Has now been added to the front page (and to my sig below). It's just a Spotify playlist, obv. As you'd expect it's dominated by indie guitar-type music, but in the 800 or so tracks at time of writing you'll also find opera, Mrs Mills, chart pop, 50s classics, hot disco, punk favourites, Motown, bhangra-hop and - of course - Queen.

It's a non-collaborative list (Radio WoS isn't a request station, man), but I'll be keeping an eye on Mark X's collaborative playlist for stuff worth pinching - particularly non-indie sounds, since the songs I haven't been able to stop playing for the last two days are "Paper Planes" and "Quicksand" (alongside Death Cab For Cutie's "I Will Follow You Into The Dark", but only when I've got a hanky handy).

So, um - Radio WoS!

So... are Death Cab any good, then? My girlfriend likes a few of their tunes and one of my mates is right into them, but he tends to be into shit metal and emo stuff, which puts me off.

N.B. I have nothing against metal, he just listens to shit metal. Also, I do have something against emo.

Wait does the Rev really NEVER listen to hip hop? Whoa.

Not often. Recommend me something that isn't just some thick arsehole bragging about how many bitches he's got.

Piff I uploaded a fuckload to the collabrative Mark X playlist. I'll just fire it up and mention a couple of highlights.

Ok,

8 point agenda - Herbaliser Latryx, Down with the king - Run DMC, That's the joint - Funky four plus one, Dont see the signs - Mark B and Blade, Childrens story - Slick Rick.

To get your started.

Incidentally, I've also fixed the WoS Shoparama to be 99% AdBlock-proof now, so all the links should be visible again.

The last two of those seem to have been deleted (not by me). The first one was horrible, and the middle two were harmless but I never cared for De La Soul.

Eh I tried. But I can apriciate even the better stuff isn't every one's cup of tea. The other two are further down the play list. Some where..

Start off with Transatlanticism. Then Plans.
I think the main reason metal fans are in to them is because their label pushed them on the likes of KerrangFM over here, but really, they're indie/rock/pop. Nothing to do with Emo.

I searched both by title and artist.

Agree to start off with Transatlanticism but I didn't get on with Plans much at all... quite liked last year's Narrow Stairs, though.

But yeah, if you don't like anything on Transatlanticism then you probably will never like Death Cab for Cutie.

stu, you might like 'de jeugd van tegenwoordig', a dutch hiphop like act which raps in some fantasy language, try to find it, drO, you know it?

spotify still not availbable to me, although i can take a paid sub now i see

Plans is Transatlanticism II for me. Even though they're years apart, if somebody told me both albums were recorded at the same time, it wouldn't be a huge surprise.

cLOUDDEAD - Ten.

EDIT - It's not on Spotify, but cLOUDDEAD is. That's a collection of 12"s, disparate but pretty good. Here is the whole of Ten on last.fm.

You could try "Take Me To Your Leader" by "King Geedorah"

It's an MF Doom pseudonym is you know who he is. One of the few hip hop acts I can stomach, I care not for their usual bling-bling nonsense.

Surely you must have heard of Dan le Sac Vs Scroobius Pip:

Here is a good place to start. And then here.

You'd be surprised!

EDIT: Oh, actually I had. Someone just pointed me to the "Thou Shalt Always Kill" video on YouTube, and I have seen it before. Would never have been able to tell you the name though.

MF Doom is my favourite artist. He's got about 6 aliases so it gets a bit confusing. The best two albums are 'Madvillain - Madvillainy' and 'Viktor Vaughan - Vaudeville Villain'. His first new album in 3 years is out in a couple of weeks and I'm impossibly excited about it.

I've gotten to quite like a new fellow called Jay Electronica. He tends to rap unusual oddness over movie soundtracks with no drums.

Of course if you can't stomach rapping then there's tons of good instrumental stuff. Donuts by J Dilla or anything by Madlib is top notch.

Dan Le Sac Vs Scroobius Pip are a bit of a one trick pony. They've got a shitty attitude as well. Ranting on about how all UK hip hop is shit while simulaniously jacking other artists popular beats.

I recommend their album. Most of the best tunes were generally already singles on youtube, there are some excellent lyrics on the quieter ones. Tommy C, for example, is an attempt to define beauty, with Tommy Cooper given as an example.

But yeah, the names are a bit crap. It took me ages to remember them properly.

Also, everyone should listen to Dan le Sac vs Scroobius Pip's "Letter From God To Man", at gunpoint if necessary. They really are a woefully underrated band, but it'd help if they didn't keep re-releasing 'Plans' and worked on some new material (it's just been shoved out for a *third* time, this time with the De La Soul collaboration version of "Thou Shalt..." as a bonus track). I would recommend anyone after top-drawer non-clichéd hip-hop check out Quannum MCs (who aren't on Spotify, sadly) or DJ Format's stuff with Abdominal (such as this).

Stu - The Spotify link in your sig just points toward "http://spotify/".

Umm... Public Enemy?

I really struggle with the "he's just rapping about his chains" attitude to hip-hop. It makes NO SENSE. The average rapper fires out about five hundred words a minute, in which case, who cares what he's saying? It's about the delivery, not the content. Anyone who listens to hip-hop and is disappointed by the lyrical content is MISSING THE POINT.

Anyway, I will happily recommend the Ultramagnetic MCs compilation on Spotify. Magnificent stuff.

*edit* Ace playlist, though. One quibble - you seem to have added thirteen Teenage Fanclub songs without including God Knows It's True OR Alcoholiday, which is totally fucked up.

But when the lyrics are good their very good. The 8 point agenda track I recomended is very clever from a lyrical stand point. The way each of the 8 points gets summed up with one word each at the end is brilliant. And Latyrx is part of Quannum don't you know?

Trouble is most of my favorite hip hop is small run 12 inches.

De La Sac vs Scroobius Pip. Is the shitty attitude that one track on album? Cos' I think that's just an attack on commercial hip hop to be honest. But yeah I have all the 7 inches from the album. Even the first release of thou shall always kill on Lex.

Christ alive, you're a lunatic. '8 Point Agenda' is bloody *incredible*! This is one of those genuine-shock, proper-wide-eyed-incomprehension bafflements. A friend of mine recently told me she *hated* Northern Soul, and that broke my brain similarly.

What hip-hop do you like Stu? This chasm of understanding needs at least a viewing platform.

Aha. Yeah, all sorts of problems there - the URL link is too long, and the Spotify URI link doesn't work because the forum code insists on attaching "http://" to the front. I think I've fixed it by using TinyURL, should work now.

I can't listen to hip hop as background music. I have to listen to it. And 90% of rappers are seriously lacking in the content department. But the ones who are good stick loads of wierd metaphors and asides into the lyrics that different pieces jump out at you on repeat listens.

The best stuff crafts a narrative, has really intricate rhythms and rhyme schemes as well as the delivery or 'swagger' as they say. The 2nd verse of this would be my favourite verse of all time. The fellows called RA The Ruggedman and it's a true story about what happened to his father in Vietnam, and what happened to his family when his father got back.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7r0KpWMNxnM (might want to skip first verse by Vinnie Paz if you find it too thuggish).

You should use the http link spotify offers. The one on the front page wouldn't work for me either.

This spotify link to the playlist should hopefully work

I thought the lyrical content was supposed to be the whole point, since the music is so often so generic.

To answer the question, the sort of hip-hop I like is, in so much as it's possible to sum it up generally, the sort with tunes. (I'm not sure why the two versions of The Message I had on the playlist - including one I'd never heard before with new lyrics - have fallen off, but they're back now.)

I always liked the idea of Public Enemy a lot more than the reality. Almost all of their records have really weedy production/mastering that wrecks potentially colossal tracks - Tricky's version of "Black Steel", say, pisses all over the original. Generally I like hip-hop best as an element of something else, in fact, eg the Disposable Heroes' amazing version of "California Uber Alles".

The HTTP links are horrible, sticking up a very ugly Spotify page as well as opening the playlist. It seems to occasionally not work, but trying again usually does the trick.

Rap = Hip hop? Then most things by Outkast. You like "Hey Ya", so it makes sense you've already hear their stuff, "The Rooster"...? Anything wrong with Missy Elliot? "4 My People", "Gossip Folks"... Beastie Boys? "So What'cha Want", "Sabotage"...

Guessing you've already heard those and didn't like, so things you're more likely to have missed:
"Cherchez LaGhost" by Ghostface Killah, "Vein" by Cannibal Ox, "Rainy Dayz" by Raekwon, also "Ice Cream" if that's not too sleazy, "Daylight" by Aesop Rock.

Lots of rap to like before you even leave the pop stuff and head MF Doom's way: "Straight Outta Compton" by NWA, "Things Gone Changed" by Notorious B.I.G, "The World Is Yours" by Nas, "Shame on a Nigga" Wu-Tang... I like "I Wanna Love U" by Jay-Z, so I dunno.

I second this. Very much so.

Funny you should mention them; I was going to recommend Language Of Violence as a great example of lyrically brilliant hip-hop. And they WERE a hip-hop group; sampling Dead Can Dance instead of James Brown doesn't make you a 4AD band.

Anyway, the lyrical content of hip-hop stopped being the point a long time ago, but yes, it was important once. I'd say that all changed in the mid-nineties, but that's largely because I gave up on hip-hop around the time Dr. Dre decided that whistling was more important than James Brown. I had no time for that, and I don't really bother with modern hip-hop; it's clearly NOT AS GOOD as the stuff that I grew up with. But, even when The Message (which was far more than just a song) was important, the lyrics were never the key thing; hip-hop, when done well, (i.e. not by a fuckwit like Dre) has always been about rhythm first, and Message second. When The Message is a strong one, that's a bonus, but (for my money) the greatest rapper of all time would be Rakim, and the greatest rap of all time would be I Know You Got Soul - a record that is exclusively concerned with Why Rakim Is Brilliant At Everything. This doesn't lessen the brilliance of his (ugh) flow - it's simply the most amazing bit of poetry ever set to a beat.

As for Public Enemy, a genuine WTF from me, there. Yes, Black Steel's rubbish, and most of the first album has a fairly trebly, sparse sound to it. However, and this is OBJECTIVE FACT, Nation Of Millions and Fear of a Black Planet are the densest, loudest, most brilliantly produced hip-hop albums of all time. The Bomb Squad, on form, were to hip-hop what Phil Spector was to pop music. Weedy? Not "who put that bomb in my stereo"?

You. Are. Mental. Entitled To Your Subjective Opinions.

Aha there we go then. See for me it is all about the lyrics and the wordplay. Didn't know about the DK cover checking that out now. Pretty awesome.

Hmm. The first versions of "Fight The Power" and "Bring The Noise" I clicked on Spotify were shit, but the versions on the proper albums seem much better, so fair enough.

(In my defence, people were banging on about PE's use of "noise" not long after I'd gotten into the JAMC, so I was a bit sneery about this piss-poor idea of the concept, which seemed in fact to be the sound of someone rubbing a balloon on their jumper endlessly. I've also always been a bit dismissive of "Nation Of Millions" purely out of prejudice at its STAGGERINGLY terrible title, which is both whiny and stupid - pretty much ALL nations are inhabited by millions, you fucking pussies. Unless you've been oppressed by Iceland all this time.)

(Piss-awful covers on the first two, as well. Despite not liking the first two I actually bought "Black Planet", just because it finally looked like a proper record.)

I am so calling my first album "opressed by iceland all this time"

What I find with the little Hip Hop/Rap I like is not so much the lyrical content but the beats and word rhythms.

Yes Rakim is absolutely one of the greatest lyracists ever. Commercial rap is of course totaly shit these days. But there is so much independent and undergorund stuff these days it's obscene. Sual Williams self titled album is amazing from a lyrical stand point and that's before you get into how broad the music is (not on spotifi yet gah) Ninja tune sub lable big Dada has been releaseing a whole bunch of amazing stuff over the last ten years. Lots of wierd concept stuff (inclueding some bits by clounded). Blade always seemed to have some thing to say (I loved his pop idol diss track, also not on spotifi lol).

That's just off the top of my head. Im just saying hip hop didn't end in the 90s for me you know.

Has everyone heard Amanda Palmer's version of "I Will Follow You Into The Dark" yet? As covers go, it's very good.

This is what she said about it:

Ignore the video; this is the first version I found on youtube that features the recording she's talking about above:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZ5vCY7yVsE

(this cover was available on her myspace page for ages, but it fell off the bottom of the playlist a while back)

Heh, I was going to recommend that to Stu, but didn't think he'd like the production.

Not bad, but it didn't live up to the comparison of the Iron & Wine cover of Such Great Heights for me.

Have you seen their Plans-based DVD, Directions? It's well worth checking out. The fan-made video by Monkmus is a sensitive and complimentary accompaniment to the song: http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/b...ctid10528359001

Do not, under any circumstances, pre-judge hip-hop on the quality of its cover art or design aesthetic. Just pretend the covers don't exist.