Joe Budden "Rage & The Machine" (Album Stream)

Rage & The Machine, the latest album from Joe Budden, with production by AraabMuzick. A lot of the press for this album was overshadowed by the Drake beef, but when the smoke clears - as always - fans will have a lot to digest with this latest offering. Stand-out tracks include: "I Wanna Know," "I Gotta Ask," "Uncle Joe" and "Idols" - whereas, I did not love the featured tracks with Fabolous, Tory Lanez or Joell Ortiz, but I rarely gravitate to the singles. Budden, a front-man for "what to do" and "what NOT to do," and a trailblazer for letting fans behind the curtain, I sit with his projects for weeks to catch all the layers of introspection in his bars. In part, I can see that Joe just wanted to take it back to rhyming - hard beats, dope rhymes & some medicine sprinkled in for those that catch it. I wasn't mad at all when he dropped a Drake diss the same day as "Flex" - again, that track wasn't for me anyway, but the album cuts spoke to me. Peep the full album below...

The Combat Jack Show "Joe Budden Episode"

On the latest episode of the Combat Jack Show, the crew welcomes back the Jersey eMCee Joe Budden. Joe discusses his new album with AraabMuzick, Rage & the Machine, maturation in Hip-Hop (and life), the success of I'll Name This Podcast Later, his historic beefs over the course of his career, Slaughterhouse, and the crazy shit with the kids that ran up on his property. Sidenote: Drake following those kids after that whole ordeal ... that's not smart at all, but super petty lol. With Joe Budden, you never know what'll come up, you just know it'll be entertaining, so dig in below.

Joe Budden "Wake" (Prod. by araabMUZIK)

"Introspection means dig deep, let's look below the wealth

I wanna know myself

How you tell bitches know they self

When you don't even know yourself?

You wouldn't know yourself

Say he Canadian, maybe Asian, Croatian

Be sounding like his Jamaican friends, depend on what state he in

I think you rap good, but you a movie star

So that owl's appropriate, we don't know who you are

Where did the boy's brain change? Was it the club scene?

Now you sound like you use people and love things

But later for how you use people and love things..."

I look at this "battle" and say to myself, there's 0 incentive for Drake to jump in this beef; he leverages his celebrity too well. It speaks for itself. Tracks like this, however, further prove that Joe is a top tier lyricist and he's the sibling-like rapper that knows exactly what to say to hit where it hurts, lol. In the end, this will be a loose track in the catalog of a superior MC that continues to showcase the best of his abilities on tracks that never end up on an album. I can say that for "Whatever It Takes" and several others he's recorded as features and mixtape cuts over the years. I salute his pen, and wish we'd get more but we won't. And that's okay, I think Joe's gonna find more success in media than rap, and there's no defeating Drake in the long-run, the conversation will just shift (win or lose) and things will go back to regularly scheduled programming. Either way, enjoy below and go back and re-listen to "All Love Lost," definitely one of my favorite albums from 2015.