This 3 For 10 roundup comes from a non existant magical mixtape boutique. A New Age store where the clerks provide you with mixtapes based purely on emotion. It would be some wild conceptual shit, like holistic healing with crystals, but the crystals are mixtapes about cocaine distribution.

If you’re looking to feel cold and emotionless in your core we have a nice joint from Fred The Godson to numb you to the chaos of life. If you want to escape the problems of the world and relax into a world of absurd possibility we’ve got Riff Raff chopped up. Maybe you desire to elevate your spirit to a plane of lush warmth relaxation, for that we’ve got a new instrumental joint from Dirtybird B. All of that spiritual therapy for the price of free ninety nine and some karmic retribution. Who wants to go half on a pop-up shop? The New York Times will definitely cover this shit.

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Fred The Godson – City of God (2011) [Gangsta Grillz] // Grade: C+

If you’re the type of cat that’s wild concerned with bringing New York rap back in its 1995 incarnation you’re probably more than familiar with Fred The Godson. You also probably don’t read this blog and have spent most of this global warming induced mild summer lamenting how you haven’t had a chance to wear your new Timbs. For the rest of the world, Fred may be a kind of a hard sell. Dude kinda sounds like Jim Jones, raps like Fabolous and looks like a giant infant with braids.

However, his recent City Of God tape with DJ Drama gives us a couple of reasons to check this dude, who might be a lost member of the Bebe’s Kids tribe. Dude comes through as a above average NY coke rapper once you cull out all the generic NY club tracks and shitty ballads. City of God gives us about 10 songs that feature Fred going in over some quality production that ranges from Lex Luger sound alikes to classic boom bap. On this tape dude sounds best over moody minimalist cocaine synth pieces. “Doves” with Pusha T features dudes rapping surprisingly about cocaine, but the combination of the cold track and Fred’s detached delivery sounds entirely on point for the remorseless dealer character he cultivates.

“How You Don’t Know Me” brings back Giorgio Moroder circa Scarface synths while Fred talks a bunch of shit. The best parts of this tape sound like a concept album about Nino Brown thinking about his life right before that old dude shot him in New Jack City. If Fred made that album he could easily carve out a lane for himself in the sea of Nautica and Northface rappers.

Download Fred The Godson’s City of God (Click Here)

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Riff Raff – Rap Game Larry Bird (2012) [SODMG] // Grade: B-

Sometimes screwing music works because you get a chance to really hear the intricacies of the song or pickup lyrics that you might’ve normally missed. In those instances the screw allows you to dissect the soundscape and let it wash over you. This is not one of those times. Rap Game Larry Bird is not an album that’s exceptionally deep in any way, the music is generally pretty sparse and the lyrics are absurdist rants from a dude who calls himself  “the white Gucci Mane.”

While Riff Raff has a way to go before he reaches Gucci’s level of insanity, his brand of simple rhyming and bizarre boasts “I done shook dice with Larry Bird in Barcelona” are exactly the type of rap that sounds amazing chopped up into a hypnotic mix. While Riff Raff may never get a XXL rating on anything he ever releases this album is leading the race in “best album to get high to and play Mario Kart for 5 hours” award.

Download Riff Raff’s Rap Game Larry Bird (Click Here)

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Dirtybird B – Hard Work In Paradise (2012) [Moon Is Half Records] // Grade: B-

Instrumental hip hop feels like it should come entirely from California. Dudes out there have giant beach,es beautiful weather, great tacos and women with tans all year long, so it makes sense when they make albums that sounds like low level psychedelic dreams. That’s the reality of California living if I’m to believe the various documentaries of the state I’ve seen (Friday, Saved By The Bell, Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and The OC).

It comes as no surprise then, that the new album from producer Dirtybird B is the sort of chilled out head nodding experience that you could imagine yourself listening to on your first night at a beach bonfire after moving to LA from Brooklyn. Headphones turned up, relaxing in a light jacket in March, thinking about the possibilities of a new city while thinking “fuck winter.”  Hard Work In Paradise is very reminiscent of the more chilled out Prefuse 73 productions or even a more rare joint like the first Dosh album. Really chill compositions that allow your mind to wander and go to beautiful places.

Download Dirtybird B’s Hard Word In Paradise (Click Here)

Damaged 5-Panel Cap ($36)

Yesterday I took my girlfriend to eat at this place where Greenpoint Coffee House used to be and we got stabbed in the guts with diarrhea pangs before we had even made it the three blocks back to my apartment. I let her use the bathroom first but her promises that she would be quick were a lie and I had to poop in a grocery bag that I held between my legs in the kitchen. It was a surprisingly neat procedure and feces didn’t spray all over the place like a cartoon. It did smell pretty awful though. Sometimes you can forget how much shitting into water can mask the stench of what your insides smell like. Christ.

So I placed my crapsack on the fire escape and washed my hands. When she came out I admitted that I’d shit in a bag. She went over to the fire escape to see and as she did so I held her mouth shut with my hand so that she would have no option but to breathe through her nose, fully absorbing the horror that had once dwelled inside me. She got pretty violent after that.

One thing you don’t realize about blumpkins until you get one is that the real humiliation isn’t that the lady is sucking your dick while you’re on the toilet but that she can only breathe through her nose while her face is right next to the toilet.

I had one of those glass encased showers at an old apartment and I liked to fart in the shower with a different girlfriend and she would scream and claw at the glass walls of the shower. I referred to this as my concentration camp trick.

Why is it such a wonderful thing to make your significant other smell your shit? I’m not some sort of shitophile, I think I’m just a bully. I guess this is just a fun form of abuse that doesn’t leave a mark for me. I guess I’m just damaged.

Anyway this hat is a five panel cap that will fit anybody.

Мишка
350 Broadway
Brooklyn, NY
718-388-1725
—
Мишка LA
1547 Echo Park Ave
Los Angeles, CA
213-536-4234

Puzzle Box T-Shirt ($32.00)

The other day my dad called me up and said,”You want to know something creepy?” I said that I wouldn’t know until he told me so he did. He told me that he read one of my recent Steady Peddlin’ posts and that Marie McCray , my favorite porn actress, was his favorite porn actress too. I told him that it was indeed pretty creepy. Then we described how beautiful her figure and face were. She really looks amazing. Some porn actresses are just like sex hogs but Marie is this graceful, delicate woman. We just rattled off all the things we liked about her.

A day after that I was Facebook chatting with Andy Animal from the Stalkers. He said,”Hey, you wanna see something creepy?” I told him I wouldn’t know until after I’d seen it so he might as well show it to me. It was the listing for the house that was built on top of the razed land where John Wayne Gacy’s house had once been. John Wayne Gacy is guessed to have raped and killed about thirty-three teenage boys and then buried their bodies in trenches he dug in his crawl space. He was also a community leader and was photographed shaking hands and being commended by Rosalyn Carter. During the excavation of the bodies from his house they dismantled the house of horrors and it’s remained a vacant lot that collected trash until a year or two ago. They’ve official changed the house number by two digits but it’s still built on top of Earth that absorbed the blood of people who died some of the worst deaths imaginable. Would you live in Gacy’s house? I don’t think I believe in the supernatural but I still wouldn’t live there. It would be a cool location for a Мишка store though unless the store turned into some sort of Hellraiser torture world. Within these walls the unholy could be unleashed. Or maybe you just buy this shirt.

Мишка
350 Broadway
Brooklyn, NY
718-388-1725
—
Мишка LA
1547 Echo Park Ave
Los Angeles, CA
213-536-4234

It’s fall now, which means young bols gotta go back to school and older heads mourn the acceptable display of near nudity that the summer brings in spades. It’s a rough time for everyone. Heads with Seasonal Affective Disorder fin to start feeling real bad on a regular basis as the days get shorter. But, on the plus side, if you get a date with a shorty its way easier to dress to impress, now that you don’t have to worry about sweating through your kufi. So, to try and lighten the mood we got some new mixtapes for y’all to rock to.

There’s some shit that sounds like outer space, which is great for y’all environmentally sensitive types to escape to. We got some remixed jams from the summer that’ll be great when you’re trying to look like wealth for a date. And last but not least we got some joints that’s perfect to rock while you walk the hallways of school and try to work on your nonchalant swag.

Jams for every situation over here…

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Nacho Picasso – For the Glory (2011) [Self-Released] // Grade: A-

In the video for Outkast’s “So Fresh, So Clean” there’s a moment when they arrive at the church cum club — in full Technicolor pimp gear. They’re walking up to the spot in slow motion under a purple sky leaning so hard that they’re almost sideways. It’s possibly the best five seconds of expressionist rap videomaking ever. It’s not realistic or even a boast, it’s just a representation of feeling fly. It’s possibly the best 3 seconds of expressionist rap videomaking ever.

Sometimes when you get a super confident MC and beats that are spacey but laid back, you can get glimpses of this abstracted reality where cats wear leopard fur coats and Benjammin Franklin socks to church. Listening to Nacho Picasso you get there a bit. Maybe it’s the fact that a majority of the beats on For the Glory sound like they were made by The Dungeon Family and Tangerine Dream collaborating just cause they really like each other’s music. Maybe it’s the fact that Nacho is on point with punch lines yet still sounds entirely bored by rapping, like he’s a comedian forced to dumb down his routine to a series of fart jokes for a child’s birthday party. Dude takes overly done concepts like tattoos “Sweaters”, reading comic books “Marvels” and tough talk “Benjamin Segal” but flips them over cloudwalking beats, with a sharp but never overly showy wit. He raps that his “African chick looks kinda like Storm”, which is a high bar to reach whether you imagine Storm as Halle Berry or the white mohawked punk version of mid eighties Iman. The important thing here is that dude sounds like he’s rapping from a world where the sky is purple on a regular basis and that’s never been a bad place from rappers to come from.

Download Nacho Picasso’s For The Glory (Click Here)

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2morrow’s Victory – Good Lads (2011) [Self-Released]// Grade: B

2morrow’s Victory are some young dudes out of London making live instrument based rap. As you read that sentence, you might’ve thought  “this shit is gonna be on some Craig David meets Roots shit and that sounds terrible on so many different wavelengths even dogs hate their music”. But, the thing is this doesn’t sound like Questlove’s best  Sherlock Holmes impersonation. Instead dudes come with some quality musical chops, in the pocket drums and mood setting synths that remind you of Castlevania 3 dungeon compositions — you know, right before you meet the boss of the castle.

Their new mixtape Good Lads has seven tracks that revel real heavy in a laid back vibe without ever getting lethargic. Greg B has a flow that reminds a bit of Phife Dog from Tribe. He always sounds like he’s rapping from a place of being mildly excited and almost out of breath. Not in the way that fat dudes rapping are out of breath, more so in a way that he’s excited to get this story about “what had happened” out to you. Jams to look out for on this one include “Breaking Bar” which has some killer bass grooves and an overall feel of chillness that could easily be slipped in a DJ set right after Camp Lo’s “Luchini” and no one would bat an eye. These are definitely dudes to look out for in the future.

Download 2morrow’s Victory’s Good Lads (Click Here)

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DJ Candlestick & OG Ron C – Chop the Throne (2011) [Self-Released] // Grade: A

As you may remember, when Watch The Throne dropped a couple months ago, it was pretty underwhelming. To sum up the entire album in a sentence it felt a bit rushed and broad. Leave it to OG Ron C and DJ Candlestick to flip the album into something way more ambitious and listenable than what Ye and Jay originally did. Check how OG Ron C and Candlestick chop up “Made In America” while overlaying “Through the Wire” to draw explicit connection between Ye’s current splendor and his humble beginnings. Dudes overlay “Why I Love You” with “Jigga What” while Jay pops off with all kinds of tough talk to subtly remind you of the days when Jay didn’t have Bono’s number on speed dial.

But, it’s not all really obvious remixing that they do, “Primetime” just sounds better than the original with bunch of flanging and doubling to the beat, giving a sense of dynamics that wasn’t there before. The highlight of the tape though is the chopped up transition from “Don’t Look Down” into “Liftoff” that pulls a Kanye reference to Beyonce in the first song and turns it into a orchestral introduction that’s only fit for the reigning queen of pop music. This remix of the album did something I was pretty sure was impossible and made me actually appreciate Watch the Throne to some degree. That shit’s cray.

Download DJ Candlestick & OG Ron C’s Chop the Throne (Click Here)

Keep Watch Coaches Jacket In Cardinal ($179.00)

My favorite porn clip is of this adult performer named Marie McCray taking a shower and then her coach comes into the locker room, goes through her stuff and then confronts her while she’s showering. After a show of mock surprise she decides to let him fuck her in exchange for an A in gym I think. I usually skip past the opening of porn movies but this one I usually watch. There are some women in porn that you watch and jag it too and then there are some that you fall in love with and could see yourself in a relationship with despite them having fucked like a thousand guys or more. Could you see yourself in a relationship with your favorite adult actress and not occasionally get mad remembering the scenes where they’re so glazed with the jazz of multiple gents that they look like donuts?

So Marie McCray ends up having sex with her muscular coach for about twenty minutes in about every position. Even though I’m an adult I wonder if that’s how other people do it. I mean, I’ve had some times where we did a lot in one time but most of the sex is just one or two positions and whatever requires as little cleaning up afterwards. Are most people cumming on bitches faces EVERY time? Should I be doing that more? I feel like that’s something you can’ do the first time with a girl unless you are both really drunk.

Keep Watch Coaches Jacket In Black ($179.00)

Back to Marie Mccray. She’s this really slender redhead and I have a thing about redheads these days. She’s not the most dynamic performer but she’s got this really graceful figure and I think she looks like James Jean drawing. For some reason I get the sense that she dresses really badly when she’s not having sex on camera, like sweatpants and T-shirts she gets for free from the companies she works for.

I think I went on way too long about my inner life and my jerk off times. This coat is great for men who want to fuck lithe, red headed teenagers in large showers and get away with it. You walk into the club wearing this and all the girls will turn their heads and be thinking coyly “You’re not supposed to be in here…” Or that’s what I’m hoping for anyway.

On a side note, if Marie McCray is reading this and wants one of these coats I’d just like to say that she should look me up if she’s in New York because I can get her free clothing and I have cocaine.

Мишка
350 Broadway
Brooklyn, NY
718-388-1725
—
Мишка LA
1547 Echo Park Ave
Los Angeles, CA
213-536-4234

No Values T-Shirt ($32.00)

There’s a long and complicated backstory to this shirt’s design and that story is that we redrew the cover to Black Flag’s later period record, My War, and wrote No Values at the bottom. I hope you were able to keep up with all that. It’s a little funny that we put No Values at the bottom since No Values is one of their great early snotty songs and My War is a more “mature” album.

I don’t care what you think. I don’t care what you say. I’ve got nothing to give you, so why don’t you just go away? I’ve got no values, nothing to say. I’ve got no values, might as well blow you away.

These are the lyrics that were sung by any one of a number of Black Flag’s singers, sung in that punk irony voice that some bands were really into. Who created that way of singing? All the punks realized it was really cool to do it at once? Who can say. Maybe it’s been around forever. Maybe all of punk grew out of the mocking lilt.

Now children, I’d like to tell you about My War. The first half of the record sounds like older stuff that Black Flag had done for the most part but side two is slower and heavier. A lot of the Black Flag listeners fell off and Hank Rollins chats about people telling me they didn’t like it in Get in the Van. Like Black Flag we at Мишка are constantly evolving. Unlike Rollins we will never go to the gym.

Anyway this shit comes in Carolina Blue, Black and White. Get it in blue if you’re a purist. Get it in the other covers if you napped through the hot selling period and that’s what we still have in stock.

Мишка
350 Broadway
Brooklyn, NY
718-388-1725
—
Мишка LA
1547 Echo Park Ave
Los Angeles, CA
213-536-4234

It’s straight up summertime now. That means BBQ’s, beach time, chilling in the park catching a tan time, maybe even chilling out on a boat time if you got it like that. For all those activities you need jams to bump in the iPod, in the Jeep or on the stereo. We got you on all fronts. We’ve got heavy bass joints by Ross and Gucci that’ll inspire your drunk friends to pick fights at the beach — remember it’s mad hard to run in sand, so, pick fights with lil dudes.

There’s also abstractly introspective jams from Zeroh that’ll make you feel like Jack Kerouac, while sitting in a park writing in a notebook. Maybe for the next one, I need to find some R&B jams to turn those late night pool sessions into skinny dipping sessions. Don’t say I’m not always looking out for y’all and trying to improve your skinny dipping situation.

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Gucci Mane – It’s All Gucci (2011) [How Fly]

How is it that as Gucci Mane has grown increasingly more insane in real life (see: lightning bolt ice cream cone tattoo) his music has gotten more normal? When dude was just smoking weed in Georgia and hanging out with OJ Da Jucieman he was making some real weird shit, talking about his farts smelling like calamari and how cold penguins would be in Boston (answer not as cold as Gucci’s jewelry). Now that he’s officially bonkers though, he’s seemingly lost his edge.

It’s All Gucci has some ok songs on it compiling recent output and some “lost” songs dating back about 5 years or so, but, it’s clear that the best material is the older, weirder stuff like “Up My Alley”. One slimmer of hope is that both of the songs featuring Waka Flocka Flame from the upcoming Ferrari Boys tape their working on are pretty hot. I’m gonna assume Waka’s insanity probably has some sort of enabling effect for Gucci. Most of the newer songs have Gucci on autopilot, at worst sounding bored, at best just giving you run of the mill Gucci on an R&B feature, but, “Stoned” has Gucci shouting out Barney Rubble, reviving his long running love of cartoon characters as metaphoric inspiration.

Download It’s All Gucci (Click Here)

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Zeroh – Awful-Alterations (2011) [Blq Brd]

What would happen if you made a rapper from equal parts Sa-Ra Creative Partners melodic space age funk weirdness and Aesop Rock dense lyrical baritone? You’d probably end up with someone who sends a lot like Zeroh. Homeboy is the type of dude to make an oblique reference to Ender’s Game and The Office in one song, but can also ride a Missy Elliot sample to talk about his future wife in another.

This is the kind of tape you can throw on just to jam the beats (which are heavy on the weirdo grooves) and be entirely cool. But, don’t be surprised when you hear a nice couplet on the 37th time that you listen to a song, making you wonder “was that there the whole time?” Though awfulalterations is a short tape, considering how much is stuffed into each song via lyrics and the ever-swinging grooves, it feels a bit longer than it is — that’s what she said.

Download Awful-Alterations (Click Here)

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Rick Ross – Big Rozay (2011) [Hip Hop Is Dream]

A lil’ before Gucci Mane’s last album Mr. Zone 6 dropped he put out a mixtape, simply called Buy My Album. Gucci, ever the businessman, made it explicitly clear that his mixtapes serve as loss leaders for his albums. With that plan in mind we get Rick Ross’ new tape Big Rozay, a short tape that exists essentially to advertise for the Self-Made album his Maybach Music Group put out recently. Appropriately there’s the expected inclusion of lead singles like “Pandemonium” and “By Any Means” from that album and they are appropriately hard-as-fuck, but, the real draw here is the first four songs on the tape.

The first four tracks work as a concentrated dosage of dude’s stadium coke rap product. Where you might’ve thought “B.M.F “or “Walking on Water” saw Ross as huge sounding as he could get, this tape says “fuck that” and has dude rapping straight over a opera stabs for “Intro (Rozay)” on some regal overture shit. There’s “Git Paid” which sounds a lil bit like 2002 El-P making a trunk rattler with his distorted synths. “Na Wut” follows suit with a Lex Luger beat that sounds like it was created exclusively for dudes to create Best-Lebron-Dunks-of-2011 videos to. It’s all big shit talking, heavy bass and fast high hats, Ross is from Miami, the Heat are from Miami it makes sense. Yet, the naysayers among us would say “didn’t the heat get eliminated in the finals?” Ardent Ross fans realize that the reality of the finals lost isn’t important because Lebron had tons of sick dunks. We’re talking bombast over reality here.  This is, of course, Rick Ross we’re talking about.

Download Big Rozay (Click Here)