Murs is the president of this hiphop shit.
Graham Barey
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Spit it Then Quit It
The Last Mustached Waltz of Josh Martinez
Josh Martinez visits the Sex Buffet one last time.
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Down on Animal Farm
It’s Not an Orwellian Political Allegory
If you don’t go to a lot of hiphop shows in Eugene, chances are good you’ve never heard of Animal Farm. If you do happen to frequent the college town’s rap scene, though, you’re probably very familiar with the quartet of emcees that bears that moniker. Rightly so. They’ve opened up for just about every […]
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Chaucer Tales
Copacrescent and the New Truth
Chaucer Barnes is a name that comes with a lot of expectations attached to it. It’s an epic name, a name fit for a monumental figure. If, when you just now read that name, you pictured in your head an eight-foot-tall black poet who breathes fire and craps hand grenades, then you wouldn’t be far […]
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The Holy Trinity
Josh Martinez on Weed, Beer, and Women
Josh Martinez likes to smoke weed. He also likes to drink beer and have sex with girls. I gather that he dislikes working, and things that do not involve weed, beer, and sex. This is a profile I’ve worked up from listening to Martinez’s albums many, many times. This is not a list of attributes […]
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Born to Rhyme
Good Rapper, Poor Speller
When the teacher asked her students to write down on a slip of paper what they wanted to be when they grew up, a young Santotzin (real name: Julius Gallegos) did not hesitate. In fourth grade, he knew his destiny was to be a rapper. He passed his slip proudly forward to the girl sitting […]
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King Cool
The Conundrum of Cool Nutz
According to evolutionary scientists, about 10 million years ago an ambitious amphibian crawled out of the primordial ooze and croaked a series of strange noises which would—in the distant future—form the foundation for all the world’s languages. Shortly thereafter it took up rapping, named itself Cool Nutz, and recorded a debut album, Dis Nigga’s Nutz. […]
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Blame Canada
Buck 65 Is Totally Original. Totally.
Hey, there are rappers in Nova Scotia. Who knew? There’s a couple, actually. Like Sixtoo, Josh Martinez (a frequent collaborator of Portland’s Sleep), and Buck 65. Buck started making rap records in the early 1990s and he rapped a lot about baseball and wack emcees in a funny fake voice. Eventually Buck hooked up with […]
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Get Weirder
Busdriver and Hiphop Now
Busdriver really is a weird fucker. Historically, he has relatively few analogs in the world of rap. His staccato, free-association style, laced with seemingly random tonal variations, has about as much in common with contemporary hiphop as it does with the Knife. But, since the avant garde in hiphop’s underground has become more and more […]