So here it is. Our final part of our Best of 2012 coverage concludes with our top 50 tracks of the year. I’ll avoid the clichés, but this has been a tough list to put together and a special thanks to everyone who produced great music throughout the year for making it tough. It’s been fun.
We’ve still got our guestlists for 2012, which will be coming up each day this week and then we’ll be returning to regular goodness. But for now, enjoy the end of the year with our Top 50 Tracks of 2012.
German beatmaker Plukk.inn, hot off his recent tape Bad Habits, has teamed up with Lesson Six favourite Raashan Ahmad on this boom bap sounding summer anthem, “No Pain”. We’re already starting to think about our third annual Soundtrack to the Summer, looks like this came out at the right time. Download the track on a name your own price deal, here.
Maybe it’s the cynic in me, but everytime I hear yet another Raashan Ahmad track, I always go into it skeptical and leave it feeling like an idiot. The Crown City Rocker’s relentless flow of dope sounds is quickly giving Raashan Ahmad the moniker of prolific. If we get more tracks like “Don’t Lie” on his upcoming album Jewels From Jakata, long may it continue.
2012 is starting off in a big way. OK, technically this is a video for a track that came out in November but when it’s this good, who cares? Here’s hoping we’ll hear a lot more new material from Raashan Ahmad in 2012. By the sounds of it, the more with Chlorine Free, the better.
Raashan Ahmad’s “For What You’ve Lost” was a strange one for me. At first it seemed like a perfectly steady album with well produced beats and good natured rhymes – nothing special. But in the past year, the album’s surprisingly kept its appeal. In fact, I’ve enjoyed it so much post-review that I’ve started to feel little guilty for not giving it more of a rave review. Luckily over the last twelve months, Raashan has give me enough excuses to post snippets and videos, but none as good as this one. Here the Crown City Rocker teams up with DJ Moar, as they make “Just Cool” even more chilled out than it was before.
Haven’t seen this one getting too much love across the blogs. It’s a shame because I thought that Raashan Ahmad’s 2010 album, “For What You’ve Lost”, was one of the best of last year. Well produced jazzy-beats and forward thinking lyrics are tough to turn down around these parts. Anyway, here’s the video for “In Love With Wax” from that same album.
This time last year, shortly after we set this thing up, we released our belated Soundtrack to the Summer – 51 minutes of laid back hip-hop for BBQs and sunny weekends. Over the last year we’ve found a lot more laid back hip-hop, just waiting for this point in the year, for our second annual Sound to the Summer. Tracklisting & Mixcloud link after the break.
It was incredibly disappointing to not have spent more time with Raashan Ahmad’s For What You’ve Lost last year. It undoubtedly would have clocked high in our Best of 2010 Albums. Fortunately Raashan has been busy with videos, with this video for “Pain on Black” being the third (unless we missed one), from that great album released at the end of last year. If you don’t know, now you know. Get on it.
Normally when reviewing an album I’ll throw up a favourite track from an album. I realised today, after just posting the review, that I forgot to do that this time. This is me attempting to remedy that.
“Imagine painting a mural but only using one can” is Raashan Ahmad’s response to being labeled & pigeonholed by the media. It actually perfectly sums up the amalgamation that is the follow up to 2008′s The Push. This mixture of styles (or lack of direction, if you’re feeling critical) might mean that For What You’ve Lost isn’t the most concise or solid release you’re likely to have heard over the last 12 months. But you’ll constantly be kept on your toes and the album slowly becomes genuinely enjoyable when it gets into its soft Bay Area jazzy-sounding flow.
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.
