Tag: Spotify

The Butcher Ain’t Coming-He’s Here

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If you listen to rap music, you may have heard the phrase: “the butcher coming *****”.

(his iconic tag comes in at 30 seconds)

If you happened to click and listen to that musical masterpiece, you might have an early understanding of the talent Benny possesses on the mic. In an era of beats carrying the songs, basic rhyme schemes, and somewhat lazy successes, Benny is a breath of fresh air thats been grinding on the rap scene for quite a bit. 

Under the Griselda record label, Benny and his other Buffalo brethren have blown up in the rap scene over the past couple of years with consistent projects with their own trademark sound-hard bars over simple but grimey beats by their good friends alchemist and daringer. While each of the 3 have their own strengths, Benny to me stands out as the one with the star power and relentless raps to break into the mainstream (which he already has a bit with his last single with Jermaine).

With his latest project Tana Talk 4, Benny adds another great body of work to his magnum opus to fans, the Tana Talk series. Tana Talk 3 is held in high regard to fans of the butcher, and a lot were worried about the fourth installment being a bit of a let down since the expectations are as high as they could be. As an artist, you’ll never make everyone happy. But for me, Tanat Talk 4 picked up right where the third left off. Maybe a little more polished and a little shorter in length, but Tana Talk 4 delivered classic Benny with some additions of features that cater to a broader audience like P Diddy. But don’t worry, Benny still calls on his NY and griselda clique to give features fans know them best for. 

With most music reviews, I’d rather keep the writing a bit on the shorter side in hopes for you to close out and give the records I talk about a spin. If you like rap, I think you could be sleeping on Benny. If you like melodic rhymes and catchy hooks, maybe keep napping as the Griselda crew always delivers raw, barebones raps and production.

Stream it here:

PS- I recently saw benny live and the performance was great (aside from being about an hour late). No backup vocals and The Butcher spitting a cappella made for an impressive vocal performance with minimal breaks.

Quarantine Quintuplets

Posted on Posted in Life Happenings, Quarantine Tings, Recommended, Sounds in SequenceTagged , , , , , , Leave a comment

Can ya believe it? Still locked down and cooped up. How quickly could the world absolutely be turned upside down. When this was first coming on, I never would have anticipated the extremes in which it has gotten to. Never in my lifetime have we had such strange and turbulent times. Where seeing friends and meeting strangers is a bad move. Going into public is frowned upon.  We are spending a lot of time with our house. Or an apartment. You might be spending time with family. Or your roommates. Or total isolation. Either way you splice it, every one of us is having our social sanity taken away, and we are unsure when it will come back (for good reason, I am no way against social distancing and quarantining). This time alone is going to grow stale quicker than it came on in the first place. Whether it’s working from home or just cruising around the crib, you might as well take some time to try new things. Yesterday, I tried this thing called “Coffee Soda”, in which I mixed cold brew with tonic water and squeezed a quarter of a lemon into it. You would surely only do that if you had been locked inside your house for 2 weeks. It actually tasted really good. As a coffee snob and coffee purist, I thought there was no way I’d like it. And that’s the point. We should be trying new things we never thought we would do in this quarantine time, simply to pass the time and maybe find new things to adore. 

Now is a good time to listen to good music. If your life were a movie (and not like IG clout-chasers saying “Yo, last night was a movie”), the pictures associated with it would grow tiresome quickly. But maybe if you put a fire soundtrack behind the monotony it could be slightly more tolerable. I imagine walking to the kettle to turn on the hot water for coffee as an example. If I sequenced that to Al Green, you would think it’s another mellow early morning. But maybe if I put it to some wild techno or heavy bass rap, you would think something different was going to happen afterwards. No matter what, the next thing that was going to happen was the grinding of the beans. But the music could make you think otherwise.

We all have our go to sounds and the music we bump on the daily, pandemic or no pandemic.  However, you might get tired of your normal wheelhouse of tunes, and be looking for something new to spice up the rotation during these quarantine times. So here is a small gift for all social distancing: I’m going to call it a 5×5. A pentagon. 5 genres and 5 songs from each genre. Maybe you’ll discover a new song you like. Maybe after listening to 5 songs, you might have a changed mind about the certain sound. Maybe you’ll still hate rap music. While there are tons of sub-genres and all that jazz (no pun intended), the 5 in this rotation are to the writers preferences: Hip-hop, Rock, Electronic, Reggae, and Blues. Hit play. Shuffling them is up to you. 

(If I can’t get the embedded player to work, here’s a list of the 25 tracks):

[Peso-A$AP Rocky, Cabin Fever-Wiz Khalifa, Murder To Excellence- Jay-Z & Kanye West, Gatti-Popsmoke & Travis Scott, Soundtrack 2 My Life-Kid Cudi, Call It What You Want-Foster The People, Up All Night-The War On Drugs, Easy Tiger-Portugal, The Man, The Longest Wave-Red Hot Chili Peppers, Lost In Yesterday-Tame Impala, Land Of Promise-Nas & Damian “Jr. Gong” Marley, Sorry-SOJA, Reelin-Iration, Stone Love-Pepper, True To Myself-Ziggy Marley, Wall Fuck-Flume, Runaway (U&I)-Galantis, Happy Violence-Dada Life, The Half-DJ Snake, The City(with QuinnXCII)-Louis The Child), I’m Still in Love with You-Al Green, Cigarettes and Coffee-Otis Redding, What’s Going On-Marvin Gaye, Pusherman-Curtis Mayfield, Changes-Charles Bradley]