"The Argument" by Fugazi

I’ve seen a lot of ‘Best Of..’ lists, and Doug has already done a pretty good job of providing a musical overview to the past decade, but I feel these albums were super-crucial for my musical development and enjoyment, and I had to say something.

The following 18 albums, sometimes missed or overlooked on retrospective lists, but deserve some mention of worth.

1. Fugazi — The Argument/Furniture Ep

The last simultaneous releases from Fugazi also happen to be their best. Fugazi has been such an important band for the independent music scene, and these two recordings truly display the band’s ability to convey their ethos and message into a powerful musical form. The band’s impressive 15 year span culminates in these two final masterpieces.

2. Animal Collective — Water Curses

It was hard for me to pick between Water Curses or Feels, so I decided to go by my play count in iTunes. I think Water Curses is Animal Collective’s most dynamic, complex, and innovative recording to date. While their current pop direction is great, I do long for their freaky folk days. Additionally, the lyrical quality is much, much better than their latest releases. Street Flash and Cobwebs are standouts. If it wasn’t for Feels, then I would say that this is the best Animal Collective album by far.

3. Q and not U — Different Damage

Dance punk from DC. This album is much more subtle than their previous release, benefiting their sound to a huge extent. The energy is still there, but in a less frantic form. It has direction, velocity, and as a result, more force and power, exemplified in These Are Flashes. Another innovative punk album from our nation’s capital, but this one reigns above the rest.

4. Modest Mouse — Moon and Antarctica

One of my favorite Modest Mouse albums and their last great recording before they lost the air in their tires. Shows what a great band can do when backed by high production values on a major label. Too bad they blew it afterwards. This album, though, continues to blow my mind.

5. Destroyer — Destroyer’s Rubies

It’s all I listened to for 4 months straight this one time.

6. Deerhunter — Microcastle

An experimental album which at the same time carries a classic rock twang to it, creating this fascinating, psychedelic hybrid. It’s constantly screaming ‘instant classic!’ Great replay value on this record.

7. Of Montreal – Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?

This album is such an emotional journey through mania and depression. And it’s a seamless record too! Cato as a Pun and Gronlandic Edit are two of my favorite songs, ever.

8. Elliot Smith – Figure 8

Yes, Elliot Smith released stuff in the 2000’s. This should be on every single decade retrospective. It’s Figure 8 for crying out loud! Is there anything else to be said?

9. Rage Against the Machine — Renegades

This album, specifically their cover of Minor Threat’s In My Eyes, is solely responsible for my introduction to early hardcore punk. And I am forever grateful. Also: Pistol Grip Pump and Kick Out the Jams are rendered incredibly. Too bad it was never intended for release and resulted in the band breaking up soon after. Mixed blessings.

10. Mountain Goats – All Hail West Texas

When it comes to stories and tales, no one does it better than the Mountain Goats. I got this album in high school and listened to it incessantly in the darkroom while making pictures. I know it so well that I can listen to it at any period and get right back into it. great for sleeping.

11. Bill Callahan – Sometime I Wish We Were An Eagle

Jim Cain is probably one of the coolest songs I’ve heard in a long time. This album is full of songs with a clear purpose and message. Callahan’s baritone delivers a soothing tale so clearly, telling us about relationships and existential contemplations. Fantastic album.

12. Black Eyes — Cough

Oh man! The most innovative punk I’ve heard in a long time and of course it comes from D.C. (released on Dischord, obviously). It takes the free-jazz from the Nation of Ulysses and others into a much more holistic form of approaching punk. Lots of energy and defiance against conformity in the underground: “And all of the boys on 17th Street, they all wear the same thing/They used to talk about visibility but they don’t see a thing” This is, well, was, until they broke up, the new punk rock.

13. Bright Eyes -I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning

The most mature and sensible Bright Eyes release, in my opinion. A great acoustic folk album, heavily listened to my junior and senior year of high school.

14. Dan Deacon — Bromst

When this album came out last April, I was still studying in Copenhagen. Once I heard it, I made sure to always listen to it so I would be flooded with images of the city to this incredible soundtrack. Great, fun album with nice arrangements and build ups. Good for biking around a city in the spring.

15. Ted Leo and the Pharmacists – The Tyranny of Distance

I listened to this record when I was learning how to drive. I saw Ted Leo at the 9:30 club in DC when I was looking at colleges. His music was a big part of my adolescence, and I listen to it today, though not with such frequency. Still, I believe that there’s nothing like great power/pop-punk.

16. Against Me! – As The Eternal Cowboy

Much for the same reason as #14, there was one summer spent singing a lot of Against Me! driving around in cars. While I don’t really listen to the band nowadays (and their newer music blows), it still holds an important place in my musical experience for this past decade.

17. Re-Up Gang – We Got it 4 Cheap, Vol. 2

Best mixtape of 2005. There was a summer when this is all my friends listened to. You’d hear, pulling up in their cars, “CLI-CLI-CLI-CLLINTON SPARKS”

18. Dinosaur Jr. — Farm

Great comeback album. Perfectly released at a time when my musical cache was lacking some rock. J. Mascis shreds like no other.

-Peter Senzamici

Peter Senzamici is the co-host of That’s Amore, Thursdays at 8 PM-12 AM Eastern Time on WRBC.

“We loved NWA, we grew up on that, we would bang kats like that, but.. we never did a drive-by nor had a desire too — Some people (youth) take music and use it as their rule book to life.”

Here we revisit one of The Clipse infamous music videos. “Cot Damn”… more too come whenever I feel like uploading more flicks by the group.

Why do I feel like I’ve heard this story before…

Label drama has been a perpetual thorn in the side of the Clipse. When Malice and Pusha T couldn’t get the major labels to see their vision, they took to the streets but not alone. Forming the Re-Up Gang with Philadelphia MCs Ab-Liva and Sandman, the Clipse delivered not one but three critically-acclaimed volumes of their We Got It 4 Cheap mixtape series. The tapes sustained the Virginia duo’s buzz between projects and introduced fans to two more lyrical giants—Liva and Sandman.

Things were going good for the four-man collective by 2008, the Clipse were signed to Columbia Records and their notoriously long-delayed sophomore effort, Hell Hath No Fury, looked ready to finally drop. Before that, though, they were set to release the Koch-distributed The Clipse Present: Re-Up Gang that July. Two months later, news broke that Sandman had abruptly left the fold to try his hand at a solo career and build up his own brand, Cannons Inc. XXLMag.com recently caught up with the Clipse’s former anchor to discuss his departure from Re-Up, his new mixtape, The Heart of the City, with Don Cannon and why he and Malice once shed tears together.

XXLMag.com: As part of Re-Up Gang, you had critical acclaim for appearing on the three highly regarded Got It 4 Cheap mixtapes. Why did you decide to walk away?

Sandman: Man, I left because I truly felt in my heart that everything the Re-Up Gang as a four-man group worked for was getting ready to start, then how could I put it? …I saw The Clipse get money and take it all to themselves—one way or another. Like, we promoted a single called “20K Money Making Brothers on the Corner,” remember that? That was supposed to be our single on the Koch album. All of the sudden, “Fast Life” came out and that was our one shot [at a mainstream look]… It was already told to the world that the Re-Up Gang album was coming first on Columbia. This shit is in publications and websites, but then I hear the Clipse was releasing an album [first]. In my mind I’m thinking that’s a conflict of interest. How could Re-Up drop on Columbia and then three months later the Clipse drop? It’s don’t make sense.

XXLMag.com: Did you ever get an explanation for why things switched from the Re-Up project to the Clipse’s next album?

Sandman: I hit Pusha up like, “What’s up?” He’s like, “The label [Columbia] said it’d be best [for the Clipse album to come first].” We knew that Koch wasn’t giving us no fuckin’ second video. So the payoff from all that fuckin’ touring, mixtapes and that grind; [the Clipse] got the benefit of that. So I’m feeling like, damn, I gotta stand around and now be on some “Wamp Wamp,” “Mr. Me Too” background video shit. That was cool then ’cause that was what it was about and I’m a team player. My niggas’ dropping albums, I’m working with that, that was the plan but for it to turn into what I just told you it turned into… When I got the call [to do the “Fast Life” video] I was like, “Nah, I’m not coming out there and I’m not with it no more.”

XXLMag.com: So is there beef between y’all over all of this now?

Sandman: Nah, it wasn’t no beef, it was all business. Me and Malice read the Bible together on the tour bus before. His grandmother passed of cancer and my grandma was dealing with that shit, too. I forget which CD we were on tour for, but my grandma had cancer, dawg, and she was going through it. My grandma is the rock of our family, so I had distanced myself in back of the tour bus, smoking on something and one day Malice came back there and he seen it in my face. I couldn’t hold it in, it was killin’ me, dawg. I just wanted to cry, ’cause it was my grandma. I started to express myself and tears started rolling down his face, too. We confided in each other about each others’ grandmas. I got love for these niggas, but at the same time the business obviously does not benefit me right now and it’s nothing guaranteed.

XXLMag.com: In XXL’s interview with the Clipse in the Novmeber issue, it said early reports were that you left because of how Koch/E1 handled the Re-Up project. Is that true?

Sandman: No, I ain’t fuckin’ leave because of what Koch did. I don’t even know what Koch did. How the fuck I know, I don’t even own a copy of that Koch album and I didn’t know nobody up there. I left because I felt like the shit that was being told to me wasn’t being acted upon. [Malice and Pusha] came and looked for me. I wasn’t nowhere looking for the Clipse, dawg. I was in the fuckin’ hood when I was selling my work when I got my first deal and when it went bad I went back to the streets made a DVD and all kinds of shit popped off. I did things that niggas do to keep their name relevant in hip-hop while I was trying to get on.

XXLMag.com: Speaking of which, you’ve stayed on your grind since splitting from the Clipse, dropping three mixtapes—most notable your recent one with Don Cannon, The Heart of the City. What else are you working on?

Sandman: Man, I’m just grindin’. I got a bevy of videos gettin’ ready to hit… We got a little independent deal on the table—shout out to my man Truth, and my man Charlie over at Traffic Distribution—they wanted me to turn [my album] in by August 15th and have it drop by October, and I just felt in my heart that if [my company] Cannons Inc. is gonna be the sole label, you know the role your label gotta play when it’s real, that ain’t even no time to fuckin’ promote an album, let alone to make sure your label is stable enough to really kick this thing off. I felt like I wanted to do another CD and just use this winter to build my juggernaut summer, like Heart of the City is a hell of a lead off into the Cannons CD and to [my sister] Housewife’s CD and to the Sandman Best of…, which is called 25 to Life, and to another Sandman CD. I’ll probably drop another mixtape in March ’cause in April the album’s comin’.

XXLMag.com: What’s the name of the album?

Sandman: The album is called 12/12. Like you know, everything starts and ends at 12, it’s a beginning and an end. However you wanna look at it, 12 disciples, 12/12 skinnies, crack bags, but the most significant thing to the number 12/12 for me is that’s the number code to hip-hip, microphone check 1-2, 1-2, and that’s my birth date, that’s when I was born, December 12. I was born on the code for hip-hop, so there’s got to be something special there.

XXLMag.com: Seemed like you had something special with Re-Up, any regrets about going solo?

Sandman: It was all love, man, but I can’t say that I didn’t see a lot of shit happening. I’m always going speak how I feel, bro. I don’t give a fuck who you is or where we at, I’m going say something if I don’t like it… The Re-Up Gang is forever, though, and I wish them the best with Re-Up Gang Records. I wish they sign [someone like] Lady Gaga and blow the fuck up ’cause that’s what I want to do with my company. Real rap, but at the end of the day, Re-Up Gang, the legacy, the four-man group, the dopest four-man group since N.W.A… That’s forever. —Anslem Samuel

Finally, the album of the year has finally dropped and not too mention its on my birthday. We will have a full review later on this week of the album. But in the meantime go purchase this wonderful piece of hip hop music and another classic in the making. 3 for 3 ain’t at all. Here is a treat from the album to leave you with.

DOWNLOAD: The Clipse – Change

After being pushed back and pushed back the 3rd Clipse album is finally here.

Fortunately it is as good as anticipated. Its fire. The Neptunes once again put a perfect sound for Malice and Pusha T.

Also in the Track Popular demand Lebron gets clowned….jus sayin

Malice Called in and talked to Bootleg Kev to speak on the new album Til The Casket Drops, his maturity, growth and subject matter on this album, how the arrest of their manager Anthony Gonzalez has effected their lives and music, whether or not he feels guilty about his friends arrest, how the Yo Gotti Collaboration came about, how the Clipse music influences certain kids, his lack of video blogs lately, he also reveals that he will be releasing a Auto Biography Book and Movie, how the production came about on the CD, and whether or not he’s worried about dropping the same day as Gucci Mane….

Till The Casket Drops – December 8 December 12 (They changed the date again SMH).

Update: You can now download the interview for your MP3 on the go pleasure!!!

DOWNLOAD: Malice (The Clipse) – Bootleg Kev Interview (Audio)

Till The Casket Drops December 8th. R E U P G A N G!!!!!

Here is the Clipse in NC. The album drops Dec. 8. Get readt for solid cocaine raps… Popeyes & Doorman all day!!!

This is a cool mixtape .. just the bad songs are REALLY wack .. But one thing is the good songs are VERY good .. Overall decent mixtape .. If you still haven’t heard it you can get it HERE .. Review after the jump!

01.Just a emcee (6/10)
02.Certainly a big deal (9/10)
03.High volume (9/10)
04.Lil’ ghetto boy (8/10)
05.Big face benny (8/10)
06.Been through so much ft. Donny Boy & Slash (7/10)
07.Watch this ft. Housewife (4/10)
08.East coast me (5/10)
09.Make em all day (2/10)
10.Crazy (9/10)
11.W.A.R. ft. Kawshen & Big Lou (7/10)
12.Bout my bread ft. Spazz Canon & Reed Dollaz (9/10)
13.Chase dis paper ft. Glasses Malone & Mistah Fab (6/10)
14.Crossroad (9/10)
15.This life (7/10)
16.Imaginary players (freestyle) (7/10)
17.Who’s world is this (2k9 freestyle) (7/10)
18.Blood I taste ft. Spazz Cannon & Housewife (4/10)
19.Sounds ft. Sock & James Cagnie (7/10)
20.Good times (6/10)

136/200 (68%)

Overall Grade: D+

Yerroooooo Cannonnnnnn! I wish Re-Up Gang still had Sandman in it .. I will most likely review this mixtape when I get a chance to listen .. But until then ENJOY! Tracklist after the jump.

Download

1. JUST A EMCEE PROD-ZUKON
2. CERTAINLY A BIG DEAL “DA BROADY FREESTYLE”
3. HIGH-VOLUME
4. LiL GHETTO BOY
5. BIG FACE BENNY
6. BEEN THROUGH SO MUCH FEAT CANNONS OWN DONNY BOY & SLASH
7. WATCH THIS FT-CANNONS OWN HOUSEWIFE
8. EAST-COAST ME PROD-SNAGGZ
9. MAKE’EM ALL DAY PROD-BOOGIIE MAN
10. HOMICIDE {CRAZY} FREESTYLE
11. W.A.R. FEAT BIG LOU & CANNONS OWN KAWSHEN
12. BOUT MY BREAD FT- CANNONS OWN SPAZZ CANNON & REED DOLLARZ!
13. CHASE DIS PAPER FT-MISTAH FAB, KOKANE & GLASSES MALONE
14. CROSSROADS. PROD- T.H.X.
15. THIS LIFE PROD- T.H.X.
16. IMAGINARY PLAYERS 09 FREESTYLE
17. WHO’S WORLD IS THIS REMIX 09 FREESTYLE
18. BLOOD I TASTE FT- CANNONS OWN SPAZZ CANNON & HOUSEWIFE
19. SOUNDS FT- JAM

Just press play.