Lil B - Motivation

I'm mainly on this for the instrumental, courtesy of Clams Casino. It's a big deal.

Lil B does his line in self-aggrandizing hyperbole on the top.

But that instrumental's a Gregorian chant for hip-hop.

Clams Casino - All I Need

You might never have heard of Clams Casino, but you've heard his music.

This song is none other than the beat he made for Soulja Boy. Here it's been retrofitted (minus the dire lyrics) with scenes of Penelope Cruz in Volver.

It's dreamy, transcendent, and produced by an oh-so-modern stochastic sampling process (which is less pretentious than it sounds). You can get the whole mixtape full of goodies on free download. It's a good thing.

Clams Casino - Cold War (Janelle Monae Refit)

I've already explained how much I love Janelle Monae, and most specifically her song Cold War. Clams Casino, who has his fingers on the buttons for Lil B and Soulja Boy, amongst others, has also seen the light, and has done something beautiful with it.

Clams makes beats for rappers, so he's taken off the frenetic drum-n-bass beat, and got something quieter and slower ticking along in the background, with a once-a-bar boom to give us some landmarks. There's a great interview with him about it here.

This is stripped-down production at its best: an instrumental so good that it doesn't even need a vocal. Lil B put something on it. He's got some good lines ("growing up we were dying to live, now we're living to die") but overall he's just, erm, not that great? I love his voice: the sound quality on the vocal's a bit rubbish but you can still hear how good his voice sounds, a bass gutteral growl. But he just has nothing to say - he must say "Lil B" eight times in this. Ah well, enjoy the instrumental!

You can download Clams Casino's whole mixtape of instrumentals via Potholes in My Blog

Clams Casino - Cold War by mantequilla