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Welcome to “Hip-Hop For Nerds”!

November 25, 2008

UPDATE: Here is my contact info if you wish to reach me directly. Especially if you are an artist with music. Anything can be e-mailed to:

hiphopfornerdsblog@yahoo.com

I would like to welcome you to my blog. In case your wondering how you got here or what the hell this even is, let me briefly introduce myself. My name is Noxtradamas and I am an avid hip-hop fan from Cleveland, OH. More than a fan though, I also write and record music, I’m a master’s level student at the University of Akron, and I enjoy intellectual conversation about the world of hip-hop. Hence the name “hip hop for nerds”. I guess I’d consider myself one, but that fact alone has helped me to meet some amazing people and do some really great things with my life.

On this blog you will find music reviews, artist spotlights, videos, songs from my personal collection of recordings, insights on the world of hip-hop and everything surrounding it, and a very genuine and educated point of view. You may not always agree with my opinion and I may not always agree with yours, but I do respect everyone’s views. There is nothing wrong with a heated debate between passionate music fans so please don’t take offense! Take a minute, surf around, leave some comments, and thank you for becoming a part of the community of Hip-Hop Nerds!

-Nox

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Cleveland Cavaliers: NBA’s Best Team Gets No Love For 2010 All-Star Weekend

February 5, 2010

The 2010 NBA All-Star weekend will be full of basketball competitions and fun, but don’t expect the NBA’s best team to be well-represented. As the 3 Point Shootout contestants were announced today, not a single member of the Cavs (who are currently the Eastern Conference’s best 3-point shooting team, and 2nd best in the NBA) was invited to the shootout. Anthony Parker (4th in league in 3pt shooting) stated earlier this week that he absolutely wanted to be involved, but the phone call to his agent never came. Boobie Gibson (2nd in the league) was uninvited as well. The rosters for the skills contest, dunk contest, and rookie/sophomore game were already announced, meaning that LeBron James will be the only one in Dallas representing for Cleveland. There are still two players yet to be added to the H-O-R-S-E competition, but I’m not holding my breath on that either.

Now as you can probably guess, only a Cavs fan would take the time to write a blog like this, but let’s be realistic for a minute here. I remember not so long ago when the Pistons were the best team in the east, they had four players named to the 2006 all star game itself, and one of them competed in the 3pt contest that same year. Now that is real representation. This year, the NBA seems to be showing plenty of love to the Lakers, Suns, and Celtics, but the likely re-match of Cleveland and Orlando in the eastern conference finals this year was apparently not enough to offer anybody besides Dwight Howard and LeBron James a chance to compete.

People will say that the Cavaliers are nothing without LeBron and that he is the only one who deserves any accolades. But if they actually watched the games, they would know better. You can’t be the best 3pt shooting team in the league, and have one of the best defenses in the league, and still attribute all of that to one player. LeBron had 15 assists the other night. That’s 15 times another player was put in a position to score and did.  When LeBron takes his 2nd quarter nap every game, the Cavs play with the same intensity even when he is not on the court. Sure, they may not have anybody too fly or flashy to compliment LeBron, but they know how to play as a team and that is all that matters.

Expect the team to feel slighted as well. They are currently riding a 10 game winning streak while making their last five opponents look like Division II college teams, but getting snubbed at All-Star Weekend will only fuel that fire more. Even the Lakers couldn’t stop the Cavs this year.  For some reason, people outside of Cleveland don’t seem to want them to win (maybe because they want LeBron on their team), but this year should be the year. They are that damn good, with or without a fellowship to join LeBron next weekend in Dallas.

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MIXTAPE REVIEW: College Smart – Everything You Wanna Hear

January 24, 2010

Rap is one of those things that pretty much anyone can do, and many try. The problem is when less-than-talented people, or those without any real message, try to pass themselves off as legitimate rappers with full mixtape and album productions. I get many submissions each week from artists hoping to be reviewed. I rarely end up reviewing any of them. Not because I don’t give their music a chance, but because their music is truly awful. College Smart, a New England based college rapper from Rhode Island, is one of the artists who e-mailed me late last year hoping for a review. I can honestly say it is the first project I’ve received in quite some time that I could actually listen to all the way through, so I chose to write about it.

Everything You Wanna Hear is exactly what you would expect from a white college rapper. College Smart doesn’t try to sound hard or act gangsta. He delivers a mixtape full of rhymes based on his own life and personal experience which makes the mixtape in itself a very “real” project. A good number of the tracks on this cd are about women, particularly broken relationships. It’s the same stuff I was rapping about in college, but College Smart delivers the music with surprising consistency for a debut mixtape.

One of the standout features of this mixtape is it’s diversity from track to track. Even with similar subject matter, each track has a unique sound, and the tempo rises and falls throughout. Tracks like “So Everybody Knows” and “The Way” are upbeat, somewhat cocky, but also intellectual in many ways. On the flip side, you have joints like “Mr. Blue” and “I Don’t Want You”, which alternate between serious and comedic in their accounts of College Smart’s relationship problems.

For a debut mixtape, this is pretty good. It does lack the depth, quality, and production of an official album, but those things usually follow a good debut anyway. College Smart has the talent to go into a real studio and put something even better together. He will have to work on his punch lines and word play, and find new ways to tell old stories, but I hear potential here.

NOX’S MIXTAPE GRADE: B-

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MIXTAPE REVIEW: Bone Thugs-N-Harmony – The Fixtape Vol. 3: Special Delivery

January 8, 2010

In the past year or so, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony have slowly crept back into the minds of hip-hop fans around the world. Over 10 years after releasing one of the greatest selling rap albums of all time, these former thugs from the streets of Cleveland, OH are back as grown men with a whole new mission: WORLD DOMINATION! Though they have released a few songs here and there since coming back together in mid-2008, The Fixtape Vol. 3: Special Delivery mixtape is their first full length release with all 5 members in about a decade.

This mixtape was billed as a gift to the fans after Bone made the decision to push their album back to March of 2010, 9 months after it was originally scheduled to release. With somewhere around five dozen new tracks in the vault, they felt they could release a handful of them to the fans to hold them over until the album dropped. But if these tracks are only the table scraps of their recent studio sessions, I can’t wait for the actual album.

There are about six or seven tracks I would consider to be album worthy, but even the others are more than solid enough for a respectable mixtape. “Me Against The World” is the first sign that Bone has really changed their style from street thugs to socially conscious adults. Krayzie Bone starts the track with thought provoking lines like ‘I see the light but from where I’m standing it don’t get bright/I keep hoping and hoping that this is not the real life/We’ll never wake up to reality so what you see is actually a waste of time/your whole life’. That tone is carried over into the Michael Jackson sampled “What Have We Done” where Krayzie drops one of the best verses of his career and the rest of Bone follows up with an environmentally conscious account of how we’ve ruined the world. “My Street Blues” starts with a chilling news clip about a 92 year old woman killed by undercover police officers who mistook her for a drug dealer, as Bone raps about corruption and violence.

The best all around track on the mixtape would have to be “Life’s Been Good”. Though there is a touch of auto tune on the hook, the production is epic and Bone’s verses really show their intellectual growth into men. If there was one track that absolutely had to make the album from this collection, I would pick this one.

Overall this mixtape is a sure sign that Bone Thugs-N-Harmony have really changed as a group. Their old school fans will likely be disappointed that the group has gone ‘soft’ on them, but just like the Jay-Z fans who criticized BP3 for the same reason, I think it’s just time they let go or move on. The music is really good regardless of whether Bone has changed or not, and this project will definitely hold me over until their album The World’s Enemy is released this year.

NOX’S MIXTAPE GRADE: A-

DOWNLOAD HERE: http://depositfiles.com/en/files/9l562yd1h

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MUSIC VIDEO: XV – “Fall Out The Sky”

January 6, 2010

I know I am a few months late with this one, but the hip-hop spirit has recently re-entered my soul, and I have a lot of catching up to do. This is another dope ass video like the MGK one I posted yesterday. It’s funny, but these new indy videos are even better than 50 Cent’s low budget videos! It’s amazing what a little bit of creativity and tech knowledge can do for a starving artist. Anyway, if you like hip-hop from the heart, this is your jam.

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Most Anticipated Hip-Hop Artist of 2010: XV

January 6, 2010

Ladies and gentlemen, Wichita, Kansas is about to be put on the national hip-hop map! One of the hottest new artists in the game, XV, is doing big things in 2010, and HipHopForNerds.com plans to follow him every step of the way. The best part about this blog post though is that XV has already stirred up a storm in 2008 and 2009, so really this is less of a personal prediction and more of a statement of fact.

I’ve wrote about XV before. In late 2008 I blogged about a track he did with Ne-Yo and hyped up his future album release of The Kid With The Green Backpack. Unfortunately that project has yet to be released, but XV did something bigger in 2009. He released an all original mixtape called Everybody’s Nobody which was recently voted Mixtape Of The Year by DJBooth.net staff, and may have even earned him a rumored spot on XXL Magazine’s freshman class of ’10 list. His new music video for “Fall Out The Sky” has nearly 30,000 hits since September, he got to perform at the VH1 Hip-Hop Honors pre-party, and he is preparing to release even more new material this year.

Overall, I think XV has more talent than Drake or Kid Cudi if you are looking for a recent rookie to compare him to, but lyrically he isn’t quite there yet, and that may be the most important factor in him getting signed. This may also be the last year that we can hype XV up. If he doesn’t do something big after 3 straight years of independent domination, he may forever be independent. That doesn’t mean he still can’t make money, but I think he’ll surprise a lot of people this year regardless.

http://www.myspace.com/xtothev

http://www.thecoolniverse.com

http://www.twitter.com/xtothevizzy

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MUSIC VIDEO: Machine Gun Kelly (MGK) – “Alice In Wonderland”

January 5, 2010

The hip-hop scene in Cleveland seems to be off to a jump start in 2010. Though I’ve only recently become hip to the music of Machine Gun Kelly (MGK), he really is an incredible hip-hop artist. I saw him perform at the 2nd annual Hip-Hop Gives Back charity event in Cleveland and he tore the freakin’ stage down! This dude is really sick, and this music video pretty much sums my point up. It’s a bit trippy (as if you would expect anything different from the song’s title), but I am most impressed by the creativity and quality of the video. More proof that you don’t need a record deal or a million dollars to do big things in music. Enjoy the video:

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MIXTAPE REVIEW: Jus Mic – Poetry For Misfits (2010) – (Download Included)

January 5, 2010

Every now and again I have the privilege of hearing a body of work that truly embodies the hip-hop culture. Going way back before rap was corporate, it was a way for oppressed, depressed, poor, or disenfranchised people to express themselves. Though I have also found joy in it’s evolution, I definitely don’t mind getting a taste of hip-hop back in it’s purist form. Jus Mic’s newest mixtape Poetry For Misfits is a special treat for fans of poetic yet aggressive hip-hop.

Jus Mic is a Cleveland-based emcee who, like many others, is still waiting for his chance to blow up. I reviewed his previous project at the end of last year which is every bit as good as this one, so make sure you check that out too. Jus is an emotional rapper who also has a great singing voice, but unlike Drake, you won’t hear him rapping and singing too much about ladies and clubs. The first track “Sick Man” starts with a studio outtake of Jus talking about raping small animals, and is followed by an aggressive vow from Jus Mic to put the pain back in hip-hop. It has decent shock value and should wake your ears up quickly.  One of the better tracks on the album follows shortly after called ‘Wasn’t Spose To Be” where Jus reminds his listeners that his path in life could have been for the worse if he hadn’t found rap. The beat is produced by Zup, who is definitely one of the hottest producers out there whether you’ve heard of him or not.

“Misery” holds a similar tone as “Wasn’t Sposed To Be”, but I like “Misery” too because Jus really opens up and allows himself to be at rock bottom on the track, which I have great respect for because of the track’s genuineness. “Broken” is probably my favorite track on the mixtape. It features a sample by Seether & Amy Lee with the same title, and tells the stories of three people who seem to be linked by the holes in their lives caused by broken relationships.

This mixtape isn’t just full of all downers though. “Think I Found My Way” is packed with energy and is probably Jus’ best overall showcase of his rapping and singing abilities, aside from the fact that the alternative style production is killer too. There are also more lighter and personal moments throughout the cd as well, as Jus discusses some of the tracks in various skits and even shares some spoken word.

All in all, this mixtape is a certified banger that should disappoint no one. It covers every possible mood there is, and you’ll have a hard time believing that this is just his mixtape material. If you really like what you hear, you can go and get his official single “Problems On A Plane” off iTunes now, as you patiently wait for his first “official” effort.

NOX’S MIXTAPE GRADE: A

DOWNLOAD THE MIXTAPE HERE

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HipHopForNerds.com Top 5 Rap/Hip-Hop Albums of 2009 List

December 23, 2009

Jay-Z – “The Blueprint 3″ Is Our Album Of The Year Pick!

These lists are never easy to make, yet so easy to debate. The world of hip-hop is becoming so large that it’s pretty impossible to make any sort of universally accepted list. If you have followed this blog though, you should already have an idea of what my list will look like. HipHopForNerds.com has been a supporter of mostly mainstream hip-hop, as well as some independent stuff that you have probably never heard before. With that said, certain artists did not make it onto this blog or into this list because they simply were not in the pool of candidates I listened to. I listen to everything I can, but I know there are probably albums I have missed. Feel free to comment if you feel I’ve omitted an artist who should truly be in the top 5. With that said, here is my list of best rap albums of 2009.

1. Jay-Z – The Blueprint 3

I know the haters are gonna be mad about this one. I don’t really know why anyone expected a 40 year old man to release an album for the streets, but that has pretty much been the big criticism. Critics call this “white collar rap”, but it’s a lyrically eye opening album if you actually listen to the words. For once, Jay is taking a stand against some of the stupidity he once stood for. He tells us why all the things he once thought were cool are no longer cool, and he shares the story of how a poor drug dealer from Brooklyn became a global star. The production of the album puts this above Eminem’s Relapse on my list, and is definitely my favorite album of 2009. It is good music for anyone who cares to be successful in life. If you consider it bragging, well, Jay has a right to brag.

2. Eminem – Relapse

Relapse is not the best album of Eminem’s career, but it beats out his previous two (Encore & The Re-Up), and should be considered as an appetizer to what I anticipate will be the best album of his career in Relapse 2. Eminem sounded like a man only beginning to reach his prime on this album. Ever since he quit drinking and drugs, his flow has gotten quicker and more crisp. You could tell he had some rust to shake off, and a few of these tracks are filler material in his overall catalog, but if you’ve heard The Refill, you already know he’s only getting better. Expect Eminem to hold the top spot on next year’s list, but until then, go get that Refill!

3. Rick Ross – Deeper Than Rap

Ricky Ross didn’t receive the greatest review from me when the album initially dropped, but in hindsight, this really is a good album. Lyrically it’s nothing mind blowing, but the replay value, production, guest features, and energy of the album make it one of this year’s best. Add that to the fact that Ross nearly outsold 50 Cent’s album in the first week, and you’ve got an emerging star here. Can Ross keep it up next year? I have a feeling we’ve heard his best work already, but maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised by another one.

4. Kid Cudi – Man On The Moon: The End Of Day

Is it possible that being born and raised in Cleveland led to my inclusion of this album on my list? Possibly. The more likely reason though is that Cudi dominated the rookie class of 09 with his music and sales this year. Man On The Moon was the highest selling album of anyone in XXL magazine’s top 10 freshman list, and was one of the best selling rap albums of 2009 in general. It is very artsy and slow paced, but when your mood is down and you need some musical therapy, this album should do the trick. It was an impressive rookie release, and Cudi will likely shine again as it appears his label is already granting him a second album packed with even more star power.

5. MIMS – Guilt

If I went around the streets polling people on their top rap albums of the year, MIMS’ album probably wouldn’t even be on most top 20 lists. With that said, most people also haven’t given this album a chance. MIMS is the type of rapper who always releases fun, shallow, danceable singles which degrade his credibility, but his albums usually tell a different story. Guilt is one of my favorite albums this year because of it’s diversity and creativity. MIMS explores the rock genre just enough to add an alternative feel to the album, and you can tell he really made this one from the heart. This album should not be slept on. It hasn’t left my rotation since it dropped, and if you think I’m crazy, at least give it a listen.

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ALBUM REVIEW: Juvenile – Cocky & Confident

December 4, 2009

Rapper Juvenile has had an interesting road back to relevance in hip-hop. After leaving Cash Money Records in 2001, going independent, returning to CMR in 2003 only to leave again, and then signing to Atlantic Records, Juvy found decent success with his album Reality Check which was released in 2006. Critics seemed to enjoy the fact that Juvenile had progressed to more mature subject matter, as he rapped about Hurricane Katrina, and turning down groupie women in honor of his wife. Two years later, his 4 year old daughter was murdered and fans began to wonder if his next album would be that much deeper. Surprisingly though,  Juvy is back to his old juvenile ways with 19 tracks full of boastful party music on his new album Cocky & Confident. This isn’t the album I expected from Juvy, but I guess we all mourn in different ways.

Cocky & Confident is exactly what the title implies. Juvenile takes us right back to his 90’s style of flow and lyrics as he raps about money, women, getting high, and every other vice that is supposed to make us feel good and forget about our problems. Rather than working with established artists and producers, Juvenile introduces us to a whole new crop of undiscovered talent which ranges from mediocre to somewhat decent. Kango Slim is probably the only one worth mentioning though, as he does have a decent voice, and is Juvy’s own version of Magnolia Chop who is known for singing hooks for B.G. We do get some vocals from Bobby Valentino and Pleasure P, and a verse from B.G., but this is hardly the major-label influenced album that Reality Check was.

There are plenty of hits on this album if you are a fan of southern rap. Most of the album can be played right through with the exception of “I’m Shining” and “I Say” which are just awful to me, but the other 17 tracks make up for it. The only song on the album with any substance whatsoever is the final track called “Listen” which is a pretty lackluster effort at remaking “Listen To Your Heart”, but at least the lyrics had some meaning. Interestingly enough though, Juvenile did not mention his deceased daughter once in the entire album, nor did he call out her killer. Maybe he’s not ready to speak on her death, maybe he never will, but I have a feeling that Juvenile will need to address that matter and other ‘grown man’ issues if he wants to stay relevant in the rap game.

Juvenile had enough juice to put out one more cocky southern rap album, and he did a nice job with it. He sounds fresh, and he sounds ready to re-launch his career, but he may also need a new gimmick. He will have to address his daughter’s murder, he will have to speak on political issues, and he will have to speak from his heart. If he doesn’t, noone will take him seriously any longer. I give this album a good grade, but if the next sounds anything like it, I’ll certainly be disappointed.

NOX-O-METER: 3.75/5.00

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Bone Thugs-N-Harmony – See Me Shine (f/ Lyfe Jennings, Phaedra & Jay Rush) [OFFICIAL SINGLE / EXPLICIT]

November 25, 2009

Release Date: October 27, 2009
Label: Asylum/Warner Bros.
Total Length: 6:33
Format: Explicit Lyrics

LISTEN: http://www.box.net/shared/yvxasr5xv5

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