hip hop isn't dead.

As you’ve likely noticed, especially this year, hip hop sees multiple new releases every single week. There are many factors involved that play a role in this turn of events, which is a topic for another day maybe, but you can watch the end result play out on the Interweb every Friday: so-called “heads” burn through every single new release in an effort to be the first to hear them, an exercise that grows more and more ridiculous with each passing week, as there is absolutely no way that anyone is deriving any sense of enjoyment from these speed-listens. So writers such as myself find themselves forced into one of two factions: either they go out of their way to write about as much of the new material as possible, gaming their respective outlets for clicks and such, or they don’t even fucking bother trying to keep up with the crowd, choosing to listen to music at their own pace and writing about shit when they get around to it. I, obviously, fall into the latter category. The fallacy of my chosen path, however, is the increased likelihood that a lot of each week’s projects will simply fall by the wayside, doomed to be forgotten.

For me, that happened with that last Roots album I reviewed, and it happened to Psycho Les’ solo debut, Psycho Therapy: The Soundtrack. Of course, a lot of my “forgetting” that the Psycho Les project even existed could also stem from how I never really saw the need for production-slash-rapping team The Beatnuts to release individual efforts. I’ll have to talk to my own therapist about that, I guess.