BassDress Blog

First of all, please excuse the ‘primary school styled’ title, but I wanted to make my subject very clear.  I need people to know that M.Sayyid (aka M. Sayyid, Sayyid Airborn, Maurice Diamond) is, at this moment in time, the only contemporary emcee worth paying attention to.  Why?

Well let me explain…

You see, everything M. Sayyid does feels genuine, it has an honesty to it which seems to be missing right now from hip-hop.  His recordings have a raw, demo quality to them, which just makes them sound so dame unique.  Like Sayyid sits down, make some tracks, spits what he wants, then releases them.  There’s no middle man, no marketing force, and no record label I can see.  It’s all done straight from Sayyid to the listener.

In a city of dignitaries,
blue chip stock, murder rate, Blackberry
I switch lanes, sick things get carried,
out the trunk, through the air that you hear rarely.

What I also revel in, in a twisted sort of way, is the obscurity of his releases.  I’m probably one of his biggest fans, and yet, I have no idea when he’s going to drop something new – or even what it will be.  This is what makes them feel special.  Every track is a lucky find, something that few other people have heard or will hear.  His Electric Arms mixtape was a total surprise, and even after it’s release, it was a nightmare to get a hold of due to it’s weird release schedule and collection of broken and invalid links.  But was it worth the trouble?  Hell yes.  You just need to hear Rev. Airborn Churched Up to know that.

M Dot, he will not drop till his knees chop.
Knees chop? Then he pop up 'cause his sleeves lock.
Unbelieve how the got them things out his Caeser,
over seas, swaying like them trees in Ibiza.

Yes, I know Biggie, Nas, Immortal Technique, Tupac, R.A. The Rugged Man (whom now sucks btw) are all great rappers and well deserving of their place in history for what they achieved and the advancements they made.  But now, they all have idiotic followers and fan bases, and huge record labels pushing them into the mainstream.  They have become impossible to escape – I can turn on the radio and hear a Nas joint now – and to me, that takes a lot of magic way from it.  Instead of having to seek it out, it’s being forced down our throats, with a marketing strategy and production gloss that only serves to strip everything of soul, intent and cache.

Hell, I even used to listen to Jurassic 5 thinking that this was as close as you could get to the real stuff – until it dawned on me that I had sat through three of their album which expressed nothing but how they were “true hip-hop” and “real emcees”.  Rapping about how you’re a great rapper, does not make you a great rapper.  Rapping about how you reject the bling and drug lifestyle does not make you ‘true’, it just puts you on the other side of the fence from 50 Cent and the like.  You’re still playing to the crowd, ‘cept this time it’s not the 12 year old suburban middle class crowd, it’s the anti-12 year old suburban middle class crowd.

This really is why mixtapes are always better than official albums – the rawness, under produced, fresh stylized verses the over produced, over though, processed ‘product’  But that’s another argument.  Go listen to M. Sayyid.