★★★★★
August 15, 2013
Brooklyn's own Joey Bada$$ emerged as a Flatbush folk-hero since stomping onto the scene last year, and his latest mixtape maintains the nostalgic boom-bap that defines his Beast Coast brand. But Nineties NY hip-hop was about oversized personalities and intricate stories, and Joey lacks both...
- www.rollingstone.com
2013-08-16
★★★★★
It begins with the bloodlust jeers of a ringside boxing crowd. A stadium announcer's voice orders them to "make some noise for the champion", before disappearing into the kush-cloud chill and brassy J Dilla loops of opener 'Alowha'. The word "champion" overstates Bada$$'s current rap game footing, but he certainly came out fighting on his breakout tape, last year's '1999'...
- www.nme.com
2013-07-22
★★★★★
One of the most surprising mixtapes of 2012 was made by a Flatbush teenager named Jo-Vaughn Scott a.k.a. Joey Bada$$, an Edward R. Murrow High School student who channeled Native Tongues-style rap music with a deceptively sharp edge while heading up the intriguing Pro Era collective. Simply put, the kid could rap...
- pitchfork.com
2013-07-12
★★★★★
Joey Bada$$ - 'Summer Knights' Mixtape Review
Jul 3rd, '13 • Music • by Eric Diep • 15 Comments
On the start of Summer Knights, Joey Bada$$ lets us know he's the "reigning champ, hailing from Flatbush, Brooklyn..." This grandiose, yet soulful introduction leads you to believe that there will be similarities from his highly regarded project, 2012's 1999. As it plays through, Summer Knights is completely different...
- www.xxlmag.com
2013-07-10
★★★★★
Hip-hop heads who are still peddling that trapped-in-the-'90s, boom-bap era of rap, have long wondered when and where the genre began to stray from its origins of sheer lyricism devoid of publicity stunts and gimmicks--a detraction in today's hip-hop world. It's a question that also stumps Brooklyn-based emcee, Joey Bada$$ on his balmy new mixtape, Summer Knights, where naturally there are more rhymes than frills.
"When did rap turn into a fashion show...
- www.cmj.com
2013-07-10
★★★★★
Joey Bada$$ was born to the world as an Internet explosion on February 23rd, 2012, the day his "Survival Tactics" video hit YouTube. It quickly went viral, and suddenly the then-17-year-old Flatbush high school student was hailed as New York's future rap prince for the way he fused youthful, cocksure raps to beats proudly evoking the city's mid-'90s glory days. (For mythology's sake, overlook the part about the song's origins lying in an instrumental from the West Coast group Styles of Beyond...
- www.spin.com
2013-07-06
★★★★★
This new mixtape from Brooklyn, NY-based teenage rap phenom Joey Bada$$ was originally supposed to be an EP-length offering. Then, a little more than a month from its release, Bada$$ took to Twitter and announced that it would be a full-length. In retrospect, he should have stood pat with the EP. has Bada$$ alternating flows, showing off everything from a rugged growl to slippery, agile stickhandling of syllables, with the beats ranging from old school boom bap to almost cloud rap-like...
- exclaim.ca
2013-07-03
★★★★★
In 1999 Sean Combs threatened to be here "Forever" while seeing to it that Christopher Wallace was "Born Again." Meanwhile Afeni Shakur resurrected her son not for the first and not for the last time, in keeping with his motto "Still I Rise." Missy Elliott landed from whatever planet she and Da Brat had been strutting around on in that "Sock it 2 Me" video back in "Da Real World," Marshall Mathers took said world by storm as "Slim Shady," Dr...
- rapreviews.com
2012-09-27
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