The Iceberg is the follow-up to last year’s instrumental The Odd Tape and a small EP he released last year called Alwasta. But if you ask me, it’s the first followup to The Good Fight, one of my favourite hip hop records of 2015. “Prolific”, clearly, barely begins to describe Oddisee’s frequent output.

This time around, Oddisee has a lot more to say. Oddisee is a great emcee, but his production has often overshadowed his vocal work for me. His voice often takes a backseat to the instrumentation. (The Odd Tape was the maturation of that style; it was completely instrumental and, of course, excellent.) On The Iceberg, Oddisee’s voice is clearer than it’s ever been.

And he has a lot to say. About “Things” (the lead single) that are bringing him down, politics, race, religion — it goes on. Oddisee isn’t shy. “You Grew Up” is an outstanding song about immigration and racial tension in America. “Rain Dance” is a song about Oddisee’s musical and financial journey — but it’s also a tremendous beat.

And therein lies the difference between The Iceberg and every other Oddisee record. Odd has always been a lyrical fellow; he’s an incredible rapper and a gifted writer. But with his voice sharing equal responsibility with the instruments, it sounds like what he’s saying is more important than ever.

Oddisee is one of the most conscious rappers out there, and The Iceberg sees him growing even more conscious and self-aware. That’s a good thing. In 2017, we need more voices like Oddisee.

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Corbin told me R & R was six years in the making, and put together entirely digitally over two countries in that time (Corbin is Canadian and Harmon is from Tennessee). As life changed for both rappers, so too did the record. Corbin and Harmon met each other at Flavor Fest in Tampa in 2010, and immediately knew they wanted to work together.

So this collaboration began in an effort to work long distance, put it together, and get it done. Six years later, after a number of highs and lows, the collaboration is over. There’s no chance you’ll see these guys tour together — the logistics won’t work — but making the project was a victory for the two family men.

And it’s a tremendous record. It might have taken six years to come together, but it doesn’t sound like it took that long. There are no signs of gestation anywhere.

More importantly, these two sound great together. They’re both great rappers with positive outlooks on life, and it’s refreshing to hear rappers who are focused on positivity.

In one telling moment on “Real Thugs” (my favourite track on the record), the duo samples Count Bass D. They turn the rapper’s one-off line “Real thugs don’t rap” into a fantastic, honest chorus. “Real Thugs” is one of those songs that works because of its reference to vintage hip hop. It strips the genre bare and naked, removes its showboating, and focuses on reality.

“Still Building” is my other favourite track on the record. The beat is great, the lyrics are clever, and the message is poignant.

I love it.

Lyrically, this is Christian hip hop. But I don’t think non-Christians would be bothered by it. If anything, this is a call for us to all get along together. It’s a reminder that we’re all humans, and that we all have to live and work together. The message is simple: we need to stand together when times get tough, and rejoice when things are good.

The whole album feels like a long period of rejoicing. There’s no negativity to be found here. These two guys are just glad to make music, and you can tell when you listen to it.

The album also packs together instrumental versions of each track, which is a great way to hear the record. The beats are definitely vintage, but they’re excellent. They sound ‘90s, but that style is still in, right? I’ve made a playlist with the instrumental tracks exclusively for work, and they make excellent music for focusing.

For a couple of independent rappers, R & R is a surprisingly strong record. It sounds indie — after all, this project spans six years and two countries — but it’s also at another level of creativity and talent. Travis Harmon and Jon Corbin have made a tremendous and positive record — and it’s nice to hear that music like this in a genre like hip hop.

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Compared to Orijin’s album, which was a purposefully short mixtape, Jon Corbin’s A New Direction feels like a carefully crafted, thematic message. Ten tracks long, Corbin told me his intent was to cover “themes like low self-esteem, ethnic identity, absentee fathers, faith, forgiveness, and putting love into practice.”

His record hits home on all of these things. Confessions of a Mixed (Up) Kid is perhaps my favourite record off the record: a catchy bass line drives the beat forward, keeping things fresh, while Corbin rhymes about his struggles growing up as a mixed race, feeling neither African American or white. And as he raps about his absentee black father and growing up exclusively with a white family, he asks for an invitation to share his struggles with you. And it feels completely authentic.

In a lot of ways, Corbin reminds me of Shad: he’s got a flawlessly tight flow, and he’s not afraid to speak his heart, but he has these old-school beats that feel as raw as his locals. Some standouts include tracks like The Prayer of a Restless Soul, Without You, and A New Direction for Jon Corbin. Great lyrical flows backed up by some fantastic beats.

He’s also got some mean guest rappers. Of course, Orijin is involved (on Life of Love), but he also features Eternia and Relic on Without You. While Jon doesn’t need anybody else to cover for him — he can do just fine on his own — he’s happy to step aside and give somebody else the spotlight.

It’s interesting to me the things that make Jon Corbin different from some of his contemporaries. I’ve heard a lot of “Christian rap,” and most of the genre is filled with either happy-go-lucky rappers who are having fun and praising God, or men who are angry and trying to figure out where God fits in their life. Jon Corbin doesn’t fit into either of those categories.

Jon Corbin has clearly had a difficult time accepting not just his race, but also his absentee father. He’s struggled to forgive. He’s struggled to make peace. It’s interesting that he doesn’t see his faith as a part of it — he sees his faith as the whole story. The music is him walking you through how he valued himself as a person when he feels nobody else did, and how he turned to God to find his value.

For non-religious listeners, Jon Corbin might be a bit much. But for the rest of us, he’s a relief compared to some of the popular hip hop on the radio. A New Direction is a fantastic album with a real sense of vision and great beats.

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Dreaming is a great example: Orijin raps out the coming return of Christ and the second coming in a way that would be energizing for those in the faith and challenging for those who are not.

That being said, it’s not all seriousness: tracks like Chill Out have a fantastic, laid-back retro vibe and have a ton of fun games and hilarious rhymes. But even when he’s being funny, Orijin is still trying to make a point about the responsibility rappers have to drop the braggadocio attitude, chill out, and get a little more honest.

Most of Orijin’s music lives that as a mantra. It’s not just his vocal approach, but also his beats: almost every one of Orijin’s tracks is delightfully old-school. Catch ’Em All, Don’t Wanna Know, and Last Minute all have these wicked old-school beats that sound like something RJD2 would have dropped as a part of Soul Position.

Re:Percussions is also a refinement of Orijin’s talent: he’s clearly stronger as a rapper, with a better sense of flow and lyrics that have a more clever sense of rhyme and rhythm before. It’s a mixtape that does everything right and little wrong: Re:Percussions is short and easily digestible, while still offering a lot of depth — and a natural progression of Orijin’s skills.

You can also listen to the entirety of Re:Percussions on Youtube.

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Tell me about how you got where you are now. That’s an excellent question. Through a slow, very organic process of building a network who encouraged and supported me and my gifts for making music, and recording music. People would give me opportunities to perform at venues like school, church talent shows, and public fundraisers.

So over the course of doing that for five years, I reached a particular season where I crossed paths with a producer, Jeremy Rodney-Hall, who was just on the same wavelength musically and spiritually. We connected, worked together to create an album, continuing along that same organic process. We just did shows that our friends invited us to, and more friends invited us to that.

Eventually, Jermaine Wall came into the picture, and he had the heart to bring his marketing prowess and management skills to support artists. So the three of us together now launched the label called LSTNFND, and really continuing to value those relational connections we’ve formed with churches, campus groups, and people in the hip hop community. And that’s my long-winded answer.

That is the shortest answer to that question I’ve ever gotten. (Both laughing.) When did you start rapping? I started rapping in 2009, and I’m aging myself as a baby right now, but I was grade twelve writer’s craft class when I started writing poetry for the first time. Just had a couple teachers who really encouraged us to keep a journal, just to put down whatever creative ideas might come to mind on the day to day.

And because, at the time, I was listening to a lot of hip hop and digging deeper and deeper into conscious hip hop — artists like Nas, Common, The Roots, the good stuff, you know… Because I was listening to a lot of that at the time, it seemed like the most natural inclinations for me to try to write in that style, instead of writing Shakespearean type poetry. So that was how it started, with a cool assignment just to keep a journal.

So cool. Do you still keep a journal? Yeah! I tend to just call it my rhyme book, or most often it will take the format of Google Docs on my phone. Still a journal in a sense, but yeah, all the time, even if I don’t have my paper notepad on me. I put down ideas as they come to me, words or phrases that have an intriguing rhythm, conversations that I have, yeah — I definitely continue to write in that same kind of pattern.

That’s very cool. So you’ve got this new record, a mixtape called Re:Percussions. Thirteen tracks, twenty-five minutes, I think, something really short like that? Twenty-four, to be precise! (Both laughing.)

You’ve really stepped up your game. It is really good. Tell me how it came together; when did you start working on this? Thank you! I appreciate that a lot. Oh my gosh, this is such a difficult question to answer because of my writing style. I will just write a bunch of songs until I start to see a theme, or until I have enough compiled to begin to piece things together as a project. So some of the songs on it I started writing more than a year ago, but more of the concrete structure and planning for the album itself started happening since September of 2015, I’d say. Even since then, it’s gone through a bunch of iterations.

Initially, it was going to be a twenty-plus track mixtape. Half of the project was going to be remixes of old songs, and the other half would be some newer, really short tracks that would just kinda blend in together and give a snapshot of my discography and where I’m at now. We realized it was not necessarily too big of an undertaking, but given the timeline we had set for ourselves and a bunch of logistical things, it made sense to shorten it, really focus in on the new material, and do that well.

And the benefit of that too is now you have the opportunity to have two records you could pack a bunch of remixes from and release your own take on a stress-free sort of untitled:unmastered deal. Exactly, yeah.

So the burning question on my mind, though, is how did Shad end up on this mixtape? (Laughing). That’s a great question. So I’ve had some interaction with him over the last two years. His shoutout on this mixtape was through our mutual buddy, John Corbin, who’s the A&R for LSTNFND and a longtime friend of Shad’s. And he made the request and asked if Shad wanted to do a twenty-second shoutout.

But Shad’s been one of my favourite artists for years and years. When I started writing, Shad was right in there. I once went to a Shad concert and brought an article about him from the Toronto Sun that I wanted to get signed. (Both laugh.) Yep. Total fanboy. So yeah, I approached him just to get his autograph on that. A couple months prior to that concert though, I had found him on Facebook through a mutual friend, and sent him a message saying “Hey! You’re a huge inspiration to me. I’m starting to explore emceeing myself, love your style, and here’s a clip of me rapping on Youtube.” (Both laughing again.)

So fast forward again, I’m getting his autograph, and he’s like “Hey! You’re Jordan from Facebook! What’s up?” (Hysterical laughter ensues.) So total starstruck type of moment. He sent me a couple more messages, gave me some feedback on my project, and he actually invited me to perform at a show he was curating during Canadian Music Week in 2012. So that was our initial interaction!

Wow. Yeah! So it’s been a few years since we’d connected in a meaningful way, but I’m on his radar, and obviously he’s on mine.

We always want to move people in two ways. Firstly, we want them to move their heads and their feet, and secondly, we want to move them to ask deeper questions.

Man, that’s a super cool story. Rad. On the topic of rad hip hop, your music has these delightful old-school vibes. What inspires you to make these beats? Who are you listening to? A lot of my influences are those soulful, lyrical, kind of real emcees: Black Thought from The Roots, Jurassic 5 — and just like the fun they have. You ever listen to their music?

Yeah man. Just their production and their whole style. A guy like Charlie Tuna who has this weird kinda voice just sounds so playful. I love that kind of hip hop that communicates how joyful somebody is about making it. So I want to communicate that tone. But it also really excites me when I can string together syllables or flows that just surprise people, or maybe they don’t think you can rhyme eleven syllables together. I love playing with technique and stretching myself in that way. But I’m kinda straying from the question here.

No way, straying is good. Let’s stray. The other key element for me, of course, is being free to express what’s on my mind, which are things of the Kingdom of God. So being able to bring out my faith in my music is a high value. I take an example from cats like Theory Hazit, Bizzle, Stephen the Levite is amazing — he does all those things I just mentioned really well. These guys catch a lot of flak because they’re at the top of the Christian Hip Hop game, but Lecrae and Andy Mineo, I appreciate a lot of the music that those guys create.

Lecrae’s awesome. Yeah, yeah. And then there’s Toronto hip hop, man, I could go on, cats I appreciate. I like hip hop that is fun, with some soul to it you can feel, and stuff that really pushes the envelope in terms of technique.

That actually brings me to my next question. You’re all about your faith, and I know you’re completely different from even a lot of Christian hip hop artists in that you and your label have a mission. Tell me more about this. So my mission is, through the music, to present my own spiritual journey and convictions in a transparent way that I think, or that I hope, invites people to see that there is depth to a person’s genuine walk with Christ. That there is joy to be found in that, freedom to be found in that. That it’s not a constrictive religious routine or dogma that Christ calls us to.

So I try to use my music as a gateway to invite them to ask more questions about what a life with Christ looks like. You can check out what our goals are verbatim on LSTNFND’s website, but it’s to present the message and the hope of Christ through music that moves people to reflect on where they’re at in their own spiritual journey. Everybody’s on one, whether they think about it daily or not.

We always want to move people in two ways. Firstly, we want them to move their heads and their feet, and secondly, we want to move them to ask deeper questions about life, who God is to them, who they are in this world, and hopefully they hit us up on Facebook and talk to us after shows. We get to pray with people, we get to connect, and point people in some small way towards their next step.

Very cool. So much of current hip hop is running the other direction from the sort of music you make. What do you think of the trends in hip hop these days? Kendrick is killing the game.

I love the jazz game he’s got going on. Yeah, man! Absolutely. I really like the fact that hip hop is making people uncomfortable. What I mean is, you have artists like Kendrick, who have found this very clever way of waking the line between commercial success and challenging the very system and culture that gives him his platform. It’s so interesting to see the way he cuts so deep into issues of racial identity and racism in the States. You know, he’s got criticisms of hip hop culture in and of itself.

And how weird is it that he’s got somebody like Dre backing him? The very progenitor of the culture as it is. Yeah! I think it’s a great thing that hip hop music is stirring people to have conversations about the music they’re listening to, or about those deeper issues. I find it interesting we’re seeing what could be called conscious hip hop kinda break through into the mainstream, but I also appreciate the out of the box creativity that Childish Gambino and Chance the Rapper and guys like that bring to the table.

It seems to me like music is going through a giant cultural shift. Between streaming, which degrades the value of music, and stuff like Soundcloud, which lets us change our music after it’s been released. How do you deal with all this as a recording artist? I’ve got a nine to five. (Both laughing.) I’m going back to school man!

Yeah, it’s such an interesting thing, because I value purchasing music from artists I appreciate. I’ve got a whole growing stack of CDs. So I have a vast appreciation for that. But I have to recognize that the majority of people who listen to our music and appreciate it, they just don’t have the same habits in regards to how they interact with content and pay for it. So part of our philosophy in LSTNFND is that we want to reduce as many barriers as possible for people to access our music, so we do make use of Soundcloud and Youtube to upload all of our music. Every single one of our releases, for free, so people can stream it.

We posted the last album, In Good Hands, on iTunes. It’s also on Basecamp. We recently started using a super cool website called Gumroad, which is great for physical and digital sales. We still do a lot of t-shirts and different kinds of march, but for most people, the entry point they have will be streaming it and listening for free.

And this makes sense. When I’m purchasing an album — and the last album I purchased was Leon Bridges’ latest — before I decide to invest and commit, I’m gonna want to know a bit of what it sounds like and feel like I know one or two of these songs decently before I pick it up. So it makes sense to me that people will want to stream and to access things on demand.

And I think also, because we have a shorter attention span, thanks very much to Facebook and Twitter and Snapchat and things like that, it’s hard for younger folks in this generation to sit down and take in a full album. So you’ll have a few tracks you like and put them on a playlist and scrap the rest. The culture of music listening and playback is definitely changing to become on demand.

And that does affect, in some ways, my and my team’s approach to creating music, and how we structure our releases. So now we’re trying to be on a more consistent schedule of just releasing one single, or one video of a free verse or something. And we aim for a biweekly basis. Just to have a remix or single, something where people can consistently get a taste of something, because we recognize releasing a full album is not always… Particularly, we want to be smart about how we release how much we release, and that it’s going to received well.

One last thing I’ll say: we tend to do projects with fewer tracks. In Good Hands had nine tracks. The album before that had eight. This new mixtape has thirteen, which is really more like ten or eleven, and a couple skits. So this kind of demand changes how we market ourselves.

Hip hop was always bad for those hour and a half long records though. The most common refrain from critics was that the albums were too long, and they said that about everybody. So keeping it short might be overdue. This new mixtape, man. Twenty-three minutes and fifty-seven seconds! It’s short. It’s digestible. There’s energy flowing throughout the whole time. Even the slightest thing, like just having a series of drops and shoutouts, we chopped them all down and edited them just to make sure listeners wouldn’t find them to be lulls.

So if you love hip hop, you could throw on Re:Percussions and listen to it four times in the amount of time it would take to listen to the new Drake record. (Both laughing.) Wait, is that a benefit or not?

What influence do you want to have? I’ll be honest and say I’m still trying to figure that out. I haven’t thought much about the impact I want to have on the industry. I’ve thought more about, how can I be faithful with the gift and the opportunities set before me this year? It’s hard to see past that kind of a timeline.

This year, that means working hard to complete another album, doing a tour this spring and summer, and continuing to tap into the support that has been coming through in the hip hop community and in the faith community to have the music heard by as many people as possible.

A new album and a tour before the end of the year — you’re busy! And I’m going back to school part time this year to get my master’s. Thankfully part time, because I do want to have time to spend on these creative pursuits. Suffice it to say that taking over the industry right now is not something I’m prioritizing. I want to continue creating music that makes people move and smile, and that’s one commitment — among others — that I’ll be doing in the next year.

Okay man. Last question. It’s a doozy though. All right, bring it.

What was your favourite record last year? Oh! (He cheats and opens iTunes.) You know what, I was gonna say Gregory Porter, because I just caught on to him, but I’m way late to the bandwagon because his last album came out in 2013. In any case, I will give it to the homie JGiven’s Fly Exam. In terms of brilliant hip hop, on multiple levels, he’s in another league in my books. He really knows how to tell stories. His lyrical technique, his delivery, he’s very unique — he’ll make you think and he’ll make you move, which are two things that are important to me.

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This Unruly Mess I’ve Made lives up to its name. It’s a total mess of an album, completely inconsistent from beginning to end, uneven from one track to the next, and with Macklemore completely unsure of what he has to say. Its most standout tracks are flawed, with choruses and verses that feel forced together. Macklemore himself struggles for half the album to stay on beat. If great art feels effortless, This Unruly Mess I’ve Made feels like hard work.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk about it.

On This Unruly Mess I’ve Made, Macklemore is working through heady stuff. He’s a famous white man performing in a genre marginalized by white media because its most acclaimed performers are black. He’s struggling as a man who didn’t want the fame if it meant he couldn’t be true to himself. And (as usual) he’s working through what it means to be a voice for people with addiction issues when he’s still tempted himself.

Thanks to a seemingly constant barrage of accolades for being a “conscious” rapper and a self-aware recovering addict, Macklemore has bravely taken on the chance to be a voice for everybody who doesn’t have one, whether that means he’s talking about drugs or the Black Lives Matter movement. He’s working through all this in real time, on a record for all of us to hear and dissect. It’s a good time to discuss his position, wrap our minds around his message.

And to be clear, there’s nothing wrong with what he’s trying to say. We need to talk about marginalization. But more importantly, we need to listen to the marginalized. And this is what Macklemore robs us of.

There’s a scene in the film Dope where the main character, a black male in his senior year of high school, is asked if he listens to Macklemore. His reaction comes quickly and doesn’t mince words: “I would never listen to Macklemore.”

The movie plays it for jokes, which means that there is a truth we all find funny in that moment. Of course a young black male wouldn’t listen to Macklemore, because he doesn’t really speak for them, as much as he’d like to.

Macklemore is in an awkward position: until his Grammy win against Kendrick Lamar for Best Rap Album, he seemed like an obvious game-changer in modern hip hop. His album, Heist, was largely fantastic — thanks to Macklemore’s fiery performance and tackling of any issue. It all worked.

Until it didn’t.

After his Grammy win, there was a palpable sense that the scene was turning against him. Macklemore seemed to realize it too, sending Kendrick Lamar an apology text saying he “robbed” Lamar of his Grammy. His newly elevated position instantly incriminated his record, which worked as a proud work from an independent and little-known artist. Tracks like Jimmy Iovine or Make the Money don’t work as well when you’re suddenly a rich white man asking questions about your own validity in your genre.

What’s left for Macklemore to say? Who’s left for him to represent? More importantly, what is his responsibility as a popular artist?

Nobody seems to be able to explain why the tide turned against Macklemore, though, apart from saying it had to do with the way we often reject popular culture in an attempt to find and identify something new. I think it goes much deeper than that.

Macklemore is trapped in a semiotic cycle that it’s doubtful he can escape from: as a signifier, he represents white culture attempting to understand “blackness” from a distance. He’s a mirror of the common white person, which makes us uncomfortable: he doesn’t know what to do about his neighbours, and instead of listening to them, he talks about being involved with them on a protest level in tracks like the muddled White Privilege II. As a white man in hip hop, he’s confused being in it with being of it.

I can’t explain with any degree of accuracy why my black friends aren’t interested in Macklemore. Arguably, it’s because he’s not representing them. He doesn’t represent that culture, or their values, or their struggles, even though he openly wonders if he should. That he even asks the question is disconcerting.

As a conscious rapper, he doesn’t represent the poor anymore either. With his money and resources, he’s not fighting against anything other than his own privilege. He doesn’t have to struggle. Tracks like Thrift Shop are absurd when the verses are rapped by a millionaire.

In an intro to This Unruly Mess on Medium, Macklemore says: “I was too comfortable. Being comfortable is what kills artists… I didn’t know what I wanted to say. Didn’t know how the ink would stick to the page.” Macklemore is wrestling with the same questions we are: what’s left for him to say? Who’s left for him to represent? More importantly, what is his responsibility as a popular artist? He has a huge platform, and it makes sense that he uses it to try to get people to talk and think.

The best tracks on Macklemore’s records aren’t the major singles like Downtown (which makes the rapper sound like an uncool poseur), or White Privilege II, which simply sounds like a misguided attempt to understand what his peers are going through. Contrarily, the best tracks are his personal odes like Kevin, St. Ides, or Need to Know. With nothing left in society that he can be authentic about, his most earnest tracks are the ones where Macklemore struggles with his own issues.

That still leaves us with the rest of the record, though. Perhaps it’s telling that many of these tracks don’t have us discussing the social issues at hand. Last year. To Pimp a Butterfly had us all thinking about Ferguson and the Black Lives Matter movement. This year, Macklemore has us all talking about himself and his place in all of it.

It’s the ultimate misuse of his own platform. It’s hard to blame Macklemore for it, but the laws of semiotics dictate that when he has nothing left to represent, the only thing he can point to is himself. It makes him feel hypocritical at worst and confused at best, despite his sincerity as a lyricist and his authenticity as a rapper. But the real problem here isn’t Macklemore: it’s that we’re all too busy talking about him and missing the real discussions he’s trying — but failing — to have with us.

This Unruly Mess I’ve Made is out now, and you can purchase it from iTunes or Amazon and stream it on Apple Music or Spotify.

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Let’s be clear about this: Church Clothes 3 is a major surprise. It’s an unannounced mixtape dropped on iTunes almost randomly after an unusually long period of quiet from Lecrae. Anomaly came out in 2014, and it’s been almost two years since his last record — the longest stretch in his career. And he released it on a Thursday to boot (which he hilariously quips about on It Is What It Is).

Surprises aside, his third album in the Church Clothes sequel is both a return to his hardcore hip hop roots and a new step for him, one that sees him exploring new directions. He sounds comfortable at this point, throwing around lyrical bullets as if it’s his prerogative.

He’s also still focused on being socially conscious with his lyrics. While Kendrick Lamar seemed almost prescient about the political climate with To Pimp A Butterfly, Church Clothes 3 feels reactionary to the situation. By looking back to modern hip hop’s roots with soul music and smash poetry, Lecrae is playing with his style without sacrificing his voice.

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