Clock Works(prod. Be Franky)

As summer approaches, Typical Cats return with another gem, a blistering slab of frosted lunacy entitled “Bitter Cold.”  One of a constellation of Qwel solo shots from TC’s latest (3, G4), “Bitter Cold” marries a sinister Natural beat that swings like a gypsy funeral with inspired verses from TC’s resident embedded journalist.  Qwel rasps like a man knocking at the lid of his coffin.  He examines the rampant nihilism of post-Keef Chicago while sparring pugilistic drums and a swirling zydeco sample. 

“It’s all love so they say / but it don’t cost and it don’t pay / somehow he lost his way up in this maze / and the world turned him cold…”  With another long hot summer looming over the city, TC aims for the antidote. 

The Bitter Cold

Scram Jones - Pay Me No Mind

For more stuff like this peep - http://www.mixcloud.com/djnatural/

Qwel killing it live on WHPK in 2000. The radio show featured freestyles and live performances by just about everyone in the Chicago scene at that time, but nobody was doing anything like this....

Live WHPK, May 2000; Qwel, Red Meat Acapella

Nonchalant EP

Prod. MZA

Seasoned.

Twitter- @Elvisionaire

Lowry's

"Look What This World Did To Us." The command is rhetorical. You're already aware of the echo, the generational discontent and alienation, the whispered and denied calls for absolution. No need to look around, just check your bank account and sigh-or echo Biggie and scream, "fuck the world." 

Or melt into the couch and absorb Red Pill's debut for Mello Music Group-a novel disguised as an album, a surly hymn from poisoned lungs. It's a confirmation of what John Cage once declared: "all great art is a form of complaint." 

Or maybe the better comparison is Bukowski, memorializing the "broken factory windows of emptiness." That makes more sense in Ferndale, Michigan where Red Pill calls home. After college graduation, "Leonard Letdown" started working at a machine shop. A temporary gig turned into a labor daze. The dream of converting music into rent money seemed more elusive by the day. 

Depression compounded. The empty packs of cigarettes turned into cellophane towers. The whiskey mixed with an absence of hope. This album is a signal flare, an escape route, and catharsis. This isn't just hip-hop, this is an attempt to distill the disillusion and cure the hangover. It's both a brilliant mission statement and a jazzy funeral for what was promised but never delivered. 

This is for those who played by the rules only to discover that the game was rigged. This is a toast for those entering their late 20s and still acting like adolescents. It's an anti-Valentine to marriage and mortgages. It offers empathy for those buried under student loan and credit card debt, but who refuse to sink. Even if the smoke rings appear like nooses, this is an artful rebuttal to the nihilism. 

Your favorite song will be determined by what theme you relate to most. Look What This World Did To Us is in league with the best of early Atmosphere or Open Mike Eagle's Dark Comedy, a modern hustle of machinery and migraines. A commemoration of going a quarter century without a foundation and an acknowledgement of the nerves that accompany a future built atop fault lines. These are the late night conversations you have with your friends. The idle nights and empty bottles, the hard questions that come after you realize the world might not be yours.

Red Pill - Smoke Rings (prod. Red Pill)

Friday (2016 Freestyle)

Atmosphere - Tonight's Man

Track 1 (Side A) off Sad Clown Bad Dub 5. 

Atmosphere - Oooooooh

Skrewtape - 94 Ecto Cooler (Produced By Mr Green)

Pink Taxi Cab (prod Calvin Valentine_

In the final years of the last millenium, two native New Yorkers added a page to Chicago's hip hop history with the advent of the WHPK Wednesday Night Rap Show. Although short-lived and never formally christened, the Show had heads from Roosevelt to the Hundreds stuck on 88.5 FM midweek. In the show's aftermath, from the ashes of countless vinyl crates and echoes of chaotic show-closing freestyle sessions, Typical Cats was born. 

Featuring MCs Qwazaar, Qwel and Denizen Kane, producer/dj Natural and media assassin Kid Knish, Typical dropped a self-titled full-length on Galapagos4 Records and began a relentless campaign to restore a fallen hip hop world to its former promise and glory. The talent assembled was unmistakable, the sound created was formidable. Firmly planted in tradition, unorthodox in invention and possessed of a strength only earned in the furnace of experience, their Sound is the Future that hip hop's Past would have had if its Present weren't held hostage by the uninspired and unrepentant. A flurry of solo projects later, Chicago's prodigal sons return. Hip hoppers rejoice. Suckers duck and cover. Typical Cats come to conquer. Battle champs, hotline legends, poetry circuit kings. 

Tuck Your Pride In 'Cause All Lyrics Connect At The Soul. And it's on and it's on and it's on. 

QWAZAAR - A native of Chicago's gritty Low End, Qwazaar strikes from hip hop's essence. Whether the subject matter is inner city or interplanetary, the flow remains untouchable - a percussive yet fluid attack that evokes South Side rain and helicopter blades in a single breath. The content is heavy- "After the dust settles, witness the blood puddles..." Lights out, kids. The Q-W-A is here. 

QWEL - You first seen his name dangling a quarter mile up on a suspension bridge from your scratch-bombed window on the Orange line. You first heard that distinctive melodic/abrasive storm of syllables on old Nacro and Scam Artist tapes with inserts printed at the Kinko's. Now the heat's been perfected-and this nasty North Side revelation music rebel is out to wake the sleepers. From Ted Turner's devil ass to the so-called competition-everyone and their mama gets dealt with when the kid laces up his boots. 

DENIZEN KANE - From the rum and coke rumble of Chicago's North Side flow spots to the celluloid veneer of Def Poetry Jam's main stage, Denizen Kane rips the party with a poet's heart and an outsider's eye. Journalistic, impressionistic, real-life and drastic, young Kane's late night Red Line revelations turn into heathen hymns on tape, capturing the moody face of the metropolis in color. How long can a lost one roam until he finds his way home? Listen to your city fall apart through the muddy mouth of an immigrant.

Live WHPK, May 2000; Qwel, Red Meat Acapella

Typical Cats

Recent comments

Still

Haleydubz

Related tracks