Tacoma Aroma?
I think posting up the same local shit that a dozen local hiphop blogs (still trips me out that there’s so many of them now), not to mention those tastemaking 2DopeBoyz, are all gonna be running to post up, has caused me to bum out about blogging in general. So while I’ll be back here putting up joints and everything soon enough, I’d rather post about stuff that amuses me from our locality. So. The dude Justis put this on the Proof a minute ago when he wasn’t crying about politics:
It looks to me like something made in a high school video lab (this might explain the clean version, although all references to Robitussin are still in there which makes me LOL), it’s amateur in every way but for some reason I, and everybody I’ve shown it to, love it. Kids from the 253 doing something this fucking silly (instead of talking about killing people, lyrically) is basically pretty fucking based. Keyboard Kid needs to do a remix. Scouring the ‘tubes turned this up as well:
This is also not very “good”, but the Based aesthetic they seem to instinctively tap into (who knows what they actually think of Lil’ B) has very little to do with quality, which is a weird observation to make about art I realize, especially to hiphop heads; but if you’ve ever had a yen for say, shitty/DIY teenage punk, or just fucked-up sounding music at all, you might see the same potential in these kids that I do to make something cool. (I like good rap, too.) The TA dudes mumble weird shit ("glisten like the water off a surfboard") over a weird minimal beat, and there’s even a couple (brief) moments in the shaky, janky-ass video that look halfway cool. (Grinder/shoebox rappers should take note: while you can’t turn shit into gold, you can at least throw it at the wall and make art. In this millenium, ain’t no time for games hard isn’t enough. A little weird can go a long way, ask Gucci.) Walking the line between pleasantly weird and horribly amateur are the young men of Tacoma Aroma.
