Tales of the Salty Bag

 I can't recall the first time I heard of R.A. The Rugged Man, but the first time I took notice of his name was on a poster with Snak the Ripper (I want to say they toured through Calgary 2009ish together...but I can't find record of the show), with my first time hearing him being on Snak's You Can't Hide. His name stuck with me, but his verse on You Can't Hide didn't really hook me. Flash forward to 2013 and I saw a post that Brother Ali was on an R.A. track with Masta Ace. After listening to The Dangerous Three I had to check out R.A's newest album, Legends Never Die . Enter Definition of a Rap Flow , that song blew my mind. R.A.'s breath control and is wild, when mixed with his bottomless flows and actual lyrical content it's mind blowing. There are times when I'm not completely on board with his content, but I respect that he's sharing his perspective and can paint one hell of a picture. Although the 7 years between Legends and All My He

 If you're of a certain age range you probably remember finding bands through Napster (or later on Limewire). Sometimes the bands were mislabeled, sometimes they were somehow linked through a search for another song. There are quite a number of bands that I found through Napster that I still listen to regularly today. Daily, monthly, annually...even less frequently. One of the..probably annual? bands..that I found in the Napster days was 88 Fingers Louie. I can't say with 100% surety that this is how I became aware of 88 Fingers Louie..but it seems to make sense to me. I just searched Blink on Napster (because of Blink 182) and downloaded stuff that I thought might be good. Well, it worked out. Blink is a dope song. 88 Fingers Louie is a great band. A couple years after first hearing Blink I was flipping through used cd's at CDPlus and came across an 88 Fingers Louie CD, " The Dom Years ". I flipped to the back to see what songs were on it, well dang, Blink's