The Diplomats & Vado
Best Buy Theater
Friday, September 30

Better than: Waiting for the next big NYC hip-hop collective to appear.

"It ain't over! Fuck y'all talkin' about?" Cam'ron emphatically declared at one point during Friday night's celebration of the Diplomats' debut Diplomatic Immunity. He was right. The Diplomats—Cam, Jim Jones, Juelz Santana and Freekey Zekey—have managed to reign as one of NYC's definitive hip-hop groups, despite in-fighting and a relatively limited body of work.

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Rich aliens, rich alienation. Still via connect.in.com

​With sincere apologies to Chuck Eddy, my two favorite records of the year also produced my two favorite singles: funny how that happens. And though ten songs increasingly feels like about forty too few, especially when Dr. Luke is working, nothing was knocking "Runaway" off this list. What can I say? Been waiting fifteen years for rap to get this emo and for emo to get this rap. As for the rest of it, well, as Sean Fennessey noted in this space last week, most of these songs are ignorant as hell. The rest are about love. I'm not proud:

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Welcome to Sound of the City's year-in-review rock-critic roundtable, an amiable ongoing conversation between five prominent Voice critics: Rob Harvilla, Zach Baron, Sean Fennessey, Maura Johnston, and Rich Juzwiak. We'll be here all week!

James Murphy, pulling no punches.

​Dear fellow illuminati,

My favorite Das Racist line from 2010 remains one they wrote in 2009: "Listening to coke rap, listening to joke rap/Listening to Donuts, listening to grown-ups/Listening to Camu, listening to Cam too." (I have fond memories of watching them perform it earlier this year in Mexico, as a drug war began to break out around us.) But I'm also partial to Sit Down, Man's "We aiight, but media cats think we clever though/Are we?/You may never know." Together, those lines pretty much explain their appeal to rap fans and critics alike--they are us, simultaneously diagramming our passions and, gulp, doing our jobs. Still wrestling with whether there were ten albums released this year that I liked more than their two mixtapes; as discerning rap critics and habitual self-deprecators, I kind of assume they're in the same spot, wondering the same thing.

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Ay! All photos by Jesse Serwer

​The Diplomats
Hammerstein Ballroom
Friday, November 27

Better Than: Byrd Gang, Skull Gang, Purple City, U.N., Dipset West

It seems a little silly, really, this Dipset revival. When times grew lean for the Cam'ron-led crew a few years back, the support staff--from Jones on down--convinced themselves that they didn't need the brains of the operation anymore. This turned out not to be true, of course, and it took Cam'ron getting back with the old gang--right as he was enjoying a rebirth of sorts with new ally Vado--to make people care again. "Salute," the first and, thus far, only track issued by the newly reconstituted crew, is noisy, fresh and kind of undeniable. New York rap doesn't have much else going for it these days, so what the heck.

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Fabolous/Nicki Minaj
Hammerstein Ballroom
November 25, 2010

Better Than: Awkward Post-Dinner Small Talk

Because the purpose of the Fabolous and Nicki Minaj's Thanksgiving double-billing was, according to the promotion, to give thanks to two of the most talented rappers in New York City (or perhaps for them to give thanks to us), it was in a way fitting that MTA difficulties prevented us from arriving on time. This made for a remarkable entrance, however, as we came through the doors of Hammerstein Ballroom just as Lloyd Banks arrived on stage to join Fabolous for "Beamer, Benz, or Bentley," a favorite in these pages and across the city. And then, as if this pairing wasn't enough, Harlem's Juelz Santana appeared to contribute his own verse. Thanks Fab!

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Still not in the least sick of hearing this song come on the radio--whether in the original, menacing Juelz Santana/Lloyd Banks vintage, the Joell Ortiz "Nissan, Honda, Chevy" remix, or the blistering Fabolous remake from There Is No Competition 2. That said, they somehow found a whips-n-vixens visual that adds virtually nothing, besides the always wonderful Juelz mugging throughout. Perhaps this was a meta move to make a stripped down, back-to-basics rap video for a stripped down, back-to-basics rap song. (It's a lot easier to love the latter than the former). Or maybe those G-Unit Records budgets just aren't what they used to be?

After a two month run obliterating the internet and any club or car in which it's played, the first great Juelz Santana song since 2006 gets the video it deserves--mad scientist Juelz in the lab, gun-addled and chemistry-steeped, Yelawolf lurking in the back, channeling something between Dylan and the cheesy rap-rock sub-Kid Rock maniac he's trying desperately to become. Worth it for the laconic and hostile opening seconds homage to the "Subterranean Homesick Blues" video alone. [2DopeBoyz]

Item #8: Swagger on a hundred thousand trillion. Photo by Christopher Struman, via

​A Polo vest, according to this SPIN article written by Voice editor Stacey Anderson. "I was wearing this a lot over the summer, and then Chris Baio, our bassist, sent me a picture of Juelz Santana wearing the exact same thing," Koenig explains. "I'm really interested in the cultural implications of Polo -- how it's this nexus of preppy and hip-hop." [SPIN]

​Seems like this would've been a great opportunity for a "Mixing Up the Medicine" reference there at the end, but we'll still take it. [NYT, via Made Up Memories]

We'd heard about it, but we didn't believe it. But the man with the worst name in rap exists--this is his faux-Drake hook on Jim Jones and Juelz Santana's "Forever" remix. The song's not bad, otherwise: Jim Jones is such an entertainingly terrible guy that he actually goes out of his way here to call Whoopi Goldberg ugly. But this Tobb Cobain thing is inexcusable---what possible path could have led a grown man to call himself this? Not for the first time, we miss former Dipset hookman Max B, whose 75-year prison sentence for arranging to have a man murdered began four short weeks ago. They do have phones in jail, right?

Juelz Santana - Harlem Forever f. Jim Jones [2DopeBoyz]