Song of the Week - My Style Is Fly (Dela Remix) by Jazz Liberatorz

I absolutely adore the production on this remix. While I really do enjoy the original track as well and it has its own merits, Dela absolutely cooked on this mix. Honestly the sound is very interesting to me, and I feel you don't really hear things like it made anymore.

The kind of electronic dreamy sound really pairs well with FatLip's lyrical flow and the hook is super catchy, it's just been bouncing around in my head for a while. It probably has to take the top spot in this album for me.

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Song of the Week - Like Him By Tyler, The Creator

CHROMAKOPIA was the first Tyler album release I've really paid attention to. Of course, I've heard some of his more popular songs before, but they've never really resonated with me. What stood out to me this time was how sincere and personal the album felt as a whole. It covers many intimate topics like his relationships, paranoia, and self-doubts. With this song in particular being exemplary of this theming.

This song covers his relationship with his absent father which ties back in to his reluctance to start a family. Outside of the narrative, the production is equally amazing, especially at the "climax" of the song where the electronic sound really embodies a kind of beautiful sadness, but also a feeling of acceptance/resolution. It's definitely my favorite song from the album and I will for sure be listening to any future Tyler drops.

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Song of the Week - Bomb Thrown by CZARFACE & MF DOOM

You simply can't go wrong with the combined talents of MF DOOM and Wu-Tang Clan's Inspectah Deck. Before checking out CZARFACE I wasn't familiar with Esoteric or either of The Czar-Keys, but their work on the track is also really great. The production and rhymes are fun and harken back to earlier days of hip-hop. The aesthetic similarities of the DOOM and CZARFACE personas, being based on retro comics, also bring a nice playfulness that I feel is missing from a lot rap nowadays. It's simply just a fun listen.

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Song of the Week - The Shining Sea by Cal Tjader

This song has such a perfect vibe. The kind of playful saxophone and piano make it a nice listen while still keeping the song calm and soothing.

I first found this song because it was sampled in Funky DL's If I Had a Day To Live

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Song of the Week - Cold World by GZA

I love the storytelling on this track. The lyrics do a great job of illustrating a scene in your mind, which is something I love in music.

The production also lends itself to the vibe really well. All the individual parts come together to create this kind of late night, lonely, mysterious vibe. It's almost reminiscent of a horror film.

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Song of the Week - You Never Knew by Hieroglyphics

I love basically everything about this song. The beat is amazing, the rhymes are tight and catchy as hell, and we get a whole bunch of amazing rappers on the same track. This, and a lot of Hieroglyphics/Souls of Mischief songs, just captures the perfect vibe for me. Just by listening you can tell they had fun every step of making it.

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Song of the Week - I Am Hip Hop by Jazz Liberatorz & Asheru

Just a good, catchy, song that serves as an homage to hip-hop and its culture.

The actual circumstances of the creation of the song are cool as well. It was recorded in Paris for the album Clin d'Oeil as a collab between French group Jazz Liberatorz who made the beats, and a bunch of different American rappers who wrote and rapped the lyrics.

This song, and the album as a whole, is just a sincere love letter to the medium of rap and a celebration of all the people and influences that made it what it is and I think that's really cool.

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Song of the Week - Mathematics by Mos Def

I love the concept of this song, every bar being presented in the context of math, numbers, and stats is really novel and I can't say I've seen anything quite like it before. His line delivery and rap flow is, as always, top-tier and really makes the cleverness of each line shine through. Mos Def is easily in my top 5.

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Song of the Week - Le Bien, Le Mal by Guru

This song's use of two different languages, french from MC Solarr and english from Guru is just such a cool concept and is executed expertly. This track is also just plain good, you can tell because I don't even understand french and I don't need to to realize that Solarr's verses are still great.

The entire album, Jazzmatazz, in general is just formed from a great idea, to mix jazz and hip-hop directly. It's no surprise that something like that would come from the mind of Guru, as Gang Starr helped to define jazz rap as we know it.

Click on the song name to listen on various platforms (including YouTube where you can listen for free)