January 25, 2011

  • Naw, this isn't intellect
    This isn't introspect
    This is when your rope only has a couple inches left
    This is when your hopes only have a couple minutes left
    No matter how dope, your homies will never get respect 
    An' everyday's like I'm tryin' to wage a bigger threat
    Get heavy play just to try to stage a bigger set
    My steady ways mean I'll never feel the trigger sweat
    Yeah, I got plenty of rage - you haven't figured yet?
    I stomp friends like the bottom of a cigarette
    'Fore they do the same to me - it's such a sick effect
    To be alone is a zone that I fit in best
    Yes, I leave my problems at home where they can get addressed
    And why the fuck do they care about how I'm gettin' dressed?
    I - am - not every other girl that you kids impress
    I'm more focused on the world than getting bigger breasts
    I'm about to snap 'em back and hit you in the neck
    So feel my feelin' 'fore you feelin' like you paralyzed
    I be writin' the realest - you peerin' into Sarah's eyes
    And every second of this record leaves me terrified
    That my optimism lost its rhythm when I dared to fly
    I am me, that's regardless of these starin' eyes
    Can't impact judgement when your subject has been sterilized
    Any questions - I'll be happy just to clarify
    I just want the chance to answer - hope I've clarified

    -Lady Essence

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    Um, damn...

    As you guys might've garnered by now, rap tends to be one of my deep passions. Given that it tends to also receive some of the greatest criticism for both being both still a very young genre (it's only 50 years old, at oldest; and remember the reaction when rock first hit the scene? Okay, not literally remember...) and for its popular genre to happen to be...well, fascinating and yet terrifyingly problematic.

    So, whenever I find a really great rap song, I try to share it as much as I can. Most recently, I reviewed Kanye's All of the Lights. I've done lists of some of my favorite story-telling songs. Et cetera.

    What's nice about Lady Essence is that she's an underground artist so I feel like I'm encouraging the continual blooming of hip hop here; oh, that's the other thing I like - she clearly listens to rap (some underground emcees - those generally who're not involved in the underground culture - clearly just picked up learning rap because of the popular stuff they've seen and, thus, tend to only focus on rapping without the cultural history of producing beats, deliverance form, and themes), so she's keeping rap in the vein of the hip hop culture. She's part of a three-to-four person crew called In the Attic. Personally, of the other two I've heard, I'm not nearly impressed as I am with her.

    On top of having an insane and utterly on point flow, she tends to have fairly intriguing topics. Plus, while not being heavy on the wordplay, her rhyme is insane, to the point that I'm just severely impressed every time she's able to articulate such concrete thoughts while having some insanely complex things going on in her rhyme. I mean, there's nothing that's carried out for all too long but there's barely a line where she's not handling two rhyme schemes at once in the above verse, not to mention that most of her rhymes tend to by multisyllabic.

    Plus, "And every second of this record leaves me terrified/That my optimism lost its rhythm when I dared to fly"?? Perfect beautiful articulation of not only how it feels when you're first transferring your written raps to actual performance (it really is quite daunting; there's a reason why most rap listeners tend to also pair as actual rappers, even if only for leisure) but also any kind of self-doubt when you try to be ambitious.

    "[M]y optimism lost its rhythm when I dared to fly." Gah, love it.

    An actual studio version of this song is on In the Attic's first mixtape, which you can download for free here: http://www.divshare.com/download/12457777-ab0 (don't worry, they released it for free).

    Also, the link to Lady Essence at ReverbNation and her Facebook page, respectively: http://www.reverbnation.com/essencehiphop and http://www.facebook.com/pages/Lady-Essence/101023706628841. The ReverbNation page has a bunch of tracks not on the crew album as well as some which don't appear on her Youtube page. If you want the Youtube URL, just follow either Youtube video here - they're both from her channel.

    Also, if you're interested in an interview with her (which I think is pretty illuminating about her as a person): http://usmfreepress.org/2010/12/lady-essence/.