Flying Lotus

One Liner:  Outlandishly weird beats

Poster Position: 8

Thoughts: I guess the C3 folks just wanted to group all of the offbeat rap-ish stuff onto one line in their poster, so they signed up Tory Lanez, this guy, Anderson.Paak, and MUZZYONNABEEHO! to star on the 8th line.  Right on.  This is a guy named Steven Ellison, who makes trippy electronic beats.  I remember listening to his album from last year, called You're Dead!, but I apparently never reviewed it for this blog.

He has a bunch of albums available on Spotify, some of which might just be long EPs, but it appears that his full albums are Los Angeles (2008), Cosmogramma (2010), Until the Quiet Comes (2012), and You're Dead (2015).  For the most part, these are instrumental freakouts, although some of them have a cameo appearance by a singer or rapper.

I have no clue who the target audience is for this music, but I can tell you right now that it ain't me.  It is kind of aggressively atypical, the kind of thing where you start to feel a groove and then it purposefully devolves and goes a completely different way into a different time signature or set of sounds.  Like a modern jazz artists who is using samples and beats rather than a trumpet.  The most popular tracks are those that either feature famous cameos (Kendrick Lamar or Snoop) or actually sound like tight ass beats that should be rapped over.  #1 is the Kendrick Lamar track, called "Never Catch Me," which has 8.5 million listens.

This even sounds like something that would have been on To Pimp a Butterfly, with that odd time signature and piano riff that never quite matches up perfectly to the beat.  And then the second most popular track (7.4 million) is a good beat, that comes from the Cosmogramma album, called "Zodiac Shit."

I bet that video makes you want to die if you have taken drugs.  Good lord, man.  But that is kind of a tight beat that would work really well if a rapper wanted to take it over and jam it out.  But after listening to the rest of these albums, I'll say that I don't care to hear this music anymore.

And then, just because its there, here is a short film called FUCKKKYOUUU that features Flying Lotus.

Terrifying.  And sexual.  And weird as hell.  With no appreciable attempt at making music involved (unless screaming is your style of music).  I do not plan on seeing this guy's show.