Minneapolis' ubiquitous underground hip hop figure P.O.S has a long list of credentials: guitarist for Building Better Bombs, vocalist and keyboard player for Marijuana Deathsquads, member of well-populated supergroup Gayngs, and a founding member of the Doomtree collective. All of these were running full bore before he was laid up with kidney failure, but after a successful transplant and months of recovery - which he recounts in both hilarious and cringe-inducing detail to host Larry Mizell Jr. - he's back on the road, on his own, and managed to make time to come through the KEXP studio. While the live room felt cavernous without a full backing band, his conversations were intimate and revealing, ranging from the (at times false) dichotomy between mainstream and underground rap and punk, the advantages and disadvantages of being a musician first and a rapper second, and the finer points of Lil Wayne's body of work. And these moments of illumination are just the breaks between his kinetic, vocally dextrous songs with the aggressive, glitched-out synth cacophony that Kanye tried to take credit for on Yeezus. Watch the whole session now:
Celebrating their fourth LP, A Man Alive, Thao and the Get Down Stay Down stopped by KEXP to throw a little pre-release party. Though the new songs are energetic and completely accessible, as Thao explains to the Midday Show's Cheryl Waters, recording A Man Alive was an incredibly personal, at time…
Portland synth pop legends STRFKR are no strangers to KEXP, but they came through the studio once again after returning stateside from a quick jaunt over to Japan and played a quick set that included cuts spanning their whole career. Their sound has often been difficult to define: at times straight…
