Red Pill – Look What This World Did To Us [Album]

After a few leaks, Red Pill finally hits us with his brand solo effort, “Look What This World Did To Us”. Dopeness! “Look What This World Did To Us.” The command is rhetorical. You’re already aware of the echo, the generational discontent and alienation, the whispered and denied calls for absolution. No need to look around, just check your bank account and sigh—or echo Biggie and scream, “fuck the world.” Or melt into the couch and absorb Red Pill’s debut for Mello Music Group—a novel disguised as an album, a surly hymn from poisoned lungs. It’s a confirmation of what John Cage once declared: “all great art is a form of complaint.“ Or maybe the better comparison is Bukowski, memorializing the “broken factory windows of emptiness.” That makes more sense in Ferndale, Michigan where Red Pill calls home. After college graduation, “Leonard Letdown” started working at a machine shop. A temporary gig turned into a labor daze. The dream of converting music into rent money seemed more elusive by the day. Depression compounded. The empty packs of cigarettes turned into cellophane towers. The whiskey mixed with an absence of hope. This album is a signal flare, an escape route, and catharsis. This isn’t just hip-hop, this is an attempt to distill the disillusion and cure the hangover. It’s both a brilliant mission statement and a jazzy funeral for what was promised but never delivered. This is for those who played by the rules only to discover that the game was

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DJ Paul: “We Almost Died While Making ‘Sippin On Some Syrup’ ” [Video]

Three Six Mafia is arguably one of the few rap groups that have proven to be truly “about that life.” During DJ Paul’s recent interview with VladTV, the 37-year-old Mafia member relives the moments where he and the rest of the crew should have been dead because of the lifestyle they led in their prime. The group was the first rap crew to talk about hardcore drugs like cocaine and syrup, and DJ Paul is quick to say that they weren’t just rapping about it. “One thing that should have killed us that we used to do a lot was getting high off cocaine for three to four days straight then take Tylenol PMs to go to sleep,” Paul remembers. From weekly binges to a car accident that nearly killed them all, Three Six Mafia has cut it close quite a few times, and fortunately for them (and us) those nights on the edge didn’t end it all. Watch as DJ Paul reminisces about it all above.

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Five Steez: TBTM Semi-Finalist (Jamaica) [Video]

Meet Five Steez, one of the semi-finalists in Take Back the Mic: The World Cup of Hip Hop for 2015. He is from Kingston, Jamaica and this is his story. “Derrick Ashong, entrepreneur and founder of Amp.It, paid me a visit some weeks ago. He interviewed me, as well as rappers from Brazil and Colombia, as part of the Take Back the Mic: World Cup of Hip Hop. We spent a couple days chatting at Gambling House Recording Studio and strolling through my old high school, St. George’s College.” – Five Steez

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