Lupe Fiasco

Today is Thanksgiving and straight up, I am thankful for Lupe putting out his new mixtape, Enemy of the State: A Love Story, late last night. Honestly, I don’t really pay any mind to mixtapes normally but I hadn’t heard from Lupe in a long long time so I figured it was worth checking out. Needless to say, it is awesome. Lupe’s clean delivery can flow over an beat but the stuff he chose to put on his mixtape is undaunted by a lot of cats in the game right now. Luckily for us Lupe is definitely not done with music. He plans on releasing his LupE.N.D. album on 3 separate releases with mixtapes scattered in between. We don’t have to wait too long for the first album either, it’s looking to be around December 15, 2009, so get stoked hip-hop heads. For now, you can hold yourself off with his mixtape featuring my personal favorite song. EnjoY!

Lupe Fiasco – All the Way Turnt Up

Auto-Tune

Alright, I am about to vent for a minute. I am tired of everyone with a microphone hating on Auto-Tune. Auto-Tune was devised to make people sound better than they really do by correcting the pitch of the human voice to hit the desired note, and it does exactly that. It’s no secret as some individuals have made their whole career off of it like T-Pain. Now we have a huge following with Auto-Tune with promoters such as Kanye West, Bon Iver, T-Pain, Wyclef Jean, Lil’ Wayne, Mr Hudson, etc. Then there are the haters such as Jay-Z, Lupe Fiasco, Wyclef Jean and various artists who are mad at the fact that the Auto-Tune users are making more money than they used to without Auto-Tune.

It is up for speculation why people dig the sound of Auto-Tune but there is one thing for sure – music is a movement and is always in motion. Right now the sound that is well respected BY THE LISTENERS is Auto-Tune with that vocoded talk-b0x sound. I have been saying that this hip-hop movement  is going futuristic and Auto-Tune provides that sound, period. All you haters just get over it- you can use it too if you want to make money like Wyclef did and talks about. Obviously he is on the fence about the idea but he liked it enough to produce a joint about it and state that you ‘have to have skill before you turn on the tune’ so he is obviously saying that he is good enough to do it, right? Anyways, I know there are a lot of people that would like to agree or disagree with me and I want to hear it all. Bottom line, Auto-Tune is music and helps create music so why can’t we just respect it?

Wyclef Jean – Mr. Auto-Tune

Jay-Z – D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune)

Bon Iver – Woods