Song of the New Year-See You Down by King Chip

by Dan-O

I would like to present King Chip with The Pretty Tony award for hidden gems. Pretty Tony is easily the second best solo album Ghostface Killah ever produced (I love me some Fishscale guys I’m just saying), the problem was he produced it at a time when Def Jam first forgot how to market rap music. When I saw it in my local record store (yes we used to have local record stores when I was young) I thought they were stocking bootleg mixtape compilations. It still stands as one of the truly perfect slept on non-limelight albums.

Likewise, Chips new album Clevelafornia arrived to a literal anti-buzz. Die hard fans of Chip (I am probably pretty close at this point) were tweeting things like “Chip has an album?!” He does and it’s the first important one of 2016. I’m not going to start trashing his label for not pushing him; Chip must be a marketing challenge. He doesn’t have a professorial teaching angle, not an honest to god gangsta rapper with a spellbinding flow. His voice is so gruff you can lose track of how brilliant he is with chorus’s. Every hook on Clevelafornia is proper. I love this song because as direct as it is about the culture of negativity that surrounds public figures it doesn’t wallow at all. This is still an anthem, one that plays in Chip’s head at award shows when his name is called and everyone wants to see him fall on his face. This song is in his mind playing, keeping his feet steady.

Don’t forget about Chip. Don’t sleep on something different when we as an audience spend so much time complaining about the people who sound the same.

Stream the song below:

http://www.hiphopengine.com/tracks/king-chip-see-you-down