Features | Awards

Extra Special Yeah Award for the Best Hip-Hop-ish Album of the Year

By Mark Abraham | 12 December 2011

Love and Hates
L.A.H.
(White Lily Records; 2011)








The unfortunate reality is that any album with zero hype, expectation, or promotion that gets released on or after December 1st is not going to make a year end list, which is a big fuck you to December. Even if one staff member (me) thinks it sounds like the most commercial parts of OOIOO making a brilliant hip-hop-ish album (I do) there’s no chance to prop, promote, and gain enough staff support to rejigger the list that has already been created by the time (December 7th) that album dropped. So L.A.H., the best hip-hop album of the year (…according to me, I guess), is just getting an award.

Which is probably fine, because this thing is obtuse in ways I’m not sure the staff could have handled. The support wouldn’t have come easy, I mean, because my colleagues would have laughed at it and then laughed at me and then we would have had to have gotten into this whole thing about what hip-hop is and what hip-hop parody is and whether or not L.A.H. is hip-hop or good hip-hop or a fucking joke (it is all of these things) and basically that conversation would have had so many angles that the sheer geometry would have crippled the staff and we would never have finished the whole year end thing in the first place.

Which would have sucked, right? So this way we can just assume that Love and Hates would totally have made our list and probably Miila & the Geeks too but I didn’t get that until after I got this so sorry Japan.