In the Middle of the Ride

Artist: Blondage 

EP: Blondage

Release Date: September 16, 2016

Genre: Alternative

Producer: Tambourhinoceros

Mini Review: 

Rating: 3.0/5.0

Notable Song: “Lucky Black Shirt”

There’s definitely an ‘80′s vibe going on with this EP, and I feel like that seems to be a trend that’s happening in music lately. You have Taylor Swift’s 1989 (2014), Kendrick Lamar’s Section .80 (2011), and Bleachers’ Strange Desire (2014), all of which makes this EP hard to stand out because those are all so great. In a way, that ‘80′s vibe makes this EP sound a little derivative. The ‘80′s vibe comes in on the first song in the EP, “Lucky Black Shirt,” which is by far the best song of the album. It has this sort of sick beat to it that’s almost hypnotic and intoxicating. “Lucky Black Shirt” is definitely the kind of song that would make an appearance on a CW show or movie montage sequence. It’s also the kind of perfect song to just sit around and drive to at 2 a.m. with your friends. The next song, “Dive,” sounds like a mix of The xx and today’s dance beats, and the dance beats part comes through on the instrumental parts of this song. Next up is “BEG,” which might be the most inventive song on the EP because of how it mixes broken down beats with this sort of deconstructed sound, but even then it’s still borrowing heavily from other sounds and it still sort of sounds like a D’Jay’s remix of an ‘80′s song. “Pray” definitely has some weird techno stuff on towards the end of the song, which isn’t a bad thing necessarily, but I feel like most Alternative bands today want to be so many different things that they almost try to encompass every genre, and this definitely feels like that. Last but not least is “FLF,” which started out really good and kind of ends up as a hot mess at the end. 

Thoughts:

“I know some rappers using big words to make they similes curve / My simplest shit be more pivotal.”-Kendrick Lamar 

Rating: 4.8/5.0

Editor’s Notes from iTunes: “Created for, by, and about “80′s babys,”

Released: July 2, 2011

Producer: Top Dawg Entertainment 

Notable Songs: “F*ck Your Ethnicity,” “No Make-Up (Her Vice),” “Ronald Regan Era (His Evils),” “Chapter Ten,” “Keisha’s Song (Her Pain),” “Kush & Corinthians (His Pain),” “Ab-Soul’s Outro (feat. Ab-Soul)”

Review:

When you initially listen to Section.80, Lamar’s first studio album--he released an EP and Mix-Tape prior to this album--the notes strike you in the same vain as most California rappers. It’s got the laid-back, no care attitude of Snoop-Dog or Tu-Pac, but just like most West coast rap, that “laid-back” vide is deceptively simple. Lamar even goes so far as to state in one of his songs, “I know some rappers using big words to make they similes curve / My simplest shit be more pivotal,” and he’s absolutely right. His “simplest shit” runs circles around more verbosely-complex rappers simply for the fact that Kendrick Lamar has mastered the art of storytelling in a way that most rappers, most musicians, often fail to do. 

The stories, all about those good ol’ ‘80′s babies, are deep and highly complex, and often times moving. But the lyrics themselves are not only what drives the stories forward, it’s the way the songs, themselves, are arranged. There’s an almost techno feel to all of the songs because Lamar employs some type of voice modulation, which gives his songs a distinctively ‘80′s feel to them, but not in the same way those of you who are familiar with Taylor Swift’s 1989 (2014) album would know. There’s an almost robotic vibe to some of the songs, which rather than taking away from the stories, adds to them. 

It’s not only the techno-feel of the songs that makes them stand out, but also the way Lamar mixes Hip-Hop/Rap with R&B and Blues, and then throws some Ragtime vibes in there as well. 

The Ragtime is felt in “Ab-Soul’s Outro,” a deeply complex song, which, in my opinion, really gets at the heart of what Lamar is trying to do with his first album. He raps:

             “See a lot of y’all don’t understand Kendrick Lamar / because you                       wonder how I can talk about money, hoes, clothes, God and history /                 all in the same sentence / You know what all them things have in                         common? / Only half of the truth in you tell it / See I spent twenty-three               years on this earth searching for answers / ‘til one day I realized I had                 to come up with my own...So the next time I talk about money, hoes,                   clothes, God and history / in the same sentence / just know I meant it,                 and you felt it / ‘cause you too are searching for answers...”

He’s not seeking a capital “T” truth, he’s not even looking to advertise that he has found a capital “T” truth to explain the intricacies of human existence. What he is looking to do is explain his experience, his struggle, his relation to the universe, and he’s saying ‘I felt this, and you feel it too.’ In a way, his entire album is about this. It’s the incredibly human stories he tells, from “F*ck Your Ethnicity,” where he explains what Hip-Hop has done for him, what he hopes to do with Hip-Hop, while simultaneously making a sort of political statement, to “No Make-Up (Her Vice),” where you think the song is gonna take on a Drake “Best I Ever Had” vibe, and then hits you with the lyrics in the first verse, “It’s the beauty in her, but when the makeup occur / I don’t see it, all I see is blur,” which change to the following in the second verse: “(It’s the beauty in me, but what he don’t see / is that I had a black eye).” The same hit-you-in-the-face storytelling thread continues into “Keisha’s Song (Her Pain)”, with the following lyrics, “Then caught a knife her bladder, left her dead, raped in the street / Keisha’s song / Mm, my little sister eleven, I looked her right in the face / the day that I wrote this song, sat her down and pressed play.” The song is both a remembrance and a warning, like most of the songs on the album. 

“Music’s the only thing that makes sense anymore, man. Play it loud enough, it keeps the demon aways.”-Across the Universe (2007)

So, what is music? Why is it so intrinsically important to who we are as human beings? Why if you play it loud enough does it keep the demons away? 

Music isn’t just the progression of lyrical ballads to today’s Top 40 Hits. No, it’s been around a lot longer then when some dude decided to play a lute and sing a little poem. It’s older than Mozart. It’s probably as old as the time of living organism on this planet: That is because music can be found in nature. Birds sing, and before there were birds there were probably bird-like creatures that also had a little song to sing. Music is a part of nature. We are a part of nature. You do the math, because I certainly can’t since I stopped studying Math after my sophomore year of college. 

We need music be it’s a part of us. We have rhythm in our souls, and poetry in our blood. 

I could look up a bunch of facts to persuade you that music is important, but I think if you’re reading this you already know that. 

So, then, what is music? Quite simply, music is us. It’s special and kinetic, and there’s a reason as to why you’ll never feel more alive than when you’re at a concert and you feel the drums and bass thumping through your chest like they’ve taken the place of your heart and pumping your blood.