#fetty-wap

#fetty-wap

Originally released in June 2004, To the 5 Boroughs is the Beastie's tribute to their hometown, reflecting on the aftermath of the September 11th attacks. Debuting at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, the album earned a Grammy nomination for Best Rap Album. In addition to the Hot 100 hit "Ch-Check It Out," the LP contains the heartfelt "An Open Letter to NYC."

If someone was to come into this room right now and pop you and me in the head and kill us, when we turned around, what would we see? Would we see the devil sittin' there in that seat ready to blow our head off, or would we see a regular motherfucker?

When he's not making proggy folk as a solo artist, Richard Dawson gets his skronk on as part of proggy new-wave art-rock group Hen Ogledd. Despite my attempts to do so in the previous sentence, the band are hard to succinctly describe: they can pivot from warm synthpop to mossy faerie folk to baggy Manchester shuffle beats to dense prog and even flashes of hip hop. Hen Ogledd are weird, but also welcoming.

"Many found the music offensive, the dancing objectionable, and the popularity of both with young people verging on a mental health crisis." So writes music historian Susan C. Cook about ragtime, the heavily syncopated ancestor of jazz that arose in the late 1800s. Like all things, ragtime's subversiveness faded over time, and, a century later, the works of Scott Joplin and other practitioners had been relegated to carnivals and fairs, their jaunty piano melodies now evoking quaint notions of old-timey fun.

2026 continues to get off to an exciting start musically, and this week gave us the first Arctic Monkeys song in four years plus album announcements from Courtney Barnett, James Blake, Snail Mail, and a handful of others. We talked about all that and more on today's episode of BV Weekly, on which we also talked about last week's A$AP Rocky album, Pitchfork's new user reviews, and more.