Chris Robinson's Music & Culture Blog
I came to the music of Mac Miller late. Like three days before he died late. I had never heard of him before. And because I live under a rock, I didn't know he was the dude Ariana Grande was dating before she got with SNL's Pete Davidson. My first introduction was his NPR Tiny …
"Tell them they can take that bullshit elsewhere, Self care, I'm treating me right." —Mac Miller As I write this on Christmas Eve, the Dow Jones just closed over 600 points down, hundreds of thousands of government workers are out of a job and going without pay, and the folks in California who lost everything …
It would be hard to find anybody who would call Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly anything but a hip hop album. Notable for its lyrical, musical, technical, and conceptual brilliance, Butterfly is a profound expression of and meditation on the African American experience in the context of a nation plagued by anti-black racism. It …
Continue reading Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly: Beyond Hip Hop, Beyond Genre
My next installment of challenging the oft-declared "jazz/hip hop intersection" takes on Flying Lotus's 2014 album You're Dead. You're Dead—which features an impressive list of musicians including Snoop Dogg, Kendrick Lamar, Herbie Hancock, Stephen "Thundercat" Bruner, and Kamasi Washington—is the end result of Flying Lotus's seamless amalgamation of myriad stylistic influences. The album is adventurous, …
Continue reading With You’re Dead, Flying Lotus Puts a Nail in the Jazz/Hip Hop Intersection
To continue the intersection of jazz and hip hop theme I wrote about in my last post, I thought I'd take on the music of Stephen Bruner, aka Thundercat, whose 2017 album Drunk demonstrates his genius ability to make music that is "beyond category"—or rather "beyond intersection." Thundercat, who spent nearly a decade playing bass in …
A lot has been made recently of jazz artists working with rappers and hip hop producers, especially folks like Kamasi Washington and Robert Glasper's work with Flying Lotus and Kendrick Lamar. A key focus of jazz critics and journalists writing about these musicians is the "intersection" of jazz and hip hop as if the two …
Continue reading Karriem Riggins and the “Intersection” between Jazz and Hip Hop
I've been thinning out my L.P. collection of late, and this little beauty came up as a candidate for the great purge of 2018. I ended up deciding to part with it because it's not in great shape, the music is just kind of so so, and the cover isn't quite cheesy enough. The music …
Continue reading This Album is Brought to You By Colonialism!
