In an interview with Billboard the day after the nominations were revealed, Q-Tip said, “I was pleased, [but] I wish my man [Phife Dawg] was here.”
Phife Dawg, a founding member of A Tribe Called Quest, died in 2016 at 45 years old.
Elsewhere during the conversation, Q-Tip spoke about how he believes A Tribe Called Quest helped bridge the gap between rock and hip-hop for many people, especially white listeners. He said, “I was just saying to LL Cool J the thing about Tribe is we played in front of more rock audiences than rap audiences. Just being on tour with Smashing Pumpkins, Hole, Green Day, Beastie Boys, and our first show we opened for Big Audio Dynamite — at our time, we kinda helped bring white audiences to hip-hop. So it’s overall good. I feel like the story of music and music’s evolution can’t happen without hip-hop artists.”
The RX is Uproxx Music’s stamp of approval for the best albums, songs, and music stories throughout the year. Inclusion in this category is the highest distinction we can bestow, and signals the most important music being released throughout the year. The RX is the music you need, right now.
Three is a very common and important number in Amber Mark’s life. In a 2017 interview with NME, she explained how that number has constantly made itself present in her life. “My mother was born in 1953, my brother was born in 1983 and I was born in 1993,” she said. “Then, my mum passed away on June 3, at 10:23 pm in 2013. Since then, I’d see three’s everywhere.” In 2017, she released her 3:33am EP. Nearly five years later, she returns with her debut album, Three Dimensions Deep, and a riveting tale that follows her through a journey of searching for the deeper meaning for her life and the world that surrounds her.
Three Dimensions Deep presents a well-executed blend of R&B and funk used in different ways throughout the album. Sometimes it’s a 50-50 split, and other times, either genre sits in the driver’s seat while the other makes its presence felt just enough so that the 17-track project remains cohesive. This varying production helps to add a second dose of life to the listener’s experience with the album, one already boosted by Mark’s enthralling vocals. Her search for life’s meaning arises on the wistful “What Is It,” where she questions the point of the bad in her life with an emotional plea into the empty skies. “So there goes my heart,” she sings with disheveled spirits on the song. “I fell apart / Trying to love.” She later questions the source of faith as she’ll need it moving forward. “Is it love that proves in our faith? / Or how we move, spiraling?”
As often as Mark questions the ways of the world, she also stays true to what she’s previously learned. Her wisdom propels her far enough to leave her with a moderate and slightly frustrating, but solvable, amount of puzzle-piecing for her to do. She rightfully distrusts the “trifling” ways of men on “Most Men,” while begging for a friend to seek better than the insufficient companion she’s currently with. Mark acknowledges the difficulties behind healing and moving on both “Healing Hurts” and “Bubbles” while overcoming the temptation to fall for old tricks and back into her old pains. Following these anecdotes of hurt and heartbreak, Three Dimensions Deep transitions into a second half that’s both energized by a new wave of happiness and gracefully presented through a worthwhile romance.
Amber Mark won’t find all the answers she’s looking for in life. That’s a feat that goes unaccomplished even by the oldest souls of the world, never mind a 28-year-old. She soon realizes that a life driven by constant searches will leave her feeling incomplete at the end of the day. “FOMO” places this discovery on wax through funky and reinvigorating production that finds Mark high off life as her feet sweep the dancefloor. “Fill up my cup, made up my mind,” she sings. “Won’t miss out on living happily / It’s about time, I’m gon’ lose control.” There’s a time and a place for self-reflection and wallowing in sadness about life’s dealings, but Mark realizes that she should at least make sure to live life through it all.
This leap of faith, which also doubles as a discharge from life’s ankle weights, adds vibrancy and excitement to her life and the album. It also makes her an irresistible magnet to what she craves the most from life. Three Dimensions Deep swings upward from a contextual standpoint during its back half. Mark is consumed by a love that’s far too good to be true in her eyes. She details this behind haunting production that accentuates her disbelief on “Out Of This World” while also comparing the new love to finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. “Pull all this weight kept me out of sight / I close my eyes,” she sings. “And with surprise / I saw the light.” Mark goes above and beyond to describe the beauty of this new romance as she places herself amongst the stars and constellations on “Cosmic” to relay the “otherworldly feelings” it gives her. “It takes me to another planet / It’s all so cinematic,” she sings with a heart bleeding of gratitude as angelic harmonies rain behind her. “Is this some sort of magic? / It seems so automatic.”
Three Dimensions Deep is a testament to letting go and trusting that what is meant to be, will be. While watching Amber Mark get swept off her feet with a perfect love is a heartwarming aspect of the album, seeing her end the album on a high pedestal and free of some of the things that held her down is just as satisfying. Mark’s official debut album is truly Three Dimensions Deep as we watch her confidence grow, her insecurities fade away, and a path open up for her to experience at that’s meant to be in her world. Mark achieves this by letting herself freefall into life’s core where she discovers what to value the most day in and day out. It’s here that she also tackles her most-inner emotions with equal parts grace and feistiness for a riveting and magical album.
Three Dimensions Deep is out now via PMR/EMI. Get it here.
Two years removed from the 2020 uprisings over the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, it doesn’t seem like much has changed in the US. Calls to defund police departments across the nation were more or less ignored (or outright defied), and in just one month, the number of headlines reporting police shootings of citizens is frankly kind of alarming.
Thus, Chicago rapper Supa Bwe has returned with his first new song of the year, reuniting with his old friend Chance The Rapper to remind us that “ACAB.” The new song, built over a plodding beat and featuring additional guest appearances from 7000 and Maryland underground rap rising star Redveil, takes the corrupt institution to task, with all four rappers calling out the overall failure to honor the “protect and serve” motto throughout the past few… well… forever.
According to Supa Bwe’s Instagram, the song is the first single from his upcoming project No Thanks, which is also his first project since 2019’s Jaguar. 2019 also contained “Rememory,” Supa’s last collaboration with Chance The Rapper, on the Just Say Thank You EP. Meanwhile, Chance recently expanded his own collaboration catalog, teaming up with Dionne Warwick on the soul legend’s “Nothing’s Impossible.” While he hasn’t been as busy on the music front since dropping The Big Day in 2019, there’s no time like the present for him to get busy on a follow-up.
The RX is Uproxx Music’s stamp of approval for the best albums, songs, and music stories throughout the year. Inclusion in this category is the highest distinction we can bestow and signals the most important music being released throughout the year. The RX is the music you need, right now.
Last year, I wrote that Babyface Ray was one of the artists who could have made the 2021 XXL Freshman list. With the release of his debut album, Face, last week via Wavy Gang and Empire, that assessment looks closer than ever to becoming a reality for the 2022 list (not to brag or anything). While it’s not a perfect project by any means, Face demonstrates Ray’s star power, illuminating an artist with all the tools to make the leap from promising underground talent to a bonafide hitmaker.
The word that best describes Ray’s unique approach to rhythm and rhyme is dispassionate. Although he’s very much a product of the frenetic Detroit underground scene, taking bits and pieces from the city’s diverse patchwork of sounds and styles, his cadence is more controlled than the frenetic pace demonstrated by other members of his cohort like Sada Baby or Icewear Vezzo. Likewise, his wordplay is similarly low-key, sans the over-the-top punchlines favored by his peers.
Instead, he sounds not exactly world-weary, but weathered, as though he’s seen and done it all – or near enough to it – and has ceased to be impressed, awed, or dismayed by the facts of the street-worn narratives he relays. Whether he’s getting money on “6 Mile Show” with Icewear Vezzo or patting himself on the back with G Herbo on “Blood Sweat & Tears,” Ray’s disposition comes across as though he’s been on the job long enough to see little change except for the faces around him. The business itself stays the same.
Maybe that’s because he’s low-key a veteran of the indie rap grind himself; prior to his latest, he’d self-released 10 projects dating back to 2015. It took 2021’s Unfuckwitable EP to finally bring him the shine he’s been working toward all that time, so you’ll forgive him for feeling a little burnt out. But there’s a benefit to that level of patience: Ray’s confidence is unshakeable and his consistency is time-tested. He attests to as much on “Overtime” with Yung Lean and “Palm Angels, Palms Itching.”
It’s also left him with an – ahem – self-effacing nature. The album opens with a reflective intro, “My Thoughts 3,” on which he ruminates on the climb to his current leaping-off point. He’s now standing at the precipice which a handful of other Detroit natives reached; the closest analog would be Big Sean, with whom he previously collaborated on the latter’s joint EP with Hit-Boy. With one foot still in the Detroit underground, clinging to the raw, chaotic beats that define that sound, and the other prepared to step into the limelight with radio-ready beats produced by the likes of 808 Mafia, Ray has the potential to be the bridge between his hometown’s insular subculture and the wider world beyond.
If anything, this poses the album’s one drawback. Its split personality holds it back; on one hand, Ray could make hits, he could be a superstar (albeit a very laid-back, iconoclastic one), but he’d have to relinquish – at least to a point – his reliance on the style that got him here. We’ve seen that backfire before when artists make the jump from regional to national stars, pissing off their day-ones by sloughing off their roots. By sticking to his guns, though, he runs the risk of alienating potential new fans and wasting the work he’s put in to reach this point
Should he simply stay the course, doing what he does here, the future is murkier. Like Face’s production, it could go either way. Or, and this is what I think likeliest, he could end up forging a new path, slowly but surely letting more folks in on the secret that is the Motor City underground rap scene, and contributing to the next evolution of rap music past its current stagnant state.
Face is out now via Wavy Gang/Empire. Get it here.
Of all the projects Kanye West hyped over the past several years, perhaps none was more heavily anticipated than “New Body,” a track featuring Nicki Minaj and Ty Dolla Sign that was planned to feature on Ye’s ninth album, Yandhi. When a demo version of the song was leaked in October 2018, it instantly became something of a fan favorite, but despite this, it was scrapped along with the rest of the album after Kanye decided to release Jesus Is King, his first big swing at a gospel album, instead.
Perhaps no one was more disappointed than Nicki Minaj, who allegedly had to re-write her verse multiple times as a result of Kanye’s evolving, spirituality-based insistence on toning down explicit content and language ahead of Yandhi‘s non-release. Nicki, who’s been on a promo/media damage control tour ahead of the release of her new single with Lil Baby, “Do We Have A Problem?” explained just why the original version of “New Body” was never released and how she felt about it.
“The public adored ‘New Body,’” Nicki recalled. “‘New Body’ is the biggest hit record that never came out. So what I thought was interesting was that Kanye made me write my ‘New Body’ verse four times over in order to fit into where he was creatively and spiritually in his life. … I missed it by a year, I guess. Had ‘New Body’ been out when he was not in his gospel era, then it would’ve seen the light of day. But, it didn’t, so it wasn’t meant to be. Everybody knows that’s the hit that got away … I think the ship has sailed for ‘New Body,’ everybody has come to love the original way they heard it.”
The leak of the song actually went viral on TikTok in 2020, prompting Nicki to tell her fans to “pester” Kim Kardashian to get the full version, but considering how things are turning out on that front, perhaps the song will simply have to live on in those memes and memories.
Saba’s new album, Few Good Things, is out now after a rollout that included smooth singles like “Come My Way” featuring Krayzie Bone and “Survivor’s Guilt” with G Herbo, as well as a short film touching on the album’s theme of family, home, and finding peace. Although it hasn’t been out long, it’s clear that the fan-favorite standout from the album is “Still,” which features Atlanta crooner 6lack and St. Louis rapper Smino as all three contemplate long-term love in all its forms.
In Saba’s verse, the Chicago rapper touches on his love for his work and how it conflicts with his love for his significant other, while on Smino’s verse, the soulful St. Louisan offers a scintillating take on a long-lost relationship, wondering if she kept his things around. 6lack’s chorus brings things full-circle, as he contrasts his superstar lifestyle with the toll it takes on his home life.
In addition to the videos and short film, Saba is preparing a promotional tour for the album set to run through March, April, and May supported by Dreamville rapper Lute and the Los Angeles singer Amindi.
Listen to Saba’s “Still” featuring 6lack and Smino above.
Few Good Things is out now via Pivot Gang, LLC. You can stream it here.
Spotify hasn’t gotten off to the best start in 2022. The platform is facing heavy criticism for how they’ve handled Joe Rogan and his spread of COVID-19 misinformation on his podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience. Rogan’s actions grew to be too much for some including Neil Young who left Spotify with an ultimatum: remove Joe Rogan’s podcast or remove my music from the platform. So far, Spotify has sided with Rogan which left Young and other artists like India.Arie, Graham Nash, and more to pull their music from the streaming service. However, as users, what if you want to completely walk away from Spotify and delete the app?
How Do I Delete My Spotify Account?
The process behind deleting a Spotify account depends on if you’re using a free or premium account. The latter requires a phone call to Spotify customer service to have the account shut down. However, if you have a free Spotify account, your profile can be deleted through the platform’s site on a web browser. First, visit the Spotify account settings page and log in if necessary. Then, on the Accounts Setting page, click on the closing your account link to the right. Under the “Don’t have Premium?” tab, click on “closing your account.” Spotify will then ask you a set of confirmation questions like “Sure you need to close?” and “Is this the correct account?” before going on to the next steps. The platform will then remind you that your saved music, podcasts, and playlists as well as your followers will be lost. Additionally, you will be unable to use your username with a future account if you decide to create a new one.
Afterward, Spotify will send you an email to confirm that you want your account deleted. For a final time, click “Close your account,” and your Spotify profile will be deleted. Despite all these steps, Spotify will give you a seven-day grace period to reactivate the account through a link that will be sent via email.
After Kanye West’s latest jab at ex-wife Kim Kardashian over letting their daughter North use TikTok “against his will,” Kardashian has had enough. On her own Instagram story, she defended her decision to share a joint (adult-managed) account with North and challenged Kanye for his “obsession with trying to control and manipulate our situation.”
Kanye’s constant attacks on me in interviews and on social media is actually more hurtful than any TikTok North might create. As the parent who is the main provider and caregiver for our children, I am doing my best to protect our daughter while also allowing her to express her creativity in the medium that she wishes with adult supervision – because it brings her happiness. Divorce is difficult enough on our children and Kanye’s obsession with trying to control and manipulate our situation so negatively and publicly is only causing further pain for all. From the beginning, I have wanted nothing but a healthy and supportive co-parenting relationship because it is what is best for our children and it saddens me that Kanye continues to make it impossible every step of the way.
I wish to handle all matters regarding our children privately and hopefully, he can finally respond to the third attorney he has had in the last year to resolve any issues amicably.
Kanye West has apparently taken issue with his daughter’s app usage, judging from a recent post he shared on Instagram. Posting a screenshot from the @KimAndNorth TikTok shared by his ex-wife Kim Kardashian their daughter North, Kanye wondered, “Since this is my first divorce I need to know what I should do about my daughter being put on [TikTok] against my will?”
This is only Kanye’s latest incident of conflict with his ex, who he also recently claimed tried to bar him from North’s recent birthday party. This was, of course, after Kanye had threatened to beat up Kim’s new beau, Pete Davidson, but let’s face it: self-reflection has never been Kanye’s strong suit.
In a previous interview, he also railed against North’s TikTok use, saying, “Tell her don’t have my daughter wearing lipstick on TikTok and don’t have her on TikTok at all if I don’t approve that.” While he says this is a case of “poking the bear” in order to discredit him, he’s kinda done that all on his own with stunts like his aborted, slapdashed political campaign (which was probably a smokescreen for the Republican candidate who tried to start an insurrection to overthrow the government).
It seems that even at his big age, Ye has yet to grasp the concept of women’s autonomy. If he hates what North is doing now, just wait ’til she’s a teenager.
