Musings on music, memories, and madness
2018 was an interesting year for music. It was like a mid-level playoff team – excellent depth throughout but few truly stand-out performers. There were quite a number of good releases to include on a best-of list, most of which I would classify as simply solid, but the few top tier albums were truly outstanding. I don’t like assigning absolute rankings (i.e., #1, #2, etc.), so I broke it down into the following salient categories:
Continue reading “2018 Music Recap”
Open Mike Eagle is an artist whose career I have followed closely. I met him back in 2004 when I was doing research for my undergraduate thesis in Koreatown, Los Angeles, where he was among a group of young MCs recording an album at JUiCE – Justice by Uniting in Creative Energy, a nonprofit, hip hop themed afterschool organization that offered creative tutelage in B-boying, DJing, graffiti art, and MCing. My interaction with him was limited but was enough to recognize the burgeoning talent, and I have watched as he has moved from Project Blowed little brother to Mello Music Group marquee talent, and now even professional wrestler with Mick Foley in his corner. Every time he shows up somewhere like Hannibal Buress’s short-lived Comedy Central show or an NPR Tiny Desk Concert, I geek out and tell everyone how I used to kinda sorta know him. We were chatting many years ago when I was doing more hip hop writing, but at that exact moment my marriage fell apart, I went back to working full time, and my life more generally went to shit so I never got to follow through with the interview we had discussed. C’est la vie, but I still wish I would’ve made it happen.
The point here is that I’ve paid careful attention to his artistic output, and while I have genuinely enjoyed all of it, his newest EP, What Happens When I Try To Relax, has become an instant favorite. It is six tracks of back-to-back bangers, filled with intricate rhymes, dynamic rhythmic cadences, and ethereal boom bap, and it is extremely easy to just let it play on repeat two or even three times in a row. In an age of hit singles and disposable full-lengths, that is saying something. Continue reading “Stuff I Like: Open Mike Eagle – What Happens When I Try To Relax”
