#the cactus album

[todayinhiphophistory]

Today in Hip Hop History:

3rd Bass released their debut album The Cactus Album November 14, 1989

[cantcatchmeee]

Heroes & Villains features pt. 1

[dallonwrites]

heads up seven up

thank uuu for the tag @encrucijada <3

okay for novel writing technically the last thing i wrote was edits (not even with the intention of editing really just playing around) on the until heaven opening (which is like. months old now but i'm not ready to actually draft the story so i keep quietly tinkering with the same set of 300 words and they don't feel first draft-y anymore) and the last thing i drafted was the lover boy opening so i'm just going to share both hehe 🫶 (also because the difference in sentence structure and thus length is sooooo fun to me)  

from lover boy:

“I’m good.” The man smiles like he believes him. He unzips and starts rummaging through a brown backpack and feels a need to keep a stream of words as he does so, fill the beachy quiet. How he and his friend — his best friend — had just got into San Francisco this morning. How they haven't slept and how they'd had been planning it for months, thinking about it for years, dreaming about it, how they stargazed the skyline from a gas station last night and couldn’t believe they had finally made it. Beau props himself up onto his elbows, half-listening, the man’s voice starting to blend into the waves, until he produces a Polaroid camera. “Could you get a photo of us, underneath the lights?.”

from until heaven (cw paternal death and vomit mention):

Joanne likes big parties, likes please, invite everyone! parties, likes what she calls chandelier parties: a self-defined philosophy that everyone’s lives would benefit from frequent doses of glamour, like a chandelier over an everyday dinner table. Felix has little experience with glamour; he'd brought a lemon risotto and gotten so wine drunk that, for a dizzy moment, he felt twenty-one again. He does not remember the party. All he knows is that he’s still drunk – in that half-melted, sludgy way that wine stays in you – and that right now, on the other side of the city, his sister is waiting for him because their father is dead and instead he’s here, stuck in a suburb he could never afford to live in, where he doesn’t know the way home and is still wine drunk with cherry-coloured blots down the front of his white button up which had, at some point unknown to him, become half undone. He knows that his headache is quietly growing vicious and he should take off his headphones, but they’re singing about Heaven and Las Vegas again – two places he has never been – and he knows that at some point, still unknown to him, his father died, and maybe that means he’s now stuck in Heaven or Las Vegas or somewhere in between. Or maybe that means he’ll just be everywhere, in the rain on Felix’s face and the ache behind his eyelids, and that’s how it’ll stay. It had been these revelations that woke him up before anyone else, on the couch of a seventies style conversation pit, dazed and then suddenly terrified, and it had been this terror that drove him to the bathroom because he thought he would vomit, but then didn't, and then noticed the roof was accessible through the window — which was when the cactus casualty took place — and now he's lying here, in the rain, all from a sudden and dire need for air.

tagging w/ no pressure @onomatopiya @musingsbycaitlin @filmografo and anyone who wants to be tagged!

[monstersoffilgaia]

[rastronomicals]

1:25 PM EDT August 9, 2024:

Steve Howe - "Cactus Boogie" From the album The Steve Howe Album (November 1979)

Last song scrobbled from iTunes at Last.fm

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[schwazombie]

Person: I'm cis and don't want a bunch of comments saying egg or whatever Someone immediately in the reblogs: that's the least cisgender thing I've read all week

OKAY MOTHERFUCKER LISTEN TO DIRECTIONS. Fuck can y'all stop being weird about other folk's gender for ONE GODSDAMNED SECOND. Listen. Listen. If we want people to accept how we identify ourselves that means we have to accept how OTHERS identify EVEN if that means they say they're cis and they have what appears to outsiders as a weird as fuck relationship with it. Let them do their own thing. They literally said they didn't want a bunch of comments WHY open your gods damned mouth fuck. Gods. Dionysos in Olympos above. Fuck. Damn. Fuck.

[xnnyfm]

[oldtreeinanalley]

i have a third if not half of russian rock memorised in my head

[garadinervi]

Twin Peaks (Music from the Limited Event Series), Various Artists, Rhino Records, 2017

[lavendorii]

17, 28, 38 😁😁💙💙💚

- beloved husband

name 3 things that make you happy

my friendies... my room.... myLIFE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!💚🌊🌊🌱🌈🌈🌈🌈🌈🌈🌈 number 4 YYOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

do you collect anything?

I used to collect monster tabs but I stopped after a while, now the only things I really "collect" are polaroids from days I hang out with my friends and momentos I'd like to keep in a box under my bed :3

fave song at the moment?

FAVORITE right now is probably christmas kids but I've bad both bad bad things and brave as a noun stuck in my head for a few days :3

[waterparksdrama]

hopefully this "second side to the story" has the texas acoustic dates that they forgot to add for IP (I am still kind of bitter about that)

i’m surprised they didn’t do that either tbh - iz

[todayinhiphophistory]

Today in Hip Hop History:

3rd Bass released their debut album The Cactus Album November 14, 1989

[luuurien]

Travis Scott - UTOPIA

(Experimental Hip Hop, Trap, Southern Hip Hop)

Travis Scott’s huge, hollow new album is lacking in spirit and attempts to make up for it with a packed guestlist and his heaviest, most experimental production to date. The results are lacking at best.

☆☆

Ever since his watershed debut Rodeo, every subsequent Travis Scott release has become a big cultural moment, music that defines the conversations around hip-hop and sets the stage for mainstream expectations the entire year. It’s easy to see why: he features all sorts of different mainstream names from Kendrick Lamar on Birds in the Trap Sing Mcknight’s Goosebumps to John Mayer and Don Toliver on the ASTROWORLD highlight CAN’T SAY; his dark and nocturnal take on trap makes his music easy to listen to while rarely pushing past the background unless you want it to; the ambitious concepts behind each of his albums makes them feel absolutely massive even if the music doesn’t land with you. Little of this remains the case for his latest release UTOPIA, the album coming out with a 75-minute documentary/anthology CIRCUS MAXIMUS full of dark, celestial shots of waterfalls and caves and attacks from a giant octopus and conversations with Mike Dean, the visual representation of an album filled to the brim with content that reveals itself it be almost completely lacking in substance. As Scott pulls from the heavier, colder side of experimental rap (entirely borrowing from Kanye’s Yeezus at times), he strips down his beats to nothing but mechanical drums and sharp-edge synths but continues to fail to say anything as a rapper outside of his usual topics - drug abuse, sex, taking your girl - and leaves UTOPIA remarkably unfulfilling as a result. There’s no strong, tangible acidity to the vast majority of these songs, a hollow attempt at a summer blockbuster where the big name features and oversized tracklist do little more than waste your time.

The album’s few strong points are in the places where this cold, rigid style of trap production gives way to songs that utilize that space effectively. Opener HYAENA kicks things off with a fat, distorted boom bap beat and buzzing synth bass, keeping things minimal but the energy high; I KNOW ?’s dark pianos and subtle percs along with Travis’ bouncy flow are reminiscent of the twisted carnival beat of 5% TINT with some extra venom in it - Travis in his element still makes some of the most addictive trap music out there, and these occasional moments of his raw talent as a producer and rapper when the beats lean into his usual volatility are simply undeniable. The rest of the album either fails to make him appealing on emptier beats that demand greater content from him lyrically to fill the space or rely on half-baked features to keep things rolling along, the back-to-back performances of Drake, Playboi Carti, and Beyoncé on MELTDOWN, FE!N and DELRESTO (ECHOES) respectively either entirely abysmal in Carti’s case, phlegmy and low-pitched and lacking in any good qualities, or just plain boring with Drake’s safe disses towards Pharrell and Pusha T (“Since V not around, the members done hung up the Louis, they not even wearing that shit / …You lucky that Vogue was suing 'cause I would've been with the Wassas in Paris and shit”) while Beyoncé’s dry crooning atop a sauceless ballroom beat that sounds more like an outtake from her latest album than anything truly showstopping. Even the stronger features from SZA and Westside Gunn near the end of the album lack much of a wow factor, sounding more like they’re there to collect a check than to make an inspired collaboration that plays to their strengths - sure, Westside Gunn sounds as brash and confident as ever on LOST FOREVER’s chilly, detail-devoid beat, but it’s surely not the best he’s ever sounded, especially once you imagine him rapping on top of some of Scott’s heavier, hazier beats from the past. Scott has always relied on features to hold his albums together when he as a solo rapper just cannot, but few of the guests on UTOPIA are worth remembering by the time the album’s over.

Where his past albums could get by with their weaker aspects by appealing to his Southern roots and musical influences (think ASTROWORLD’s liquid smooth boom-bap closer COFFEE BEAN and hometown homage R.I.P SCREW), UTOPIA relinquishes those few personal charms to try and grasp a more universal message, the few tinges of humanity present on the album in the sensitive alt-R&B highlight MY EYES with support from indie folk experimenter Justin Vernon and neo-soul recluse Sampha relegated to a few lines referencing the Astroworld Crowd Crush (“I replay them nights, and right by my side, all I see is a sea of people that ride wit' me / If they just knew what Scotty would do to jump off the stage and save him a child”). On the whole, though, not much of UTOPIA has anything to say, a death sentence when he also wants to deconstruct his production and leave so much open space, lingering for six minutes on the Young Thug-assisted SKITZO where a bog-standard trap beat and unrewarding beat switch tries to add just a little bit of excitement to their dead on arrival performances. If you didn’t enjoy Travis Scott as a rapper before, UTOPIA only gives you an ever clearer look into his shortcomings in that department, 73 minutes where only a few moments of him truly getting into a beat and having something interesting to say on it exist. For as much as UTOPIA aims for transgression, for its beats to hit hard and for Travis to make Coldplay references and voice his support for “Ye over Biden,” so much of UTOPIA feels like your standard, overwrought trap album where a concern for a stacked credits list and lots of songs to throw onto streaming playlists overrides any real artistic vision. The story he tries to convey of stepping into darkness in order to find what truly fills your spirit doesn’t translate in an album where no real magnetism is present - as much influence as he takes from Kanye, Travis Scott has none of the gravitas or raw emotion that made Kanye’s most unwieldy music feel so immense and meaningful. Instead, UTOPIA treats spectacle as the be-all-end-all, acting as if features for more than half of the tracklist and long runtime will make up for just how unexciting it all is. By breaking his music down to its bare essentials, Travis Scott makes it ever more clear just how bland much of his discography is when you take away the psychedelic trap beats and gritty Southern flair, UTOPIA so far removed from the few things that made his previous music attractive that the noisy, harsh production he’s already years late to only serves as another reminder of how all the smoke and mirrors were a crutch for him artistically. UTOPIA may try to take you under the surface of Travis Scott’s glossy trap, but there’s still little worth coming back for.

[aturnoftheearth]

one one hand i can’t talk about the new stage setup because it really means long lost is no longer theeee album it’s now being merged into the other 3 to make room for the new one and i can’t help but miss it a little. on the other hand the comedian sounds so fucking insane i need to melt it into my skin

[samantha326]

Lisa being Lili. Part 11 😍🛐🦆💛

[microphonebully]

Don Toliver Drops 'Love Sick' Album

Don Toliver drops a new album titled Love Sick with 16 new tracks. The new project is the follow-up to his Life of a Don album released in 2021. The Cactus Jack artist rolled our a single campaign on social media giving us individual animated cover art for most of the songs. He also thanked each artist for featuring on the songs with him. The new project features appearances by James Blake,…