Listening Party: Lil Yank and Divercity

Here’s the gimmick: Each week, we’ll pick two local bands — an opening act and a headliner — link to a site where you can listen to their songs for free, then ask you to spend a few moments of your precious time to tell us what you think about them. Some may be great, others may be mediocre or awful — that’s for you to decide — all we ask is that you listen with an open mind.

Opening Act: Lil Yank

It’s been a few weeks since I delved into the dark catacombs of the local hip-hop scene, so I thought it was about time I strapped on the headlamp and trudged through once again. I haven’t been avoiding the genre exactly, but apart from some rare exceptions, I’ve found very few local hip-hop artists I’m all that excited about.

But listening to music that fails to excite or captivate is part of the music writers’ job description, and I’d put it off for too long as is.

Fitting, then, that this week’s opening act is Lil Yank, a performer that does exactly nothing for me at all. But before I get into that, I’d like to start by letting Lil Yank speak for himself …

Hello World. It’s ya homeboi LIL YANK checkin’ in witcha folks.Anyway, I’m reppin’ dat Spartanburg, South Carolina aka Sparkle City and IM THE HOTTEST AZN RAPPER OUT OF SC n 1 of THE HOTTEST AZN MC OUT DA SOUTH. Heres a tip for you wanna be rappers. “IF U DONT KNOW HOW TO RAP, DONT TRY TO RAP N IF U KNOW HOW TO RAP, YOU DONT HAVE TO TRY”. Ima solo artist but Im rollin’ wit my team …

Allow me to decode: Lil Yank is from Spartanburg, and he feels he’s easily one of the best rappers of Asian descent in the greater Spartanburg area, if not the whole of the American South. His recommendation is that people who can’t rap shouldn’t attempt it, and those who can rap generally do it with ease. And, although he has friends with whom he occasionally performs, he’s essentially a solo artist.

All that’s great, but his music is … I’ll be polite … predictable.

In “Fresh to Death,” he talk about how good he is at picking up women in the club, smokes weed whenever he wants and has fancy shoes other people can’t buy yet, as they are not available. In other words, he’s bragging. Just like every other rapper with nothing important to say, Lil Yank spends the entirety of this track — with its highly lackluster beat and samples — telling us he’s a pretty cool guy, certainly more enviable than most of the people one encounters on a daily basis and far more so than his “haters.”

And then there’s “I Said So,” a song about how dangerous he and his friends are, if crossed. Starting with a shout out to all his gangstas, hustlers and pimps, then rapidly comparing his talents to the virtues of anal sex (I’m not kidding), Yank then gives us this wonderful couplet as an example of his understanding of the poetic form: “My whole squad, man we deeper than the ocean; fuck with my squad you’ll be sleeping in the ocean.”

Rhyming “ocean” with “ocean.” Excellent work.

Or how about “Hit the Floor,” which sounds exactly like Eminem’s “Superman” slowed down a little and stripped of well-crafted lyrics. Actually, every song I heard by Lil Yank could be easily compared to a better song by a popular artist, but I’ll let it drop by saying that, at absolute best, this music is highly derivative.

The thing is, Lil Yank isn’t bad, per se. He just has absolutely nothing going on in his music that you haven’t heard a thousand times by a thousand different rappers over the last two decades. If he was actually talking about something — anything — other than how nifty he is and how much trouble those who oppose him are in, he might even be worth listening to.

Every rapper ever has written about haters, pimps, how awesome they are, how much money they have, how they are going to punish those who don’t like them … I mean c’mon dude! Meanwhile, he’s completely missing the fact that being ASIAN in the SOUTH is actually pretty interesting. Just like, say, Eminem being self-admitted angry white trash from Detroit is a pretty interesting place to start from.

Of course pimps, hos, clubs, weed and fancy shoes are easier to write about, so that’s what we get from Lil Yank. But that’s all we get. If you simply must listen to one of his songs, I suggest “Fresh To Death,” because it’s newer than the rest, and because it really doesn’t matter which one you listen to, so you might as well go with the one that’s already queued up in the music player.

Headliner: Divercity

Since Spartanburg-based hip-hop and R&B group Divercity doesn’t have a central MySpace or website, you’ll probably need to check out the pages of two of its three key members, Lawrence “LT” Williams and Charlee Sims (who, refreshingly, has no hip-hop handle). Along with Michael Breeze. The trio appears to be a loose hip-hop and rap collective, and it’s those collaborations that have proven to be such an interesting, if occasionally frustrating, find.

Take a song like “I Did You Wrong,” which — although kind of harsh in tone — is essentially about the break-up of a long-term relationship and the troubles in male/female relationships. The song is unpolished and amateurishly recorded, but it actually works as a song. But it’s not about being awesome, threatening people, having money or anything like that. It’s about something human, and you don’t have to be a gansta/pimp/playa combiation or whatever to understand what the song is actually about.

Or the song “If I Could,” which is about regret after a painful breakup. It’s basically saying “I made mistakes, I did some dumb things and I wish I could take that back.” How un-gangsta is that? And with Sims actually playing an acoustic guitar on the song, rather than some rehashed beat, it actually feels like a song. Not a groundbreaking one, sure, but a song by any definition.

Not that Divercity is immune to the hip-hop bragfest infection. “Shoot Em Up” is a variation on that theme. A lot of LT’s work tends to be more in this vein, but it there’s a difference between frequently visiting a theme and living there.

There are problems with Divercity’s music, most notably long periods of extremely loose and sloppy flow, but nothing to hint that they couldn’t get better in time with practice. All of the members appear to be very young, so to an extent this is to be expected. Most 17-year-old folk singers are sloppy singers and guitarists, after all. Of course, if you aren’t listening for the good stuff, some of their songs are actually really, really lame. But the seed of a good crop of tunes is definitely there.

And how refreshing it is to hear something like Sims’ rambling “New Guitar Track,” which is a single track him being very excited about a new song he wrote, but unable to do anything much with it yet, as he doesn’t know how to sing.

If you keep your expectations VERY low with Divercity, and listen for what the lyrics could be, what the tracks could sound like and the overall trajectory of their music, rather than where it happened to be when the songs were recording, and I think you’ll find them a group worth keeping an eye on.

Now, it’s your turn. I’ve put my views out here on the digital page, but you can correct, amend, disagree, refute and rebut any and all of it by commenting in the field below. Notice something about the bands that I missed? Write a comment. I’ve had my say, now it’s all about you.