The other night BFred – who threw me that guest week over at XXL way back when and currently holds it down over at Complex – assembled the opinions of a bunch of rap bloggers and assorted hacks regarding the new Eminem song. The surprising thing about the end result is that my score wasn’t the lowest, although that may explain why I only received one Twitter jab from a cracker groupie while Noz received a couple of love letters via email. Remind me to award 0.5/5 next time.

What’s The Consensus? The Internet’s Top Tastemakers React To Eminem’s ‘Not Afraid’

Phillip Mlynar isn’t Australian, doesn’t roam a post-apocalyptic wasteland searching for fuel and may not even own a dog. But ask him the timeless question, ‘U mad, doggie?’ and he’ll reply, ‘Yes, I am.’ Fresh from his stint of yelling ‘Eff you and Your Heroes‘ like this was a listening session for the first Lench Mob tape, Phillip is back to vent his frustrations about the current state of the rap game.
(more…)

Here’s a guest drop from Phillip Mlynar, who was the Deputy Editor at Hip Hop Connection magazine before people stopped buying rap magazines.

Talking about rappers whose fanatical fan worship bore no relation to their actual talent or recorded output used to be easy. Someone would say that 2 Pac was the greatest ever rapper. Someone who’d listened to more than three rap records in their life would counter by pointing out the patchy nature of his music, and how he was prolific in the sense of hopelessly lacking any sense of quality control. They’d be hit back by someone talking about how Afeni’s son was the hip-hop generation’s James Dean and how his whole thug life aura and rapist-without-a-pause mentality was bigger than music and all of that. Then someone would mention “Brenda’s Got A Baby” and everyone would shake hands and move happily on.

These days though there’s a slew of rappers and rap chaps whose publicity, fan worship, and reputation makes ‘Pac looks positively underrated. Here are the five leading exponents…
(more…)