Despite being only three albums deep, Shad K has made one hell of a name for himself in the underground scene. Rightly so, TSOL remains one of the highest rated albums on Lesson Six and if we we’re around when The Old Prince came out, I’m sure that would be up there as well. So without further ado, here is Shad’s Essentials.
Apparently this track will only be free for a limited time so pick up some decent Kero One (essentially a remix of “Keep It Alive”). Production by Green Tea.
Now I know this is only the seventh Top Six but I’m starting to lose track. While digging through iTunes I found a few suitable tracks that, apparently, we had already posted. There’s probably an easier way to do this. Anyway here’s another top six, the best yet?
A brilliant video for Sage Francis’ “Love The Lie”
J-Live has been stepping up the content in the build up to his fifth full release, SPTA. Apparently random letters as your album name is a thing now. Anyway, here’s some free music! While it’s downloading you should check out his release from earlier in the year.
It’s Thursday and rather than leave you with that shortish review of a new Cut Chemist mix, we decided to give you more free music. I’ve always been fans of Circle Research since their collabs with Abdominal a few years back. Now they’re throwing out instrumentals left and right. Not only do they have semi-regular podcasts for free – which you should subscribe to – they are also giving away four tracks from their recently released album, Gardiner Express. Well I say recently released it came out in April, but you know. Anyway here is a select track, that uses some very clever sampling.
It’s easily forgotten but this thing called Hip Hop originated in Africa. Luckily Cut Chemist is here to you remind you. With his unique ability to dig out the rarest of samples, Cut Chemist proves that he hasn’t even touched the surface of his talents. That is until he came armed with a bag of Ethiopian, Colombian, Sudanese and Afro-Brazilian records, cross-bred them with some beats you might have heard of and called it Sound of The Police.
When producers branch out and release their own album, they tend to fall flat. Through no fault of their own, I mean when the producers take this right of passage they normally deliver great beats. However that top-notch production is usually paired with strangled rappers who never really get the room to explore the subjects we like here at Lesson Six. However, that’s where Incise differs. Armed with a roster of self-proclaimed conscience rappers, Incise undoubtedly delivers one of the soundtracks to the summer.
It’s five years since Hurricane Katrina so here’s a video for the brilliantly produced “Babblin” by Stalley, which happens to be about that. I can’t talk for the rest of the album but it is free, so you have nothing to lose.
Here’s the video for Myka 9′s “I Must Cross”, a track of the soon to be released MYKALOGY album.
Jan 10th
Nov 29th
Sep 24th
At the end of last year Spin Magazine compiled a fairly comprehensive video of video game samples in hip-hop. It started to make a few of us at Lesson Six think how many were actually about video games rather than just sounding like them. The result, a list of our top six tracks about video [...]
Lesson is about progressive & cliché-free hip-hop with intelligent lyrics. Striving for something more than the mainstream perception of hip-hop. This means no misogyny, no glorification of drug-use, no violence and no played out flaunting of personal wealth.
