This is one of those bubbly slumpers that make me really wish I'd grown up a Bay kid—pretty much everybody you meet who's spent time in Northern California has an encyclopedic knowledge iconic of slumps and slaps that helped define the party rap of our generation. And as the universe has caught up with the Bay sound and slang, they just keep innovating. Which brings me to A-1, a rapper from San Francisco, who has absorbed the lessons of his forefathers with the nuanced eye of a born student. This is "There I Go," in which A-1 takes an absolute monster of a Mr. Carmack instrumental and cowties it into something that sounds so vital and absolutely hyphy that it pretty much had to come from the Bay. It's from A-1's upcoming Thurlian album, which I for one am eagerly anticipating.
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