Prophetic – Wow, You Still Sleepin? (download here)
“My music is the product for the hood, the ghetto, still suburban kids got it, tho,” Milwaukee rapper Prophetic boasts. He prides himself on residing between these two worlds. On his latest mixtape, Wow, You Still Sleepin?, he raps of driving through the North Side wearing a black tie, but also of dining at fancy restaurants in a hooded sweatshirt, feeding on the glares of white diners. The mix is divided between homegrown soul from local producers like Adlib and Dylan Thomas and flossy industry tracks, including Gucci Mane’s “Wasted” and Clipse’s “I’m Good.” Like Jay-Z, whom he closely models his poise after, Proph raps primarily about hard work and its rewards, dwelling particularly this time around on the fruits of labor. Surrounded by women who once rejected him, he snacks on Peking duck by the pool as he plots his empire. “Sitting underneath the sun, lotion with chamomile,” he muses, “that’s why I be standing there, because I understand shit. Every success I had, I sat down and planned it.”
Donnis – The Invitation (download here)
This may be a first: a mixtape that teases not an album, but another mixtape. A couple weeks before the planned release of Fashionably Late, Donnis’ hyped follow-up to his name-naming 2009 debut mix Dairy of an ATL Brave, the Atlanta rapper is offering an intermediary mixtape called The Invitation. “Twelve original tracks coming for y’all, man, ASAP, so just goddamn sit tight,” Donnis says of Fashionably Late on the intro to The Invitation, “but in the meantime, what me, Infamous and Holiday did was lock ourselves up in the studio for three days and see what we come up with: The Invitation.” So Donnis just raps over industry beats herewhich is actually a handicap, given how the blindingly excellent the production was on Diary of an ATL Bravebut the format allows him to showcase his rapping in a way his song-based debut often didn’t. He proves himself a better rapper than even his debut suggested, an eager-to-please wit with an infectious, friendly drawl. “Exotic hoes in the car, I’m human trafficking,” he beams over the groove from OutKast’s “Aquemini,” “and my garage look like we done brought the traffic in.”
|
|
K. Michelle – What’s the 901? (download here)
Rick Ross, Gucci Mane, Trina and the Three 6 Mafia are among the rappers featured on Memphis R&B singer K. Michelle’s What’s The 901? mixtape, and it’s a testament to Michelle’s tough-as-nails presence that she eclipses all of them. A steel-boned, iron-lunged strong woman in the Mary J. Blige mold, Michelle sounds equally at home belting traditional torch songs as she does rough-and-tumble hip-hop, and even at 18 long tracks, her mixtape never misfiresa promising sign for her upcoming Jive Records debut. Embedded below are a couple YouTube videos that demonstrate Michelle’s dueling sensibilities, the first an aggressive Rick Ross collaboration (“You Should’ve Killed Me,” a mixtape highlight), the second a stripped-down live performance of the ballad “Where They Do That At.”
%uFFFD
