A film about Northwest hip-hop from

2020 Succs!

Taylor Hart from West Coast cannabis hip-hop site Respect My Region selected 2020 Succs! as one of the very best Northwest albums from 2020, saying:

For me, Macntaj gets the award for best COVID-themed song with “I Hope You Cough” off of his album 2020 Succs!. The brilliance of just that song, to me, is enough to land this album in my top 24. Even if the rest of the album sucked (it doesn’t) I’d probably still put it on my list simply because I laugh so hard when I hear “I’m finna be at your house. I’m finna sneeze in your mouth. I’m gonna drink up all your juice, and take a leak on the couch.”

Lucky for us, Macntaj is no one-hit-wonder. He’s the type of artist who keeps you on your toes. There’s a distinct quality to the tone of his voice that is easy to recognize. Yet, he can change it up from time to time to where you might question if another rapper just hopped on the track mid-verse. One of my favorite qualities, though, is Macntaj’s masterful and dynamic delivery. Throughout the entirety of 2020 Succs!, he gives us a wide variety of different styles that keeps things spicy all the way to the end.

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A film about Northwest hip-hop from

NEWCOMER

This 82-minute feature film is an intimate introduction to Seattle’s vibrant hip-hop underground. It was assembled from hundreds of tiny performance clips—shot for Instagram—into a single, continuous concert mosaic, and stars 93 of the top hip-hop artists from The Town.

Here’s how KEXP describes it in their review: “NEWCOMER stretches the idea of the concert film to an artistic extreme: Sub-minute snippets artfully arranged to resemble a field recording of Seattle’s rap scene, the pieces fractured and pieced back together in a truly engrossing way. The narrative flows through venues like Barboza, Cha Cha Lounge, Vermillion, Lo-Fi, the Showbox, the Crocodile, and dozens more. It’s Khris P pouring Rainier into a Solo cup while he raps; bodies packed into regional landmark ETC Tacoma; SassyBlack improvising a song urging concertgoers to buy her merch; the delightfully awkward dance moves of white people in KEXP’s Gathering Space; Chong the Nomad beatboxing and playing harmonica simultaneously; Bruce Leroy bullying a beat next to the clothing racks at All-Star Vintage; Specswizard rhyming about his first time performing in front of a crowd while standing before The Dark Crystal playing on a projection screen. The film is about the moments we experience—as lovers of live performance—just as much as the performances themselves.”

NEWCOMER was directed by Gary Campbell and was an official selection at the 2020 New York Hip-Hop Film Festival and the 2020 Golden Sneakers International Hip-Hop Film Festival in Hamburg, Germany. Throughout November 2020, the film screened for four weeks on the Northwest Film Forum theatrical screening site in honor of Hip-Hop History Month.

You can watch the full movie below.

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A film about Northwest hip-hop from

Trappy Gilmore

Hmmm... There’s not a lot of information about this record in the museum encyclopedia.

This TOWN LOVE website was created in 2021 as a pandemic-era project. It was a volunteer-led effort to help document and celebrate the complete history of Northwest hip-hop between the years 1981 and 2020. This public archive we built is now available for free online for everyone to read and explore.

If you'd like to contribute, and you know something about this particular record--a story, a memory, or a favorite lyric--please email us a short write-up, and we’ll add your thoughts to the archive when we get the chance.

Thanks for your help in preserving the history of our scene!

Did we get it wrong? It happens. Send us an email and let's get it corrected right away!

A film about Northwest hip-hop from

Trappy Gilmore 2

Hmmm... There’s not a lot of information about this record in the museum encyclopedia.

This TOWN LOVE website was created in 2021 as a pandemic-era project. It was a volunteer-led effort to help document and celebrate the complete history of Northwest hip-hop between the years 1981 and 2020. This public archive we built is now available for free online for everyone to read and explore.

If you'd like to contribute, and you know something about this particular record--a story, a memory, or a favorite lyric--please email us a short write-up, and we’ll add your thoughts to the archive when we get the chance.

Thanks for your help in preserving the history of our scene!

Did we get it wrong? It happens. Send us an email and let's get it corrected right away!

A film about Northwest hip-hop from

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Omni EP

Regardless of what I write here, you won’t be ready for the otherworldly, dimension-bending, gothic, and Gregorian opening of “War Ready,” the first track off of the newly-released Omni EP, from Macntaj and Levitate. This project fuses rap with industrial EDM, producing four songs of pure adrenaline. Imagine the noise of hip-hop hard drive failure, of succumbing to the latest hacker virus, blended in a smoothie with the twisted metal and shattered glass of car crashes. I was riveted in my chair, taking in one of the most spectacular sonic spectacles of the year. The metal-plate vocals on “Lightwaves remix” emerge from the machines, reaching sci-fi sentience before Raz Simone and Gunplay bring down a digital thunderstorm. Holy cow. My brain is broken. I love discovering music that sounds this fresh.

Did we get it wrong? It happens. Send us an email and let's get it corrected right away!