Shane Madill
The Silhouette
Pusha T’s My Name is My Name and Danny Brown’s Old should be your front-runners for hip-hop album of the year. It is honestly that simple. Contrasting both, however, provides perspective on two entirely different experiences and styles that operate on opposing sides of the hip hop spectrum.
Pusha T’s My Name Is My Name is classic hip hop lyricism with modern production. He balances being faithful to the streets that raised him and his new found prosperity, a classic dichotomy for rappers. These themes are further supplemented by the production from a more established tier of artists, primarily Kanye West and Pharrell Williams.
Pusha T raps about his place in the music scene and how this is his time to rise up to greatness. He raps about women and, more often than not, with surprising emotional sincerity. He raps about pushing drugs to get by in the streets and how these drugs affect strangers and friends. Though these are all relatively common themes in hip hop, the overall polish of his craft and the production leave this album achieving relative greatness.
Danny Brown’s Old, however, combines alternative lyricism with alternative production. XXX, his previous mixtape, was essentially about his personal experiences with hardcore drugs and his realizations about what these seemingly positive experiences were actually doing to him.
Old represents the relapse and breakdown of Danny Brown into the person he used to be. The escapism that drugs provide from his struggles, such as near-suicidal depression, takes control and consumes him. Unlike the beginning of XXX, he is fully aware of the consequences of taking these drugs, but does not care because the benefit of temporarily forgetting his experiences keeps him in the vicious cycle of dependency. It is a harrowing experience to hear him speak from his heart about all of his conflicting emotions and experiences. Fear, depression and pain are the core of this album, though they are masked under the veil of drugs and the resulting trip.
The contrast between these two albums demonstrates how hip hop can achieve greatness through multiple approaches, and how the genre allows for a wide variety of stories to be represented. If you are just a casual fan of hip-hop, the recommendation is that you experience and attempt to internalize both of these albums.
4.5/5 each
The rap-conscious public first heard of Pusha T after he formed a group called Clipse with his brother Malice in 1992. His rapidfire cadence is as striking now as it was then, but his circumstances have changed dramatically. As he put it in a freestyle on Funkmaster Flex’s Hot 97 radio show, “Malice found religion” and is rapping no longer. Pusha himself was signed to Kanye West’s G.O.O.D Music in March 2010 and lent a slew of topnotch verses to Yeezy’s masterpiece, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Now a few months away from his debut under Ye’s tutelage, My Name Is My Name (which is either a clever reference to The Wire or Exodus 3:14), Pusha is looking to generate hype in the streets with a mixtape, which he absolutely does on the grimy Wrath of Caine.
Though his coke-dealing days are a thing of the past, Terrence Thornton isn’t one to let you forget how hard he is and is grinding in another way. The tape is littered with gems, but “Millions” is definitely the track that boasts the most sheer grandeur and will be included on the upcoming album. As you might’ve guessed, “Millions” speaks of the lavish lifestyle the Virginia native has come to enjoy after years of being underappreciated. But the stale trope of opulence takes on a new sheen under the production of Southside. As if to warrant the claim that “this shit sound like God, don’t it,” Pusha enlists larger-than-life Rick Ross to drop some bars. Responding to the challenge, Rozay brings a childlike exuberance to the song, proclaiming “I got this, I got that/I got that, I got this” which beckons the image of a spoiled kid bragging to his crew after Christmas. The simple hook of “millions in the ceiling, choppas in the closet” is liable to get engrained in your head as it did for me and unfortunately my mother as well, who had gotten fed up with the song reverberating throughout the house and walked into my room to reprimand me as I was miming throwing money stacks in the air. I assure you nothing is more humbling than having the woman that raised you laugh at your attempts to emulate a hardened rapper and his trademark snarl.
Along with “Millions” the rest of the tape is also phenomenal, with French Montana offering his best Future impression on the “Doesn’t Matter” hook, while Pusha raps pugnaciously over Young Chop’s “Blocka”.
By: Tomi Milos