] Ugh, Double M, bang!

Who is Meek Mill

Robert Rihmeek Williams, famous stage name Meek Mill, is an American rapper. Born in Philadelphia, the artist began his musical career with The Bloodhoundz. In 2008, hip-hop artist T.I. made the first entry.

#Meek Mill - Off The Corner Lyrics #Meek Mill LyricsArray

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worldslyrics · 4 years ago

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Otherside Of America Lyrics-Meek Mill Lyrics, Meek Mill Sang this song Which is very lovely and attractive song. Otherside Of America Lyrics is Released on 2020. Otherside Of America Lyrics-Meek Mill Lyrics song is a great choice for you, If you want to be a singer then Sing this hot and lovely Otherside Of America Lyrics which is sang by your favorite singer Meek Mill. Otherside Of America Lyrics-Meek Mill Lyrics

Otherside Of America Lyrics-Meek Mill Lyrics

{Donald Trump:} What do you have to lose? You’re living in poverty Your schools are no good You have no jobs 58% of your youth is unemployed What the hell do you have to lose?

{Meek Mill:} Reportin’ live from the other side of America

Mama let me sip the forty, I was just a shorty (Damn) Then I started spittin’ godly, then they said record me I feel like this shit was for me, this shit just my story (Facts) Yeah, uh Jumped off the porch, uh, I got a Porsche, won’t take it back I’m on the block with the killers and holdin’ my own, of course (Yeah, check, check) I seen my mom and dad separate, ain’t talkin’ divorce (Talkin’ divorce) Said daddy was livin’ by the fire, and he died by the torch (Check, check) I’m where the AKs is, we like the Bébé’s Kids Ain’t have a daddy, I listened to suckers the same way that Ray Ray did I’m totin’ Smith &’s and HKs and I just was a grade A kid Ain’t have no guidance, we grew up with hitters and did everything they said Point out the block, we spinnin’ that (Spinnin’) Run in the spot, we gettin’ that (Get it) Give us some work, we flippin’ that (Flippin’) I’m hittin’ from jail, they ain’t hiittin’ back I need a lawyer, money for commissary, and nobody ain’t sendin’ that I’m in my cell like, “When I get out, I’m makin’ a movie, no Cinemax” (Woo) Yeah, back home and I’m fresh on bail Phone chirpin’, it was next to Tell Block popppin’, it was extra sales Big dogs, they ain’t showin’ remorse I was beggin’ just to catch a sale Same block, we was goin’ to war I was prayin’ I ain’t catch a shell (Check)

Uh, we was starvin’ for a thousand nights Livin’ like we tryna die tonight Glock .40 sound like dynamite I was fuckin’ up my cop money Sellin’ soap like it’s China white OG’s said, “You fuckin’ the block up” I was mad, I was tryna fight Nigga, we hungry Mama at work, daddy, he dead, nigga we lonely Stomach growlin’ like a AMG, goin’ to bed, we hungry Uzi on me, all my friends are dead, nigga, we lonely Reportin’ live from the other side of America

Reportin’ live from the other side (Yeah) Same corner where my brothers died (Yeah) Livin’ life, we ain’t got a care Told my mama I ain’t dyin’ here (No) .40 on me, I ain’t buyin’ beer (No) Ain’t have a will, now I’m flyin’ Lear Bunch of felons on the jet with me Make a movie like it’s Con Air Started off in the basement Now it’s rooftops and LeBron there Still fightin’ open cases Out on bail, nigga, but it’s my year Summertime, it get cold out Heater on me like a Moncler Closet bigger than my old house Thinkin’ ’bout it, I was fine there Came out the dirt (Dirt) Dedicated, I was makin’ it work Medicated, I was takin’ them Percs Devastated when my niggas got murked Educated, had to get to it first I knew trappin’, it would get me in jail Playin’ with pistols, it would get me hearse But I ain’t give a fuck, send me to church (Woo) Yeah, they gotta catch me in traffic (Traffic) I ain’t with none of this rap shit (Rap shit) I’ve been tryna run from these caskets All this pain built in me, nigga You don’t want none of this action Go get some money and feed your fam ‘Cause this is a fuckin’ disaster, yeah

{Meek Mill (Michael Smercornish):} I always dreamed too, of being like, on like CNN and being able to like express myself And, and, and speak for like the voiceless young men of America (Do it) The first step, I would say, I grew up in American in a ruthless neighborhood where we were not protected by police, uh We grew up in ruthless environments, we grew up around murder, you see murder You see seven people die a week, I think you would probably carry a gun yourself Would you? (Uh, yeah, I probably would)

Otherside Of America Lyrics-Meek Mill Lyrics

Artist: Meek Mill Released: 2020

Sing More Song

Sweeter Lyrics-Leon Bridges Lyrics

Hard Days Lyrics-Brantley Gilbert Lyrics

Lifetime Lyrics-Ben And Ben Lyrics

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Still With You Lyrics-Jungkook Lyrics

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talkbazemedia · 6 years ago

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Nav Ft. Meek Mill – Tap

Nav Ft. Meek Mill – Tap MP3.

Download Nav Tap Ft. Meek Mill, Here comes a new song titled Tap from Nav featuring Meek Mil.

Tap by Baby Soulja & Meek Mill was dropped off Nav newly released album tagged Bad Habits.

Quotable Lyrics

In the trap, hang in places that you can’t go Glock .40, he got smokey, yeah, the draco Thousand nights on that corner eating egg-rolls Bad b***h Puerto Rican, look like…

View On WordPress

#Meek Mill #Nav

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investmart007 · 6 years ago

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Anita Baker, H.E.R., Meek Mill shine at BET Awards

New Post has been published on https://is.gd/0eKfSD

Anita Baker, H.E.R., Meek Mill shine at BET Awards

Legendary singer Anita Baker was honored at the BET Awards with impressive performances that nearly brought the eight-time Grammy winner to tears.

Baker earned the Lifetime Achievement Award on Sunday at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles, where Ledisi, Marsha Ambrosius and Yolanda Adams — in superior form — sang the singer’s well-known hits onstage.

The 60-year-old, who dominated the R&B charts from the early ’80s to mid-90s with smooth songs like “Sweet Love” and “Giving You the Best That I Got,” used her speech to encourage the artists in the room to keep music alive.

“I would ask that the music be allowed to play, that singers are allowed to sing, and rappers are allowed to rap, and poets are allowed to rhyme,” Baker said.

Rising singer H.E.R. had the night’s best performance, as she sang the R&B hit “Focus,” played the electric guitar like a rock star and sang softly during the sweet love song “Best Part,” where she was joined by Daniel Caesar.

Rapper Meek Mill, who was released from prison in April, also captivated the audience with his performance: He rapped the song “Stay Woke” on a stage transformed into a street corner, featuring hustlers, children and police officers. A mother screams as her child is shot during the powerful performance, and an officer lays an American flag over the body.

Meek Mill also made a statement by wearing a hoodie featuring the face of XXXTentacion, the 20-year-old rapper-singer who died after being shot last week.

“We can’t get used to these types of things. We’re too used to young people getting killed,” host Jamie Foxx said when speaking about XXXTentacion later in the show.

The Oscar winner told the audience to “try to sneak a message in” their music.

“We got to figure something out,” he said.

Snoop Dogg celebrated 25 years in music, performing the classic songs “What’s My Name” and “Next Episode.” The rapper also performed songs from his recently released gospel album this year, wearing a choir robe on a stage that looked like a church.

Childish Gambino, whose song and music video “This Is America” tackles racism and gun violence and became a viral hit last month, gave a short, impromptu performance of the song when Foxx brought him onstage.

“Everybody begged me to do a joke about that song. I said that song should not be joked about,” Foxx said.

Foxx kicked off the show rejoicing in the uber success of “Black Panther,” namedropping the records the film has broken and even pulling Michael B. Jordan onstage.

“We don’t need a president right now because we got our king,” Foxx said of T’Challa. “(Director) Ryan Coogler gave us our king.”

Foxx entered the arena with a stuffed black panther toy — with a gold chain around its neck — which he handed to Jordan. He later pulled the “Creed” star onstage to recite a memorable line from “Black Panther.”

“Bury me in the ocean with my ancestors who jumped from ships, ’cause they knew death was better than bondage,” Jordan said to cheers from the audience, which included Childish Gambino, LL Cool and DJ Khaled.

The film went on to win best movie.

“The film is about our experiences being African Americas and also captures the experiences of being African,” Coogler said. “It was about tapping into the voice that tells us to be proud of who will are.”

At the end of his speech he told the audience to travel to Africa and learn more about the continent’s history.

Most of the awards, including video of the year, were not announced during the live telecast.

SZA, who was the most nominated woman at this year’s Grammys, won best new artist and said she’s “never won anything in front of other people.”

She dedicated the award to those “lost in the world,” saying: “Follow your passion … believe in yourself.”

“Girls Trip” star and comedian Tiffany Haddish, who gave her speech in a taped video after winning best actress, also said encouraging words.

“You can achieve anything you want in life,” she said.

DJ Khaled, who was the leading nominee with six, won the first award of the night — best collaboration — for “Wild Thoughts” with Rihanna and Bryson Tiller. He was holding his son on his hip onstage and also used his speech to highlight young people.

“All of y’all are leaders and all of y’all are kings and queens — the future,” he said.

Migos won best group and gave a fun performance that even had Adams reciting the lyrics.

Nicki Minaj crawled on the floor a bit during her performance of two songs, and she later joined YG, 2 Chainz and Big Sean for “Big Bank.” Janelle Monae went from rapping to singing for top-notch performances of “Django Jane” and “I Like That,” and Miguel, in a white suit, was smooth as he sang the songs “Come Through and Chill” and “Sky Walker.”

The BET Awards normally hands its Humanitarian Award to one person, but six individuals received the honor Sunday. Dubbed “Humanitarian Heroes,” the network gave awards to James Shaw Jr., who wrestled an assault-style rifle away from a gunman in a Tennessee Waffle House in April; Anthony Borges, the 15-year-old student who was shot five times and is credited with saving the lives of at least 20 other students during February massacre in Florida; Mamoudou Gassama, who scaled an apartment building to save a child dangling from a balcony last month in Paris; Naomi Wadler, the 11-year-old who gave a memorable and influential speech at March for Our Lives; Justin Blackman, the only student to walk out of his high school in North Carolina during the nationwide student walkout to protest gun violence in March; and journalist and activist Shaun King.

Debra Lee, who stepped down as chairman and CEO of BET last month after 32 years at the network, earned the Ultimate Icon Award.

“The power of black culture is unmatched. It’s beautiful. It’s amazing. It’s everything. It’s us,” she said.

She ended her speech quoting former U.S. President Barack Obama, calling him “our commander in chief,” which drew loud applause from the crowd.

“And, it’s Debra Lee, out,” she said as she dropped her imaginary microphone.

By MESFIN FEKADU, AP Music Writer, By Associated Press

___

#Anita Bakar #Baker earned the Lifetime Achievement Award #BET Awards #Meek Mill shine #The 60-year-old #TodayNews #who dominated the R&B charts

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aqlyrics-blog · 7 years ago

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She On My Dick Remix

New Post has been published on http://purelyrics.net/lyrics/rick-ross-she-on-my-dick-remix/

She On My Dick Remix

–Intro: Bruno Mali– Maybach Music Slide, hoe, watch this I’m drippin’ dressin’ on these hoes, nigga Get your bitch, nigga She gettin’ real friendly, nigga Talk to these niggas

–Verse 1: Meek Mill– Richest nigga in the city so she on my dick Shawty know she fuck me good and like she caught a lick My daughters took that for the feds, went and bought a brick Said welcome back, gave ’em some keys on some reporter shit, woah Whippin’ the white, we might just ran through a brick in the night Give ’em a price, Lord a number when he flip it twice Still in the trap, bitch on her back while I’m out for a bite I’m on some shit, these niggas ain’t lit, I give ’em a life, woah She on my dick, she on my dick Got that word, that pussy good now she on my list Rose Patek, look like duck sauce on my wrist Young nigga, Bentley trucks parked on my strip Standin’ on the corner like I’m King Kong And [?] stop with that .40, playin’ ding dong And back and forth, ain’t no rappers like ping pong She fuck Rozay, she on my dick, we sing the same song, woah

–Chorus: Rick Ross– She on my dick, she on my dick (woo) She on my dick, she on my dick (woo) She seen my moves, she on my dick (woo) The richest nigga, yeah, she on my dick (woo)

–Verse 2: Young Dolph– I used to torture, gave him back his life He got it wrong if he think I’ma fight him War cries on all on my lil’ homies homicidal 300 soldiers like I’m Leonidas I flips them yams and gave my man a Merci We pop them bottles every night like it’s our anniversary Hot in Dade County, they gon’ try to stretch him One APB and they’ll apply the pressure I know them hot boys, she say I’m the coolest That coolin’ kid’ll have that chopper coolin’ I took a 50k right to my jewler Even though a nigga got it, I be actin’ Jewish No Master P, they got me feelin’ foolish She hold my dick, I let my gangster bitch hold down my toolie Yeah, she got potential so I had to school her I text her papi, he send me my moolah

–Chorus: Rick Ross– She on my dick, she on my dick (woo) She on my dick, she on my dick (woo) She on my dick, she on my dick (woo) Richest nigga in the city, she on my dick (woo)

–Verse 3: Bruno Mali– I tried to spread the bitch but she on my dick Told her jump up in this whip, come and drive a stick I might buy a purse, I might pay her rent She a all-star, first round draft pick She call me at the gas station pumpin’ gas I pulled up at the Chev, run up, drop off a couple bags Fish tailin’ off the lot with somebody’s thot When she met me, I was in a drop countin’ guap Said she fantasize ’bout a real trap nigga She on my dick so hard, she came before I put it in her Ha, young, rich, black, trap nigga With a fuckin’ 7 figures A huncho on my wrist Pull up in the whip with the shit and blow your bitch a kiss All of this ice on me make it hard for you to miss Every time you see me, look like I just hit a lick, woah

–Chorus: Rick Ross– She on my dick, she on my dick (woo) She on my dick, she on my dick (woo) She on my dick, she on my dick (woo) Richest nigga in the city, she on my dick (woo)

–Verse 4: Rick Ross– Rims stackin’ on the rear, album of the year If I want to see her, well then here come the lear Clear the runway and double in [?] The baddest bitches only ones that come to see us Jewels every every day, I’m burnin’ loud (that’s me) On the top floor and I’m the biggest earnin’ now (that’s me) Shittin’ on these niggas, Tweet, see ’em in the streets I’m only talkin’ money so we rarely speak I got the bitch a buzz and she fell in love Now she climbin’ out the deck, fuckin’ with a thug Had my skully on when I fuck her in the tub Dirty money, buy Chevys, only one I love She love it how I’m livin’, such a wise decision In the history books, never in my feelin’s Pussy wet enough, I think I got her drippin’ Still on my lap, I could count a million

–Chorus: Rick Ross– She on my dick, she on my dick (woo) She on my dick, she on my dick (woo) She on my dick, she on my dick (woo) Richest nigga in the city, she on my dick (woo)

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nevermadeadime · 8 years ago

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more life

More Life

The Biggest rapper in the world sounds more relaxed than he ever has on "More Life", a record that sees him pulling collaborators from all corners of the globe to create a playlist for the club or the sesh.

Culture-vulture, wave-rider, trend-hopper: all of these terms have been used as sleights against Drake throughout his career. Whether it be breaking the Weeknd and having Abel Tesfaye write half the hooks on "Take Care" or stealing the beat for "Hotline Bling", Drake has always had to face these allegations and they have usually been justified. This trend culminated with the massively successful release of "Views", and the equally massive backlash that album saw from fans and critics around the rap community.

"Views" was a slog of a record. Ten songs too long, the decision to break it into 6 rap songs, 10 pop songs and another 4 or so rap songs served to alienate both his rap fanbase and his broader, pop audience. And the singles all hopped on the sound of the moment, Dancehall-lite tropical pop. Problematically, Drake had started singing and rapping with a Jamaican accent, and cut Popcaan off of a massively successful single that he probably wrote. Drake's faux patois on the album was grating, and the most overt pop moves of his already very commercial career felt like a concious pivot away from hip-hop.

Sure "Views" had great lyrical tracks, hits and some beautiful melodies, but the length, structure, and overwhelming darkness of the album wears on the listener. It is not a classic record the same way "Nothing Was The Same" or "If You're Reading This It's Too Late" were, that's for sure.

So now, nearly a year later, Drake has given us "More Life", a 'playlist', not an album, but a record that features 22 tracks, 20 of which are Drake songs. The record is leagues more enjoyable than "Views", and up there with the best records Drake and 40 (for they are one and the same at this point, the most dominant songwriters of the decade) have done.

Drake has taken the accusations of trend-hopping and turned them on their head, curating a truly international album with songs that appeal to his broadest audience yet. He has finally figured out how to make these different regional sounds he has been messing with into authentic and respectable sounding songs. The standout example of this would be the song "Get it Together", in which he takes a classic black coffee song and essentially changes nothing, simply adding his own lyrics. Instead of the culture vulture feeling that songs like Hotline Bling or Controlla gave, it feels like an expertly calculated display of good taste, and works flawlessly.

This newfound clarity is clear from the features too. UK rappers Giggs and Skepta have verses, and the sound of London is all over the playlist. This allows him to co-opt UK slang like 'KMT' or 'wasteman' and not sound ridiculous because he has the godfathers of this shit all over the damn record. Similarly, the riddims, the sheer amount of looks he has thrown Popcaan and Vybz Kartel at this point, and the fact he's calling these songs "Blem" and "Madiba Riddim" make all this Jamiacan shit more acceptable to me than Views was. It also helps that the songs are less overtly pop leaning than songs like "Too Good" or "Work". This shit will never be for me, and 'Gyalchester' is easily the worst song on the album to me at the moment, but when he gives you 22 songs it doesn't matter if a few miss.

Because everything else is fucking HEATERS. From the first two songs, you'd be forgiven for thinking we're gonna get another "IYRTITL", just low stakes bars over the hardest beats money can buy. That's what I thought. Then you get to "Passionfruit". If there's any justice, this song will be the biggest hit of Aubrey Graham's career. It hits the same beats emotionally as "Hold on We're Going Home", but over a truly futuristic and out there house beat that wouldn't sound out of place in Fabric, Output or anywhere else. The song is incredible, my first time listening to it I couldn't believe that he made a song like this and actually wound it back on the record but it works and is just amazing. very cheeky!

"Get it Together" is great, the Jamaican sounding songs (Blem, Gyalchester, madliba riddim) are all wack to me though. Sampha's "4422" is better than half the songs on "Process" (which was kind of a disappointment now that I think about it). If he was gonna include an obscure British singer he'd worked with before I'd have preferred Jai Paul! Skepta's track is hard obviously.

Then comes "Portland" featuring Quavo and Travis Scott, which, besides "Passionfruit", is the other obvious hit on this record. This shit bangs. It's also using that flute sound which has been really big in the last month or so, that future song and "Tunnel Vision" have it too. Anyway, the first line of the song is already a meme "My side bitch got a 5s with the screen cracked" and the hook+flutes+features mean the song is guaranteed to be huge. The next tune, "Sacrifices" with Thug and 2Chainz would've been the hit 5 years ago, sounds a lot like "All Me". Hook is kind of boring but 2Chainz might have legitimately the best verse on the whole playlist. Dude will be rapping hilarious verses everyday until he's like 90. "Got wood on the Cartier, that's a face full of splinters!" Thug is obviously great. more on him later.

"Nothing Into Something" is simp Drake and I'm sure the people who enjoy that will enjoy it. "Teenage Fever" is great though. The J-Lo sample is so obvious but so great. it's a solid reminder that Drake isn't writing these songs about random thots, he is writing them about his relationships with Jennifer Lopez or Serena Williams. Drake was a teenager when that J-lo song came out. You have to respect the hustle that he got with her and then sampled her on a song about how into her he was as a teenager. damn. left turn indeed.

Fuck "KMT" though, free X! The Giggs verse on "KMT" is tied with the 2Chainz verse for best on the album though. This is the one bit of swaggerjacking on this record I can't abide, just completely stole xxxtentacion's flow. x will be huge though we aren't worried. Gotta be honest looking at the tracklist I don't even remember "Lose You" and "Can't have everything". I listened to them again they are ok. "Lose you" has some clever lines it's pretty good actually. "Can't have everything" is aite but the bit with his mum at the end is pure fire.

"Glow" featuring Kanye would be the one dissapointing moment on the record for me. The song is actually really good, especially the end and the way the sample comes in, awesome. But it feels like this song was supposed to be the intro for the Drake x Ye record, which hearing this would have been fucking incredible. hopefully we still get it. This is Kanye's first appearance on wax since the whole Trump thing, so I'm glad his neighbor has thrown him this look and happy he seems a bit better! Good for you Ye!

PND is kinda trash imo. Fake Love is a dope song we know this already. "Ice Melting" is fucking awesome though, probably my favorite song on the record right now. The hook is like all the songs from "jeffery" combined together like voltron into their final form for this Drake album. This song also deserves to be a hit but then again I think every catchy Thug song will be a hit and only "Lifestyle" ever was! Thug has two features and he is definitely the lowkey MVP of this album.

Also, I might write something more in depth about this but Thug definitely wrote Drake's verse on "Sacrifices". This segues into a bigger point I guess. We are now nearly two years removed from the Quentin Miller tapes and Meek Mill's accusations. It is interesting how the conversation shifted from "is it true?" to "does it matter?" and I think the answer to the second question is a resounding no. I have come to terms with the fact that Drake gets a lot of help on his songs, and that a lot of his throwaways, feature verses, and even a few hits are written by other people. Drake is always there I'm sure but it's clear that Thug wrote that verse. This is all besides the point of the actual quality of the album but w/e. point is, no one cares and it doesnt matter.

Maybe because these events are so behind him, Drake sounds more relaxed on “More Life”. On “Views” he sounded angry, defensive, and it made the music sound cold. “More Life” on the other hand, sees Drake sit back and make songs for the club and the people more than for himself and his ego. If “Views” was a cold, dark, winters day, then “More Life” is a summer night, seemingly never ending, just good vibes.

Man, I barely even talked about the sound of this album! 40's atmosphere and sound is so familiar at this point that it's hard to say anything new. It's lush, its lavish, its deep, its loud. These 22 songs form a collection of the most expensive sounding beats currently possible to make. Honestly, these Drake records are at the point that we can compare them to Pink Floyd or Chic in the attention to detail and sheer fidelity of the sound. Yet dont say they dont evolve. "Passionfruit", "Portland", "Ice Melting" and "fake love" really do sound different to anything Drake has rapped over before. Drake and 40 have a formula, they are never going to flip the script like Kendrick did with "TPAB" and that's fine. These guys have another 5 or so years of this before they start to fall off, just enjoy it.

#drake #more life #review #article #music review #pitchfork

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