Today, for the first time in two months, a Monday rolled around with no new "Good Friday" track from Kanye West's unbelievably dope and successful series. Although he says he may start it up again, I thought there was no better time to take a look back at the audio journey that's kept up all checking Kanye's site as soon as we wake up Saturday morning. So with no further ado, I proudly present every track from "Good Fridays".
First impressions matter, so in no particular order here are my first impressions of Kanye's latest "Good Sometime After Thursdays" series, "Chain Heavy". For example, that beat's nice, but it's not nearly as complex as past production. (The beat was made by Q-Tip, not Kanye. Tip also says there's a lot more coming, possible even on Jay and Ye's collab album "Watch the Throne". Oh hells yeah.) Listen and download...
in the midst of all my beat-making pondering, Ye went and dropped "Looking for Trouble", a record that's clearly intended to be first and foremost meant to showcase lyricism. Mission accomplished. Pusha T crushes his verse, Kanye comes through with some damn good punchlines and CyHi continues to impress. But it's the work of Big Sean and J. Cole that will have people talking. Listen and download....
This new "Good Friday" joint is so dope it's giving me Tourettes: Holy sh*t balls f**k godd*mn "The Joy" is incredible. So incredible in fact, that I'm not even going to bring up Kid Cudi's non-performance. Instead, let's recognize that 99% of the rappers in the game would kill their grandmothers to put out a record like this, and Kanye did it for free in his spare time. The man's just on a different level. Listen and download...
Call me crazy, but I think Kanye West may finally have learned to let go; on his latest G.O.O.D. Fridays leak, the hip-hop megastar takes a new approach to the familiar breakup theme, telling the girl he loves “Don’t Look Down” as she rises, phoenix-like, from the ashes of their failed relationship. In addition to revisiting the subject matter of his last full-length, West employs Swizzy (and The Individualz) to refine the 808s sound here, flipping a mournful piano-brass-synth arrangement into something of a hip-hop funeral march with the help of some rolling snares. Listen and download...
I've been reminded of two things throughout Kanye West's incredibly successful and influential "Good Friday" series. One, he's still a d-bag. Two, he's a hip-hop genius. (Note, those two things are probably related.) Even when he's clearly just f**king around in his spare time Yeezy makes doper music than 99% of the popular. Of course I'm talking about this week's offering, "Take One for the Team". Listen and download...
So Kanye cheated a little bit on this week's"Good Friday", so what? I mean, I would definitely be a little pissed if Kanye pulled out some two-year-old joint featuring him, Swizzy, Tony Yayo and 117 other dudes, but this "Don't Stop"? This shit is, pardon my language, so motherfucking dope I could care less how old it is. Listen and download...
True story. Kanye was dead set against dropping a new Good Friday track after last week's leak fiasco, but then late Friday night he read my article and was like, "Yeah, Nathan S. is totally right. Stopping Good Fridays would only hurt me much more than it hurts the leakers.' And boom, just like that, we get a new track, "Christian Dior Denim Flow". See more...
Another Monday, another recap of the madness that went down Friday night via Kanye West's ongoing Good Friday series. This week we get the darkly tuned, guest feature heavy new cut "So Appalled", featuring verses from Ye, Jay, Swizz (kind of), Pusha T, CyHi Da Prynce and RZA (kind of). We've got a lot of ground to cover here. We'll have to break it down outline style. Listen and download...
Each week we will send you a recap of our top stories, downloads, and videos.