sunezBy SUNEZ
The writer, a roads carver of creative passages articulate the culture when the beats too loud for you. Alone with my trading card articles protected by ol’ gold borders around these crinkled papers. The professional duty as a journalist or better, a historian before its time cements rewinds, sharing the dreams of the gifted Black, Brown and rugged. From their easel to my ink diesel, their revelations of purpose are the tales behind the beats, justice steps past the poverty, ten more than were ever given. You want to see the builds where I salute da kidds that gunsling, digg my understanding into scrolls of growls from brethren from another alike town. Knowledge this… 
Salute’s verses like a long striding gunman, confident that the wild west raps will all be tamed in the layered letters he orates. His weaponry is Bronze’d in the Nazareth wardrobe of snared spurs walking through breakbeat barrels firing off bass’d bullets. The dry dust of an aftermath that leaves tumbleweeds of insight and layed out bodies of cleverest punchlines. The most unknown Wisemen, now serving time in correctional facilities, kites with aid from Bronze Nazareth and the late great Kevlaar 7 (Always RIP: Remembered In Perfection), these letters from the town he marshaled through, Diggstown.
Salute always MCs calmly even when his tempos rise. It produces a rolling effect that melodifies his lyrics, leaving perfectly timed silences inside the words. His intensity and his pacing is extremely deceptive because he stays right on the beat casually with expert clarity. On the incredible title track, his ideal flow is stated with, “Diggstown get down/spit rounds/silencers four pounds/ no sounds/guillotine chase cream broken dreams/forgotten world/lost girls/and them dope fiends/keep it clean/but don’t provide for their seeds..they wanna lock us down/complicate our sanity/so fuck a helping hand/nothing was handed to me/mute the bullshit and focus on my salary/the understanding is to understand I understand/check the label/ignorance define the Blackman/shit is cold, nigga/just like my soul nigga/rough jungle where the lion won’t fold nigga/play it by the code/travel through the broken road/couldn’t see it bro by the blindfold…” His flow works oddly balanced obstacle courses as “Horoscope” or “Black AeroSmif,” easily because his pauses are part of the bar structure. His phrasing on “Forty Horses” literally thickens the bop of the song’s percussive motions as Salute is a dynamic yet subtle instrument.
KEVLAAR 7 RIP (REMEMBERED IN PERFECTION) & SALUTE
Lyrically, Diggstown is an establishment of his character of smooth style and ruggedness yet it is filled with his hardships. Trials and conflictions (“Lord What Did I Do Wrong?,” “Nothing to Lose”), visions of the youth and the streets (“I ain’t putting down my kind/I’m just keeping it real/give a fuck how you feel when I’m speaking the truth/like Bishop said, ‘niggas die for the juice’/I ain’t lying/I’m tired of these young mothers crying/young brothers either dropping in cage like a l caged like a lion/is this the jungle? Or at least we make it seem that way…” – “Mirror Sky”) balanced into a complex reality is consistent here. The complete lack of preachiness and his ability to build calm and cool is the sinister mentality his battle bars convey. Battle bars that also reveal the mentality in these Detroit jungles as on “Brick Cold Kidds” where he rhymes, “From the litter of the kittens to the middle of the mitt/now we big cats/can’t you see the jungle vision/it’s birds to be flipped/we don’t trick it on no bitches/lethal like the weapon/my crew well connected/throw it in the sky/watch it fly and they fetch it/never been a snitch/so I’m the nigga known for sketching…” The highlight is on the menacing Kevlaar 7 track, “Fuck It,” where Salute verses with passionate concrete cracking bars that fades with an archived interview of the late Wisemen brother Kevlaar 7. Nearly a year later and the genius of Kevlaar 7 that was shared and yet to come cannot be understated.
BRONZE NAZARETH
Bronze Nazareth has filled 2015 with incredible beats. A producer with volumes of beats works collaboratively with his MCs. Often Bronze produced MC LPs as Phillie’s Welcome to the Detroit Zoo (2013) or Killarmy’s Dom Pachino”s War Poetry (2015), have a varying active role from the MCs from choosing, arranging and guiding the outcome of the tracks. With Salute locked up it, Bronze takes a more active role to complete another cohesive jewel. With a load of 2015 LPs, (Canibus, Dom Pachino & Wisemen’s Illah Dayz – #ArtOnArt & #ScienceOnMusic review HERE), it cements Bronze’s sound as Boom Bap Blues with highlights on the variety of styles he can engage in. Particularly with this Diggstown work where the expected Soul from “Lord What Did I Do Wrong?” with high speed Soul cries give into a steady mid-tempo key’d track or the strings through definitive drums that do select work with a living, morphing bassline to the discerning listener on “Forty Horses,” to the cinema horns and drumrolled break on “Middle Eastern (Lone Star)” we know of these type of Bronze bangers. Yet Bronze hits peaks in this sound as with the incredible drum drop and the woo’d howls on the title track or that welcome home soul introducing the illest firing pistons as snares on the humming bass of “Slow Leak,” possibly one of the craftiest clips of meanness on the LP. However, the variety is well worked with the oft kilter drum rolling that marks “Black AeroSmif,” the the thick hand clap track on “Horoscope,” and the sound quirk that makes the “UnCommon” bounces through with drums with distinctively separated smacks. The beauty of Boom Bap is the drum and as with Illah Dayz debut, The Illahstrator, Bronze’s diversity of drum work from pitch, resonance, wonderful use of drum rolls and complexity, really turn the supposed simplistic addiction to a real study.
The brother of my brother is mine own. Family that protects its proper principles from the samples to the love that’s ample. We then gots the government of notions, intentions and illy inflections that punctuate policy. From the scripts of Bam, the Blues of the Delta and the constitution of Bronze Nation, the amen to men’s tenements were the amendments in the song sheets. Striding into Diggstown, from my Eastern roots of Mecca, all to see these long playered sights of insight and finally Salute da Kidd…