Lyricism is the backbone of hip hop. Although there are a ton of rappers who aren’t saying a gotdamn thing, there are those who are exceptionally gifted at putting words together over a beat. And with so many songs dropping during any given month, we feel that those rhymes that combine lyrical dexterity and cleverness with verbal gymnastics should be celebrated. Enter: Verse of the Month.
Past winners have included Black Thought, Kendrick Lamar, André 3000, and Phonte. And for August, Mick Jenkins gets the nod for “Bruce Banner.”
— [CLICK FOR HI-RES] —
“Honestly, can’t nobody come for me ‘cept Kendrick.”
This month was stacked with quality entries, but it’s Mick Jenkins who gets the nod for Verse of the Month, and he called it with the first line of his verse.
While we anxiously await his Piece of a Man project, the Chicago emcee hulked out on his opening salvo. Name-dropping everyone from Nate Berkus and Alex Haley to Mark Cooper and “Keshie” Walcott, Mick wasted no bar in the 3:45 stronghold he possessed on the record.
Although the race was rather close—with Young Chris going off on “Angles” (and pretty much every other verse on The Network 5), Young M.A flawlessly pulling off the whole “Car Confessional” concept, Sheisty Khrist taking home the fan-vote, and Mickey Factz never disappointing us when it comes to bar work—Mick ended to edging out the competition with lines like, “If intelligent discussion was dribbling, you’d be traveling/ And I’d be somewhere Harlem Globetrot traffickin’ truth” and “Alex Haley at the root of it all/ My quest for love just wasn’t suited for y’all and my black thoughts won’t be muted or diluted/ And livin’ water can’t be polluted at all.”
While this was once again a tough month (with Eminem threatening to toss a monkey wrench in everything), it’s safe to say that Mick gets the victory lap this go-round.
If you want to go from a 1980s video arcade to a dystopian world of 2088 with a pit stop in 2025, you can get there by riding Arcade Knights’ authentic ’80s synths on “Neon Dreamers” and the album it ends, Cyber Hack.
The amount of musical knowledge that AL99 has obtained in his 25 years on Earth is more than most people can hope for in a lifetime.
Tim Benson shows this in the video for his new positive hip-hop track, where he sings that you can “choose to smile.”
.jpg)
With her rich, vibrant R&B voice, Wadena is the perfect artist to put out an anthem for strong women that fuses R&B with hip-hop and trap.
Bast from Crystal Fighters took some time out to tell us more about their debut LP and what they have planned in the future.
Vivek Pandya is an artist bringing something new to the world of music.
In his new throwback track, “A Lil Bit,” positive rapper Ken, The Admin serves up more than a little bit of good vibes.
Travis Scott transformed rap’s sound and left his mark on sneaker culture. Now, as he enters a new chapter, the question is whether he can dominate everything else too.
Long after Juice Wrld and XXXTentacion died, Kynkra fell in love with music and realized that nobody was making the kind of music that he liked to listen to.
Advertisement
Leave a comment