The Audacity of Dope

This is how I walk through London when I’m bumping Majid Jordan…

Some of our favorite artists, individually and collectively, denitia and sene came through Sunday Night Sound Session recently to chop it up while on tour here in Seattle.  We talked about their backgrounds, how they met at an artist collective, their first impressions of each other, what their creative process is like, breaking barriers between genres, their side fx EP releasing in January 2015, and more.

We’ve been playing their music for a while so it was great to finally meet in person.  Big shout to them for coming through and to Lea with the First Ladies for filming/editing!

I really like the wavelength that Cole is on right now. Real, honest, genuine. Artists should take note: focus on telling your story and let your music come naturally. Don’t force it. Don’t chase radio singles. Do what fits. And use your voice to speak on the real:

Preach, Cole!

Hmmm.

Filthy. Those Toronto boys don’t play…

The visuals for one of my favorite songs of the year, “Realla” off TOKiMONSTA’s Desiderium dropped a little while ago, but I didn’t catch them until now.  Hope you enjoy.

Cleaning up and organizing my archives today and I came across these videos of our Studio 93 interview with Big Sean from 9/11/13.  As he mentioned at the beginning of the first video, Sound Session gave Sean one of his first major radio interviews and we’ve been homies ever since. One of the coolest and nicest dudes in the biz. It’s always a ton of fun to chop it up with him.

We never posted it or blasted it out since the production value is pretty much non-existent.  A year later, it’s obviously older content, but it’s still a fun discussion that has some interesting insight from Sean on his music and life.  It’s something that belongs in the SNSS library here on TAOD.

I’ve been talking to folks a lot lately about K.R.I.T. and how incredibly dope he is and I still think he’s highly underrated.  In my opinion, the 4 artists making the best rap music today are Kanye, Drake, Kendrick, and K.R.I.T..  Cadillactica is more of the same.  The album drops Tuesday, cop that!

Visuals for one of the songs of the year.  A lot of fans wanted Kendrick to keep going in the direction he established on good kid, m.a.a.d city, but the message here is so necessary.  Well done K. Dot.

One of the best writers in hip-hop, one of our favorite artists, and one of our best friends, the incomparable Shad, visited Sound Session to speak with J. Moore and I recently. We discussed a variety of topics, exploring what it’s like coming up in Canada making his style of music, winning the Rap Juno Award (Canadian Grammy) over his countryman Drake, and how he chooses to promote himself in the US market. He also spoke about his last album, Flying Colours, and his plans to take the follow up project in a new direction, before running through a lightning round of questions covering 90’s sit-coms, left handed basketball players, his favorite sneakers, and more.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Shad represents everything I love about hip-hop and I cosign literally every song/message he’s put out into the world.  Very talented, very humble, and very intelligent, I wish more artists would follow in his footsteps.