Skip to main content

Kota The Friend VibeZ

Thirty-three tracks from a Brooklyn rapper who has built an entire career without a label, and whose records are almost defiantly gentle.

Kota the Friend

Kota the Friend is one of the more instructive success stories of the streaming era: an independent artist from Brooklyn who has never signed a major deal, produces most of his own music, runs his own imprint, and has built a substantial audience entirely on word of mouth.

The music is a deliberate refusal of the genre's defaults. His records are quiet, warm, jazz-sampled and conversational; he raps about his son, his mother, his uncle, therapy, travel and gratitude. There is almost no aggression in the catalogue at all, which in hip-hop is a genuinely unusual position to sustain across several albums.

The interludes are the structural signature. His albums are punctuated by short spoken pieces from family members, which turns a collection of songs into something closer to a home recording.

What to listen for

"Hollywood" opens the set and is the most immediate track here — a good demonstration of how much groove he gets from very little.

"For Colored Boys" is the most important song on the list, and the one that best shows what his gentleness is for: it is a record about permission, addressed to an audience that rarely gets it.

"Mommy" is the emotional peak, and the family interludes — "Grandpa's", "Uncle Cal's", "Pop's", "Melvin's" — are not filler; they are the reason the album works as a whole.

The city and place songs are his best writing: "Colorado", "Sedona", "Chicago Diner", "Nola", "Sydney" and "Myrtle". The last is a Brooklyn avenue rather than a beach, which is the whole joke.

"Solar Return" with Saba is the best guest feature, and "Full Bloom" is the prettiest arrangement.

"Church" and "Alkaline" are the two to play for anyone who wants to hear him rapping rather than reflecting.

Go deeper

FOTO (2019) and Everything (2020) are the essential albums, and To Kill a Sunrise with Statik Selektah is the hardest-hitting.

Saba's CARE FOR ME is the other great record in this emotional register, and Mick Jenkins and Sylvan LaCue belong in the same conversation.

Listening note: do not skip the interludes. The spoken pieces from family members are the structural spine of these albums, and without them the songs read as a pleasant collection rather than as the family portrait they are meant to be. They are also, track for track, some of the most affecting minutes here.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Monty Alexander VibeZ

There is a moment on almost every Monty Alexander record where the jazz piano trio stops behaving like a jazz piano trio and starts behaving like a Kingston sound system. That moment is the whole point. Fifty tracks deep, this is the sound of a man who never asked permission to be two things at once. The pianist who brought Kingston to the Carnegie stage Monty Alexander was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1944, and by his teens he was already gigging around the island — close enough to the birth of ska and rocksteady to have absorbed it in his bones rather than learned it from records. He moved to the United States in 1961, and the origin story that follows is the kind that sounds invented: Frank Sinatra heard him playing in a Miami club, and Jilly Rizzo, Sinatra's friend and club owner, put him behind the piano at Jilly's in New York. From there Alexander fell in with Milt Jackson and Ray Brown, two of the most demanding rhythm partners in the music, and never really ...
Post a Comment
Read more

GuiltyBeatZ VibeZ

If you have danced to anything out of Accra in the last ten years, you have probably danced to GuiltyBeatz without knowing his name. Forty-seven tracks of a producer's fingerprints — and the fingerprints turn out to be the melody. The Ghanaian producer who made Afrobeats swing Ronald Banful, who records as GuiltyBeatz, is a Ghanaian producer and DJ whose sound sits at the crossroads where Ghanaian highlife, Nigerian Afrobeats, amapiano and UK dance music all meet. He came up producing for Mr Eazi — the Banku Music partnership is where a lot of listeners first heard him — and his breakout as a name in his own right came with "Akwaaba," the 2018 track with Mr Eazi, Patapaa and Pappy Kojo that spawned a dance craze and became one of the defining African club records of its year. His reputation went global when he worked on Beyoncé's The Lion King: The Gift , but the more interesting story is the consistency. A GuiltyBeatz beat is usually ide...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kashif VibeZ

Kashif is the reason a lot of 1980s R&B sounds the way it does — and the reason you can hear the difference between a synth bassline played by someone who understood bass and one programmed by someone who didn't. This is a producer's playlist, and the producer is everywhere. The architect of the synthesized soul record Kashif was born Michael Jones in Brooklyn in 1956, raised in foster care, and taught himself music young enough that by his teens he was touring with B.T. Express. What he did next reshaped a decade. In the early 1980s, as a producer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist, he was among the first to build R&B records around programmed synthesizers — the Minimoog bass, the Linn drum machine, the Fairlight — without letting them sound cold. That distinction matters. Plenty of producers adopted the new gear; Kashif made it groove . His basslines are played with the phrasing of a funk bassist, full of slides and ghost notes, which is why rec...
Post a Comment
Read more