REASON — New Beginnings

I’ve been struggling with hip-hop for a long time now. Like I haven’t had any ‘gang’ experience. And it’d be disingenuous to pretend much of hip-hop doesn’t harbour shitty attitudes towards fifty percent of the human population. That stuff is often explained away: playing a character, truthfully portraying a life led by a section of society over-represented in hip-hop — ‘gangbangers’. We’ve broadly accepted that hip-hop plays by a different set of rules from the rest of us. Well I’ve been struggling with that, and as a consequence, I’ve been speaking about hip-hop less frequently than I would’ve earlier in my life.

With those double standards in mind, New Beginnings is a good hip-hop album. But with those double standards in mind, I can only see my enthusiasm for hip-hop dropping with time 🤷🏾‍♂️. For example, I can’t make it past track 5 of this album despite knowing it does the craft of hip-hop well. Make of this what you will. Oddly, this probably means I’m featuring an album that I myself will not be listening to much (or at all).