video review: 'city as school' by uncommon nasa & kount fif

Honestly, not a great project, but I still feel that I was expecting something different out of this and couldn't quite square away what we got. Eh, it happens.

Anyway, Earl is up next, along with (sigh) Billboard BREAKDOWN - stay tuned!

album review: 'city as school' by uncommon nasa & kount fif

So I've advertised this a bit on Twitter, but here we go: a full week ahead where my primary focus is underground hip-hop, and I'm excited for it - I've got a lot in my backlog, both in recent releases and acts who have waited too long, let's get into it!

And let's start with one of the projects for whom I actually haven't seen a ton of buzz: a new album from New York veteran Uncommon Nasa who built his career as an engineer within Def Jux in the 2000s, but who you might be more familiar with cutting a swathe through the underground this decade as both producer and rapper with a set of tangled, dense, but highly rewarding albums. He came onto many folks' radar with New York Telephone in 2014, but won me over convincingly with Halfway in 2015 and Written At Night in 2017, two of the best albums of their respective years, along with a pretty solid project in 2016 with Short Fuze called Autonomy Music that I'd argue holds up pretty damn well to this day. But you'd be forgiven for thinking that he's seemed a little quiet the past few years... and there's where I'd argue you might be misinformed, because not only did he release a collection of short stories and poetry in 2018, he also produced a pretty hard left-field project with Last Sons this year called Chekhov's Gun, which I also reviewed and it also kicked a lot of ass! But I knew it would only be a matter of time before Nasa got behind the mic again for another project, so on Halloween last week he released a project produced by Kount Fif and featured many of his regular collaborators, including Short Fuze, Guilty Simpson, Last Sons, and more. Seemed to be a pretty agreeable release for the underground, even if it seemed like the buzz was rather muted... but screw it, I wanted to cover it, so what did we get from City As School?