Fresh. I’ll have pick up the new album when it drops, although i won’t be getting PAL198x. As much as i love synths the PAL didn’t wow me. Its a cool little gadget but not cool enough for me to drop an extra $40. The infomercial was hilarious though.

The sound quality was horrible, I could hardly hear the guitar. If ya want to hear a good cover of Tango til They’re Sore, look up Delta Spirit’s 4/14/11 Daytrotter session, ya can get it for free at daytrotter.com.

Yeah, I get what your saying. I wasn’t really demanding that backpack rap be the only hip hop covered, I was just stating that I’d like to see more of it. Seeing as this writer is new to stereogum, I figured I’d put my input in early while he, hopefully, is still reading and taking advice from the comments. When I was younger I used to listen to a lot more rap but as I got older a lot of it started to bore me. I enjoy a song about smoking bud every now and then, but rappers just talking about doing or selling drugs, and their “riches”, and their designer brands, and killing people cause they’re thugs seems so contrived to me. I like to think of hip hop as a movement with a positive message. It doesn’t have to always be serious though. I can get down with a song about eating cereal and watching cartoons on a Saturday morning, or about comics, or a good ole fashioned fuck the police song, or songs that aren’t really about anything other than displaying the artist’s rhyming abilities and flow, or songs about sex, or even about killing people if its done funny or with some emotion put into it(ex. Sage Francis- Hang Time). I guess its the mainstream popularity of hip hop that emphasizes the balling club bangers while intellectual or heart-felt lyricists are passed over that irks me. While I get that hip hop is diverse, the style of the artists I mentioned are also quite diverse. There are similarities, socially conscious raps, great word play, as you mentioned, politically-oriented rhymes, but they each have there own distinct style. Example: I listen to Sage because his raps are more like poetry to me(I really enjoy his spoken word), I listen Aesop because his flow is epic and rhyme schemes are so goddamn intricate, Atmosphere just seems down to earth to me, El-P produces great electronic beats, Buck 65 has an odd country-western flavor to him and some of his stuff reminds me of Tom Waits(especially Talkin Honkey Blues). And I’m sorry but I can’t get into Lil Wayne at all. Scratch that apology. I hear younger people talk about how great of a lyricist he is and how great his metaphors are and I feel tempted to ask if they know what a metaphor is. Gucci Mane is also terrible IMO. I haven’t heard any of Big Boi’s solo stuff but I do enjoy Outkast.