press that clutch
a transitional goodie:
since last week was J-pop and this week is going to be mostly hip-hop from me, I thought I'd offer this track as a starting point. Shing02 is a Tokyo-born, internationally raised cat who seems to be the only Japanese hip-hopper raising the bar for emcees over there (he also designed the wonderful Vestax Handi-Trax). Japanese emcees seem to misinterpret hip-hop as having had gangsta as the archetype, and too often you get these J-thugs rapping about shootin' boke suckas when in fact no one but the police owns guns and the biggest SUV they roll in is a RAV4. it just doesn't make sense. Shing02, on the other hand, does things like take traditional Taiko drumming and use it to program his bass tracks, and brings in elements of real Japanese culture into hip-hop to create something completely new. moreover, it's the best representation of the tiny slice of the J-hiphop pie that doesn't try to reinvent western rap using western themes that have no cultural precedence or real tie to the people using them. this track has it all - a booming Taiko-sampled bassline, Japanese rockabilly surf-ish guitars, the syllabic perfection that is Japanese timed to the beats, and those crazy sliding skratches.
