📰 The Hype Williams of the Soundcloud Era Drops His Own Album 📰

 STORY

Lyrical Lemonade’s Cole Bennett Documented a Moment in Hip-Hop. Now He's Creating a New One

By Paul Thompson

When Cole Bennett was a high schooler in Plano, Illinois, he started a music blog, Lyrical Lemonade, where he posted reviews of his favorite drill albums. This was the early 2010s, the dawn of Soundcloud rap, and soon he was evolving from blogger to live event promoter and music video producer, working with then-budding stars like Lil Pump and Juice WRLD. Last month Bennett, who is now 27, released a compilation album with Def Jam, All Is Yellow, that features huge names like Kid Cudi and Eminem and feels designed to take his career in a new, more commercial direction. But as Paul Thompson writes in this deeply felt profile, the record is also a powerful snapshot of the Soundcloud era, a time, Bennett recalls, when artists were sleeping on each other’s floors and almost no one was signed to a label. “The goal,” Bennett says, “is to do things that maybe no one else understands besides me and a couple of my friends I grew up with—but it means so much to us.” Maybe that’s the lesson here: Make something for your crew, and the whole world listens. —Alex Hoyt, articles editor

In the opening credit sequence of Into the Wild, Sean Penn's 2007 adaptation of the John Krakauer book about a young man who gives up all his possessions to live in the Alaskan wilderness, that young man—played by Emile Hirsch, wide-eyed and half-prepared—treks up the snowy mountain where he’ll hunt, scavenge, brace against the elements, and eventually die. While he climbs, a simmering Eddie Vedder song swells: “I've got this light,” Vedder growls, “and the will to show/I will always be better than before.”

A little over a year ago, Cole Bennett, the 27-year-old music video director, sat down to watch this scene and was struck by inspiration. “It feels like this big feat, this big moment,” he says, lounging on the patio of Soho House in West Hollywood. This is a few days before the release of All Is Yellow, a compilation album credited to Lyrical Lemonade, the music blog Bennett founded in high school, which has since unfurled into a multimedia and live promotion company. Bennett and a pair of friends are inconspicuous among the wealthy, well-dressed crowd, save for the black hats with “ALBUM” emblazoned across the fronts in bright white letters.

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