When you name a song “Fat Belly,” there’s obviously not some deeper meaning to decipher or literary metaphor to unravel: Homeboy Sandman is a fan of food and he’s going to write a damn rap song about it. So there.

We all have some weird relationship with food: We eat too much of it, not enough of it or post pictures of it to Facebook. When there’s so much anxiety about what we’re eating (“recent studies show that … “) and what it means for our image, I love that Homeboy Sandman can just celebrate food for what it is, free of all the guilt.

Continue reading Homeboy Sandman: Fat Belly (video) →

There’s rap songs, and then there are rap songs that make you wanna learn every word – the cadence, the flow, the rhythm. The songs that you wanna bump in your crappy car factory stereo system and pound your steering wheel to (and who cares if you end a sentence in a preposition?). There’s rap songs so good you don’t even need a proper chorus – just some mean-mug humming. That’s Homeboy Sandman’s “Mine All Mine.”

The Queens, N.Y.-based MC dropped his Chimera EP via Stones Throw on Tuesday, but “Mine All Mine” came out earlier in the year on the Subject: Matter EP.

Homeboy Sandman uses his two-plus minutes on “Mine All Mine” to rap about (per the EP cover) “the things that belong to me that rappers never rap about when they rap about things that belong to them. This song is not about my chain, or my money, or my car, or my skills, or my girls. It’s about my socks, and my toothpaste, and my lotion, and my favorite television programs.”

If lines like “My insurance is WebMD” don’t sell you on his everyman approach, then seeing Homeboy Sandman rock this track with his family (and his Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles notebook) surely should do the trick.