I Am Very Tall

So, I don't know why, but for some reason I seem to have unknowingly picked up an affinity for white nerds that play black music. Most recently, this has been playing out in my forays into soul, where I've been listening to the likes of Mayer Hawthorne and Jamie Lidell. To be honest, I didn't even know that they were white when I first heard their music. I just knew that I liked combination of the old school aesthetic that they were bringing and the dressed up rhythm sections that they took from modern times. When I found out that pretty much all of them were white, I tried to expand a little bit and listen to guys like Raphael Saadiq, but the aesthetic just wasn't quite the same.

Anyway, it's happened again. Just today, I started listening to this guy, and I can already tell that I am going to be a big fan. He's a total nerd - a Jewish kid that went to UPenn and got a job at Google, only to quit his job to become a full-time rapper. The image on his debut mixtape (which can be downloaded for free right here) is of him in a marching band outfit. The samples that he uses are all from mainstream indie rock bands, e.g. Death Cab, Yeasayer, the Black Keys. That being said, he is highly reminiscent of Lupe Fiasco, except without the references to skateboarding or Islam. The song that I'm putting here is one of my favorites, and is him going over "Tighten Up," from the Black Keys. Hope you guys like it.

Hoodie Allen - Tighten Up