Even since before Baltimore rapper StarrZ signed with Universal, he’d been hyping up Live Forever, Die Dope, his upcoming follow-up to last year’s Best Mixtape Ever, and its lead single, “Dope Trilla.” This month, the anthemic Feddy 2 Times-produced track was finally unveiled, in the form of an awesome video that only serves to highlight how massive the song sounds.

The Dope Trilla video, directed by Abeni Nazeer, depicts Baltimore with the kind of cinematic grit that is rarely done so well in local rap videos, with StarrZ rapping while chowing down on a chicken box or toting around a skateboard. And just when the song couldn’t get any crazier, the last minute is given over to an extended sample of the neighborhood shoutouts from the ‘90s Baltimore club classic “Handclap” by DJ Snoopy and Lil Mama (not the New York rapper that later came along performing under that name).

City Paper: Rhyming has changed a lot since you started, and some of those changes were brought about by your own innovations — do you make any attempt to update your flows or your vocabulary to contemporary tastes when you write now, or do you still have the same basic approach you had in 1987?

Rakim: My concepts have evolved and because of that the rhymes flow where they need to, but I haven’t made a conscious decision to change my style.  From my first days on the mic, people have always tried to say “do it like this” or “this is what’s hot now” but I think if you’re always chasing after what’s the new best thing, you’re not being true to yourself as an artist so I stick with what I do.  I’m a hiphop fan, so I listen to everything and I’m a curious person, so I’m constantly seeking knowledge and there’s no doubt the genres direction, multiple directions, influence me and expand my thinking, but I don’t change the foundation.

CP: You’ve said your flows have been inspired by the melodies of your favorite jazz musicians — can you given an example of where one line might have those kinds of origins?

Rakim: I think it’s not one line, but the entire style that I try to emulate… it’s Coltrane when he breaks out into a solo… playing two notes at one time…and I play sax so I know that ain’t even possible but he does it.  So Ill try to take what’s impossible and flip it.  That might mean expanding 16 bars to 20 or crushing internal rhymes in where they’re not supposed to fit.  Just drawing inspiration from what my icons were doing with their art.

Rakim: It might sound a little funny coming from a dude who remixed James Brown and George Clinton to make his own music, but to be honest, I prefer when people stay original with they own projects and leave mine to me.  But I understand that its an homage or a show of respect.  50 once said his favorite rapper said check out “My Melody.”  Jay incorporated “Follow the Leader” and some other stuff.  Robin Thicke’s “Mr. Sexy” had my nieces dancing.  It’s a blessing to be where I am and to get that kind of love.

CP: Do you think that the mythic status you achieved with your early work has made it difficult to make an impact with new music?

Rakim: I try to live up to my own expectations and those are pretty high.  If I concentrate on elevating my lyrical content, that might in turn elevate all lyrical content or at least get cats thinking about it.  I’ve always been an underground rapper so my influence is more on the foundation of the culture.  If what I do can get a young artist to stop and think about what he’s rhyming, that’s bigger than a radio hit or a platinum plaque.  That’s impact with greater meaning.

Rakim: You can’t take anything from Eric when it comes to what we did.  There was a lot more to the music…and to the business…than what happened in one studio session or another. When we was coming up, Eric put a lot of people in the right place at the right time and there was an energy he brought that helped shaped the outcome. He doesn’t need defending.

Rakim: That’s always a tough one to answer cause I’m a fan first, nahmeen.  There’s a lot out there to love.  You got people like Fab and Jay repping NY hard from the podium.  People like Kanye, HitBoy, Pharrell, Ryan Leslie pushing production to new heights.  Artists like Brother Ali and Bishop Lamont keeping things close to the truth.  There’s a lot of good out there that elevates above the clutter.

Rakim: I’ve always believed that following trends, chasing after what’s hot instead of what’s inside you…that’s the biggest enemy of creativity, the biggest challenge to HipHop.  There’s artists that do what they do and sell millions of albums but that doesn’t mean everyone should try to do what they do.  When an artist stays original, stays true to their own vision, that stands out to me more than superstar status.

Rakim: I’ve done a few shows in B’More.  About a half dozen years ago there was one where it was snowing out…like blizzard snowing with a foot or more on the ground…Now ya see, I don’t fly so it’s me driving into town and we are crawling.  I don’t have time to go to the hotel or nothing, just get to the stage.  And I get up there and, blizzard conditions outside, me late and still, that crowd is packed in the room and the energy is through the roof. That’s that B’More love. Don’t worry, I’ll be on time next week – no snow forecasted.

Rakim: There’s two sides to the sword, nahmeen.  When I was coming up HipHop was a neighborhood thing and it was somewhat confined in both the expectations of what you were supposed to be rhyming and the access to resources to create quality music….and that’s coming from the first rapper to sign a million dollar record deal and help change the content of our rhymes.  Now, the genre is a global phenomenon and artists have access to the best production and instrumentation in the business.  I have some nostalgia for the street corner and park party days, but its a blessing to see this thing on an international level…and to have come along with it.

“Kings (Edited Into The Echelon),” so titled because it features edited lyrics for artistic reasons rather than for the purposes of radio airplay, is submerged into in distortion and vocal effects. Recorded hip-hop was born full of the white noise of tape hiss and scratchy vinyl, but in the digital era producers who wish to capture that kind of ambience need to do so deliberately, sometimes to the point of contrivance. While Speed On The Beat may be following in the footsteps of other lo-fi auteurs like J Dilla or MF Doom, he’s not copying their methods or sounds, instead carving out his own idea of how to make hip-hop sound appealingly wrong. Songs For… (The Rebirth and Evolution of the Modern Male) will be out on August 17th.

The inaugural Baltimore Popfest at the Charm City Art Space, which I wrote about in this week’s City Paper, features many performers from far flung locations, but only a couple local combos. One of them, Wildhoney, has only been playing shows for a year, but has quickly made an impression around town with loud live shows and a beautifully fuzzed-out self-recorded demo tape. When I spoke to Wildhoney guitarist Joe Trainor last week, however, he was happy to inform me that just that day the band had released its first real studio recording, ”Like Me,” for streaming and download.

“Like Me,” one of three songs that will be released on a 7” EP this summer, is a little slicker and cleaner, while still retaining the band’s ragged shoegaze energy. “It was a little heavier than I wanted it to be,” Trainor says of the demo, noting that the new EP will better reflect his ideal vision of the band’s sound. There’s also the length: where the songs on the demo were tight three-minute rockers, “Like Me” is an even tighter one minute and 57 seconds. With Popfest on the horizon, it’s a perfect opportunity to showcase Wildhoney’s pop instincts.

With local underground venue The Bell Foundry canceling some upcoming shows (an unfortunate if familiar situation), bands booked to play the space have been scrambling for other options. Among them are Friend Collector and Curse, who were to kick off a brief East coast tour tonight at The Bell Foundry. After being told the show was cancelled, we’ve now learned it is back on. The bill is Friend Collector, Nicky Smith, Boardroom Heroes, Kill Lincoln, Let It Go, and Evokatones.

Friend Collector roses from the ashes of The New Flesh, who were for nearly a decade one of Baltimore’s finest proponents of loud, ugly punk rock. Founding New Flesh bassist Jason Donnells and guitarist Greg Dembeck, who joined the band in 2007 and was instrumental in the productive second half of their run, reteamed a couple years ago to form Friend Collector, and last year released a debut album. The new record, Friend Collector II, is a 6-song blast of aggression highlighted by a propulsive performance from drummer Scott Russell, who kicks all kinds of ass on “Spiritual Vacancy.” Friend Collector have said they don’t plan on playing out much this year, so get your ass down to Club K tonight. Or, if you’re in New York or Connecticut or Rhode Island or Massachusetts, catch them later this week.

Information has been sparse so far, but the news has been going around town that Steven “Low Key God” Loney, a ubiquitous figure on the Baltimore hip-hop scene for the past two decades, passed away on Sunday, March 17th. Though not a recording artist himself, Loney seemed to show up anywhere grimey underground hip-hop thrived in Charm City for years, from the infamous mid-‘90s ciphers on Eutaw Street to the countless events he promoted with his Team Fifty crew at clubs like 5 Seasons. Wheelchair-bound since 1990, when a gunshot took him out of the street life, Loney had an endless passion for music, but had been less visible on the scene in recent years as his health worsened.

Low Key God nurtured the careers of dozens of rappers in Baltimore, most notably his good friend Ray Lugar. I interviewed them both for a feature on Team Fifty for City Paper in 2006, and Jefferson Jackson Steele photographed the two with another old friend, DJ Scottie B. Loney was one of the most exhausting conversationalists I’ve ever interviewed, a fountain of passionate self-aggrandizement and shit-talking – he was famous for staying on the mic at his own events, filibustering while MCs waited to perform. But he was also a funny, magnetic presence, a true one of a kind individual, who cared about his community and his peers.

“When I speak, you know I mean what I say,” he told me in 2006. “I might cry, I might choke up, break down, I gotta get it together. But I’m’a look you right in your eyes and say I know what you’re goin’ through, because I went through everything you’re goin’ through.” Check out this 2007 episode of Deep Flow TV, which captured Low Key celebrating his birthdays and being paid tribute by many many local artists at 5 Season.

Last summer, the CW network attempted to jump into the post-American Idol gold rush of singing competitions with “The Next,” which went from city to city looking for hometown heroes. I recapped the episode in which the show’s celebrity mentors came to Baltimore, and pop singer Jordan Baird won the night and went on to compete in the first season finals. At the time, I regarded Chris Bivins, the teenage R&B singer who was mentored by Nelly and performed an Usher song, as the weakest of the episode’s four prospects. But he’s been apparently emboldened by his moment in the spotlight, and his new track ”Heaven” is pretty good.

“Heaven,” the lead single Bivins’s upcoming HoCo Red EP, features a guest rap from up and coming Baltimore MC Jay Verze. Producer BJR gives the track the kind of brooding, textured production that makes it feel very up-to-date with R&B in 2013, not necessarily a hit in the making but certainly a confident first step towards mainstream radio. And the video, co-directed by Bivins and Addy Play, may be as impressive for showcasing the young entertainer’s visual sense as for his singing and dancing skills.

So I assembled a YouTube playlist of every music video by or featuring Smash, 15 videos that run an hour and span his entire career. There’s plenty more Smash on YouTube, from live performance footage to uploaded mixtape tracks without visuals, but I stuck just to proper music videos with Smash rapping in front of the camera, though production values vary widely from one clip to the next. Things run chronologically, starting with the pre-stardom 2006 video for “Daddy Gettin’ Money” and ending with a clip released just a few weeks ago for Smash and Hello Rello’s remix of T.I.’s “Ball.” In between, there’s DJ Gemini’s posse cut “D.M.V. Dream Team” with Mullyman and Skarr Akbar, the 2011 tribute to the home team “Ravenstown,” and multiple collaborations with Caddy Da Don. Two of the videos from last year, “Thank God” and the collab with Atlanta’s Alley Boy, “Goons,” had over half a million views, demonstrating just how large Smash’s fanbase was growing before his life was tragically cut short.

Severn, Maryland-based rapper Brian Ennals has been slow to trickle out music from his upcoming Candy Cigarettes project since the great “Newport Music” single dropped last year, although the track finally got a video recently. So this week, Ennals unleashed the second single ‘When You Wake Up,” a spleen-venting breakup song, just in time for Valentine’s Day. On it, Ennals skates the fine line between genuine emotional hurt and self-deprecating humor, chiding an ex, “Yeah I’m a selfish asshole, but you were supposed to look past that.” The soulful beat by producer M-Lito inspires Ennals to pay tribute to Cam’ron’s memorable shoutout to Just Blaze, as he proclaims “I’ma take a couple bars off and let Lito live” before letting the beat breathe.

The Baltimore hip-hop twittersphere would have thrown a fit no matter who was on the list, but nearly half of it being comprised total unknowns even within the scene certainly fanned the flames. The article even linked Mooked Out’s latest release on the mixtape site DatPiff where, as of this writing, it has 4 downloads and 14 streams (one of which was me). But XXL’s tweets promoting the article referred to the list as “10 new rappers you need to know” (words not used in the piece itself), which also focused some of the criticism on the older MCs on the list. Three of the rappers on XXL’s list have been kicking around long enough that they also appeared on the fun Baltimore Hip-Hop Trading Cards I helped City Paper put together way back in 2006 (and believe me, not everyone was happy about who was or wasn’t picked for that). Mullyman, Skarr Akbar, and C.O.M.P. have remained prolific in recent years, but were perhaps not ideal choices for demonstrating Baltimore’s “next wave.”

The author of the XXL article, Kimberly Brown, is a local who works at Sinclair Broadcast Group and contributes to The Baltimore Times. She clearly knows the scene well enough to have covered some bases pretty well, and simply chose to spotlight some lesser known acts she happened to like to fill out the rest of the list. That the post isn’t ranked and doesn’t make any claims to a definitive “top 10” gives her the right to do that. And the calls on Twitter for a “real list” are predicated on a fantasy that there’d ever be one that everyone would be happy with. Still active veterans of the city’s ‘90s hip-hop scene like K-Mack or Labtekwon could’ve gotten a mention. So could genre-busting dancefloor-friendly MCs like Rye Rye or DDm. There are Baltimore rappers like Test or A$AP Ant, who are affiliated with hot mainstream stars (Future and A$AP Rocky, respectively). 92Q listeners might expect to see local radio darlings Caddy Da Don and Smash. And there’s a whole wave of rappers getting national attention via blogs, like Rickie Jacobs and Kane Mayfield. There, I just
named another 10 rappers, and there are still some guys feeling left out right now.

Ron Rico has long been one of the producers in the city bridging the worlds of hip-hop and Baltimore club music, although his soulful midtempo tracks for MCs like Mike Malachi often bore little similarity to his raucous club tracks. Over the years Rico has dropped verses here and there, but didn’t seem to take rapping as seriously as producing until last summer’s In My Own Little World EP. And his new track  “Black History,” out just in time for the beginning of Black History Month,  is a confident new step forward for him as an MC.

“Black History,” like many Ron Rico productions, is heavily sample-based, with the beatmaker taking cues from influences like The Rza and J Dilla to find fresh new ways to chop up old breaks. While tracks on last year’s EP often featured assists from rappers like Malachi or Greenspan, Ron Rico goes solo here, throwing his fist up and name-checking Marcus Garvey and Langston Hughes over jazzy horns. The track is more celebratory and evocative than it is lyrically substantial, but Black Month History is, after all, a celebration, and Ron Rico does have some experience getting the party started.

The DJ Booman-produced track makes a connection that’s on-the-nose but nonetheless works: Prince singing the title of his megahit “Purple Rain” in a stuttering loop over relentless snare drums, in a style that recalls Lil Wayne’s “A Milli,” while Mullyman spins purple prose about the Ravens. Even if the team wins the Super Bowl, the song will never go mainstream, mainly because Prince Rogers Nelson doesn’t clear samples, but “Purple Reign” definitely deserves to break out from the pack of Ravens rap tunes that get more plentiful every time the team makes the playoffs.

Some Baltimoreans may feel a strange, perhaps unpleasant sense of déjà vu when laying eyes on DJ AngelBaby’s Get Pumped Vol. 1. A mix CD of Baltimore club music by a popular female on-air personality from 92Q, distributed by the local retail chain Downtown Locker Room, can’t help but bring to mind the dozens of such mixtapes that DJ K-Swift released before her death in 2008. DJ AngelBaby, a Baltimore native who started working at 92Q the same year, picks up the baton with her first mix, which includes an intro and outro from K-Swift’s old friend Pork Chop, as well as new tracks from Club Queen favorites like KW Griff, Say Wut and DJ K-Spin. K-Swift is only shouted out once, towards the end of the collection in a drop by DJ Reddz. But the bottom line is that club music deserves these kinds of splashy collections of the biggest tracks of the moment, and in K-Swift’s absence few have even attempted to fill that void. Club music has always been in need of more female participation, and DJ AngelBaby throws her hat into the ring at a time when women like the rappers Rye Rye and TT The Artist are waving the flag for Baltimore club proudly.

Get Pumped Vol. 1 is executive produced by one of the club scene’s hottest producers of recent years, Murder Mark, and features several of his tracks along with other new school hitmakers like DJ Pierre and James Nasty, as well as some of the producers from outside Baltimore who’ve made their own variations on the sound of the city. Invariably, samples of recent hip-hop hits, chopped up or sped up to fit a club music tempo, dominate the mix, but a wide variety of textures and production styles creep in from the dozens of contributors. It’s a kick to hear DJ Big O and Nadus remix “Pop That,” the French Montana hit that samples the same Luther Campbell track from which Baltimore club derived one of its most famous songs, “Doo Doo Brown,” a rare moment that links the past and present.

It was only last spring that Baltimore rockers Gary B & The Notions
released their latest album, the excellent How Do We Explode, but they decided to close out 2012 with a little more new music on the Cheri EP. The title track is a worthy addition to the canon of Gary Barrett songs titled after girls’ names, alongside “Lori,” “Amy,” “Jenny,” “Sally” and “Lyndsy Fonseca.” The latter ode to a relatively obscure television actress (the daughter on the couch in How I Met Your Mother!), is among the Explode tracks that are, surprisingly, remixed and dramatically touched up on the rest of the EP.

Gary B & The Notions have always been a straightforward guitar/bass/drums outfit, and How Do We Explode is their hardest rocking effort to date. So it’s a bit of a shock to hear some of its riffs turned inside out, or in some cases replaced entirely with thumping new beats backing Gary B’s nervous voice. V O T’s “Street Drugs (Make ‘Em Plenty ReMix)” is the spikiest and most distorted of the new mixes, and comes closest to successfully reinventing the song. The other remixes, produced by It Could BB Guns, Chris Moore, and KNTRLR, are a mixed bag, no pun intended, often failing to reward such a risky stylistic departure. But it’s still intriguing to hear the Notions in a new light, suggesting that they may not always be such a meat’n’potatoes guitar band after all.

J. Roddy Walston & The Business have long felt like one of Baltimore rock’s best prospects for mainstream success; after all, they are one of the only local bands to have found their way onto 98 Rock playlists, and sound damn good there. Still, it was a little surprising last week to get word last week that the band would be performing on VH1′s morning talk show, Big Morning Buzz Live. The other guest on the December 17th episode was rap superstar T.I., but at the end of the hour it was J. Roddy and the boys who got onstage and performed “Don’t Break The Needle” for a national viewing audience.

VH1′s Jim Shearer introduced the band with the appropriate description of “Jerry Lee Lewis meets AC/DC,” and J. Roddy Walston, who’d complained on Twitter of the show’s 6 a.m. call time, shyly made his way through a quick interview, and then flubbed a few words early in the song before the band clicked and sounded almost as good as they do at one of their many sold-out Ottobar gigs. Throughout the performance, VH1 put little word bubbles with information of the band on the screen, including an almost-mention of the City Paper, when stating that the band “was recently chosen as the best live band in Baltimore by a city paper.” C’mon, guys, all you had to do was capitalize two letters and you would’ve mentioned us by name!

It’s been over two years since The Business’s first nationally released album, their self-titled Vagrant Records debut, made its way into stores, but clearly the band is still regularly hitting the road and promoting the album and “Don’t Break The Needle,” which was featured on the soundtrack to the Mark Wahlberg flick Contraband earlier this year. So perhaps Big Morning Buzz Live was having trouble booking more famous performers so close to the holidays, or perhaps this Wal-Mart-sponsored performance is a sign that J. Roddy Walston’s commercial prospects are looking bright for 2013. The band hasn’t yet announced a new album, but 2012 did see the digital release of an excellent new studio track, “Jesus Gonna Do His Best.”

The search for a modern Christmas song worthy of addition to the canon (besides, of course, that deathless Mariah Carey track) is, perhaps, a fool’s errand. But every 4th quarter, acts big and small continue to toss holiday-themed songs and albums out into the world, and whether they perfectly capture the spirit of the season or achieve Christmas carol immortality or not, there are often some worthwhile and entertaining tracks to be heard. This year, a couple came out of Baltimore: one from soul singer/songwriter Brooks Long, and one from indie rapper Jumbled.

Brooks Long & The Mad Dog No Good, featuring pianist Jim Jones sitting in with Long’s usual backing band, recently released ”Christmas Letter From Franklin Square, an affecting tune that takes place in the titular West Baltimore neighborhood. ” She Wants It All,” by contrast, is a brief, humorous rap about shopping season by Jumbled, who previously recorded a memorable ode to another time of year, the Best of Baltimore summer jam “Snobaltimore.”

Ben Goldberg, who formed the group as an experiment in using his Eb contra alto clarinet in the role of a bass player, was the de facto frontman for the night, introducing each song with short, playfully strange speeches. At the top of the set, he said simply “The name of this group is Unfold Ordinary Mind. Unfold…” he then paused, and blew into his instrument, letting out a deep blurt of melody. “…Ordinary…” Another honk. “Mind.” Another burst of sound from the clarinet, and so on. The beautifully unpredictable composition that followed, he later explained, was called “The Introduction,” and was written in tribute to the late singer/songwriter Elliott Smith.

Unfold Ordinary Mind is a fascinating band, perhaps more than the sum of its impressive parts. Tenor saxophonists Eskelin and Rob Sudduth sometimes lock into warm harmonies, sometimes go off on simultaneous, beautifully discordant solos. Drummer Ches Smith has a full arsenal of relaxed grooves, unpredictable accents and atmospheric textures at his disposal, each song tracing a winding but cohesive narrative narrative thanks largely to his steady hand. Goldberg’s sturdy low end is the eye of the storm, and Cline, as always, is the subtlest of guitar gods, blending into the ensemble until he’s ready to stand out with an incredible sequence of tones that magically emanates from his strings and array of effects boxes.

The band reportedly recorded their upcoming album, which is being released by Goldberg’s BAG Production Records, on the first day of rehearsing together. But their Windup Space set was not an improv free-for-all; the musicians referred to sheet music throughout the set. Some moments were very clearly composed but still allowed for spontaneity. After “Breathing Room” opened with an especially lovely melodic passage, Goldberg stopped and politely asked the band, “let’s do that again,” seemingly just for the joy of playing it rather than to correct a mistake. Leaving the stage after an hour and a half, Unfold Ordinary Mind returned for one last song, the lengthy and deceptively titled “The Second Interlude,” which ended up being downright funky in places. Guys like the musicians in Unfold Ordinary Mind are always combining for new groups that only make a couple records or gig sporadically, but this combination felt special enough that hopefully there’ll be lots more to come, perhaps even in Baltimore.

On December 1st, World AIDS Day, the Metro Gallery held a fundraiser for Moveable Feast, the Baltimore-based organization that has been providing food and other services to people with HIV/AIDS and other life-threatening conditions since 1990. As a celebration of an incredibly noble and worthwhile cause, it was an edifying way to spend a Saturday night, but it was also a pretty fun concert. And that was primarily due to The Firecrackers, an aptly named Baltimore foursome that ran through a set of crackling punk tunes with girl group harmonies. The band, founded by Pat Termite, formerly of Cleveland power poppers The Beatnik Termites, had a bombshell frontwoman named Colleen and big hooky songs we would’ve described as bubblegum even if they didn’t actually have a song titled “Bubblegum.” When the band finished their set, the audience was so vocally demanding for more that they pulled out one last song, a midtempo tune called “The Waltz,” that wound up being a welcome change of pace.

Earlier in the night, the quartet The Honest Mistake played an enjoyably jangly set that marked the 11th wedding anniversary of singer Joylene Dahlia and guitarist Chris Ehrich. Singer/songwriter Tim Kaye opened the show with a solo set, his piano-driven songs sometimes not done proper justice by a garish synthesizer patch – we realize it’s a pain to play gigs with a real piano, but it really would sound so much better. Still, he ended his set on a literal high note with a cover of Prince’s “Do Me, Baby” that could’ve lapsed into shrill camp but instead soared with Kaye actually doing the song’s squealing falsetto justice.

Pitbull has never been afraid to reinterpret and recycle, and Global Warming is full of shameless samples and interpolations of instantly recognizable pop hits like Sheryl Crow’s “All I Wanna Do,” A-Ha’s “Take On Me,” and Mickey & Sylvia’s “Love Is Strange.” But there’s still something surreal about hearing one of the most famous women in the world sing the lyrics of a Baltimore club track. J.Lo and Pitbull have collaborate three times before, including on last year’s triple platinum megahit “On The Floor,” so if “Drinks For You” is released as a single you may be hearing Class’s words everywhere soon.

Trawling the internet for new releases by Baltimore area musicians, we look for good records to champion, and try to ignore or forget the bad. But sometimes we find something so horrendously awful that it begs to be shared, such as Hungry D’s Getting’ High In The Drive-Thru, a stale and deeply unfunny parody of circa 2009 AutoTune rap. Hungry D appears to be the alias of Bel Air-based musician Guy Wallis of the “death folk” band One Watt Sun, who are actually not bad, the same of which cannot be said for this release.

An apparently white rock musician donning a dreadlock wig to rap songs like “Auto-Rap Is Gay, N—a” and “I Love Crack” is offensive enough in and of itself that Getting’ High In The Drive-Thru almost need not be evaluated on its musical merits. But it is worth noting that it also sounds fucking terrible. As satire, it’s outdated and toothless, and as broad comedy it’s far dumber than what it attempts to ridicule. And as a bonus, “Bacon Mafia (I Need Bacon)” piggybacks on another tiresome trend in internet humor. Fortunately, Hungry D claims to have only spent a half hour making these 8 tracks, which run a total of 12 minutes, so at least nobody wasted too much of their time on this sad, worthless, racist shitpile of a record.

When we named Crimes the city’s best new band in this year’s BOB issue, we were only going on a hunch, based on a small amount of recorded music and one or two dynamite live shows (for the record, they didn’t even have to buy anyone a beer). But their small catalog is steadily growing with a series of oddly named EPs: first the 2-song Ronny in 2010, then the kickass 5-song Fluffy earlier this year. Now, the Crimes Bandcamp page is previewing three of the four tracks from Meatsy, which will be out on 7” vinyl on December 11thand is available to pre-order now.

One of the advantages of hearing a band slowly unveil itself on a sporadic series of small releases is that you can hear them develop and refine their sound bit by bit. In the case of Crimes, it suits them especially well because brevity is part of what they do, most of their songs falling between 2 and 3 minutes. Each of their three releases so far has been with a different producer and studio, and Meatsy, recorded by The Wayward guitarist Nick Skrobisz, may be the best realization of their live sound to date. The 3 songs currently streaming include also give a pretty full range of what Crimes does well, moving from the opening “Oh, D” on the more melodic end of things to the shouty, abrasive “Sleep Deprived” and the anthemic “Snakes.”

Photo: J.M. Giordano

Maryland and the rest of America chose some winners and losers this week. But on Saturday, November 3rd, Baltimore’s hip hop underground celebrated its own best and brightest with the 6th annual Baltimore Crown Awards. The organization behind the awards, The Baltimore Scene, held an online vote open to the public, and then handed out trophies to the winners on Saturday night at the 5 Seasons. And a few days later, TheBaltimoreScene.com has uploaded photographs from the evening, as well as the full list of winners.

The big Hip Hop Artist of the Year category was split into two awards by gender, with Los taking the male division and Dat Girl Kesh winning the female division. Bmore’s Very Own won the Blog/Website of the Year category (full disclosure: my site won the award in 2008), The Bangladesh Project won Band of the Year, and a dozen other individuals and organizations took home awards for best studio, poet, DJ, and other categories. The 2012 Baltimore Legend Honorees included cornerstones of the scene like Porkchop, DJ Booman and Ray Lugar, joining a roster of previous inductees like Labtekwon and Brown F.I.S.H. Check the Baltimore Scene site for all the details.

TestMe, a longtime fixture of the Baltimore hip-hop scene, is getting a label deal with Future, the Atlanta rap star who’s been ubiquitous on urban radio this year with hits like “Turn On The Lights” and “Same Damn Time.” Future, an Epic Records artist, is signing TestMe to his own company, Freebandz Entertainment, and the two rappers will perform together and officially announce the deal this Friday, November 2nd at Club Dubai in Baltimore.

Though only in his early 20s, TestMe has been a presence in Baltimore for many years now, dating back to his appearance as a teenager on the local classic Darkroom Productions mixtape Hamsterdam: The Best of Baltimore, Vol. 1 in 2005. He’s got a robust social media following, and has racked up 92Q airplay for singles like 2007’s “What It Is” and this year’s “Party Hard” while opening for national acts like Young Jeezy and Yo Gotti. Earlier this year, TestMe released the mixtape Everything Green with DJ Scream, which featured his first collaboration with Future, ”Gotta See It 2 Believe It,” which also featured Sisqo. Later this month TestMe will release his first mixtape as a Freebandz artist, Brenda’s Baby.

City Paper: So let’s talk about Respekt.

Teddy Douglas: The resident DJs are myself, Graham, Fleg, Boodamonk, Karizma, Spen and myself, and we’re doing Halloween theme, Willy Wonka theme this time around.
CP: How far are you going with the theme, are there costumes and decorations?

Graham Hatke: [holding out a card] So basically, like, these are the flyers for the party, which are essentially ‘golden tickets.’ It’s actually worth a little bit of something because it’s like three dollars off. We’re gonna be having some chocolate bars with Respekt wrappers that are in the same sort of design scheme, stuff like that.

TD: It’s Halloween weekend, it’s not actually Halloween, so but we’re sure people gonna dress up in the theme of the party, so with the club we’re basically gonna turn it into a chocolate factory. The Four Hours of Funk guys are gonna have their room, and Spen and Karizma and I have the main room.

CP: So you’re already looking forward to making it a tradition of doing this twice a year?

GH: Yeah. It makes it a pretty good thing to just sort of gather up everyone.

CP: Had you done anything together before that?

TD: Yeah, actually, what really spawned the whole thing was they invited me to do a Four Hours of Funk party for them, about six months prior to the first party. I’d also been talking to Spen and Karizma to doing a party, and I came up with the idea to do our party all together, and it’s been a brilliant collaboration between the parties involved. Our communities are working together really really really well. I don’t think Baltimore has anything like it. And you’re gonna hear all different kinds of music, there’s gonna be breakers.

GH: A lot of the different dance crews from Baltimore and D.C. come out, and that’s, which is different. You would think that would sort of be a daunting thing, but people feel welcomed by it, actually. These are people from their 40s to teenagers.

TD: We’re looking at a big age demographic, that represents the party, I’m the oldest of the guys, so you’re gonna get that demographic of the kids who want to know about the history, and then you have the house heads that are gonna be there because they know what they’re gonna get.

GH: The thing of it is that with house music, it’s really hard nowadays to get really good stuff, or to experience it with other DJs.

CP: As far as finding a venue for the music?

GH: It’s everything, finding new music online or new records, finding a party that might play it.

CP: Is it because people aren’t making it as much or it’s not as popular?

TD: It’s the way we obtain music, there’s no stores, there’s no one champion saying “You should buy this.”

GH: People, especially younger people, especially kids that are dancers, are very captivated by house. They might’ve grown up breakdancing, but now they wanna get into something that’s a little more soulful and a little more free in certain ways. Being able to be in the loop of a party like this gives them an opportunity to experience the real thing, which is very hard to come by.

TD: Which is reminiscent of when I first started DJing in the ‘80s, there was all kinds of music being played in the club, there was Sugar Hill Gang, there was house music, there was all kinds of music. So when I started DJing there was a mesh of music, I played everything from Kraftwerk to Trouble Funk, everything in between, Depeche Mode.

CP: Yeah, I’ve read about how back then guys like Afrika Bambataa would have eclectic tastes just because they would be willing to play anything dance-ready, because there was so only so much music geared toward DJs at that point.

TD: At the clubs I hung at like the Paradise Garage, if it was danceable, it was played.

CP: Now there’s a hundred records in any specific style, so if you want to play a really narrow spectrum of music, you’ll never run out.

TD: Right. And this party represents that. The name came up, Respekt is actually, we kinda played off of our initials, like S is for Spen, T is for Teddy, and K is Karizma – we don’t have any initials for [the Four Hours of Funk] guys!

GH: It’s ok, it’s ok. (laughs)

TD: Karizma actually came up with the name, and it is basically about respecting the origins where all of this is coming from. We were just talking about bringing in international guest DJs maybe once a year to even give the party another little layer of spice.

CP: What is the generation gap here? How old are you?

GH: I’m 30.

CP: And how old are you?

TD: I’m 48.

CP: So it’s a big gap.

GH: But it all comes together as one.

CP: I’m the same age as you, and I think it’s all about whether people of our generation have some respect and curiosity for what came before.

TD: There’s something to be said for that, because I think a lot of kids really wanna feel that, because everything comes from something. I just think it was a brilliant idea for us all to join forces. When I went to the Four Hours of Funk party, these guys are playing music that I used to play when I was a young DJ, and I was like hey, these guys are searching and they got a heavy collection. And then they have this audience, the 20-year-old audience, I thought that was interesting.

In my latest Rap Sheet column for the City Paper, I ran down a list of Baltimore rappers who’d amassed over 10 thousand followers on Twitter, as an attempt to measure the online fanbases of hometown MCs. But that raised the question, who are the most popular Baltimore musicians on Twitter in general? So here are the top 10:

10. B. Rich (@BRichbaltimore)

25,000 followers

B. Rich is best known for the 2002 major label hit “Whoa Now,” which predated Twitter by several years. But he’s kept grinding away as an independent artist, and apparently still has a lot of eyes on him.

9. TestMe (@testme410)

25,000 followers

TestMe started out rapping as a teenager nearly a decade ago, and over the years has enjoyed some success with his mixtapes and with singles getting played on 92Q, and it looks like he’s still going strong, at least on Twitter.

8. King Midas (@KingMidasMusic)

31,000 followers

King Midas may be best known in Baltimore for producing and performing the hook on Caddy Da Don’s breakout hit “Grindin’ On Me,” but Midas, who’s also produced songs for Mystikal and Sean Kingston,” has Caddy beat by over 10 thousand followers.

7. Sisqo (@OfficialSisQo)

32,000 followers

It’s been a long time since “Thong Song,” but Sisqo is still perhaps the most famous pop star to have repped Baltimore in our lifetime, and he’s got the followers to prove it. The reunited Dru Hill also have 14 thousands followers.

6. Rye Rye (@RyeRye)

44,000 followers

Rye Rye’s Interscope debut Go! Pop! Bang! has been out for a few months now, and she’s had a banner year of touring and making appearances on TV and in magazines.

5. Beach House (@BeaccchHoussse)

78,000 followers

It’s easy to think of Beach House as just one of many good indie bands to have come out of Baltimore over the last few years, but their Twitter stats are a reminder of just how huge they are; their latest album, Bloom, even debuted at No. 7 on the Billboard 200.

4. DJ Class (@DJCLASS)

91,000 followers

DJ Class has been repping Baltimore club music on a worldwide scale since 2008’s “I’m The Ish,” collaborating with huge stars, and continuing to drop club bangers nonstop.

3. Los (@iamKingLos)

101,000 followers

Los, who was seen this week on the BET Hip Hop Awards alongside his Bad Boy Records labelmates, is by far the most visible rapper out of Baltimore at the moment, and the numbers he racks up on both Twitter and mixtape download sites are pretty impressive.

2. Mario (@MarioSoulTruth)

192, 000 followers

The most recent of Mario Barrett’s many huge R&B radio hits was three years ago, and since then he’s been in the headlines more for his stint on Dancing With The Stars and a domestic incident with his mother. But he’s still pretty damn famous, and is working on a new album, Restoration, due out in 2013.

1. All Time Low (@AllTimeLow)

462,000 followers

This pop punk quartet formed in Timonium in 2003, and their last two albums debuted in the top 10 of the Billboard 200. Their latest, Don’t Panic, was released on Tuesday, and may soon do the same.

“Cruisin’” is melodic and upbeat, and sounds as good now as when it was first released over the summer, and the video merely accentuates that, without adding much thematically. Jay isn’t the most charismatic guy in the world, and he opens the song with more fake laughs than a Wiz Khalifa mixtape, but for a teenager he’s pretty quickly growing in ability and confidence. Perhaps a little too much confidence, though – the line “I’m so different, just take a listen” betrays that he may not realize just how many rappers are doing these kinds of songs just as well these days.

Tod A. formed Firewater in the mid-’90s from the ashes of his previous band, Cop Shoot Cop, drawing together influences and backing musicians from far flung locations like the Middle East and Asia. Those eclectic sounds provided exotic window dressing for the acerbic humor and gritty noir imagery of his anthemic songs, though for a time that flavor started to drop away from the band’s albums. Then, the globetrotting side of Firewater returned in a big way on its last two albums, 2008′s The Golden Hour and International Orange, which was released last week. The latter was recorded in Istanbul and Tel Aviv last year during the Arab Spring, and carries an appropriately revolutionary spirit.

Those two most recent albums dominated Monday’s setlist, and the songs uniformly sounded far better onstage than on record, from the opening “The Monkey Man” to the final song of the night, an absolutely explosive “This Is My Life.” Though their early albums remain their best, Firewater are an even better live band now than they were ten years ago. The current six-piece lineup includes Johnny Kalsi, who plays an Indian dohl drum, and a trombonist, both of whom played without amplification so loudly in the small Backstage room that they lent the whole band an almost imposing physicality. Firewater peppered just four songs from those early albums into the setlist, but all were well chosen. Before the encore, the band finished its set with the swinging, bombastic “So Long, Superman” and the frenetic “Dark Days Indeed,” both among the band’s finest songs and both featuring one of Tod A.’s favorite phrases, “go to hell and hallelujah.”

“I’m A Raven” features Authentic John Doe and an opening verse by the strangely named WhyHateInTown. And throughout the video, directed by fellow rapper and jack of all trades Tha Profitt, Bar Cardy and his guests party and pre-game with fans outside M&T Bank Stadium, where seemingly every article of clothing on every person has some purple in it. The cheery chorus of children singing on “I’m A Raven” is perhaps a little too saccharine for its own good, but it could very well become a theme song for the city if things go well this fall.

Every couple years, a rapper becomes absolutely ubiquitous by sheer force of will, recording guest verses for every artist that will pay for them, from the smallest regional acts to the biggest major label stars. At one point it was Bun B, for quite a few years it’s been Lil Wayne, and in 2012 it has been 2 Chainz, the Atlanta rapper who recently rode over 50 guest appearances this year alone to a #1 album. And one of his many clients is now Baltimore’s Caddy Da Don, who’s always been on the lookout for the next step up in his career, and nabbed 2 Chainz to boost his new single “Retarded.” The song may not have the most politically correct title, but it’s catchy, and the bombastic beat was laced by K.E. On The Track, who has produced radio hits by Rick Ross and Roscoe Dash.

Earlier this year, rapper OOH of the group Brown F.I.S.H. launched a new chapter of his solo career with the release of the first single by his alias Yo Slick. But the line between his two names has remained blurry, and his site DamnYoSlick.com recently premiered an epic video for “Let The Light…” credited to “OOH aka Yo Slick.” Even more confusingly, he originally released the song as an OOH single in 2009, and included it on the 2011 EP The Big 7, which will apparently be re-released under the Yo Slick name on September 7th.

The gorgeously shot 11-minute clip, which was directed by Grasshopper Philms and co-written by OOH himself, falls somewhere between a short film and a mere music video, and in some ways the seams show a little too clearly. For most of its running time, it alternates between a dialogue-driven narrative, and quick bursts of OOH performing the song, giving the whole thing a somewhat stilted rhythm. The plot, which ends with a “to be continued” screen that suggests more to come, has a bit of a political bent to it, clearly influenced by OOH’s experience working in Baltimore city schools and nonprofit youth programs. And, somewhat subversively, it’s all soundtracked by a booming track that’s primarily about how shiny the rapper’s watch is.