sunezBy SUNEZ
We’ve got nothing to fix outside. Struggle is an afterthought and when we make it we talk about that. When we get it is when we made it. Purse up your hips, sway your lips and give your brains away. Fade to Drake. Pause…it all stillmatic when the music stays for real people. The MC isn’t a minister of compromise but a master of ceremony using the mic to capsule the truest moment. A vocal martyr of contradiction willing to menacingly chronicle and magnificently capture this hellish world we suffer in. Never hypocritical, they meticulously coopt vinyl orchestras, broken apart and chopped into whole pieces so no one can find their words stashed. Only we, the Hip Hop listeners, they represent for, the ones they speak to, the ones they share to. And the listener is the first sellout. We stopped listening. So this Hip Hop writer, that sits in his own element and is fulfilled by the others, has to find the mighty constructs that still continue to bring this Art honor.
Out in LA, the knowledge of self that charges so many great MCs, has fueled the non-conformist rugged interaction JMega the God lyrically engages the breaks with. One of the most prolific debuting MCs of the decade, he has already released boom bap LPs as the MC star of Truemasterz (The First Atom & Plus Lessons: Volume One) and with producer Junior Makhno (Truemasterz presents: Blood & Thunder). Now, with his present solo album, Niggaz is Kingz Forever, he packs 25 more tracks of rawness into his bandcamp.
An MC of sinister cadence of effortlessness one may only notice his impeccable ear for breakbeats and his unapologetic tone of streetlife supremacy that needs no large budget, popular social networking uprising or astrological alignment with slayback or cash folly crews. An independent MC as JMega, loading chunks of work as collections for buyers’ named price is Man Caring only for Music Creating. With Niggaz is Kingz Forever, the theme isn’t to blatantly ring the empowering realness of a knowledge of self to the listener via the dominance of his excursions as proof. Instead, it focuses on the theme that regardless to whom or what, we work it out to that supreme state. A nigga go savage to striving to supreme enlightenment is an endless journey. But through it all, a nigga is still king. We still dominate these mics, these tables, these walls and these lines we write fight insight through.
The beatmakers from MighGawd, Purpose of Tragic Allies, Kwervo, Wheely, Sicknessmp, One Drop Beats, Dee Metto, DJ Bilingual, Don Ve, RTTC, and Gymleadermatt all to a unitive blend of breaks, tough cuts and sample sources often unfamiliar enough and/or properly put together to immediately break necks. JMega runs dominance constantly throughout as on the snare heavy breaks of “True Power” building on destroying, “Deadly melody/smoke the weaponry/one chrome, one black/so they ivory and ebony/ til’ legacy born/Chill Lord, probably die by the sword/especially so I train daily with the iron palm/my specialty style treacherous don’t stand next to me/perfectionist/blueprints that move on your treasury.” Much of the content is that battle rap kingship actualized through tales of his Love Allah world as on the weed excursions of “Kali Dreams” or the paper chases of “Presidentes Muertos” or the gutter mentals on “If I Die” that verse a ruggedness that isn’t making excuses or preaching but harshly picturing for us in bars. The peak is the revelations of “Let Niggaz Live” where JMega ponders, “I had a vision that there’s more to this life/than fast cars and women/ are you kidding?!/I’m not listening/this shit’s what you make it/and these niggas quick to take it/they pull out guns make you strip naked/need to watch those around you/they smiling in your face/kill you for the title, for loot/it’s a deadly game/many niggas die for petty shit/pour some nigga out in remembrance/a tear drop/really it’s the have its and have nots/the devils have this shit bolt locked/niggas kill son and piss in the pot/ and I know I’m just as guilty as them/paint myself black ski mask/spit it like opium/fuck it, this is the life I chose/by the sword/ what’s it all worth?!/really if it ain’t worth to die for…”
This Hip Hop has made the lives we live cliché in the process of making them known. And JMega is a maker of lyric collections that gives two fucks about it all—check one and two and another verse. A superior beat selector, if he focused on funneling and filtering his albums in smaller, more concentrated Long Players we may see supreme albums. Until then, we have another immense collection of add ons that demonstrates great talent that slowly becomes stronger thematically, as this rugged Niggaz iz Kingz Forever definitely is.
Twitter: @jmegathegod