E-40 continues to astound. At age 44, with his 23-year-old son following in his footsteps (that's him, Droop-E, on the second verse) the Vallejo rapper is making some of the very best music of his entire, 22-year career. This is from the The Block Brochure: Welcome to the Soil 3 album. The beat was made by Droop, seemingly by banging on an empty garbage dumpster.
Each time I visit Northern California, I remember how it's funny that I never seem to remember how beautiful it is when I'm not there. This happened again last week, when I went there with with my wife and my kid over spring break.
I know E-40 is a big dude. I know he's a heavy hitter in the rap game. (A baseball lover, the Bay Area rap great sometimes goes by the name "Charlie Hustle." Hey, maybe he should collaborate with Ohio rocker Robert Pollard on the soundtrack to that Pete Rose documentary that's coming out in July? On second thought, there probably aren't two artists I'd less rather hear collaborate, though I'm a fan of them both.) And I guess this new track doesn't tip the scales like the 500-megaton-whomp of the "Weedman" beat. But still, this is lightweight jammin'? No way!
There's bad news this morning. Like there is every morning. But there's good news, too. Because, following up on the myriad joys of his four-album Revenue Retrievin' series, Vallejo rapper E-40 has just released his next project, a three-album job called The Block Brochure: Welcome to the Soil. There is no one easier to root for in rap, and nothing to not absolutely love about this video.
Around this time last year, Vallejo's E-40 got together with his man Stressmatic and made "The Weedman," which I thought we all should have heard rattling the chassis of every car on every street in every town in America for the next four months. We didn't. But I think the album it came from, Revenue Retrievin': Day Shift, and its separately-sold second half, Revenue Retrievin': Night Shift sold pretty well in California, so that's good. Today, this year, 40 and Stressmatic return with another great song, with another great beat, from a third album in the Revenue Retrievin' series, Graveyard Shift, that comes out at the end of [...]
Wow! I've only been listening to it for half a day now, and I've known plenty of people with a much better ear for discerning such things than I have, but E-40's new song "The Weedman" sounds to me like it ought to be a giant smash hit. I think it's totally excellent! It is very much like Jim Jones' 2007 hit "We Fly High," which is really okay, because "We Fly High" is a really great song.
This new Madonna video, in which M.I.A. appears (and doesn't do much, along with Nicki Minaj), is not as good as M.I.A.'s new video, "Bad Girls." Considering this, and also the great video Jay-Z and Kanye West made for their song "Otis" last summer, it seems that the Bay Area hip-hop subculture known as "hyphy," which peaked four or five years ago, is having its most lasting cultural impact in the phenomena of the dangerous-looking car tricks known as "ghost riding."
"Arne May's team at the University of Hamburg, Germany, applied heat to the arms of 38 volunteers over six days. Half of them were told the heat would get more intense, and they reported constant pain levels. The rest felt less pain as they got used to the sensation. The first group also had increased activity in a brain area involved in pain perception." So reports New Scientist's Jessica Hamzelou about an interesting phenomenon with an excellent name that I didn't know existed: the "nocebo effect," which, just like it sounds, "describes any case where putting someone in a negative frame of mind has an adverse effect [...]
