Blue Chips is a monthly rap column that highlights exceptional rising rappers. To read previous columns, click here. Releasing music in relative obscurity can engender insecurity, the self-doubt mounting with every year critical acclaim and peer recognition doesn’t arrive. Brian Ennals was intimately familiar with that disheartening reality for a decade. Throughout the 2010s, the […]
Blue Chips is a monthly rap column that highlights exceptional rising rappers. To read previous columns, click here. By most metrics, Jay Worthy is refreshingly accessible, communicative, and punctual for a rapper of his stature. He has hundreds of thousands of monthly listeners on Spotify and millions of streams to his name. Still, with no […]
Blue Chips is a monthly rap column that highlights exceptional rising rappers. To read previous columns, click here. Soon, a music critic will write an essay on the glut of “new” artists copying their influences wholesale. Said critic could quickly point to the hordes of double cup-clutching Future aspirants with higher chances of rehab stints […]
Blue Chips is a monthly rap column that highlights exceptional rising rappers. To read previous columns, click here. Young Slo-Be is likely older than his peers in Stockton, California’s burgeoning rap scene, but he slyly refuses to reveal his age. “I tell people [my age] all the time,” Slo-Be says over the phone, his smirk […]
Blue Chips is a monthly rap column that highlights exceptional rising rappers. To read previous columns, click here. Water sloshes in the background when Adam Levin answers the phone. Bath time ran longer than anticipated, so the 32-year-old Chicagoan calls back when his infant daughter is occupied with episodes of Sesame Street. Teacher by day, […]
Blue Chips is a monthly rap column that highlights exceptional rising rappers. To read previous columns, click here. T.F’s memoir could open in a blazing Southern California wildfire. At 18, he and fellow incarcerated firefighters cut smoldering brush and dug parched soil to prevent towering flames from incinerating more acres of hillsides and mountains. He […]
Is it sacrilegious to smoke weed inside a decommissioned church? This seems to be the central question for Baby Stone Gorillas on the set of their “Keep Goin” music video. Dress shirts for the video, the ticking clock on the church rental, our interview — these are afterthoughts for the burgeoning Los Angeles rap group […]
San Joaquin County Jail, like most jails, records and monitors inmate phone calls. When EBK Young Joc calls for our interview, the Stockton, California-born rapper is understandably wary of saying anything the Sheriff’s Department might characterize as incriminating. (See the recent case of Baton Rouge rapper Lit Yoshi, whose recorded prison phone calls were played […]
Blue Chips is a monthly rap column that highlights exceptional rising rappers. To read previous columns, click here. If you know Stockton, California’s high homicide rates and the gang activity, poverty, and institutional neglect that account for them, Louis Park seems located in a different zip code. The lush, green park is interspersed with towering […]
The best NBA players outwork their peers in practice. They shoot more jump shots, run extra sprints, hit higher reps in the weight room. Since emerging as the breakout star of Detroit rap trio Shittyboyz, BabyTron has approached recording projects like Sleeve Nash and Luka Troncic (both puns on NBA all-stars past and present) with […]