Prince Ali ft. Casual, Planet Asia and Keith Murray - "The Majors"
It’s easy to see why the Late Night Hype Show guys are salivating over this track: Four great, cult emcees from totally different cliques team up over one of the best beats of the year.
Lupe Fiasco – "Superstar"
[The real music video hasn’t leaked to YouTube yet, but is posted here] With its electro polish, blue-eyed chorus and up-tempo meditations on the good life, Lupe Fiasco’s latest single liberally borrows motifs from Kanye’s Graduation. It’s going to be a huge hit.
eMC – “What It Stand For”
Although 2007 didn’t yield the long-promised debut eMC album, the hard-touring team of Masta Ace, Punchline, Wordsworth and Milwaukee’s own “Unfuckwittable” Stricklin kept teasing us with singles and videos. In the latest, they painstakingly brand themselves, and even if the song never definitively answers the “what does it stand for?” question, it ensures that listeners won’t be forgetting the group’s name any time soon.
Smif N Wessun ft. Rock and Joell Ortiz – “Stomp”
Smif N Wessun used to be scary in that “waiting for you in a dark alley and you’ll never see them coming” sort of way. With age, though, they’ve lost some of that subtlety: Now they’re waiting for you in the middle of a well-lit street with a sledgehammer. “We’re going to stomp through any hood we feel like stomping through,” Steele snarls, “We ain’t who you want to run into, nope.” The new single is more brash than the gritty, boom-bap jazz that made their debut, Da Shining, such a classic, but it works.
