Yelawolf, G-Side, G-Mane and DJ Burnone
YELAWOLF
http://www.myspace.com/yelawolf
For those that weren't in the know, Yelawolf pretty much fell out of thin air when he dropped his seminal mixtape Trunk Muzik last year. Though he released his debut album, Creekwater, in 2005 and signed a deal with Ghet-O-Vision Ent. in 2007, Yelawolf didn't really see much mainstream success until then. Having released only a few mixtapes beforeTrunk Muzik, the Alabama native heated up the internet during the months prior, releasing a music video with Dipset's Juelz Santana for their collaboration Mixin Up the Medicine (Remix) and hopping on tracks with Raekwon and UGK's Bun B. Not your typical emcee to get some major co-signs, the greasy, growling rapper made a name so quickly for himself that Trunk Muzik could have been swept under the digital rug but instead, it snaked across the internet like a Southern virus, with blogs and mags touting their newfound love for this long-haired emcee on almost a daily basis.
On the mixtape, the rural white Alabama rapper comes off like the result of some mad-scientist experiment: If, say, you cloned one of those syllabically over-generous Anticon rappers and raised him in the deep South, injecting a twang and a tangible MJG influence into the twisty all-consonants yammer that's ruled the nerd-rap underground for the past decade. But that description isn't quite fair to Yelawolf, a young industry veteran who already has a few mixtapes to his credit and who's improved at an alarming rate. For one thing, he's evolved into a genuinely strong rapper, dipping and weaving through beats with the confident rhythmic command that his nerdy Northern counterparts rarely manage. And for another, he takes obvious joy in drawing up vivid images.
Hip-hop hasn't ever quite seen anyone like YelaWolf, but much more importantly, they haven't heard anything like the man either. It's not every day that a rapper can label his style as a mix between Outkast and Lynard Skynard, and it's an accurate description, but that's exactly the case for the Alabama native. A lean rapper with a penchant for combining thickly drawled Southern slang with automatic weapon fast rhymes, Yela is fearlessly determined to break into hip-hop's often cloistered ranks, as evidenced by the force of Trunk Muzik. It shows that Yelawolf is a powerful new rap voice, one that draws from all over the map without sounding much like anyone else.
G-SIDE
http://www.myspace.com/gside74
G-Side, the rap duo of Yung Clova and ST 2Lettaz from Huntsville, a mid-sized city that has produced more than its share of great and buzzed-about rappers lately, including Paper Route Gangstaz, Jackie Chain, 6TreG, and Kristmas. The BlockBeataz production crew has given the city's rap scene its own sound: a woozy, synth-based, bottom-heavy crawl that treats big-room trance the way OutKast and UGK records used to treat 70s soul. G-Side might be the perfect complement to BlockBeataz' glimmering funk. Both ST and Clova are warm, conversational rappers who talk about drug-dealing histories and future ambitions with grace and perspective.Together with BlockBeataz, Clove and ST make supremely satisfying album-length statements like the 2008 LP Starshipz & Rocketz and the recent Huntsville International. The latter is more a free internet album album than a mixtape; both members simply call it a "project". It's loosely built around a theme of travel, of the duo's joy in seeing their music make its way around the world. Between songs, various European DJs and bloggers show up to say nice things about the duo. But Clova and ST have never been to Europe; they'll embark on their first European tour this spring. Later this year, they hope to release another album, The One, on the local label SlowMotionSoundz.
