Coke Machine Glow on my album Street Astrology: Forget Run the Jewels 2: this is the best hip-hop album of 2014. It’s brighter, bolder, and ballsier than any other entry in the genre this year. Not because it’s so “hard,” or whatever; the most aggressive lines on the album, from “Tearz in Heaven,” are directed at Eric Clapton and his deceased son. It’s bold because, in classic Noah23 fashion, it bucks trends by refusing to adhere to any one style or approach in order to produce its complex effect, and because it integrates a set of deeply personal experiences into a universally accessible work of art. Noah’s the anti-Rick Ross. Instead of building up an elaborate fake mythology, he raps a true story about how “My Mama Bought Me A Nitrous Balloon” and makes it disorienting enough to be believable. But this is no Childish confessional, as the personal is so expertly stitched with the abstract and downright absurd that the listener is too busy sorting out the levels to be caught up in any of them. Like a great postmodern novel, it blends the profane with the profound and ends up somewhere beyond either of them. Street Astrology is complex, occasionally messy, and on one occasion (we’re looking at you, Lil Shark) disastrous. But it is never complacent, not for a second, and that fact alone would distinguish it from 99% of rap albums released on the internet. That it happens to be thrilling, eclectic, exuberant, and often brilliant is a nice bonus. cokemachineglow/category/unison-2014/?pg=2
Posted on: Tue, 30 Dec 2014 20:18:23 +0000
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