Weekly Recap - The New Version (June 30th - July 6th, 2025)

 Monday & Tuesday

I was on a holiday and didn't listen to that much music. On car rides there and back we listened to a playlist we have for long car rides.

Wednesday

I went for a walk and listened to Frank Sinatra's album In The Wee Small Hours from 1955.
I started reading 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, the 2010 Finnish edition (with 80 Finnish albums among those 1001 albums), and this is the first album in that book.

I liked how melancholic it was, but couldn't help but to get Christmas and/or old Disney movie vibes.

Thursday

It was a rainy day so I didn't go for a walk. Instead I stayed in, deep cleaning the bathroom and listening to It's Just Begun by The Jimmy Castor Bunch. It's in Can't Stop Won't Stop, the book about the history of hiphop I started reading ages ago.

I liked the other songs, but not Troglodyte (Cave Man). Men blame Cardi B for sexualizing hiphop, but nah, bro(s). She may be one of the most annoying and dumb women I've ever seen, but she did not sexualize hiphop. You did it yourselves. Hiphop has been sexual and misogynist for a long time, and so far, this is the earliest example I have found of it. From fucking 1972. 20 years before Cardi was even born.

To summarize the history: People, mainly men, invented hiphop. Some of them had sexual, misogynistic lyrics and the rest of the men were cool with that. Women started to rebut that in about a decade or two, with acts like Salt N Pepa and Lil' Kim, making their own sexual lyrics. Both sides continued writing sexual lyrics for the next 40 years, when hiphop gained mainstream success. Both men and women treating women as sexual objects to be looked at and to have sex with became a standard in the mainstream side of the genre early on.
There is nothing particularly shocking or outrageous in what Cardi does, when you look at the history. Hiphop heads can only blame themselves for rappers like Cardi existing and being successful. If you don't want hiphop to be sexual them stop making it sexual, stop writing and listening to bars that talk about bitches and hoes and fucking and tits and ass and domestic violence. You ARE the culture. In order to change the culture, you have to check yourselves and change what you do and support. As long as there's men talking about women in this way, there's going to be the movement of women sexualizing themselves even harder. 

There isn't really anything else they can do, is there? If a man is a misogynist, he won't care about the woman's talent, he won't care if she's underage, if she's gay, if she's trying her very hardest to not be seen as sexual. He will still treat her as a commodity, as a sexual object and conquest. The only way she can control a man like that is by being very openly sexual from the get go, so he can't use that against her. Him calling her a slut or a whore or commenting on her body won't have any power over her, because she agrees with you. You can't slut shame her if she feels no shame in being a slut. The second step after being a sexy slut is to deny the misogynistic man access to her body. Sure, she's half naked and therefore he can look at her half naked body, but he will never ever be allowed to consensually touch that body. And again, she's very vocal about her lack of consent with a man who doesn't treat her with respect. So if he does something to her and tries to victim blame her, she has proof of saying no. It's a very sad reality women sometimes face, that the only way to have agency against a deeply misogynistic man is to have something he wants but refusing to give that to him, i.e. their own bodies. If you have nothing they want, they will walk all over you and treat you like shit, and 99% of the time, other men will not step in.

Friday

I run some errands and listened to Kesha's album called "." aka (PERIOD). It was a coherent and entertaining pop album, I enjoyed it. I'm so happy for her, for getting off the contract she was tied to with her rapist, and about starting her own label.

Browsing though my Release Radar, the following songs interest me:
- Mimi Barks - Crawling (Unless it's a Linkin Park cover - I hope not.)
- Will Ramos - Códigos
- The Dali Thundering Concept - Greenwash Me (Even though I'll probably listen to the album when it drops.)
- Knox Hill - Bang (The premiere is tonight, but I guess he released it here "early". I'll still participate in the premiere later today, the music video looks interesting, based on the teaser.)
- remynotagain ft. Ares & Turisti - Ei taas (I don't know remynotagain, Ares and Turisti are some of the biggest names in Finnish hiphop right now.)
- sKitz Kraven - Show Me
- Katarsis - Kas man be jūros
- Kanine - ELA BRINCOU COMIGO
- Oppidan x venbee - over you

The rest are from albums I've already listened to or am about to listen to at some point, from artists I don't remember that well, an artist I follow is only featuring in it, or it's a remix of a song I've already heard.

The Mimi Barks song is a Linkin Park cover. Meh. No one can compare, and therefore they shouldn't even try. RIP Chester.

Is this the same Will Ramos? I mean, it could be. But I'm not sure. Could be just a namesake, Spotify has had problems with those in the past. If this is the same Will Ramos, it's stylistically very different. Latino pop, not a hint of his metal roots.

The Dali Thundering Concept's Greenwash Me is one of the most interesting songs I've heard all year. It's metal, it's electronic, it's hiphop at times. It has unconventional time signatures, the singer is very talented (versatile, consistent and good at annunciating)...  This goes on my Metal playlist, my Rap & Hiphop playlist AND my Listen To This! playlist. Cannot wait for the album! They're quite a small band, with just over 16 000 monthly listeners, so Loudwire might not list them... Gotta keep my eyes on it in Spotify. Or if I get around to using Bandcamp more, they might be there as well...

I like the beat on Knox's Bang. The hook's catchy. There's something in the production, his voice sounds a bit weird... But then again, so does the beat. It's a choice, and not necessarily a bad one.
Also, I don't know why, but it's hard for me to make out his lyrics from the audio alone. I understand his talking just fine, but rapping... Not always. The sound quality or the mixing ain't the issue. So it must just be the accent that he has when he raps and the accents that my brain understands, not being compatible. If he includes the lyrics in the description or a pinned comment or something tonight, I'll look into those a little further, but... Otherwise, I won't bother. There's no point dissecting lyrics when I can only make out about two thirds of them.

Would rather move on to a song that's in Finnish, where I can make out 100% of the lyrics. I like Ares's style of rapping. The very staccato delivery and interesting word choices to make the song rhyme. I don't like Turisti in this song. Autotune shit. The hook's ok. The song's about rags to riches, basically. Not wanting to go back to having no money, being much happier now that they've made hit songs and money.

I think I'm getting sick of sKitz Kraven. I still think his voice suits horrorcore very well, but lyrically, it's getting repetitive. I unfollowed him. I watched the movie called Babygirl yesterday and it fucking sucks. And this song reminds me of that. The male lead could have written this song. Both sound like they're 13 and trying to be kinky and it's the most cringe shit ever.

I liked the Katarsis song, even though his voice was a bit nasally and it was a bit repetitive. It was only 2,5 minutes, so that's fine. I liked how layered the production was.

The Kanine song is different from his other songs! Others are melancholic EDM bangers, á la 2010s. This has more lyrics, more hiphop influences, it's slower and calmer.

I don't know Oppidan, but I like venbee. This doesn't do venbee's voice justice. 

In the evening, I watched the Knox music video. It was very good, I wrote a separate post about it. 

Saturday & Sunday

I didn't really listen to music, I was busy with other hobbies.