Kool Keith: Thirteen Tracks of Sonic Psychosis, Zero AI

Producer Mike Redman builds the world, Chuck D, DJ Shadow, Del and a full cypher walk through it

Few MCs have made a catalog as hard to file as Kool Keith's. Ultramagnetic MC's, Dr. Octagon, Dr. Dooom, Black Elvis: four decades of doing it his own way. On August 28, he added Sonic Psychosis, a 13-track album made with producer Mike Redman, who owns Redrum Recordz.

The liner notes state it plainly: no form of AI was used in making the album. Redman painted the cover himself, a cosmic red backdrop with hypnotic imagery, and he composed, produced and mixed every track. The one shared production credit goes to DJ Shadow on "Uh-Oh, It's Me Again." The instrumentals were recorded at Redrum Studios in Rotterdam, while Keith's vocals were recorded in New York City by J. Stylez.

The guest list reads like a family reunion. Ras Kass and DJ Lord are on "Lyrical Insanity," Killah Priest on "Psychedelic," Del The Funky Homosapien on "Traveling Through Time," and Craig G on "Times Square." "From Beyond The Galaxy" is a full cypher with Sadat X, Mr Lif, Young Zee and Trackstar The DJ. Scratching is split among Redman, DJ Lord, DJ Shadow and Trackstar.

The closer is the title track with Chuck D and DJ Lord. According to MRC Hip Hop, it's the first time Keith and Chuck D have appeared on the same song. The album opens with a nod to Keith's roots, a track called "The Ultramagnetic."

As for how it lands, Hip Hop Golden Age calls it one of the most convincing Keith releases in years. Their argument is that Redman gives Keith one consistent world to move around in, something his huge catalog hasn't always had. Redman, per MRC Hip Hop, is known for his work with Public Enemy and his Deformer project.

Thirteen tracks, and we're still not tired of them. "The Ultramagnetic," "Lyrical Insanity," "Ultraman 7000," "Times Square" and the title track have been on heavy rotation in the Funknuz office. Kool Keith is still the real deal, and with an A-list of guests riding Mike Redman's funk-heavy beats, this one feels like a 2026 classic.

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Sources & Further Reading

1. Redrum Recordz – Album page, credits and tracklist
2. MRC Hip Hop – First Look at Sonic Psychosis
3. Hip Hop Golden Age – Sonic Psychosis review
4. Discogs – Release entry

Official Artist Links

No affiliation — Funknuz earns nothing from these links; they go straight to the artist.

• Redrum Recordz – Buy Sonic Psychosis on Bandcamp
• Redrum Recordz – Label website

A note on this article: This piece was researched and drafted with Funknuz AI, then edited, fact-checked, and finalized by our editorial team. All sourcing is linked above. AI can make mistakes, and so can we — if something reads off, that's on us, not the tech.

Larry June's Who Coppin: Uncle Larry Keeps Cooking

Sixteen tracks, zero rush — the Bay Area's healthiest hustler drops his second album of the year

Larry June doesn't sound like he's in a hurry, and that's the whole point. Born Larry Eugene Hendricks III in San Francisco's Hunters Point neighborhood, raised partly in Atlanta before finishing school back in the Bay, June built his name the slow way — nineteen self-released projects deep before most casual fans caught on, with a brief stint at Warner Records in the mid-2010s that he walked away from to keep doing things his own way. These days he's independent again, releasing through his own imprint The Freeminded, and that independence is the whole engine behind his catalog: no label calendar to answer to, no filler to pad a rollout — just steady, well-made albums on his own schedule.

The other half of the June story is the one that made him a Bay Area icon beyond rap circles entirely: he's arguably the genre's first true wellness rapper. Long before "clean living" was a hip-hop talking point, June was rapping about fasting until 1pm, fresh-squeezed orange juice, and morning walks instead of trap-house war stories — trading crime narratives for spreadsheets and smoothies, basically. The orange became his whole visual language, down to the merch and the album art. Albums like Orange Print (2021, which topped Billboard's Heatseekers chart) and Spaceships on the Blade (2022) built the template; The Great Escape with The Alchemist (2023) and last year's Life Is Beautiful with 2 Chainz and The Alchemist widened his audience further.

Who Coppin, released July 17, 2026 on The Freeminded, is June's second full-length of the year — landing just five months after Spiral Staircases, his joint album with Curren$y and The Alchemist. Sixteen tracks, about 49 minutes, and true to form for an artist who treats consistency as a personality trait rather than a marketing strategy.

What stands out on Who Coppin is how sparingly June uses his guest list. Motivational speaker and podcaster Wallo267 opens the record on "Go Outside Intro," setting a tone that's part pep talk, part scripture. Jhené Aiko shows up on the airy "California Dream," floating over production from Cardo Got Wings. R&B veteran Musiq Soulchild brings a softer, more vulnerable register to "Pretty Green Eyes," produced by Jay Versace. Bay Area veteran B-Legit adds a rawer voice on "Win or Lose." None of it feels like a guest-chasing exercise — each name earns its spot rather than padding the tracklist.

The album closes on "God Got Us (Ain't Too Many)," which critics have singled out as June at his most effective: part hustler, part motivational speaker, closing the record the same way he's built his whole career — one steady step at a time, no shortcuts implied. It's the throughline of everything June makes: the luxury-rap surface stays intact, but the actual message underneath is discipline, patience, and doing the work quietly until the results speak for themselves.

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Sources & Further Reading

1. Album Info — Apple Music —  Who Coppin
2. Wikipedia — Larry June 
3. Ratings Game Music — Who Coppin (Album Review) 
4. HipHopVibe — Larry June Drops "Who Coppin" Album
5. Shatter the Standards — Album Review: Who Coppin
6. KQED — The Bay Area's healthy rap wave

Official Artist Links

No affiliation — Funknuz earns nothing from these links; they go straight to the artist.

larryjunetfm.com — official website (listed as his site in his Wikipedia infobox)

larryjune.bandcamp.com — official Bandcamp store, distributed via EMPIRE

A note on this article: This piece was researched and drafted with Funknuz AI, then edited, fact-checked, and finalized by our editorial team. All sourcing is linked above. AI can make mistakes, and so can we — if something reads off, that's on us, not the tech.

E-40: Turning His Money Over, One Hustle at a Time

Inside the Bay Area legend's new 40-song quadruple album — and the entrepreneurial empire that's been building alongside it for over a decade

Three decades into a career most artists would've long since wound down, E-40 just did the opposite: he dropped a 40-song quadruple album. Turning My Money Over arrived August 28, split into four themed 10-track discs — Once, Twice, Thrice, and Cuatro — and stacked with guests spanning eras and coasts, from Bay Area mainstays Too $hort and cousin B-Legit to Larry June, Juvenile, Busta Rhymes, Anderson .Paak, and Killer Mike. He announced it himself in typically unbothered fashion, telling fans simply that the greatest game spitter of all time is back. It's the kind of scale that would read as excess from almost anyone else. From E-40, it reads as pace — the same pace he's kept since 1992, when Vallejo's most prolific voice started building a catalog that now ranks among the deepest in Hip-Hop.

But the album is really only half the story of what E-40's been building. Since 2013, he's poured that same restless energy into a business empire that's grown almost as large as his discography. What started as a single wine, named after himself, is now a full portfolio under his Earl Stevens Selections label: 17-plus still and sparkling wines, E. Cuarenta Tequila, Tycoon Cognac, two whiskey-adjacent spirits in Kuiper Belt Bourbon and Kuiper Belt Gin, Tycoon Vodka, the Sluricane cocktail line, and a golden lager. Off the drinks side, there's Goon With The Spoon (sausages, burritos, ice cream) and The Lumpia Company, the Filipino food business he co-owns that now runs a restaurant in Oakland, a stand inside the Giants' Oracle Park, and a food truck in San Francisco. He's said as much himself: "We family-owned. Black-owned business for real from the ground up," E-40 said on The Breakfast Club. "I'm talking about no investors. No nothing."

The word tying it all together — tycoon — isn't incidental. It's one of his. As he told Forbes, the name wasn't invented, just repurposed: "Of course it has always been in the dictionary, but nobody was screaming tycoon until I was screaming tycoon on numerous records." That's the pattern with E-40's vocabulary generally, and it's worth pausing on for one line: he was calling weed "broccoli" as far back as 1993, on "Practice Lookin' Hard" — years before the term resurfaced and sparked arguments over who said it first. Money got its own word from him too: scrilla.

Turning My Money Over works as a title for both halves of what he does — the music and the businesses run on the same hustle, and thirty-some years in, neither shows any sign of slowing down.

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Sources & further Reading

1. E-40 — Tracklist and features for Turning My Money Over
2. E-40 — Album announcement
3. Entrepreneur — How E-40 built a Bay Area business empire
4. Black Enterprise — E-40's culinary and spirits empire
5. Forbes — E-40 on building his spirits empire and coining "tycoon"
6. HotNewHipHop — E-40's slang legacy, including "broccoli"
7. XXL — E-40 clears the air on who used "broccoli" first

Official Artist Links

No affiliation — Funknuz earns nothing from these links; they go straight to the artist.

• E-40 Official Store — music, tour merch & apparel
• Earl Stevens Selections — wines, tequila, cognac & vodka
• Goon With The Spoon — sausages, burritos & ice cream
• The Lumpia Company — Oakland restaurant & merch

A note on this article: This piece was researched and drafted with Funknuz AI, then edited, fact-checked, and finalized by our editorial team. All sourcing is linked above. AI can make mistakes, and so can we — if something reads off, that's on us, not the tech.

My Philosophy, Thirty-Eight Years Later

KRS-One built a song out of a mission statement in 1988. In 2026, he's turned that same title into a book — spending a year researching in Greece to argue that philosophy itself has been telling the story wrong from the start.

There's a myth that gets repeated so often about KRS-One's 1987 debut Criminal Minded that it's calcified into fact: that it's the first gangsta rap album. KRS-One doesn't accept the label. Asked directly, on record, he gives that credit to N.W.A. — they're the ones who actually got saddled with the term. Criminal Minded, he says, was something closer to reality rap, even conscious in its own way. The distinction matters, because it's the same distinction he's been drawing his whole career: between describing the streets and glorifying them. He calls it "criminal-minded to spiritual-minded" — a straight line from the album that put him on the map to the man he'd become.

That evolution has a name now: My Philosophy: Hip Hop Beyond Entertainment, his fourth book, titled after the 1988 Boogie Down Productions track that first laid out his worldview over a Stanley Turrentine sample. Thirty-eight years later, he's still making the same argument — he's just widened the frame. He spent close to a year researching the book while on tour in Greece, and its premise is a direct challenge to how philosophy gets taught: that Western philosophy starts its own story in the wrong place. Everyone points to Pythagoras, Aristotle, the Greeks — but philosophy, he argues, begins with the first humans, full stop. He traces it back to Lucy, the 3.2-million-year-old Ethiopian skeleton anthropologists named after a Beatles song rather than anything about who she actually was — and makes the point plainly: African history isn't a footnote to world history. It is world history. His summary of the whole book comes down to one line: philosophy, in its true sense, is the development of character. Without character, he says, you can't learn.

It's not a new idea for him — it's the same one that produced The Gospel of Hip-Hop back in 2009, an 800-page work structured like a religious text, built around what he calls H-LAW: Health, Love, Awareness, Wealth. Its foundation goes back further than the book, to the culture's own founding principles: Afrika Bambaataa and the Zulu Nation first codified Peace, Love, Unity, and Having Fun as the guiding creed of the culture, and KRS-One has carried that forward his own way — sharpening the last of the four into "safely having fun," a small edit that says a lot about how he thinks the culture should police itself from the inside rather than wait to be policed from outside it.

That instinct goes back to something rawer than a book or a creed, too. In 1989, after his DJ and creative partner Scott La Rock was shot and killed, KRS-One founded the Stop the Violence Movement, channeling grief directly into a call for the culture to hold itself accountable. Around the same time came a related initiative, H.E.A.L. — Human Education Against Lies — and it traveled further than most people realize. It wasn't confined to records and interviews; the concept shaped real actions on the streets of Europe, including a 1991 Amsterdam intervention where a Benetton billboard was spray-painted in H.E.A.L.'s name, an act that led the Dutch Advertising Code Committee to formally rule the advertisement 'contrary to good taste." Both the Movement and H.E.A.L. were early, practical versions of the same instinct that would later formalize into the Temple of Hip-Hop in 1996: Hip-Hop is not just music and dance, it's a culture with knowledge and self-understanding built into its foundation from the start, alongside breaking, MCing, graffiti, and DJing.

He's brought that same argument to a very different room recently: a 2026 episode of Lemme Ask You This, the podcast Talib Kweli co-hosts with Tef Poe — a show built on unfiltered, long-form conversation at the intersection of art and activism, closer to genuine dialogue between people who've spent decades inside the culture than to a industry press run. Across a wide-ranging conversation, he walks through the South Bronx, the origins of boom bap, the founding of the Temple — and then, without prompting, turns the conversation onto what he calls "the culture of white supremacy." His argument there isn't abstract. If a group holding disproportionate power is also the group driving the world's corruption and unchecked capitalism, he says, the ethical move for that group would be to step back and let others lead. The refusal to do that, he argues, is the actual mechanism keeping the wrong people in power — not some natural order of things. He goes further, invoking the Declaration of Independence's own justification for overthrowing tyrannical government, and turns it into an accusation: people who call themselves "real Americans" are ignoring the document itself. He closes the thought by comparing Dr. King's 1963 speech to the present — reading it again recently, he says, he was struck that the same complaints, police brutality, voting rights under attack, could have been written yesterday.

It's the through-line that connects everything: a song in 1988, a movement in 1989, a temple in 1996, a gospel in 2009, and a philosophy in 2026. Same argument, four decades running, in whatever room will have him. As he puts it himself: Hip-Hop is not just music, and it never was supposed to be.

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Sources & Further Reading

1. By All Means Necessary — Boogie Down Productions (Wikipedia)
2. KRS-One — artist overview (Wikipedia)
3. The Gospel of Hip Hop: The First Instrument — KRS-One (Goodreads / Open Library)
4. KRS-One Invading Europe: The 'My Philosophy' Tour 2026" — https://undergroundhiphopblog.com/news/krs-one-returns-to-europe-in-my-philosophy-2026-tour/
5. "KRS-One Brings 'My Philosophy' to Zagreb in Live Lecture and Book Signing" — Maria Jackson 27 Magazine
6. Lemme Ask You This with Talib Kweli & Tef Poe, Episode 29 — KRS-One (YouTube)

Official Artist Links

No affiliation — Funknuz earns nothing from these links; they go straight to the artist.

KRS-One — krs-one.com

Temple of Hip Hop — thetempleofhiphop.org

My Philosophy Book - myphilosophybook.com

Boogie Down Productions - https://www.bdp.one/

A note on this article: This piece was researched and drafted with Funknuz AI, then edited, fact-checked, and finalized by our editorial team. All sourcing is linked above. AI can make mistakes, and so can we — if something reads off, that's on us, not the tech.