Reality Bites...

So many reality shows, and so many of them are terrible. But people watch this stuff, despite feigning revulsion. "Trash culture" is on the rise, and with everyone from Consequence to The Game landing "roles" in a reality show, we wanted to get in on the action and list some potentially quality programming that would pair our favorite rappers of the day with reality shows we loathe/love. Tell VH1 to holla at me, man. The outcome of these unions might learn the viewers a thing or two. At the very least it would make for entertaining television with the only casualties being the hair pulling, sleeper-holds and ruinous affairs you see on other shows. Places, people!

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Just Enjoy The Show...

Let that man multitask. In between bong snaps and awaiting a new episode of The Regular Show to come on New Orleans' rapper Currren$y is also having an extensive conversation with SOTC about the scattered array of topics potheads tend to have. Like about cartoons for instance. And snacks and shit. Mostly though about how he's has released such a high-volume of work over the last five years, that he has prompted hundreds of thousand of followers to download and attend everything that carried his Jet Life logo.

See also: Curren$y's High Productivity

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Direct Flight Tour: Curren$y w/Styles P, Smoke DZA, Fiend 4 Da Money, Corner Boy P, Trademark Da Skydiver, Young Roddy
Webster Hall
Thursday, May 31

Better than: Staying on the ground.

Last night, the New York stop on the Direct Flight Tour—with the Jets Styles P and Curren$y, as well as a ton of their associates—got off to a roaring start, with Cornerboy P paying homage to the city by wearing Knicks regalia and turning in a surprisingly great set. P bought out Fiend 4 Da Money, and they performed their freestyle over Rick Ross' "Stay Schemin'" just as the crowd really started to swell. By the time Fiend was done, running through "Flying Iron" and "Champagne," the place was packed solid. Toward the end of his set Fiend hopped off stage and rapped directly to the crowd, and that led into the funniest moment of the night—he passing the mic back to the stagehands and walking off instead of getting back on stage for his big finish.

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In honor of today being 4/20—every smoker's favorite day of the year—SOTC has compiled the 25 Best Rap Songs relating to weed. Though some may be more about bud than others, all are guaranteed to make your high all the more enjoyable. Be forewarned, though... this list doesn't have any happy hippy weed music—this is straight thugged-out entertainment. Locate your lighters.

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After a couple of failed attempts at riding under someone else's banner (No Limit, Cash Money), Curren$y ventured out on his own and struck gold, amassing hundreds of thousands of loyal followers and lighting (pardon the pun) the way for rappers like Wiz Khalifa and Mac Miller to carve out their own territory in cyberspace. As other rappers took his cue and rhymed more about smoking drugs rather than selling them, the term "weed rapper" was born, and an entire subgenre was written off as just stoners rapping about their favorite pasttime.

What is a weed rapper, though? Every time I interviewed Jim Jones he was smoking. Same goes for Snoop and Raekwon. Does that make them weed rappers? Guess it just boils down to subject matter then, huh? I guess Cypress Hill are weed rappers then? No? Oh.

It probably doesn't help a whole hell of a lot that he named his recent EP with Styles P #The1st28 (as in 28 grams in an ounce), but I thought we were done calling Curren$y a weed rapper. Luckily, Spitta's has a great defense against the "weed rapper" ball and chain: Keep doing exactly what he's doing. The kid's output is unmatched, and his flow will eventually absolve him of any talk of being a one-dimensional rapper with bud as a crutch.

In further defense of Spitta being stuck with this limiting title, here are ten joints where his topics of choice stray from marijuana.

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Smell that money burning.

This concludes Sound of the City's year-end roundtable, a conversation about pop music in 2011 between Tom Ewing, Eric Harvey, Maura Johnston, Nick Murray, and Katherine St. Asaph. Read it all again.

Thanks for the handoff, Nick, and thanks to Katherine, Tom and especially Maura for the great conversation over the past few days. I'll try and wrap this thing up with the rigor and candor you all have displayed so far. Quickly, to Tom's question about Skrillex: he is a big deal, and we should be talking more about him. I was just having a conversation about the fact that, yet again, hi-NRG dance music is making important inroads into American dance culture—for the first time since the "electronica" moment of the Chemical Brothers and Prodigy, then the Big Beat microsecond of Fatboy Slim and Moby, which we quickly learned worked best on this side of the Atlantic in car commercials and movie trailers.

Skrillex's (and Canadian contemporary Deadmau5) most immediate predecessor—in terms of function, not form—is clearly Girl Talk, who taught American college and high school kids that it's okay to wild the fuck out now and again. Yet whereas Greg Gillis seems like an accidental hero who started making music off Limewire downloads after getting home from work, Skrillex strikes me as much more of a musician's musician—an ex-emo kid who saw an opportunity he couldn't pass up. As some of my smart esteemed colleagues (including Tom—hi Tom!) were discussing on Twitter yesterday, critics need to pay attention to this new wave of party-starters. It's very likely to be a passing fad holding us over until Rock Comes To Reclaim The Fist-Pumping Throne, but maybe—just maybe—it'll trigger the rise of an entirely guitar-free musical culture for the next decade.

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Method Man w/ Curren$y, Big K.R.I.T., Smoke DZA, Fiend & Cornerboy, Marcus Manchild, and more
Best Buy Theater
Friday, October 14

Better than: Hanging out in my own living room (barely).

Last time Curren$y and Big K.R.I.T. rolled through Manhattan on the Smoker's Club tour (sans Method Man), both rappers patrolled the stage with a nervous energy, intent to prove to a New York crowd that they had the chops and the presence to succeed as more than just hometown heroes. K.R.I.T., after all, had been booed off the Highline Ballroom stage only a few months earlier, and Curren$y had only recently released the first of the Pilot Talk albums that would finally prove he had the skills and personality cross over from the world of free downloads on DatPiff. Compare that with Friday night, at which the rappers with the most to prove—dudes like Houston newcomer Marcus Manchild—were allotted no more than a couple of songs hours before the headliners would take the stage.

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Curren$y
Irving Plaza
Monday, June 6

Better than: "Dude, I'm so high right now."

There are few ways to describe a Curren$y show without it sounding like a meeting of a cult, or an extremist political party. The place is packed, overflowing into the hallways of Irving Plaza. Giant flags proclaiming Jet Life, a better (read: higher) way of living, wave. The crowd's hands, with pinkie and thumb extended, go up, and they stay there... and they stay there. Curren$y, meanwhile, serves as a reassuring presence: "It's like you're cleaning the house, and you're playing this in your iTunes, and this song comes on and I come out and it's okay, because I'm in your crib!" If this crowd hasn't drank the Kool-Aid, they've at least tried to smoke it.

A more dangerous man would exploit that power.

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The New Orleans-based Curren$y is a weed rapper, which means his job is to make something usually associated with directionless demotivation seem badass. The art of weed rapping is the art of bragging about surpassing low expectations, and there are a couple ways to do this: the current big mainstream WR, for instance, is probably Lil Wayne, but for Wayne weed's just one of about nine zillion obsessive symbols of his own space-alien Otherness. (No other rapper besides Andre 3000 has spent more time getting high on spaceships, but Weezy never invites you up.) Then there's the drifting, goofy warmth of Redman and Method Man, rap's acting Cheech and Chong in the 90s; or of MF Doom, who raps in free-associative mumbles and cut an album with Aqua Teen Hunger Force. These guys welcome you in, the way people who are incoherently stoned on something mellow do: the albums let you sit down, hang out a while, accept that not a whole lot's gonna happen, laugh hard. The stuff MF Doom mumbles turns out to be really clever, if you pay enough attention.

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The year in music, circa 2010, started at the Cake Shop, with a shred-down to the New Year courtesy of Siren Festival MVP-to-be Marissa Paternoster and her band Screaming Females. After a tour through the NYE fetes of the Lower East Side and Williamsburg, that night ended amidst a marathon show at Bushwick's Shea Stadium, right around the time the Blastoids' drummer poured paint on his kit and started splattering away.

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