Kendrick Lamar: "Westside, Right on Time" [feat. Young Jeezy]

Kind of strange having Jeezy on a Black Hippy track, but this new Kendrick Lamar joint is a freebie issued as part of Top Dawg Entertainment's fan appreciation week. Jeezy unexpectedly doesn't add anything to the track but at least he doesn't take anything away from it either. The 70's string-drenched soul sample is the real highlight anyway.

Talib Kweli: "Push Thru" [feat. Curren$y and Kendrick Lamar]

Just goes to show how quickly the churn is in mainstream hip hop when Talib Kweli is the old guard on his own track. Here he gathers upstarts Curren$y and Kendrick Lamar for one of those classic old soul, world weary feel (kinda) good tunes that Kweli is known for. This is the first of presumably many leaks leading up to Kweli's Prisoner of Conscious [sic] out at an indeterminate date later this year.

Schoolboy Q: "Blessed" [feat. Kendrick Lamar]

While fellow Black Hippy alumnus Kendrick Lamar broke through in 2011 - including a showing in Pitchfork's Top 50 Albums of the Year - it seems like Schoolboy Q got slept on just a bit.  Q also had an digital only album released in 2011, and while it garnered good reviews it didn't necessarily put him over the top.  We'll all get a second chance to properly show our respects when Habits & Contradictions is released on January 14th.  Don't fuck it up, y'all.

Kendrick Lamar: "Rigamortis"

The gestation period in modern hip hop is not a long one.  After toiling in obscurity for most of the 90's, Kendrick Lamar released the O(verly) D(edicated) mixtape in September 2010 to his first real taste of acclaim... barely a year later, he's already worked with Snoop and Dre, J. Cole and Game as well as appearing on the cover of XXL.  As he states in "Rigamortis":  "don't ask for ya favorite rapper, he dead... I killed him".  Lamar has the flow of an alt-hip hopper but the lyrical predilections of a hardcore gangsta rapper, sometimes - as here - bordering on a horrorcore level of violence.

11/27/11 UPDATE: