Lil Skies "Life of a Dark Rose" and Doc D's "Planetary Destruction"

Hey guys, hope you are all doing well. This is officially my first blog post and I’m excited to share it with all of you. Like I talked about in my “About Me” page, the way I created the video attached to this post was through a Twitch stream where I listen to music I haven’t listened to before and give my take on it. Even though I don’t have any specific musical knowledge on the theory of how these songs were created, I believed that it would be interesting enough to talk about aspects of music that aren’t communicated enough such as concept albums, inspirations, and the ideas that come out of these individual projects.

I started off by listening to Lil Skies’ “The Life of a Dark Rose” due to his release of his most recent album “Unbothered” that came out this week. I figured that if I were to take a look at the concepts created in that album and how they relate to the artist, I should first see how he entered the rap scene with his debut project. I listened to it, and while there wasn’t much to talk about material wise, I did enjoy the flow on the crazy cool beats in the project. While the lyrical substance stayed within the range of drugs, girls, and money, his sound and his ability to ride each beat on the album like a wave was charismatic. This album came off to me as something you can play in the background and bob your head to, which is perfectly fine. This project sounded great, and some of my favorite songs would be “Welcome to the Rodeo”, “The Clique”, and “Signs of Jealousy”.

The next project I listened to was very different and gave a lot more material for me to pick apart. The known rapper Logic owns a record label, and his new artist “Doc D”, created his debut project on Soundcloud called “Planetary Destruction”. I personally loved listening to this because this project was full of inspirations from the classic boom bap rap from the 80s-90s. I enjoyed listening to the eerie scratching of the records as we hear classic beats with fun wordplay. The concept on this album was also interesting, having space exploration and nerdy lore fit in with its contrasted aggressive rap styles. I talk a lot on the video about projects and how concept albums allow a new form of creativity that wasn’t really explored before around the 54th minute. Overall, this project was fun and interesting as we see a blend of modern fascination of space exploration be mixed with retro style beats and rapping. My only criticism would be that I felt like I heard too much of Logic rather than the spotlight being on the new artist Doc D. My favorite songs from the project are “Better Text Back”, “Outer Space Gang”, “Ready Player Gun”, “20 Million Woolongs”, “Bounty Law”, “Cosmos 105.7 (Skit 4)”, and “Death of Destruction”.

Those were my takes on the two projects I listened to on this video. Thank you for reading this and let me know if you have any thoughts on how I can make this a better experience for you all.

IMPORTANT: none of the music heard on the video is mine and are owned respectively by their artists and music labels.