Fort Minor - The Rising Tied

I liked it A LOT when I first heard the album. But now, I still regularly play a good portion of the songs, like Remember the Name, Right Now, Petrified (really good!), Feel Like Home (also good, reminds me of a Dr. Dre beat), In Stereo (sick ass beat, catchy chorus), Red to Black, Out the Back, and then all three of the bunus tracks: Be Somebody, There They Go (Shinoda flows nice in this one), and The Hard Way.

It's funny how a guy from Linkin Park puts out better hip-hop than most of the bullshit rappers today.
 
album is fuckin dope. Believe Me (love Bobo's percussion solo), Feels Like Home, Cigarettes, Get Me Gone, High Road, those are my favorites.
 
I find most of it unlistenable. Reanimation was a lot better than this crap.

Mike Shinoda's flow is the worst thing about him as a rapper, it's his lyrics that save him. Even his lyrics are pretty damn corny. The things he talks about, the image he represents - a lot of west coast underground rappers did it a lot better than him. I give him credit for acknowledging that somewhat and putting some people on, but the fact remains that he's getting a lot of props for doing what a lot of other people have done, and not nearly half as well as them.

It's not even like it's hard to find the guys Shinoda got his steez from. Plenty of skate videos feature their music. The Tony Hawk games do, too.

The beats are also terrible. This is a textbook example of why trying to leave samples behind is bad for hip-hop. The stuff on the Green Lantern mixtape sounds a lot better than this.

It's funny how a guy from Linkin Park puts out better hip-hop than most of the bullshit rappers today.
It's incredibly disheartening to read this, especially when it's by someone from Cali. People complain about hip-hop and then go and run and buy this stuff by a nu-metal survivor.

Meanwhile, Tha Liks are calling it quit, Mystic and Quannum acts are doing commercials to pay rent, E-Swift is smoking crack on camera because the filmmakers need it for their documentary about him trying to get CLEAN because rocks were his last resort after he couldn't sustain a career, Hobo Junction have called it quits, Del can't even bring himself to flow, Living Legends members are selling homemade albums on cassettes on the corner, after fifteen years the Freestyle Fellowship cats are still obscure... I could go on.

Mike Shinoda is not a good rapper. He did not make a good rap album. He distilled and diluted a lot of styles, adopted them, made them a tiny bit cornier, and pretended he was a Real Hip-Hop Gee Whiz Emcee. That's not good music. That's vanity. Masturbation. Air guitar. What Mike Shinoda did, I was doing in my basement and in front of the bathroom mirror to the noise of a shitty cassette player after I finished my multiplication tables.

Five million people ate up Andre 3000 doing the same thing, though, so I shouldn't be surprised.
 
roaches said:
It's incredibly disheartening to read this, especially when it's by someone from Cali. People complain about hip-hop and then go and run and buy this stuff by a nu-metal survivor.

When I said what you quoted, I was comparing the CD musically (not necessarily lyrically) to most of the rap I come across in my daily life, which is what is played on MTV, BET, and the radio. Did I say his album was the epitome of hip-hop? No. I just said it was better than most of the bullshit out today... including G-Unit's garbage ass redundant songs, that "Laffy Taffy" track, a good 95% of anything that has to do with Lil Jon, Mike Jones, and the rest of them. I know that there are a lot of underground rappers with way more talent, but neither I nor the average listener stumbles upon their material on a regular day.
 
roaches said:
I find most of it unlistenable. Reanimation was a lot better than this crap.

Mike Shinoda's flow is the worst thing about him as a rapper, it's his lyrics that save him. Even his lyrics are pretty damn corny. The things he talks about, the image he represents - a lot of west coast underground rappers did it a lot better than him. I give him credit for acknowledging that somewhat and putting some people on, but the fact remains that he's getting a lot of props for doing what a lot of other people have done, and not nearly half as well as them.

It's not even like it's hard to find the guys Shinoda got his steez from. Plenty of skate videos feature their music. The Tony Hawk games do, too.

The beats are also terrible. This is a textbook example of why trying to leave samples behind is bad for hip-hop. The stuff on the Green Lantern mixtape sounds a lot better than this.

It's incredibly disheartening to read this, especially when it's by someone from Cali. People complain about hip-hop and then go and run and buy this stuff by a nu-metal survivor.

Meanwhile, Tha Liks are calling it quit, Mystic and Quannum acts are doing commercials to pay rent, E-Swift is smoking crack on camera because the filmmakers need it for their documentary about him trying to get CLEAN because rocks were his last resort after he couldn't sustain a career, Hobo Junction have called it quits, Del can't even bring himself to flow, Living Legends members are selling homemade albums on cassettes on the corner, after fifteen years the Freestyle Fellowship cats are still obscure... I could go on.

Mike Shinoda is not a good rapper. He did not make a good rap album. He distilled and diluted a lot of styles, adopted them, made them a tiny bit cornier, and pretended he was a Real Hip-Hop Gee Whiz Emcee. That's not good music. That's vanity. Masturbation. Air guitar. What Mike Shinoda did, I was doing in my basement and in front of the bathroom mirror to the noise of a shitty cassette player after I finished my multiplication tables.

Five million people ate up Andre 3000 doing the same thing, though, so I shouldn't be surprised.

I think you're being a little bit hard on it man. His flow isnt perfect, really, it reminds me of Beastie Boys, maybe it's his voice.

As for content and it being done before, maybe, but all hip-hop has been done before content wise. Show me one rapper thats talking about something totally new and fresh? And i thought the cigerettes song was pretty witty, if not original. And personally, I have not heard another MC make a song about a Japanese-American man during WW2, ever.
 
Maybe I am being a bit hard on him, but almost everyone else from critics to fans are doing the oppsite.

i thought the cigerettes song was pretty witty, if not original. And personally, I have not heard another MC make a song about a Japanese-American man during WW2, ever.
The "Kenji" joint gets props because that's an angle that hip-hop hasn't covered, but the execution wasn't that great.

"The evil Japanese in our home country will be locked away"?

That's a gross oversimplification of what happened. The song is nothing more than an extremely streamlined history lesson. I can see it being played in American elementrary school history classes, right after the kids are spoonfed the idea that Abraham Lincoln was an awesome guy who made war so he could free the slaves.
 
So, how bad does "Cigarettes" spit in the face of 95% of rappers today? I'm not talking about the quality of the song, but the theme.
 
S O F I S T I K said:
So, how bad does "Cigarettes" spit in the face of 95% of rappers today? I'm not talking about the quality of the song, but the theme.

innit.
 

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