The Singles Jukebox

This Monday ends with some Angolan hip-hop…

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[4.17]

Brad Shoup: The track is palmslapping Eminem crossed with “Hate Me Now”; the quartet, thankfully, acts like they’re on a standard posse cut.
[6]

Jonathan Bradley: Like if G-Unit comprised Tony Yayo’s weed-carriers, not 50 Cent’s.
[4]

Crystal Leww: At this point, I think rap just needs a break from all the tracks with a bunch of dudes standing around self-seriously. 
[3]

Iain Mew: Reminds me a little of Mos Def’s “Oh No,” except with a chorus replaced with short bursts of portentous choral synth. Cygas and guests barely keep it interesting and energetic enough not to wish too much for something more to break it up.
[5]

Micha Cavaseno: Global cypher-core at its finest: In 2016, rap has never sounded so distant from the dawn of the new millennium. At this point, the global narrative demonstrates that you can use 808s and drum machines to all kinds of alarming rhythms and pulses. It needn’t be the typical boom-bap drive either and that’s what makes “Distúrbio” fucking pointless. If you use the boom-bap in that unfunky plod, you just sound like Eminem’s album cuts, or, worse, Immortal Technique preparing a 176 bar dismantling of the Military Industrial Complex. Now, this is deliberately unfair to Cygas & co. and I’m aware that they took the time to pen raps of significant value to the song. But rappers have often been told that their words are the most important thing in the world, and when they do, they let things such as technique and music fall behind. When you refer to a music as “poetry” in its seeming lack of musicality, you allow this error to substantiate and rot the genre, manifesting in stillborn tracks such as this. “Distúrbio” is not a good rap song because it refuses compassion, conversation, or compromise. Instead it’s all about paying attention to the significance of a song with a terrible beat.
[1]

Jonathan Bogart: A posse cut as straightforward and unpretentious as any that have been laid down since the late 1980s: chorus-free, it cycles through four rappers of varying levels of charisma and intensity over an out-of-the-box gloomy-triumphalist beat. Angola’s ceiling for rap superstardom is still relatively low compared to that of big, wealthy African nations like Nigeria and South Africa, but even so none of these guys are troubling it. Pleasant confirmation that hungry street-level rappers are much the same all around the world.
[6]