Check out Ital Santos' catchy new single with Eugene O' Neill - "Chocolate Hearts & Roses" out now along with the new album "L'Amore" a clever commentary on modern dating from the Black Cloud impresario himself!
Tristan "Tanjint Wiggy" Acker is staff writer for JooseBoxx, a youth hip-hop and poetry tutor, and member of the Inland Empire nerdcore hip-hop group the West Coast Avengers. Catch more of their work at westcoastavengers.com, follow Tristan on Twitter @Tanjint or e-mail him at tristanacker@gmail.com
Black Cloud Music alum and BrickToYaFace staple Faimkills has been re-issuing his material on major online outlets starting with Dystopia Cornucopia and Good Times for A Change.
Faimie’s brand of hipster lit-hop is unique and ultimately irresistible
though it did take time to grow on me. The way he pokes at both stuffy literary
culture and machismo-obsessed hip-hop culture is a delight and you never know what
angle he’s going to be critiquing society from. Sometimes both and the target
is often himself. All too aware of the ways that love and sex tear people down
from their lofty stated ideas, his work drips with irony without being snobby
and annoying. His wordplay and flows are different and engaging, switching between
speeds and linguistic registers
The idea of these re-issues was brilliant and well-timed for this listener. I'd heard a couple singles and collabs from Faimkills and knew he was an educated dude but his large discography had been daunting up until now and I didn't know where to start. He polled social media followers on which records to re-issue on iTunes and the rest and casual new fans like me benefited and now have an easy jumping on point. Hearing this era of Black Cloud with him, Jynxx, Noa James, Curtiss King, Yasin and more is a real delight for someone like me who came into this community in 2014 and later.
One thing present in both albums is the juxtaposition of the hard and the soft. Hard banging beats by Dope Kid Danny, Jynx and Curtiss King soundtrack these albums where Faim gets vulnerable, poetic and honest about love and the other intricacies of youthful social interaction.
In particular, Good Times For A Change seems to nurture the seedlings of ideas explored on later
Faim works Thrashed Out and Manic Pixie Dreams where he further
explores among much else the narcissism of modern love, the latent sexism in indie hipster scene culture through the lens of the
stunted growth tough guy-ism of mid-2000s hip-hop culture. I look forward to getting into his work for the first time all over and over again as these re-issues continue.
Tristan "Tanjint Wiggy" Acker is a staff writer for JooseBoxx, youth hip-hop writing instructor with CHORDS Enrichment Youth program (chordseyp.org) and member of the Inland Empire nerdcore hip-hop group the West Coast Avengers. Catch more of their work at westcoastavengers.com, follow Tristan on Twitter @Tanjint or e-mail him at tristanacker@gmail.com
Ital Santos, the artist formerly
known as Jynxx, recently released a well-curated collection spanning the first ten years of his career called Decem.
Meditating on it a few times over a few months makes me think deeper on his
double album The Transition. I always
thought of the title as referring to the time in his life and his mindstate
while creating the album but now I realize much of his career reflects the
transition that West Coast Rap itself was going through in the first decades of
the twenty-first century.
The music community in Cali was going through a Transition
that Ital correctly identified- transitioning away from the dominance the 90’s
held, transitioning out of losing 2pac and more broadly, moving beyond the
Gangsta Rap narrative that had been dominant up through the late 90’s and the
end of the century. Ital never lost sight of the idea that older cats go
through these things for the benefit of the youth, so that they don’t have to.
You can hear the cultural Transition throughout Decem. The
older tracks bristling with a little more trigger-happiness and aggressive
masculinity. Their pre-track shout outs sound Death Row-style and Yasin, a frequent Santos collaborator on the earlier works, throws down hard bars over powerful and grimy boom-bap. The later tracks are more chill and even stoner-hippie in their
wizened observations and wisdom. Noted posi-gawds like Noa James show their
earlier more gangster side on older tracks from the collection too: again, the
Jynxx / Ital Santos Transition reflects the larger cultural shift, here is a
musician who has been here for all that. Songs in between like an addictive R
& B number, "Black Brown Soul Revue" sung amazingly by CornBreeze near the end help show Ital’s diversity and vision.
The record's given me a new appreciation for how Ital develops choruses- 'Realest shit', 'Crisis', 'All for the money', 'Rain Check' and plenty more show his understanding of the interplay of the sung soul sample and the rapped refrain but more importantly they are catchy and give his music an enjoyable momentum. More recent tracks include standout performances from Slick C, D'zyl 5k1 and of course a frequent Ital collaborator Mando the DJ on the cut.
Santos shows us his part in local lexicon development with tracks like “the 9”, and the collection’s standout almost-closer “The Realest Shit I Ever Wrote” on which he says "I got friends but sometimes I feel alone." The whole song is a bluesy soul slapper which encapsulates, I think, Ital's desire to shed light on the struggle of people in the I.E. This record commemorates a decade of him doing exactly that, through different collaborators, different eras and personas of the self, just trying to give the I.E. the kind of musical shading and texture so many other hard-up communities have had in the past. He's been busy in this last decade and I look forward to what he produces in his next.
Tristan "Tanjint Wiggy" Acker is a staff writer for JooseBoxx, youth hip-hop writing instructor with CHORDS Enrichment Youth program (chordseyp.org) and member of the Inland Empire nerdcore hip-hop group the West Coast Avengers. Catch more of their work at westcoastavengers.com, follow Tristan on Twitter @Tanjint or e-mail him at tristanacker@gmail.com.
David May - The Lifestyle Of A Dream Chaser (Prod. by Brook Beats) Album: The Lifestyle Of A Dream Chaser The second single off of David May's first Black Cloud Music Release. Directed & Edit by: Adam Martinez (DJAddemUP)
