"Birthdays, Relationship Advice & 90s Radio"
Cast: J. Brown, Nick, Kalis, Lee Deltoro
For the fifth installment, the crew discusses the slippery slope of relationship advice (should you give it? should you listen to it?). We also touch on why birthdays don't matter anymore, the inconsistencies of weather reports, and whether TV is now more important than movies.
Also, some listeners were having some playback issues with the last few episodes, so I've switched back to Soundcloud and re-uploaded the first four episodes. You can go back and listen to them out here, here, here and here.
by J. Brown
Confession: I really like T-Pain. Having attending college from 2004-2008, Mr. Pain was an integral part of my party-going experiences. It could even be argued that other than Lil' Wayne, T-Pain was the biggest hip-hop artist during that time period. In addition to having his own smash singles, like "Buy U a Drank", he was also featured on A LOT of other people's singles. Just look at this list of singles that he was featured on; his 2007 was insane.
Graduating college should have put T-Pain in a strictly nostalgic place for me, somewhere along with Bacardi Limon, fake IDs and Ramen noodles. That hasn't happened. I still enjoy his music, and could probably spend an unnecessary amount of time spouting the merits of Thr33 Ringz. So the other day, I was listening to his latest album while mopping the floors in my house. (I'm still an adult, after all.) On the first song, he used a phrase that's overused in hip-hop, but for some reason, it made me think. Yes, I said it: T-Pain's music made me think. In the first verse - which is mostly just about being a baller and gettin' these hoes - T-Pain claims that he does it "for my hood." Though I've heard rappers say this countless times on records, for some reason, I really thought to myself, 'What does that actually mean?' How exactly does one "do it for their hood"?
Instead of giving you another biased album review with subjective statements from one listener's point of view, we decided to use a more holistic approach by asking three different listeners to share their opinions on Kendrick Lamar's latest album, To Pimp a Butterfly. In addition to regular contributor J. Brown, we received the reviews from singer/rapper/songwriter David Brown from Atlanta and videographer Rae Ruckus from NYC. None of the writers were given any of the other reviews prior to submitting their own, so each writer's piece is solely representative of the album as they heard it. Now, on to the reviews...
