My Philosophy

So it’s Friday night (or about to be). You just got paid. Unless you
actually just got laid the fuck off and are now feeling the crunch,
desperately searching old jackets and flipping couch cushions for Pabst
money. (Raise your hands.) Hopefully you saved enough to hit the
December 19 CD- release show for The Gutterbrook, the debut
album from UW grads Rudy and the Rhetoric. Rhetoric is the MC,
who chatters out a dense verbal binary smacking of Aesop Rock or
perhaps Onry Ozzborn (who appears along with his Grayskulian
co-defendant JFK on “Bladerunners”). Rudy is the producer. You
know how the producer from Jedi Mind Tricks calls himself the Enemy of
Mankind? Rudy should call himself the Enemy of Sound Guys. (Club
owners: just kidding!) It’s just that his home-crafted beats slap hard
and heavy like your dad after happy hour—razor synths
methodically saw through your skull, the bottom jackhammers your
sternum into shepherd’s pie, people go apeshit. It’s a good thing. The
pair have a trademark sound here—a hard enough thing for any
emerging act to come up with—they just have to find some more
breadth to keep it fresh. Meanwhile, Gutterbrook is a
steel-hard, paranoid work of PDK-rap, a fresh debut that hints at big
things for these two—so check them out at Nectar along with
Grayskul, the Let Go, Candidt, and a rare
appearance from ace turntable terror(ist) Waystyles.

Best news I heard all week: This weekend, to celebrate seven
successful years, the world-famous Yo, Son! is doing a
special OG version (with DJs Scene and DV One) on
Sunday, December 21, at Chop Suey in addition to their typically
wall-to-wall-packed edition at War Room on Saturday (this weekend
featuring DV One, Soul One, B-Mello, and Fourcolorzack).
Those storied, shit-faced Sundays are the stuff of local legend, and
were the uncontestable highlight of my going-out experience as an
adult; the patented “Low Class Hiphop, Turntablism & Bad
Taste” vibe set the bar high enough to make me wholly uninterested
in any other club night for the half-decade since. Often imitated,
never duplicated, its eclectic-on-accident mix of b-boys, punk-rock
kids, and all-purpose shitbags made for rowdy drunken debauchery this
city hasn’t seen since, son—seen? It’s gone a lot glossier in
recent years, with more hair product, fashionista bullshit, and
expensive kicks, but I’m not mad at all—as long as I can wreck my
liver this one last time at this rare revisit to the real.
Steady & Stuck Under the Needle, this is your present
to me—aw, you shouldn’t have!

That said, sorry, kids, I just can’t fuck with 808s &
Heartbreaks, like, at all. What’s more, Kanye, sorry, but
light-skinded niggas might be coming back in style, too, as the new
joints from Ludacris and Common are both very solid. I’d
advise you to stuff a stocking with ’em, then Wake Up and Smell the
Chestnuts.