Stop Sleeping - Blueprint

I remember standing at my kitchen sink sorting through a stack of discs. Most were unopened. A few had signatures on them. But there was one. One was missing the cd jacket and in its place was a flattened marlboro red box, and scribbled in black sharpie was the phrase "Listen to nothing else".

This was back before I relied fully on the internet for finding new music. Back when I would use the front seat of my car as my to do list, slowly going through a stack of music over the course of days, weeks or months. Back when I used to listen to one album for weeks on end, not because I had nothing else to listen to, but because sometimes life is one disc.

The cd with the makeshift cover was a disc I kept in my shitty discman, and subsequently inserted into my shitty duct taped tape deck adapter, for fucking months.

The cd was 1988 from Columbus, Ohio emcee Blueprint. It ruled the spring into summer and summer into fall of 2005. I listened to little else. Nothing else put me in the pocket like 1988, and there was nothing else I could fucking listen to that could make me feel as comfortably angry at nothing in particular.

His fucking voice. His crisp dark yell of a flow. He was one of the first emcees I ever heard that I thought bodied the term "spit". His s's and plural's and his shit's, it was gripping, deliberate and fucking aimed right at my fucking face. His content was nothing I was used to hearing. He had this blunt fucking honesty about being the music geek he was, was proud to be and would continue to be.

He didn't make excuses for loving shit none of his peers did. He loved what he loved and he fucking loved living the way he lived, popularity be damned, and I fucking loved that he was doing this all himself. Him admitting he hid out in his basement bangin' out beaters and playing video games made me appreciate him as a potential friend rather than just a rapper I looked up to. (STALKER MUCH?)

I fucking loved every beat. With its DIY fuzz, and the way he walked all over every fucking rhythm like he wrote the beat to the rhyme and the rhyme to the beat simul-fucking-taneously.

I understood every fucking word. Every single story or tale or descriptive missive, Blueprint talk-rapped an even keeled, perfect metered delivery, and I was fucking giddy like a fucking white boy at a Dave Matthews concert. Blueprint has owned my fucking ears since '05, and I refuse to make excuses about not knowing his much about his catalog before April of 2005.

I fucking hated him for loving him so fucking much. I knew almost instantly that Blueprint would remain as important to me as JUICE, and Rubberoom, and Atmosphere, and Sarcasm from Them Badd Apples, and Nas. But while in the category of one of my favorite fucking rappers ever, he was different somehow.

As a guitar player I noticed something different in Blueprint's lyrical approach. He wasn't writing over beats like a regular rappy rapper does by keeping shit to a specific count, meter or bar length, no, he was fucking riffing like a fucking guitar player finds his space inside of a time signature. I thought I heard glimpses of it in the Electric Purgatory discs with Illogic, like his verse on the track Cold Out Here to be specific. He wasn't rapping like other rappers.

And then he goes and fucking does this:

Blueprint is a fucking disgusting motherfucking muthafucker.

Everyone flick off your screens if you feel me.

After listening to Dream Big a good 88 times in a fucking row, I knew dude was putting together his lyrics like a musician tacks together a rhythm and a melody over a beat and a mood. He's fucking songwriting while other muthafuckers are just rapping.

I MEAN THE muthafucker JUST fucking FLIPPED AN ENTIRE EP OF THE WHO TRACKS AND IT NOT ONLY DIDN'T fucking SUCK, IT WAS fucking MAGICALLY DELICIOUS GODTHEFuckDAMNIT. I always said it was bound to happen, SOMEBODY had to sample The Who, but it was going to be a slippery slope and it could really fucking suck ass or it would fucking make me slam a fucking hot coffee into my forehead like a Molson Ice when I was 19.

Fuck Blueprint. I can't help but want to fucking shove him in my pocket so no one else gets to listen to him but me. Fuck everyone.

And then his latest Adventures In Counter Culture drops last spring.

AiCC fucking proves my initial theory that dude isn't writing fucking rap music. Dude's writing fucking music and over it, he just so happens to be fucking rapping better than most rappers rapping like regular rappers who ain't have the throat or delivery of dude. It's fucking baffling. Electro indie introspection, stabbed in the gut with a sonic steroid hip hop injection, Blueprint bloops and blorps his fucking autotuned futuristic rap-singing ass through tracks I can only describe as amazeballs.

Whether you listen closely or just happen to notice what's on the hifi, Blueprint gets fucking better and fucking better and fucking better with every fucking release. But maybe he's not really getting better, maybe he's just starting to understand how to harness the technology he's noodling with, and maybe this is just the fucking way Blueprint is.

To sum this shit up: all Blueprint makes me want to do is buy thin t-shirts so I can fucking rip them off all the fucking time.

And to quote the great Blueprint just because I had it playing while I shaved my own amazeballs this morning:

I thought it was gunshots, the way my Boombox knocked...