Like it or not, pimpin’ is a leopard-skin swatch of hip-hop’s patchwork tapestry.  Mostly you gotta try and laugh at it.  So I come to bury the pimp not to praise ‘em.

Prostitution is an ugly fucking business.  But those old Cadillacs were mighty fly.

42nd St. (A.M. Breakups Remix) - Super Chron Flight Brothers (feat. Lord Superb, Pastense & HiCoup) / Pimpin’ Chipp - Ghostface Killah / Somebody Gotta Do It (Pimpin’ Ain’t Easy) - Ice-T / Pimp of the Year - Dru Down / Pimpin’ Ain’t Easy - Slick Rick & Dana Dane / Who Are the Pimps? - Boogie Down Productions / Bitch I’m a Pimp - Too $hort / I’m Your Pimp - Skull Snaps / Theme From The Mack - Willie Hutch / A Film Called (Pimp) - Common (feat. Bilal & MC Lyte) / Macula’s Theory - Prince Paul (feat. Big Daddy Kane) / Hookers At The Point - Action Bronson / Pimp Shit - DJ Babu / Superhoe - Malcolm & Martin / Hardcore Hustle (Instrumental) - Madvillain / Signifying Rapper - Schoolly D / A Thousand Angels Standing on the Head of a Pimp

It’s The Old Testament Mixtape.  That’s right.

Hosted by Charlton Heston.

Genesis - El-P, Nas & Charlton Heston / The Garden - Cut Chemist / Adam & Eve - Qwel & Kip Killagain / The Garden - Son of a Bricklayer / Paradise Lost - Redshield (Of Oldominion) / Wrath of Kane - Big Daddy Kane / Noah - A.M. Breakups / Pitch Black Ark (Instrumental) - Micranots / Pain Language (Instrumental) - DJ Muggs / Lot’s Wife - Red Ants / In The Middle Of Infinity (6) - 3:33 / I Am What I Am - Chubb Rock / Moses - Slick Rick / The Ten Plagues (feat. Malcolm X) / The Ten Plagues - Socalled (feat. Killah Priest) / Into The Water - DJ Krush / Exodus - Remedy / The Ten Commandments (feat. Notorious B.I.G.) / Levitibus (Instrumental) - Stoupe / The Number Song - DJ Shadow / Holy Are You - Rakim / God Moving Over The Face Of The Waters

The passing of Donald Byrd a couple weeks ago got me thinking a little more on jazz’s influence on hip-hop.  Robbie at Unkut came through with the ten greatest Donald Byrd samples, which are a tribute to the man’s work and his (unacknowledged, unknown possibly to him too) contribution to some truly classic cuts.  And that doesn’t include “Buck ‘Em Down,” “Self Destruction” and “Fear Of A Black Planet,” just for starters.

Over at whosampled, Byrd is listed for over 100 songs sampling him and another 100 of music he produced–and remember whosampled is pretty incomplete (and that’s a good thing, since nobody except DMCA and lawyers want all samples known.  Sampling is like magic tricks, or pussy, or pussy magic…when it loses its mystery, we’re all poorer for it).  And compare that to Miles (96 samples) and Coltrane (40 samples–I’m pretty sure that’s a crowdsourcing failure, right? Nobody sampled ‘A Love Supreme’ yet?! Common? Lupe? Some other cunnilingus adept rapper?! That shit can’t be right.)

So on the one we owe Donald Byrd for a heavy grip of classics.  Peace to him for that.  Thing is though, while you could do a great ‘Donald Byrd Sample Mix,’* it wouldn’t sound all that…jazzy.  (It’s an idea though, I’ll think on it. Actually I was trying to convince Hevehitta on the twitter the other day to do a series of all-one-breakbeat mixes.)  Samples get cut up, flipped, slapped, tweaked and the result hits the groove but a lotta times far from the source–which is one of hip-hop’s great achievements, that artistic transformation of sounds.

What I’m trying to say is, you know how scientists are always coming out with shit like, 81% of the human DNA comes from the housefly, or we’re all descended from this one rat-looking-thing?  If there ever was a Hip-Hop Genome Project, I think we’d find a much higher percentage of jazz up in there than you woulda guessed.  Wait–not to compare jazz to a housefly or a prehistoric rat though.

Anyways here we got another hour of jazz/hip-hop beats where the influence is upfront, so forget everything I just said.  That was just off the dome on account of Donald Byrd, I already had this mix going when he passed.  C’mon son, it’s not like you come here for the coherent hypotheses or even read all this wobbly verbosity. You come for the beats.  I got you.  I got your beats.

Conflict (DJ Critical Hype Blend) - Guru (feat. Masta Ace) / Ill Street Blues (Rework Instrumental) - STS / Stand Up (Ode to Allen Ginsberg’s Beat Memories) - DJ Hellblazer / Blue & Green - Mr. Moods / The Second Shoot - Planet Soap / Morning - Maliks / Nonverbal Communication - Rob Swift & Dave McMurray / Endless Nights - Mononome / When the Dust Settles - Kurtis Sp / Pot Belly - Rob Swift & Lou Donaldson / Hypnotic - Eric B. & Rakim / Step Right Up - PremRock / Lagoona’s Bliss - Live Human / Chi Nike ‘e Pedi - DJ Manueli / Mont - Bil Basmala / Iron Head - U.X.O. / A Different Blues - Apple Juice Kid / Piano Fragments - Bones The Beat Head / I’m The Man (Instrumental) - DJ Premier / Loungin’ - Guru & Donald Byrd

Take 1

Take 2

*Update:DJ Polished Solid - All Donald Byrd sample mix, great tracks there.

**Update: Unkut - All-ESG’s ‘UFO’ & All-’Nautilus’ sample mixes

Throwback to Cadillacs and the dawn of crack.

Ill St Blues - Kool G Rap & DJ Polo / Reign of the Tec - The Beatnuts / One Shot, Two Shot - Ol’ Dirty Bastard (feat. Thirstin Howl the 3rd) / 6 In the Mornin’ (Bunky Mix) - Ice-T / Night Of The Living Baseheads - Public Enemy / Simply Dope, Part 2 - DJ Mark the 45 King / Life in the Fast Lane - Geto Boys / Bring It Back - Roli Rho / Life’s Ill Pt. II (The Empire Striketh) - Vast Aire (feat. Breezly Brewin & Vordul Mega) / Stillmatic (Paid In Full Mix) - Nas / Code Of The Streets (DJ Critical Hype Blend) - Gangstarr / Beware of the Ghetto - Fokis (feat. E-Cashe$ & Don Chi) / Cars & Shoes - The Coup / Army Fatigue Rap (Damu The Fudgemunk Redef Remix) - Kaimbr & Kev Brown (feat. Roddy Rod, Hassaan Mackey & DJ Marshall Law) / Get That Money Black - Meyhem Lauren / Jungle City - Bey Battery, Pruven & Agartha Audio / Bad Bad Man - Fat Joe / Blue Street Ills

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn’t go away.

- Philip K. Dick

Icarus Falling - PSY/OPSogist / All Day Breakfast - Jel / Numb - Blueprint / Temple of the Golden Pavilion (”Like Some Enormous Music”) [excerpt] - Philip Glass / Fendi Shoe Bomber (Instrumental) - Nephlim Modulation Systems / Can You Feel It (Instrumental) - Schoolly D / Thomas is Gone Now - Gasoline Monk / Cradle to the Grave (Instrumental) - Mobb Deep / Calamus - MF Doom / Ice Cream (Instrumental) - The RZA / Connections (Instrumental) - Godfather Don / Sun vs. Clouds - Black-Tokyo Musik / [Echo from the Hosts interlude feat. Shabazz Palaces] / Snow (Remix Instrumental) - Roc Marciano / Queens Get The Money (Instrumental) - Jay Electronica / Forever Is Wasted - Mononome / Head Spins - Djinji Brown / [Empire of Dirt interlude feat. Johnny Cash] / Years - Bartholomaus Traubeck / [Beaten Metal interlude feat. Antibalas] / 30 - Danny Brown & SKYWLKR

[above] R.A. The Rugged Man & Mac Lethal :: Crustified Christmas

Every rappity-rap Christmas song ever from Egotrip: Naughty / Nice

[below] Eazy-E :: Merry Motherfucking Christmas

So uh…the world was supposed to end today?  Probably didn’t?

Man, that apocalyptic shit gets tired.  Most of y’all are probably too young to remember everybody freaking out that the world was gonna end on January 1st, 1000.

I read that the Mayan calendar ended on that date because it was carved on a temple.  And they ran out of room and were all, ‘Well we ain’t building another temple.  My hand fucking hurts.  2012, that’s like hundreds of years from now, that’s enough, let’s go get a beer.’

Anyways.  The final instalment of Best Joints of 2012.  Hosted by Orson Welles.

Reputation - Apollo Brown & Guilty Simpson / Bust Shots - Wu-Block (Ghostface Killah, Sheek Louch & Inspectah Deck) / I Shall Not Be Moved - Public Enemy / Crocodile Tears - Billy Woods / Memoirs Of 2071 - Verbezerker (Waatu & Vig Vega) / Rhymin Slang (Dave Sitek Remix) - JJ DOOM / The Don - Nas / Southern Fried - Killer Mike / Black Roses - Bigg Jus / Walk Hard - Gangrene / Odd Future - Short Fuze & Nasa / The Mad Writer - L’Orange (feat. yU) / I Know Why You Mad - Troy Ave / Good Luck - Lil Chuuuch / Brown - Homeboy Sandman / In The Middle Of Infinity-3 - 3:33 / 2012 - KRS-One

The recap:

• Bloodstained Elevators
• Unattended Luggage
• Special Guest Stars

If the world did end it’s too bad you didn’t get to hear this, it has some great tracks on it.  Also, you know, sorry about the dying and fire and destruction and whatever.  Floods and shit. Comets.

[below] Too $hort’s Hanukah song.  Because…menorah beeeiiiiiiitch.  For real, I don’t know why this exists.

Felt to me like 2012 was the year rappers got love for being real–not just being real, but being themselves, with a bigger variety of those selves than ever.  Danny Brown and his fucked-up hair.  Bronson and his combination cookbook/rhyme book.  Even Kitty Pryde with her redhead-from-Florida-who-works-at-Claire’s-Accessories-and-raps-about-boys.  Why’d everybody turn on Rap Genius all of a sudden?  They turned out to be fronting.  And assholes.  I heard people talk about ‘folklore rap’ and ‘grown man rap’. I didn’t hear anyone talk about Drake or Kreayshawn’s contributions to the culture.  Hip-hop’s always been about ‘real recognize real,’ but not only has it never had before such a multiplicity of individual voices, that coda’s usually had the footnote that ‘(except it’s better if you pretend to be a murderous drug dealer with a ridiculously lavish lifestyle.)’

Once you get off the 2Chainz/ratchet/gangsta/smoke-too-much-weed-to-do-more-than-string-random-words-together axis, you could have a real omnivorous musical diet.  It’s kinda like a Tumblr effect, where kids post a Method Man track and then an Urkel .gif and then a Frida Kahlo painting.  No one’s paying attention to region, or style, or whatever–you listen to what you like, and cats can make what they like–since radio play and sales are over, just do what you want.  Hip-hop’s on shuffle.  All I heard out there was what a great year it was for hip hop–true, true.

Album of the Year

Ka :: Grief Pedigree

Most end-of-year lists by people who actually know shit about hip-hop are gonna lead with this one or the Kendrick Lamar.  Me, I think I’m the wrong coast or the wrong age or something to be really feeling GKMC.

Grief Pedigree is nothing if not heartfelt.  Every line, and Ka’s scratchy, low voice, shows weariness, wisdom, struggle.  This album didn’t come easy–Ka’s been working on his own for years, trying to find his place in hip-hop.  Pedigreealone took two years, he says: “one year writing, one year digging.”  It’s self-produced, simple but strong beats built around perfect and unique loops and drums low in the mix.  The lyrics are long strings of rhymes, endless quotables.  The whole product shows the stamp of true handmade craft.  It’s ‘grown man rap’ as if the Mobb Deep of Infamous had disappeared and come back from the streets 20 years later.  If Jay-Z is Avon Barksdale and every new gangsta on the scene is Marlo, Grief Pedigree is Bodie music.

There’s been a lot of fair comparisons to Illmatic–both are short, tight, cohesive, packed with detail and imagery, and give us one man’s view on the life out there, a kind of projects bildungsroman.  Both reward you with repeated listens, both are classics, both are poetry backed up by peerless beats.

So can I get fuckin’ pretentious for a minute?  Pedigree is maybe more likeDubliners–a collection of linked semi-autobiographical stories about a young man, as written when he was older, and can look back not only with a sense of loss and regret, but also a pervasive sense of mortality.

The ancient Egyptians postulated that every man has seven souls. The spirit, the vital essence, was called Ka, breathed into us at the moment of birth as the soul that makes us alive. After death, Ka was the only reliable guide of through the Land of the Dead. In hieroglyphs the Ka was represented as a second image of the Pharoah, the unseen double. But unlike other souls the Ka was sustained with food and drink, even after death. Even a soul gotta eat.

This is not just album of the year.  This is the one to beat for the decade.  It’s good to see Ka coming in from the cold–literally, because when this dropped he was out selling CDs in front of what used to be Fat Beats and running back and forth to the post office to mail out orders.  Ka is “Born King NY” indeed: No paper raps just lead rhymes / Niggas spit they shit…I bled mines / Food for thought, meals essential, shrine your mind / Build your temple…

Runners Up

2 billy woods :: History Will Absolve Me

Woods is that dude sitting on his stoop in a tank-top and Army surplus pants, sipping alternately from a Clamato and a Heineken for his hangover, reading the paper and getting pissed off about it. Spits with intelligence and aggravation, his records are like the OST for “An HBO Original Movie: Inside The Mind of the DC Sniper.” Political rap has mostly been about rousing sloganeering, not usually turning its cynicism on the struggle itself. In 1989 P.E. told us to Fight The Power. On an earlier record a couple years ago, woods wagers “five cigarettes says the revolution won’t change shit.”

HWAM once again shows woods as one of today’s most intelligent, dense and complex MCs, bending bars and packing his lyrics with fragments, namechecks, references, history lessons, cynicism and wisdom. Necessary post-9/11, post-Iraq, post-modern, post-postal music. Music for the struggle that isn’t over, but no easy answers and no escapism. Because there are no easy answers and there is no escape. It’s not easy listening, but these aren’t easy times.

3 & 4 Public Enemy :: Most of My Heroes Still Don’t Appear On No Stamp & The Evil Empire of Everything

Look peoples, P.E. I will always ride for, it’s personal.  Hip-hop for me started with that guitar loop at the start of “You’re Gonna Get Yours.”  I’m the guy who thinks Muse Sick N Hour Mess Age is actually the Bomb Squad sound taken as far as it can go, and P.E. putting out a record 10 years before most people could appreciate it.  But I’ll admit after the stripped-down direction of 1999’s There’s A Poison Goin’ On’, the four LPs that followed had some good songs but were kinda…weaker.

Chuck & co. have been promising to release two LPs in the same year almost every release since Apocalypse ‘91 I think, but this time they actually did it–and in a year where I consider an album with half of its tracklist worth keeping good, this isn’t filled out, stretched or padded.  It’s 24 tracks of pretty solid Public Enemy.

I’ll admit that lyrically, there’s not the same brilliance of P.E.’s past, but musically these two records have P.E. really pushing their chops and, for the first time, showing a new range by trying on styles from across Black music’s history–Motown, reggae, old school hip-hop, and revisiting the punk/rap style of their old Anthrax collabo, this time with Tom Morello and Henry Rollins.  It’s the sound of a tight musical machine, honed by endless touring, flexing its muscles and putting on a new variation on the show.

5 El-P :: Cancer 4 Cure

Originally I thought only half of this was brilliant, and I had about 17 paragraphs written in my head about how he’s spending too much time hanging out with indie-rock dudes instead of sampling “Get Your Mother Off The Crack,” and how I never listen to I’ll Sleep because it sounds too fussy but I fucks heavily with the Weareallgoingtoburninhellmegamixxes, but then I just listened to C4C again.  It’s actually fucking great, and my sole critique is: 50 Shades of Guantanamo erotic foreplay, what the fuck man, keep it to yourself, that shit creeps me out.  Here are some words no one is allowed to use in writing about El-P any more: paranoid, robot, futuristic, Blade Runner, dystopia, post apocalyptic.  Thank you for your cooperation.

6-20: Other Most Definitely Official Albums Mostly Not On Other People’s Lists, But Don’t Let That Stop You

• Agartha Audio & Taiyamo Denku :: Quadrofiendia This is just a good, solid banging record.  Denku and a range of solid guest MCs hold their own over some of AA’s best beats.
• The Alchemist :: Russian Roulette Ill producer-driven record which wisely saves Alc’s best beats for a hand-picked artisanal lineup of MCs, in a year when he had more hands in everything than that limerick about the man from Mazingers with cocks for fingers.
• B. Dolan :: House of Bees Vol. 2 I don’t really get why B. Dolan doesn’t get more love in the underground, or even above it, since he’s really a talented cat behind that beard…saw a lot of idiot white ‘intelligent’ MCs get love this year who universally failed to bring heat.  This is your mans right here.
• Bigg Jus :: Machines That Make Civilization Fun I wish this record had gotten 10% of the press El-P’s record did, seeing as they’re both ex-CoFlow.  I admit only the first half is good, but that half is peerless, incredible density and flow.  (Paging Mr. Len…white courtesy telephone…the fuck you at man…)
• Collectible Humans :: String Theory So ‘progressive rap’ is a thing now, meaning the beats are ill, the rhymes are esoteric (not to be confused with Esoteric) and intelligent (not Wise Intelligent).  Sometimes it works and sometimes I think, ‘Damn, Aesop Rock has a lot to answer for.’  This one most definitely works.
• DJ Format :: Statement of Intent This was another DJ-driven record of great beats, that brought among other great guest MCs Mr Lif and Edan back from…whatever the hell they’ve been doing…to rhyme over some good ol’ fashioned funky beats.  Some AH YEAH shit.
• June Marx :: Seven Trumpets Sound Like some kinda Killarmy version of Quantum Leap, June Marx is stuck in the sweet spot between the second Wu-wave like Sunz of Man and the surge of ancient gangsta astronauts isht like Killah Priest and Jedi Mind.
• Meyhem Lauren :: Mandatory Brunch Meetings Old fashioned NY face-slaps with dashes of gourmet callouts and some supremely strange metaphors. And a long closing shout-out to the Chinese Communist Party for absolutely no reason I can figure out.
• Open Mike Eagle :: 4NML HSPTL Mike is maybe the most intelligent MC out there today.  By ‘intelligent’ I don’t mean dropping numerological Clarence 13X stuff, or UFO theories, or political diatribes like we usually mean by ‘intelligent hip-hop.’  I mean the dude is smart as hell.  ’Clever’ and ‘witty’ are awful things to say about anyone but yeah.  Only MC to break down the financial crisis and only MC to ever reference The New Yorker mascot (except that one time Kool Moe Dee did it by accident).  There was a lot of talk about ‘grown man rap’ this year because of stuff like Nas rapping about his daughter…this is rap for grown men who really need to catch up on The Nation but then smoke weed and watch Hard Eight again on cable instead.
• PremRock :: Mark’s Wild Years Rap’s graveyard of failed concept records is about the same size as its actual graveyard.  A hip-hop homage to Tom Waits, on the face of it, is gonna turn off hip-hop AND Tom Waits fans most likely…but you know what, this really works.  Not in the ‘interesting exercise’ sense but in the ‘interesting album’ sense.  Cop it. And I don’t even really fuck with Tom Waits.
• Roc Marciano :: Reloaded Anyone who doesn’t have this universally loved record on their year-end list is a motherfucking moron who should be banned from writing, or even making lists about, hip-hop ever again.  No doubt the beats on Marcberg are better, but this is a great record.  The two best reviews are over on Passion of the Weiss and Kid Mero’s.
• Talib Kweli & Z-Trip :: Attack The Block Now I remember why I always check out any new Kweli project even though his output has been total ass for about ten years.  He fucking brings it on this one for once.  Z-Trip’s still got it on the beats too.

Best Instrumental Shit

I didn’t listen to a lot of instrumental shit this year, or maybe I did and I just don’t remember because they sucked.  But these really stood out.

• 3:33 :: In The Middle Of Infinity This was one of those, oh shit I gotta get their whole discography records.  It’s that dark, grimy ill shit I like.  Peerlessly so.
• Kid Koala :: 12 Bit Blues In contrast to that bafflingly shitty DJ Yoda club record that also came out this year, Koala creates the world’s first and incredibly dope turntablist LP out of blues records.
• Mononome :: The Secret Melody I think there may now be too much instrumental jazz-hop in the world.  Shit needs like a carbon credits program or something.  But this was a truly beautiful EP.

There were a lot of other records–a LOT of other records–I just can’t say were ‘albums of the year’ because less than half the tracks were banging.  It’s just how it is.  The Nas, the RZA OST, Killer Mike…I fuck with those, but they just didn’t have enough overall great joints to be albums of the year.  If you think I missed something, hit me off in the comments.

Hip hop this year was on some Love Boat shit.  Mad guest appearances.  So many of the best joints had features, this is Best of 2012 #3, the All Features Edition.

Remember in the ’90s, when it was like a federal requirement your record had to say “(feat. Busta Rhymes)” on it somewhere?  (It had something to do with agricultural subsidies?)  This year was kinda like that, except with the same six or so hungry MCs everywhere.  These guys were like the specialist guest stars

Zilla Rocca said on the twitter that back in the day, Redman used to get $20k for a guest verse, and now it’s more like a thousand.  So that means Danny Brown made about $657,000 this year.  And for a guy who probably doesn’t move very fast, Action Bronson sure made it to about ten recording studios every day.  I’m guessing pimped-out personal pedecab, full-time Samoan to pedal it.

Also, I hate finding out crazy shit like this: “We are told in Love Boat II that Gopher, Doc, Isaac, and the captain all served together in Vietnam, but no reference to this is ever made again.” Fuck you Wikipedia. I cannot unlearn that.

One last thing: next year, I wanna see the words “(feat. Greg Nice)” 5000% more often.  That DJ Yoda joint is almost official, if it was called ‘Crispin Glover’ instead of ‘Charlie Sheen.’

2012–more feat. than a fuckin’ caterpillar. With SPECIAL GUEST STARS…

LORNE GREENE as… MR. MUTHAFUCKIN’ EXQUIRE

CHARO as… DANNY BROWN

THE GUY WHO PLAYED GOMEZ ADDAMS as… OPEN MIKE EAGLE

THE SKIPPER FROM GILLIGAN’S ISLAND as… ACTION BRONSON

SCOTT BAIO as… HIMANSHU

RICARDO MONTALBAN as… ROC MARCIANO

and

LONI ANDERSON as… HERSELF

Oh Hail No - El-P (feat. Mr. Muthafuckin’ eXquire & Danny Brown) / Cobra Commander (Kenny Segal Version) - Open Mike Eagle (feat. Danny Brown) / Spaceship - MHz (Danny Brown verse) / You Have to Ride the Wave - Himanshu (feat. Danny Brown & Mr. Muthafuckin’ eXquire) / Werner Herzog - Busdriver (feat. Open Mike Eagle & Nocando) / From Scratch - Illogic & Blockhead (feat. Open Mike Eagle & Has-Lo) / Home Team - Troy Ave (feat. Action Bronson, Mr Muthafuckin’ eXquire & Maffew Blocksdale) / Special Effects - Meyhem Lauren (feat. Himanshu & Action Bronson) / The Turning Point - The Alchemist (feat. Roc Marciano) / Loco-Motive - Nas (feat. Large Professor) / That’s Enough - Talib Kweli & Z-Trip (feat. John Forte, Skyzoo, Posdnous, Rubix & Fashawn) / Target Practice (Shuko Remix) - Vinnie Paz (feat. Jus Allah) / Monumental - The White Shadow Of Norway (feat. KRS-One, Bigg Limn, Raekwon & Immortal Technique) / FCK YR LF (Verse 32) - BLKHRTS x Curly Castro / Dinero - DJ Absolut (feat. Joell Ortiz, Raekwon, Reynos, Al B Back) / Granite - Shinobi Stalin (feat. Roc Marciano) / Nine Spray - Roc Marciano (feat. Ka)

5th anniversary mix.

Some joints I played before, some not.  All of them bang.  Fuck your own face.

Fuck ‘Em - The Geto Boys / Kill The Perfect Beat I (feat. Public Enemy/DJ Pone, Metallica/Vitamin String Quartet, Ice Cube, DJ Muggs, Eric B. & Rakim) / Armageddon - Kurupt & DJ Muggs / Full System Station - El-P / Headband - Billy Woods / Lost At Birth - Public Enemy / Kill The Perfect Beat II (feat. Dr. Octagon, Peyote Cody, LL Cool J) / Juice (Know The Ledge) - Eric B. & Rakim / Son Of Shaft - The Bar-Kays / Freeze The Frame [interlude] - DJ Hurricane / Apache (Grand Master Flash Remix) - Incredible Bongo Band / Hip Hop Is Dead - Nas / Kill The Perfect Beat III (feat. Camu Tao, Dert, The RZA & Havoc) / Fat Gold Chain - Schoolly D / Pinky Ring (Magowl Remix) - Wu-Tang Clan / Land Of The Gun - Immortal Technique & Breez Evahflowin / Tougher Than Leather - Run-DMC / From The Planet Of Eat - Cannibal Ox / Better & Better - KRS-One (feat. Pee-Doe)

V

Five years ago today, I posted this sonic clusterfuck and never looked back.  Listening to it now, it’s just like everything else I put up here: good beat, badly mixed, full of samples which are funny, bizarre, political and disconcerting.  And, it’s totally different from anything anyone else does.

But mostly it’s badly mixed and slapped together. I’ve gotten a lot better over the past nickel, but every time I get one skill down I’m trying out three other new things not very well.  So bear with, my neighbours. Even the worst assembled mixes on here have great joints on them. I stand by my tracklists g, they’re all official.

Greatest Hits

2012.  88 mixes later. (Shit, really? Is that right?)  175,000 hits, from all 50 states and 120 countries.  I’ve been featured on the Percussion Lab home page for about six months (because they probably forgot it was there).  I’ve heard from a lot of people who dig what I’m doing, and only had one serious hater.  For all that I’m grateful.  I don’t overrate what I do by even one RCH, but I’m glad the fam is feeling it.  Because most of the time I’m trying to turn people on to great hip-hop they mighta missed, and I know that’s happening–so I spread the word.  I do my bit, I get to give something back.  All good. Cuz that’s why I do it: when you here a song, it’s so damn fresh, you gotta share it somehow, by boomin’ system or sprinkling some Christopher Walken samples on it and putting on the internets.

A couple of cats said I should run down the site’s greatest hits.  The top three are all cuts I made, popular I guess ’cause they’re short:

• Brooklyn Zoo (4% Technique Mix) :: this made it into those weird Russian mp3 sites, so that’s why it’s got…7,500 hits? Dayumn.
• My Pet Goat ::  this was a fuck of a lot of work, so 5,000 hits makes it worth it.
• The Expiration Date :: like My Pet Goat, this gets downloaded a lot in China, because THEY FUCKING HATE AMERICA.

Thing is though, these mixes accrete hits over time like a motherfucker, so I gotta run down the most popular by year:

• 2007 - Go Tell It On The Mainframe aka James Woods is Bugging.
• 2008 - A Rhythm Runs Through It is an all-round good one, funky instrumental shit, even your moms might like it.
• 2009 - Super Chicken: A Dub-Hop Mix / Revenge of Super Chicken [tie] started a series of 7 mixes and made me realize what I do is collect, curate & collage.
• 2010 - DOOM: Live From Latveria?! was cool because PSY/OPSogist did two remixes just for this. Also, that’s Bill Murray doing Johnny Storm’s voice on the samples.
• 2011 - Autolect: Autology Volume One I’m glad this got love, because it was a blessing for Hasan to let me put it together. I kinda like the second one better though.
• 2012 - The Spraycan Diaries was hanging around my hard drive for a couple years before Hevehitta drove me into action, and I’m glad he did.

If I had to choose my own personal best–the ones I listen to a lot–they’d be:

• Cities of the Red Night
• City on the Edge of Never
• The Illamentations
• They Live, We Sleep
• The Falling, which I only listen to on 9/11, but it’s the best piece I ever did.

L

How it started. I been making mixes on cassette for 25 years this year, starting with pause tapes–Red Alert, Chuck Chillout, Mr Magic, Marley Marl.  Originally I was gonna digitize the first one for this 5&25 anniversary, but the tape is pretty degraded and…uh, side A ends with 5 versions of “Bring The Noise” (about 20 minutes) and side B ends with 7 versions of “Rebel Without A Pause” (about 25 minutes).

Even by the second tape I was laying in extra shit, some Scraping Foetus off the Wheel vs. Terminator X, some Apocalypse Now OST dialogue.  Five years later I had the VCR hooked up to the stereo to lay in samples…goddamn that takes some dexterity and patience to hit all the PLAY and REC and PAUSEs at the same time. All this nostalgia for the mix cassette–shit, I used to spend a whole day doing those things.  Now I spend…uh, a whole day.

2007, I’d laid off for a few years, thought about doing my 50th tape. But I had these MP3s to get on there, needed to go digital. Started fucking around with software. Figured it’d be easier to put ‘em on the internet than send CDs to those that I usually gave my mixes to–especially as those cats are worldwide.

The Roman numeral for 50 is L.  Therefore, plus other blazay-blah, Elmattic was gonna be the name of the tape.

Greatest Mrs.

I been doing this a long time. Every boy needs a hobby, and I don’t fucks with model trains.  I got at least another year’s worth lined up–time travel, the Bible, A Rhythm Runs 4 It, BBop For BBoys (Take 3), one of Asian-influenced beats. After that who knows.

The thing that fucks with me though, is that when I made that first tape–hunched over the boombox, waiting for Red Alert to play that new, hand on the REC–that was around the time I got my first serious girlfriend.  On this 5&25 anniversary, I’m divorced.  So hip-hop, mixing, has been with me longer than any relationship.  It’s my greatest Mrs.

The Perfect Beat

I kept the motto from day one.  The Buddha says: When you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha.  When you meet your father, kill your father. I don’t actually know what the fuck that means. Pretty sure I read it in a Lone Wolf & Cub comic anyway.

This site is where I figure out things about hip-hop. What it means. What it does. What makes the perfect beat?  What is the perfect beat?  The perfect beat might be on some 12″ b-side in a dusty crate.  It might get made tomorrow, next year, or in 2022.  Or 3012, because rap goes on to the year 3000.

For now, though? I’d have to go with “Shook Ones” (part one or two, I can’t choose), Roc Marciano’s “Snow,” and the cut below–Public Enemy’s “Son of Public Enemy (Flavor Whop Version).”  Play this one at my funeral fam.

A very special Labor Day mix in honor of America’s most loved federal workers–TSA screeners!

Been a gang of good joints stacking up this year, even just since I dropped this.  So I figure I better break you off these 15 MMXXII jammies strictly from the underground.  Just because you mighta missed ‘em, slept on ‘em, or never heard of ‘em, doesn’t mean they don’t bring juice.

Because underground hip-hop is like unattended luggage–sitting there and you don’t even notice, and then BLAOW! It blows up and…ah fuck it, I just thought it sounded like a good title, Christ, who gives a shit. Sometimes I bore my own self. Just play the damn music.

Unhandled Crossings - Agartha Audio & Taiyamo Denku / Cry - Sector 7G / Mouth Of Madness - A Tribe Called Death / Boom Bap Goon Rap - Kyo Itachi & Ruste Juxx / Peoples 1 - Chin Injeti (feat. Bishop Lamont, Shad & Skratch Bastid) / Bi-Polar Jazz-Funk (Pete Cannon Remix) - Blah’s Mr. Wrong Presents / Big Wig Sole - Ensilence (feat. Kid A) / People - Juan Deuce (feat. Romen Rok) / Monsters Ball - Citizen Kane & Nickel Killsmics (feat. Keef Wookie) / Hold On - I Self Devine / Devil Do - Collectible Humans (feat. DJ Addikt) / Super Villains - Revelation (feat. Prem Rock, Judd & Uncle D) / Come To Jamaica (The Lost Verse) - B. Dolan / Back To Basics - K-Def (feat. El Da Sensei) / Cartoon Katana Cornflakes - No Emotion Goldmask

So the cats at World Around Records hit me off with a stack of unreleased and rare tracks from the vaults…World Around is an international collective of artists with a roster that’s definitely coming up.  Since they’re around the world but also on some hollow earth, Aztec workout regimen, platypus manifest destiny shit, it came together as Irrational Geographics.

Bad science is some crazy shit, but normal science is some crazier shit. I musta read about a dozen articles about that Higgs boson and I still don’t understand shit.  Pluto’s had two moons discovered in the past seven months.  A Humboldt squid is smarter than all Republicans in Congress.  Quantum computing means you can have atom-sized switches on chips which can be on, off, or maybe-on-maybe-off,-who-the-fuck-knows.

Meanwhile, fundamentalists get frothier on the daily worldwide–the last gasp of superstition in the face of the future we already live in.  We got the potential and the dangers to remake the world like never before, but motherfuckers just wanna argue about gay marriage and whether women should be allowed to go to school.  Let me show you this CGI video about creationism on my iPad. I’m finna fly in this jumbo jet to kill this Dutch dude whose cartoon insulting The Prophet I saw on the internet. That’s some irrational geographics, son.

These joints though? Pay attention, you might learn something.

AMRM Shit - Godforbid / I Rule You - Humpasaur Jones (prod. DJ Squid) / Voodoo Child - Louis Mackey (prod. Dr. Quandary) / I Don’t Know - Humpasaur Jones (prod. Dr. Quandary) / Untitled - Zilla Rocca (prod. Dr. Quandary) / Octopus Blood Is Black - Observe (feat. Man Mantis) / The Whiz - Man Mantis / We Got Fangs This Year - 5 O’Clock Shadowboxers (feat. Alex Ludovico & Curly Castro) (prod. by Zilla Rocca) / Punch You in the Face - Chris Dizzy (prod. Spesh the Lone 1) / Legendary (DJ MSP Remix) - STINK TANK / Oohhhhh - Eugenics (Louis Mackey & Dotkom) / Salt Mines - Adam Kadmon / Animals - Chris Dizzy / Weathered Skeleton - Daimyo / Beautiful Women - Louis Mackey (prod. Man Mantis) / Evening On Ganymede - Daimyo / Instant Production Music - Humpasaur Jones (prod.Man Mantis) / Like Clockwork (Particles 2) - Dr. Quandary / Leland Palmer - STINK TANK (prod. Dr. Quandary) / Morphballs - DJ Multiple Sex Partners / Birds of Britain [bonus track outro]

World Around homes page

World Around on the Twitter

World Around on the Soundcloud

B-boys in the front, back, side and middle. Check out my b-boy rhyme and riddle.

No samples this time. Sometimes I just wanna hear the beat. Also my doctor advised me not to watch either of the Breakin’ movies.

‘B-boy’ was originally an all-purpose term for anyone who rocked with the hip-hop elements, then it was used strictly for breakdancers (or maybe the other way around).  I don’t know what we’re all called now. Maybe we’re too many, too varied. I mean, Kitty Pryde doesn’t rock shelltoe Adidas. Jay Electronica probably wears…moccasins.

But this is a dedication to all b-boys.

Dedication To All B-Boys - Schoolly D / B Boys Style - Lil’ Jazzy Jay & Cool Supreme / B-Boy Beat - Wild Style Allstars / 5 elements/B-Boy Breaks - Z-Trip / Tribute to the Breakdancer - Grandmaster Flash (feat. MC Supernatural) / B-Boy Contortionist - Idiot Proof / Return Of The Funky B-Boy Drums - Zeb.Roc.Ski. & Ms. Def Cut / Lords of Cardboard - DJ Format & Kid Aroe / Breakdance Electric Boogie (Junior Cartier Remix) - West Street Mob / Street B-Boy Beatz - Calagad 13 / Dedication - Brand Nubian / Invocation - Common / Dedication - Beastie Boys / Boombox - Blueprint / B-Boy - Orko The Sycotik Alien / B-Boy Stance - Global Phlowtations / Dedicated To Hip-Hop - DOOM vs. Mos Def (DJ Phonetic mix) / A B-Boy’s Alpha - Cannibal Ox / I Remember - KRS-One

Kryloniqatsi I / Writing On The Wall - BPMZ / Aerosoul - Tommy Tee / The Taking of Pelham One Two Three - David Shire / Lune TNS - Company Flow / It’s All Destroyed - Zeb Roc Ski / Kings In The Game - Sick Jacken (feat. B-Real) / Wholetrain - KRS-One & El Da Sensei / The Trains Are Now So Clean - Daedalus / Third Rail - Masai Bey / The Manhattan Project - Typical Cats / Homage 2 Da Bomberz - Tame One / The Amphitheatre - Grandmixer DST / Antivandalism - Sixtoo / Search & Destroy #1 - Tenshun / Hisstory - Material (feat. Rammellzee) / Armed With Krylon - Dälek / Kryloniqatsi II / Krazy Kings 3 - El-P

Graffiti is ephemeral by definition.  It’s going to be buffed, washed, painted over.  When it first started, a piece could run a year or so on a train.  But when the buff came in, writing became not only more of a protest against disenfranchisement but almost a philosophical one as well–against entropy, against mortality, against the inevitability of gradualism.  The futility combined with the incredible craft is part of what makes it so powerfully defiant: I AM HERE. YOU CAN ERASE THIS, BUT I AM HERE.

There’s also the aspect of a cultural guerilla war.  Writers took on a lot of guerilla tactics, thinking, language, and brought war into art.  I remember an interview with Max Roach around 1987 where he said the drums on LL Cool J’s LP sounded “like war drums, like armies on the move.”

Graffiti isn’t dead by a long shot. There’s hardly a city in the world you can go to without seeing some great pieces.  But New York subway art, that’s been dead for almost a generation.  And in a lot of ways, graf is a lot poorer for it.  A giant wall mural gets the scale right, the setting right–graf looks bad in galleries on canvas because it’s too clean, too small, too quiet, too de-urbanized.  (I’m feeling Seen’s new metal wild style sculptures though.) I think it’s a mistake, and a serious reach, to try and jam graf into art history. It is of itself, for itself, and by itself.  But I think really it needs that thunder of sound, that movement a train gives it to really come to life how it was meant to, as the writers used to:

…in some deserted midnight yard, they will find their natural canvas which is of course that metal wall of a subway car ready to reverberate into all the egos of all the metal of New York, what an echo that New York metal will give into the slapped-silly senses of every child-psyche who grew up in New York, yes, metal as a surface on which to paint is even better than stone.

If you weren’t there, you can only imagine what it was like to be down there in those dark, dank stations, all dirty tile and I-beam pillars and filthy bums and shit.  And suddenly with a roar and a screech a twenty-foot explosion of color rolls in right in front of you.  A gift of beauty. In the form of someone’s name.

“The name,” Cay 161 told Norman Mailer, “is the faith of graffiti.”  What did he mean by that.  Mailer interpolates:

You hit your name and maybe something in the whole scheme of the system gives a death rattle. For now your name is over their name, over the subway manufacturer, the Transit Authority, the city administration. Your presence is on their presence, your alias hangs over their scene. There is a pleasurable sense of depth to the elusiveness of the meaning.

Sometimes I think hip-hop is how I figure out what it was like to grow up in New York as a child who was afraid of everything. Because graf artists weren’t afraid of anything. That shit they did in the yards and tunnels was on some ninja nibelungen shit into the dragon’s lair.  They had a passion and commitment and fire that I wish I could even aspire to.

So, also this is something I saw:

People who rented STYLE WARS (DVD) also rented…KNIGHTS IN ARMOR…POWAQQATSI

And what the fuck is up with that, because Rammellzee is dead, and who else would rent that combo of flicks?  Dondi is dead.  Iz The Wiz is dead. Kase 2 is dead.  Stay High 149 just passed last week.  Even the subway cars they wrote on have been dumped into the sea.

But yeah. Knights In Armor. Powaqqatsi.  Kryloniqatsi–in Hopi, ‘qatsi’ means ‘life.’  Spraycan life.  Did anyone ever tell you what was written on the trains?

Subway Theme - DJ Grand Wizard Theodore & Grandmaster Caz / Out To Tag - Serve 1 & Sue Works / Platform Rapform - The Chemist / Graff Time - Chali 2na / Out For Fame - KRS-One / Ambush in the Night - Looptroop / Tagz, Throw Ups & Pieces - Da Nuthouse (feat. El Da Sensei & Sak One) / End To End Burners - Company Flow / Wholecar - Roger Rekless / Slow Burna - Akrobatik / Getting Up Anthem: Part 1 - Talib Kweli (feat. Rakim) / Wrong Side Of Da Tracks - Artifacts / 4 My Writers - MC Juice / Got The Fever (Lewis Parker Remix) - Meyhem Lauren / Graff Life - Literates / Bombing (Snippet) - L.I.F.E.long & Shamalex / The Escapades of Futura 2000 - Futura 2000 & The Clash / Pump Me Up (All City Mix) - Trouble Funk / Telemundo (Bombing Theme) - El-P

Graffiti, and I guess breaking, were the first prominent aspects of hip-hop…graf artists were having gallery shows before any records hit the charts, and for sure New York’s general public noticed their subways turning into riots of tags and burners before they heard ‘Rapper’s Delight.’

Let’s skip the whole boilerplate history of graf, what it meant, voice of the disenfranchised, frustration into artistic expression, art as vandalism, claiming part of the city as their own, the word ‘palimpsest’ which really gets on my fucking nerves, and FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD. (Also just for the record, this thing about Egyptian hieroglyphs. That wasn’t graffiti, unless you also want to claim the Sistine Chapel as an end-to-end burner.)

There’s so much you could say about graf, but it’s been done better by many smarter motherfuckers than me, especially on the sociopolitical steez.  There’s the creation of a whole new art form–a wholly original one–out of raw talent plus what was available: the spraycan, the marker, pop’s turntable…and the improvisation to build on that: the caps off your mom’s oven cleaner, the blackboard eraser, breaks on old records, power from the streetlight.  And the jawdropping results.  How the fuck did you make that detailed, precise painting on the side of a goddamn train, in the dark, with a couple of spraycans?  How did you take some wack disco and old R&B records and make that hard-ass funky beat?

There’s the exclusionary, internal messages; writing for the initiated.  The rebirth of the anonymous and ignored into superheroes with aliases and powers (you don’t think doing 3D letters is a superpower? Or spitting a tight 16?)  The repetition of these names, the power of the names. And this obsession with language itself, using letters as an artform, using speech as a musical instrument–that’s real interesting to me. It starts with the names and becomes this transformation of language into a medium, an implement itself–the twisting of letters into wild style, the twisting of words that rhyme.  Rammellzee saw this as graf’s most subversive aspect, it’s just that nobody understands what the fuck he was talking about. In 1959 Burroughs said ‘writing is 50 years behind painting’ and changed the game. By 1979 painting was 20 years behind writing. Graf caught it up to the year 3000.

Anyways. There’s only about 50 songs about graf writing. Why is that? Why isn’t there an acknowledged classic graf theme besides the Artifacts joint? Maybe because the golden age of graf was over before the golden age of rap started, thanks to the buff, Koch and the MTA. (Imagine if the crackdown on sampling had started in 1987! The entire culture would have been snuffed out in infancy, on some Moses-falls-out-the-basket dolo. Bullrush the show.)

So this mix is a non-identical twin to Hevehitta’s The Writers Bench, which you should peep out because he killed it. No drips. We shared tracklists so there’s some overlap but like I said, there’s only so many tracks.

This is The Five Elements, Part One. Destroy all lines.

Please stop dying now. Wait until you’re very old and we can’t believe you were still alive.

Thanks.

[below] MCA :: A Year And A Day

I always thought this was his best, most blistering set of rhymes.

Me and my boys probably listened to License To Ill every single day in ‘87. Still know all the words. Couldn’t listen to it for about five years. A cat we knew had the Paul’s Boutique demo on cassette about 6 months before it dropped. Shit was like the Dead Sea Scrolls.

By the time of Hello Nasty I moved away from the Beastie Boys…I just thought other cats were doing more interesting stuff, felt like the jokey, clever, party-hearty thing was getting old compared to, say, Heavy Mental. Couple of years ago I revisited and saw how much craft there is in their rhymes and music, a lot of interesting experiments happening. In the MCA obits I don’t think the musical innovation gets enough play. No doubt they got kinda stale but they never got lazy, pandering or repetitive.

Also, you really gotta give them their due for breaking hip-hop into suburbia, wider audiences–like it or not, it turned hip-hop into a viable economic genre resulting in labels, radio play, tours…you want hip-hop to have stayed in the park with power from the streetlight, you do that and tell me if it would have survived to see 1990.

And they get props for being there from the start of the Golden Age. Def Jam’s second release (DJ002) was the Beastie Boys’ Rock Hard EP. I was disappointed when Chuck D said Paul’s Boutique ‘went UNDER people’s heads.’ I guess because everyone fell all over its sampling, and the Bomb Squad had already been doing that in an even more intricate way. But I was really struck by what Chuck D said about MCA.

I think it was in the 33 1/3 book where Rush is bugging the shit out of the Beastie Boys to make a License to Ill 2 and make another shitload of money, but MCA is off in Tibet, and Ad-Rock is trying to act in Molly Ringwald movies, and Mike D is writing short stories or learning watercolors or archery or some shit. And Rush is going fucking nuts. Because Rush is a businessman: maximize a successful product. But the Beastie Boys are bohemian artistes. Reflects their backgrounds to a T. Rush didn’t get into music for the art, he got into it to move up from Hollis. The Beastie Boys were already comfortable. Maybe obvious but coming from decently well-off families meant the Beastie Boys could afford to fuck around and innovate. But we should all be glad they did, because if they repeated License To Ill in five ever-decreasing Xeroxes (like Cypress Hill pretty much did after Temples of Boom) they’d be dimly remembered jokes like Vanilla Ice & Hammer. ‘Oh, those frat-rap guys! With the hydraulic dick on stage!’

You can’t really make a good MCA tribute mix, because the 3 MCs wove so tight on almost every track. Trading lines/words as well as verses. Try and dissect a song just to pull out MCA, and it’s a bare snippet or butcher job. I can’t build a mix on that. You’d have to be some atomic structure laser DJ, and then it’d turn the tracks into something totally different.

The way the Beasties’ work as MCs together on tracks is tighter than anyone else I can think of. Run-DMC maybe, but with 3 MCs it was on a whole other level. EPMD, but they rhymed slower (PMD could go and grab a sandwich and still be back on stage in time to parry Erick). The Wu structure for example is so different–each MC gets a verse or a whole track, very little playing off each other that way.

So if some DJ tries to extract essence of MCA and turns a mix out of it, I’m down, but it’s not my lane.  Peace to the King of the Ave.

See also:

• No Trivia & Passion of the Weiss tributes
• MCA interviews the Dalai Lama for Grand Royal
• Jimmy Green’s Brooklyn Dust Beastie Boys Mix

I’m Sam from Siberia, not Serbia! Do you know where it is? Oh c’mon! Everyone knows that Siberia is a snow desert somewhere deep in Russia.

We still got internet, but for the rest it’s a beat complicated. However I managed to setup a studio using a lot of cardboard, Soviet synthesizers and iMac G4 Besides I borrowed a camera from my next-door buddy.

Wonder what we could make using all these garbage? Imo tell ya!! Dude, garbage is the trendiest thing possible nowadays! We got lucky with that. See what we did with our own powers www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hh9JuLsdX5c It was a bitch to record in a cardboard box size of a jail cell, a beat stuffy. ) That’s why I’m looking forward to fixing the whole ‘’studio'’ situation.

If it blew your head off or at least didn’t leave you emotionless I would like to ask for your support: Buy it via iTunes - http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/sibirskaya-zima-single/id518142734 or PayPal Donate - https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=YZUR4G2EBBFWA Also check out my guestbook and leave a post if you would like: www.sam321.com

Or simply buzz my office: +7 926 251 4440 I speak some English and Chinese, besides there are German and French speakersin da house. That’s why I truly believe we can find common language and exchange opinions. Stay in touch!

Uh…yeah. Word up my Siberian brother.

I don’t know how many people he spammed on Soundcloud, but he’s getting mad views and comments right now:

To me this sounds like a joke. I’m still wondering if it is one… Nevertheless it seems as if you found people who like whatever it is that you’re doing. Referring to me, I’d be happy if you don’t send me your stuff again.

I’m confused… I don’t know it I like it or not…. very interesting though…. I feel hypnotized. I think I love this video now, I do love this video! its the best!….. I think I’ll go kill myself now…

i wonder what drugs they take in siberia

Roundup of the best of 2012 so far.  Because fuck it, that’s what most podcasts do, and agonizing over finding that perfect James Coburn sample gets real old.

I’m gonna guess you already heard that new Nas joint and El-P going full retard though.  If not, maybe that cave you live in is not what’s popping.

Bloodstained Introvators / Spaceship Earth - DJ Format (feat. Edan) / Salute - Fokis (feat. King T & Sadat X) / Coca Cola Freestyle - Heems / 103 & Roosy - Action Bronson / No Downtime - KA / Tote Gunz - KRS-One / JSA - Jel / Nhomadz (Spit 16) - L.I.F.E. Long (feat. Breeze Evahflowin, Shabaam Sahdeeq & Swave Sevah) / Big Day for the Little People - Godforbid & Thirtyseven / I Strangled the Accordion - Third Sight / High Heals… - P. Kaye / The Birth of Slim Fussy - A.M. Breakups (feat. Teddy Faley & ADAM) / Green Velvet - A Tribe Called Death / Vast Vehicle - Zilla Rocca & Dr. Quandary / One Foot in Front of the Other - Routiger Slob / Spaceships - Bisco Smith & Peter Jay / Arrival - Bil Basmala / The Miracle - Homeboy Sandman / Grown Up - Danny Brown

• ADAM :: The Early Life of ADAM
• Aloadai (Taiyamo Denku & Jaylacage) :: Cycle of Death
• Atari Blitzkrieg :: Return to Ragnarok
• Carl Kevorkian :: Ugly Ass Music Vol. 1
• Cult Favorite :: The Kingdom
• Dr. Quandary :: you should just check out all his shit.
• DJ Frenic :: The Future Will Be Better Tomorrow / Lessons From The Past
• Humpasaur Jones (feat. Signifire) :: ‘Promotional Gift’
• Maffew Ragazino :: Rhyme Pays
• Mumblez Medina :: ‘Towards A Walk In The Sun’
• Vinnie Paz :: The Priest of Bloodshed

Above: “Tough Jew / Rabbi Holding Guns” :: Necro

Below: “Pesach Zeit” :: So-Called (feat. P Love)

WORLD PREMIERE!  EXCLUSIVE!  UNRELEASED! And all that shit.

So Nasa of Uncommon Records (a.k.a. Adam Warlock, a.k.a. ADAM, n.a.k.a* Big Brother Fried Peanut Butter) said on the Twooter he was gonna put together an Uncommon sampler for SXSW.  I offered to mix it and crap samples all over it, and he was with it: eight bangers from the Uncommon roster, laced up with weird Western shit.

220 CDs will be available at Uncommon SXSW performances, and you can also cop it digitally over on the Uncommon Bandcamp.

It’s ONLY available until March 18th–after that it’s GONE.  Not ‘gone’ meaning ‘far out, man, that’s really gone, man’ but ‘gone’ meaning over, that’s it, that’s all, finished, ya estuvo and Gee Oh Ehn Eee.

Milk & Bullets - Aeon Grey / Unhandled Crossings - Taiyamo Denku & Agartha Audio / Spirits - Atari Blitzkrieg (feat. ADAM) / Repeated Questions - Pruven / Two Days - ADAM / Odd Future - Short Fuze & Nasa / Live from Tent City - DCK VNNGT / The Grind - Acid Reign

[*not actually known as]

UPDATE: OK, it’s gone.  You might could get it from me if you ask real nice.

UPDATE UPDATED: You can still cop one of the CDs free with an Uncommon t-shirt until they run out. ACT NOW! LIMITED TIME OFFER! Etc.

New York’s always been a big advertising target for Roach Motel.  On the subway they used to run them in every car: Roaches Check In…But They Don’t Check Out. In Spanish it always seemed extra ominous to me: Las Cucarachas Entran…Pero No Pueden Salir. (That’s probably the only complete sentence in Spanish I know that doesn’t start ‘Tu madre’.)

And what is a subway car but a moving roach motel.  What is New York but a big stack of roach motels.  ”All American cockroaches were immigrants,” notes Roach Facts.  According to the Observer in 2008, New York’s roach population has fallen as a side effect of gentrification.  Four years further into the recession, I bet that’s not true anymore.

I don’t need to draw you a map.  Dehumanization is always the first step in exterminating people.  And reclaiming epithets is what hip-hop has always done best.

Cockroach Omen - Red Ants / Everyday In the Street (Dukes Go Up’s Can You Dig It Remix) - El Da Sensei (feat. Bekay & Sean Price) / Ruger - elhuana (feat. Bloody Monk Consortium) / CockRoach People Remix - Dig Dug (feat. Skrilla G) / Hard Times - J. Period (feat. dead prez & The Roots) / L.I.F.E. - Joell Ortiz / Same White Bitch (Got You Strung Out On Cane) - Schoolly D / Cockroaches - Necro / Ode to the Ghetto (Dr. Quandary Remix) - Guilty Simpson / Black Soap (Beatnikz Remix) - C-Rayz Walz (feat. M1) / Day of the Jackal - Sadat X / The Gold Watch - Mr. Muthafuckin eXquire / women revolution tennis shoes - Skipp Coon & Mr. Nick / Collage - Ka / Imani (Willie Green Remix) - Vordul Mega (feat. Billy Woods) / Right Back At You - Mobb Deep (feat. Ghostface Killah & Raekwon) / Momentum - Priviledge & Dr. Monokrome / Thank God - Danny Brown

New York State of Mind, Part 2 (Perquisite Remix feat. Benjamin Herman by GMJ) - Nas / Me, Not The Paper (DJ Premier Remix) - Jeru The Damaja / Jazz Is My Religion - DJ Rob Swift (feat. Bob James & Dave McMurray) / Huah Ha - DJ Revolution / Slick Money - Senor Kaos (feat. P.SO & Large Professor) / Musical Journey - Kero One / L’intruso -thegodfatherExperience & Alice / Solo Dancer (Stop! Look! And Rock The House, B-Boys!) - Charles Mingus / L’chemy - L*Roneous / Bamboo Flute Blues (Kid Koala Remix) - Kid Koala & Yusef Lateef / Ibid, Desmarches, Ibid - DJ Spooky/ Endeavors for Never (The Last Time We Spoke You Said You Were Not Here. I Saw You Though.) - Shabazz Palaces / A.E.O.C. - Edan / Alternative 3 - PSY/OPSogist / Ice Cream Van - The RZA / Listen - DJ Osiris (feat. Mr. Dibbs)

Big up to Danny at The Find for running the first one of these.  Thought I was done versifying on the topic, but some of the comments were interesting:

Although I’d argue that jazz-hop has become just as sampled as old funk records by now (even though the depth to which producers have been digging through jazz has been pathetically unimpressive, in which I totally agree with you), jazz and hiphop music are completely non-compatible in all but a surface aesthetic or instrumentation. Jazz is inherently a music of improvisation and melody, hiphop is one of repetition and beat. Sampling a jazz record to transform it to a hiphop beat is akin to straight-jacketing it, basically killing everything which is vital and alive within it. Producers sample jazz-records the same way they sample funk records, which is completely the wrong approach.

Adversely though, Rap (the spoken word) is probably spiritually closer to Jazz, which has always been closely related to poetry. A free improvisation by a talented emcee within the fabric of a tight jazz group is a wonderful and natural thing, no different from the solo-ing of any instrument, and not too far from Scat Singing. Its a shame that few emcees have been really confident enough to put their ego aside and allow themselves to meld into the fabric of a improvisational jazz group, but the results can be spectacular.  -Mladen

Dope article. But when discussing this subject I think it’s important to stress that what it boils down to is that hip hop and jazz, though sharing some qualities, are two different animals. I think jazz and hip hop can play nicely together and at times borrow textures and aesthetics but unless one sets out to make a true fusion then we’ll simply have hip hop music with jazz under/overtones and vice versa. -Stidak

I feel as a non-musician or beatmaker personally I can’t judge if Mladen is 100% right or not.  Maybe the improvisation aspect of jazz is being overemphasized?  I mean, lots of musicians jam out…that’s one (of many) reasons to avoid Grateful Dead shows, right?  Isn’t there some kinda improvisation involved in creating beats on an MPC or whatever, or even in turntablism?  These are really not rhetorical questions: I’m not a musician, so I have no idea.  The idea of freestyling/ciphers vs. that element of improvisation in jazz is definitely on point though.  I also think there are some pretty varied beatmakers who use a great deal of elemental interplay which is beyond straight jacketing a sample into repetition.

I don’t know what a ‘true fusion’ of hip hop and jazz would sound like…Buckshot Lefonque and that Easy Mo Bee/Miles Davis thing gave pretty piss-poor indications.  Most definitely the best beatmakers are using a wide range of timing and textures, but can they really ‘improvise’ when every decision requires a conscious, technical aspect (i.e. ‘now I’ll sample this Ornette Coleman right here’…loads up WAV file, clicks around to find the sample, uses mouse to move it into place, etc.)?

Finally I think there is a common element to (certain kinds of) jazz and hip-hop, which is directed chaos, organized confusion: weaving together layers of discordance and finding a groove in there.

Anyways though, my main mission is to keep you on the cool out with another hour of good jazz/hop tracks. Got enough for another mix but hit me up with any tracks I mighta missed.

This mix is brought to you by Audioleak, for its soon-to-be-released webzine/downloadable magazine.  I’ll hit you with the link when it drops.  Big ups to AtotheZeem.  You could probably break him off if you had something good to throw in his mag.

So…Dirty Laundry: I gave you the 16 most brolic tracks of 2011…I gave you the 14 weirdest bangers of 2011…This here’s the 19 funkiest-ass joints of 2011.

As A Lion - Esoteric / Distractions - Talib Kweli / Manute Bol - The Black Opera / Nerd English - Willie Evans Jr / Burning The Mirror - Jedi Mind Tricks / Kings - Falside / Swamp Breathe - Ill Clinton / Seijun Suzuki - Blue Scholars / Triggerman - DJ Revolution / Nasty - Nas / Inner Passage - Dday One / Right On - Paul White / Child Of The 90s - Louis Mackey & Thirtyseven / Like Father, Like Son - Onra / Dump Truck (Instrumental) - Gangrene / Murder One - Lewis Parker (feat. EastKoast, Vast Aire, T.R.A.C, Sav Kills & Baron) / Chicken Spot Rock - Mr. Muthafuckin’ eXquire (feat. Dallas Tha Kid) / Cessation - Aeon Grey & Sabicas / Who We Are (Instrumental) - Amerigo Gazaway of Gummy Soul

…and here’s some late additions to my Best of 2011 picks:

11. Esoteric :: Boston Pharoah

12. Louis Mackey & Thirtyseven :: No Humans Allowed

13. Aeon Grey & Sabicas :: Paper Cranes

Extra Brolic Shit:

Lol - Danny Brown & Black Milk / Huzzah! (Extend-O-Mix) - Mr. Muthafuckin’ eXquire (feat. Despot, Das Racist, Danny Brown & El-P) / Light Years - Has-Lo & J-Zone / Science - DJ JS-1 & Jeru Da Damaja / Black Lagoon - Black-Tokyo / Drones Over BKLYN - El-P / That’s Your Brain (Swangin) - PSY/OPSogist / Hoard 90 - Gangrene (feat. Roc Marciano) / Walls of Insurrection - Dälek & Gym Brown / M.A.S.H. - The Black Opera / Bubonic Plague #3 - Tenshun / Beware - Death Grips / an echo from the hosts that profess infinitum - Shabazz Palaces / Amphetamine - Teddy Faley & A.M. Breakups

So a couple of months ago I saw a headline in the Onion AV Club–”The Big Question: What makes music boring?“  I was all, neighbour please. (That’s the culturally appropriate variant of ‘nigga please.’)  Music is definitely not boring right now.  Then the article is all about a bunch of indie-rock bullshit which is by definition boring.  So, that’s your problem right there holmes.

Then the esteemed Dart Adams did his Abe Simpson of Rap thing with “Why There More Than Likely Won’t Be Another Golden Era Of Hip Hop.” No, Dart, there won’t.  There won’t be another Renaissance or Enlightenment either.  Hip-hop, like any human endeavour, progresses and adapts and changes.  And right now it’s accelerating and smashing shit on a Large Hadron tip.

2011 was the Year Shit Got Weird.  The bar for weirdest-ass hip-hop LP was set by Dr. Octagonecologyst in 1996, and no one’s ever made a freakier, more insane record.  But this was the year when weird-ass shit was everywhere and universally acclaimed.

Yeah, ‘11 was also about human tampon Drake and Hold The Phone…and ’90s innovators sounding pretty stale (Jedi Mind, Immortal Technique).  But the collapse of the music industry and the rise of net-based DIY means cats are doing whatever the fuck they want.  The underground vs. bling schism collapses when there’s only room for a handful who can move units…no point trying to hustle a record contract or radio play any more.  So dowhatchalike like Shock G.  (Brandon Soderberg of No Trivia breaks it down here.)

End of ‘10, everyone was all about Kanye’s My Beautiful Laundrette Fantasy Island…I mean, everydamnbody jizzed themselves behind that.  About two of us were shouting Super Chron Flight Brothers instead.  2010 was all about Lil B and Odd Future too…OF, I feel the beats: the beats are really fucking weird.  But the rhyming is mediocre and the lyrics are just pointless teenage nonsense.  Both of them got outshone this year, maybe as Yayo says they “fell to the wayside due to a struggle to be taken serious (B), and what feels like an overall laziness (Odd Future).” I’d say they were trying too hard to be weird, and have been eclipsed by more innovative, more honest, nuttier shit.  Das Racist is another one of those.  I don’t feel all that Adult Swim rap, but if it opens up kids’ ears so they’re ready for Shabazz Palaces rather than skateboarding down the road to hell that is frat rap, it’s all good.

Some cats trace the Rise of the Weird-Ass through Lil Wayne, Outkast etc.  Dave Bry’s article in The Awl makes a good distinction between the ‘I’m crazy’ lean of Eminem (or the Geto Boys), which really means ‘I don’t give a fuck’ rather than ‘I should seek professional help.’  Prefix similarly notes that “Even the most successful of today’s emcees seem cagey, apologetic, paranoid.”

A lot of what we call hip-hop now is not only damn strange-sounding, but pushes the definition of hip hop.  Take Open Mike Eagle–Rappers Will Die of Natural Causes took trophies on a lot of lists, and aside from really odd-ass sounding production, he doesn’t really rap: he kind of talks/sings.  He, like, salks.  He tings.  Death Grips’ Ex-Military got huge love in the underground, and that crazy ass hardcore punk shit is not Kurtis Blow’s hip-hop.  Peep out the Uncommon best-of podcast: NASA wonders whether his top four picks can really be called hip-hop.  Most definitely envelope-pushing shit has been around since Anticon dropped Music for the Advancement of Hip Hop in ‘99, but this year it hit the big time.

Even New York fucking Magazine sees this, calling out ASAP, Clams Casino and eXquire as New York rappers pushing boundaries away from “the insular mentality of the city’s rap revanchists” like Joell Ortiz. (Oh snap! Joell! Son! They just called you a…revanchist?)  Even the goddamn New Yorker–in an article about fucking Drake, no less–sees that “hip hop…is in a period of transition in which formal constraints have dissolved almost entirely.  How do you even know whether something is hip hop?” (No doubt, but I do know this: Drake isn’t.)

In an era where the music industry is dead, hip-hop has once again adapted to stay ahead of the curve and survive, creating a wider scene.  There’s a greater diversity, and more cross-hybridization and less statification–it’s not just Dirty South vs. East Coast, or backpackers vs. superstars.  Check out the rap nerdery of this chart in SPIN.  A lotta cats were pissed off because they weren’t on it or their favorite MC wasn’t on it or whatever.  I think the problem is that it’s too small.  MORE BUBBLES, GODDAMN IT.  There’s no bubble for all the hip hop what came out of the Arab Spring…fear of a rap planet, holla.  (Side note: Ibn Thabit, has hung up his mic now that Qaddafi’s gone.)  Where’s the mighty Midwestern cats?  The Overintelligent White MCs Who All Sound The Same?  The M.O.P.-for-Vendetta, Public Enemy Meets Farewell My Concubine sound of The Black Opera?

Nah, dun.  You finna make a bigger chart.

Past few years, everyone’s best-of lists felt lazy and boring to me. This year, I ain’t seen one single list that didn’t have something on it I was feeling.  (And here’s a couple of lists with joints I mighta slept on and need to check out from Scratched Vinyl and DJ Jazzpants.)  A lot of critics/bloggers managed somehow to like Drake and Watch Me Drone AND XXX or not forget the Muthafuckin’ (like the NY Times).  How the fuck does that happen? I mean, aside from the Village Voice maybe, I don’t remember anyone putting Fear of a Black Planet on the same best-of list as Bon Jovi.  A lot of cats I don’t really like got end-of-year love, like Action Bronson and ASAP Rocky and whatever the fuck (and XXL managed to do a dozen lists which were all clueless), but the biggest champs of weird-ass hip hop in 2011 were:

Danny Brown: The Tigger of Rap

Everybody loves this dude, no question.  He hands down snatched the crown.  And dukes is fucking weird.  The waterfall hair and jumble-of-chiclets teeth goes with his intense, nervous slanging.  He’s the Constant Consonant Eater.  Revanchist of the Gangster Duck Flow.  Brown takes the overboard getting-high-and-eating-pussy of Ol’ Dirty but combines it with a paranoid sense of mortality, and gives us flashes that his crazed behaviour emerges from the ruins of Detroit, still waiting for Robocop’s redemption.

Black & Brown with Black Milk is my shit over XXX.  XXX definitely picks up the last third, when it becomes painful and honest, and I’ll revisit the rest while waiting to see what he gets up to next.

Mr. Muthafuckin’ eXquire: Bringing Back The Stupid

eXo brought back the gleeful don’t-give-a-fuck: he’s broke, he’s flabby, he’s drunk. It took balls to straight-up jack El-P and Necro’s beats–and then lace them with odes to late-night fried chicken spots and general miscreant R&R. But co-signs came fast and furious, and no doubt I had “Huzzah” on repeat for a month straight.

We’ll see what he builds off the back of Lost In Translation, but if “Gold Watch” is any clue, he might give Roc Marciano a run for his money.

Shabazz Palaces: Wow, These Are Some Really Good Mushrooms

Shabazz Palaces went pretty much ignored for their first two (far superior) self-released EPs, pretty much by their own doing.  Once they hopped to Sub Pop they got a bump, and also because everyone wanted to know what Ishmael Butler (formerly known as Butterfly of Digable Planets and now calling himself Palaceer Pink Gators or some shit) has been up to for the past decade.  (Besides that godawful Cherrywine thing.)  Answer: studying up, thinking hard, and eating a lot of hallucinogens.  Possibly also Afrofuturist sweat lodges were involved.

Black Up is confounding, demanding and challenging.  It’s totally discordant yet addictively compelling–seeking, chasing, laying back in the swirl.  It creates its own world and trades in backpacks for paperbacks.  Like in The Terminator, it came across time to love you.  If the bar for a truly avant garde hip hop LP was set by The Cold Vein, a decade later Black Up raises the stakes.  Its amazing success will hopefully crack ears open for overlooked acts like Elucid, DJ Spooky and Dälek.

2011 felt like the end of The Wire, where the central characters were replaced with their younger figuras.  The new decade–and a new Atomic Age–has just begun.

Offical Hard Body Knocks of the Year 2011

Hey DJ - Juan Deuce & Falside / Who Is It - KRS-One & Bumpy Knuckles / Help Me - Pastense, HiCoup & Willie Green / The Heat (American Language Remix) - P.L.O. (feat. Has-Lo, Zilla Rocca & Curly Castro) / Villain - Metasyons / Culture Shock - Animal Farm (feat. DJ Rob Swift) / Ghetto Dreams - Nas & Common / Mo Danger - Mohammad Dangerfield / Hot Breeze - Sadat X / Memorex Massacre - Timeless Truth / Dumbtron - Willie Evans Jr. (feat. Paten Locke) / Tantrum - Longevity / I’m From PG - Oddisee / Give It More - Canibus & Killah Priest / The Scroll - Raekwon / 1987 (A Conglomeration of Years) - Adam Warlock & Agartha Audio

1. L*Roneous :: Notes of the Righeous Outlaw
2. KRS-One & Bumpy Knuckles :: Royalty Check
3. Mohammad Dangerfield :: Mohammad Dangerfield
4. Raekwon :: Shaolin vs. Wu-Tang
5. Shabazz Palaces :: Black Up
6. Danny Brown & Black Milk :: Black & Brown EP
7. Gangrene (Alchemist, Oh No & Roc Marciano) :: Greneberg EP
8. Iron Lyon :: Groundwork EP
9. Juan Deuce & Falside :: The Mechanics EP
10. Short Fuze & NASA :: Toxicology Music EP

Best Instrumental LPs of the Year

1. A.M. Breakups :: The Cant Resurrection
2. DDay One :: Mood Algorithms
3. Onra :: Chinoiseries Pt. 2
4. PSY/OPSogist :: Auditory Hallucinations
5. Tenshun :: Bubonic Plague

Yeah, I’m supposed to write a little pithy paragraph about each one and why it’s so great, but a lot of those I already wrote about, and you know, fuck it.  It’s a short list anyways because a lot of LPs only had three good tracks this year.  To be continued in a couple of weeks with the most brolic-est tracks #16-30, and a long-ass incoherent State of Hip Hop post…

Scratchoetry - Alien Army / The Brew Out - Wu-Tang Clan (DJ 2-Tone Jones remix) / The Gift - The Whitefield Brothers(feat. Edan & Mr.Lif) / Jazz Thing (Movie Mix) - Gang Starr / Freedom Jazz Dance (Remix) - Nas, Miles Davis & Olu Dara / Human Language - Mumbles / Heat It Up (Album Version) - Rakim / Mystery (Reprise) - Miles Davis & Easy Mo Bee / Applesauce - DJ Quest / Dark Water Jazz - Jenova 7 / Sum Shit I Wrote - Common / Ha-Doh - DJ Krush & Toshinori Kondo / Vermont - Airnino / II B.S. - Charles Mingus (RZA’s Bounce Mix) / Dolphy Surround - JohnnyBoy & Manuele Atzeni / Ruby in the Rough - Celestial Impressions / It Sounded Like a Roc! - MF Doom / Jazz Break #6 - DJ Mark the 45 King / From Heritage - Dday One

The jazz/hip-hop relationship hasn’t been nearly as fruitful or long-established as you’d think it woulda; if funk and soul are hip-hop’s parents, jazz is kinda like an uncle who drifts into town now and then, sleeps on the couch, bums hip-hop’s cigarettes and tells stories about the good old days.  Trouble is, we look at him like he’s a played out rummy bum-ass, but back in the day uncs had skills, scared people just as much as hip-hop does/did, and had seriously bad-ass musical chops.

The much-maligned ‘jazz rap’ thing never really made it to a full-fledged genre, I don’t think…its original history was really only a handful of songs: various scattered cuts by Stetsasonic, Gangstarr, Tribe, De La and other Native Tongues cats.  As far as albums, there’s only really Guru’s hugely uneven Jazzmatazz series, the first Digable Planets LP (which actually isn’t as jazz-sample-heavy as we think), and that Buckshot LeFonque record with Premo and Marsalis, which nobody really listened to.

I’d say jazz sampling came about–innovated by Premier pretty much–from the desire to make more cooled-out, chilled tracks, delve into jazz’ rich musical crates, and get away from soul and in particular James Brown sampling, which by the early ’90s had pretty much jacked the entire catalogue.  Also, those fat basslines son!

Mighta been, as the homie Mobb Deen pointed out, that the huge rise in sampling costs and lawsuits sprung up at the same time as jazz-rap was making moves.  By ‘94 (the Silver Age),  jazz rap had been consigned to Brooklyn dinner party background music.  Jazz samples and the odd jazz track definitely pop up as much as any other genre in hip-hop’s paintbox–opera or spaghetti westerns, say–but no artist really makes it their signature sound. From there, you got the odd Dolphy or Mingus remix LP tribute, and the eighty gazillion Japanese DJs instrumental jazz-hop LPs, driving in the lane DJ Krush made. (Like that Digables, we think Krush is all jazz-hop, but most of it isn’t.)

Trouble is, jazz as a sample source, like any other, is a house with many mansions…I mean, that human tooth-whitening strip from Entertainment Tonight made a jazz album; on the other hand you got Eric Dolphy, whose stuff is so batshit I know a professional sax player who won’t fuck with it. But there’s definitely a few things that can ruin jazz-hop: pathetic flutes, weak females on the hooks, ambient meditation whalesong noises, and weak as fuck beats. Also, beatnik sunshine spoken word bullshit rapping.

Mostly the problem is their sampling studies don’t take on the really rough, hard-ass crazy be-bop shit of Mingus, Sonny Rollins, Africa/Brass-era Coltrane, Ornette Coleman etc.  Jazz musicians themselves have either bitterly resented and violently hated hip-hop or expressed a pretty mild interest.  Even collabos that you’d think would be stupid fresh, like the El-P/Matthew Shipp High Water, flunked the dope test because of a weak jazz side; the Easy Mo Bee/dead Miles Davis LP was too…shiny.  Dday One, DJ Krush and Mumbles all have great jazz/rap cuts, but not whole LPs which are famous for being the definitive jazz/rap LP.

Maybe there’s no definitive jazz/rap LP because hip-hop’s never been about being definitive.  Is there a definitive hip-hop anything LP?  Hip hop’s more about being interpretive, allusive, and using whatever’s at hand.

Start curating good jazz/hop cuts though, you end up with enough for three or four mixtapes…so today we got the first of a new series.  (Which is good, because I’m all out of super chicken.)

Wait, what the…it’s International Jazz Rap Appreciation Month or some shit–check out The Find Mag :: 20 Years of Jazz-Hop.  Not one duplicate track neither, but yes, including the dreaded US3 I hoped to avoid mentioning.  (It’s some kind of video mix, and no, I won’t be doing one of those unless it’s Totally Batshit Killing People, The VideoMix (feat. Crank, Crank 2 & Natural Born Killers).)

Quanah Parker (last to come in), Dylan Egon. Asbury Park, NJ.  2011

‘American Beauty’ :: NPR New Pirate Radio (Dr. Monokrome & Priviledge) (feat. Taiwo)

I could be wrong in naming L*Roneous a Most Overlooked of All Time…maybe he’s huge in the Bay and I just don’t know about it.  I’ll tell you what though, I didn’t discover 1998’s Imaginarium until this year, and it is a certified classic.  Definitely a high water mark for late-’90s hip-hop, and I can’t believe I slept on this jaw-dropper draws-hopper.

I don’t do the whole biography blahzay blahzay (he runs it down his own self here), but let’s just say Da Versifier’s credits stretch back to 1990.  On the meaning of the name:

I was reading some ancient Roman stuff and my nickname is L-Ron, “Eous” of course means the nature of something. My name means the nature of L-Ron. That’s what my music has been all about. I was always reading about cats like Maximus, my friends starting joking around saying I was L’Roneous, and I decided to keep that. [UGSmag interview 2001]

Now don’t think he’s on some Rammellzee tip, L*Ron isn’t one of those psycho/mystical rappers, he’s just a highly intelligent scholar type for real.  Imaginarium picks up maybe where Digable Planets left off, but dips into introspection, the re-invention of conscious/underground hip-hop of the late ’90s, and what you might call a friendly raised fist a la Black Star.  This is dedicated, to those who view hip-hop as a voyage… begins the LP, and damn if he don’t take you on one.

I think what makes the LP so superlative is that it’s a cohesive whole–not a concept album, but all the songs add up to something larger; think Blowout Comb or Fear of a Black Planet…hell, any of your favorite LPs have the same aspect.  But Imaginarium has a definite progression, depth and scope.

Musically, it takes in the whole scope of Black music, from African, neo-African, jazz, funk, boom bap, uprock bass loops…you hear a bit of Last Poets in there, a bit of Premier, some De La…but then he’ll hit you with a track like “Oral Exercise” which sound like a Muggs or Onyx beat, and “Regimens” which could just as well be Mobb Deep.  Lyrically and vocally, he sounds a lot like Del Tha Funkee Homosapien, but it’s no contest he’s a better lyricist with a lot more to say.  In 1998 he was doing the fractured word mosaic thing that cats didn’t understand until Cold Vein. Look, peoples: you owe it to yourself to check this album out.

I haven’t checked out this 2001 Dreamweavers project he did with Elusive, but I’m finna get on that.  Solo, L*Ron came back in 2004 with Purposely Powerful, working with a range of producers which made for a lesser album; it’s a collection of songs, rather than the opus of Imaginarium.  No doubt cuts like “Hop” and “From Under A Cloud” are ill standouts though.

Six years later, the free Roller Coaster EP went deep into the funk/soul sound of the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s.  Cotdamn what a comeback.  Some of the strongest shit from start to finish I heard in ‘10, no doubt–it might feel a bit like a throwback, but it sure sounds fresh to me.  This year he dropped Notes of the Righteous Outlaw and some free tracks–it’s all pouring out after a long dry spell, and thank God for the rain to wash the trash off hip-hop’s sidewalk.  The LP’s standouts are “Full Metal,” “Sacks Piff Avenue” and “The Sound of Color”…I seriously fuck with those three cuts, and am digging the recent free joint, “Present Progressive.”  Man, it’s really hard to pick just one track to represent.

Yeah, just another rapper right?  Wrong kid.  You can peep out his audiobook Sketches of a Straight Line here.  Now that’s some heaviness.  That’s representing Oaktown to the fullest.  L*ron is having a late-career renaissance.  He’s gonna take this itty bitty world by storm.  And he’s just getting warm.

• At the Ban-de-camp
• On the Words Press
• Imaginarium on the iTune
• Righteous Outlaw on the iTune

Bil Basmala (formerly known as Autolect) came in hard this year with his four volume Nobody Beats series…he asked me to take the slew of funky, soutronica, neo-hop, authentically deep tracks and create a best of in my usual style. (Meaning lay samples all over the place.)  Peep it out and get the upcoming Nobody Beats box set of all five volumes when it drops.  You can cop the mix chopped into tracks here, if like that Some Like It Hot sample bugs you or something.

Wake Up / Shots / Prophet (vs. Jeru Tha Damaja) / Vortex / Measure / Yesterday (vs. Jack Lemmon & Joe E. Brown) / Floating Lazarus (vs. Malcolm X) / Time Lapse / Nice / Miles A Head (vs. Miles Davis)

Sort of hosted by Gary Farmer and Johnny Depp.

It’s A Crime - Roc Marciano / Vein - Cannibal Ox / Scrap Or Die - Danny Brown / Scot Free - Bronze Nazareth (feat. RZA) / Caught A Body - Ryks / Crime Saga (Perfecta ‘79 Remix) - Shabazz The Disciple / The Shit Is Real (DJ Honda Mix) - Fat Joe / Take It In Blood - Nas / The Street Theme - Greenhouse Effect / 125, Pt. 2 (Fresh Air) - Joell Ortiz / Advance Pawns (instrumental) - DJ Muggs / I Can’t Cope - Skipp Coon & Mr. Nick / Small Time Hustler (instrumental) - The Dismasters / B More - Super Chron Flight Brothers (feat. Zesto) / Barksdale Corners - Shabazz Palaces / Street Diction - Dälek

About this photo (by Richard Drew), theologian Mark Thompson wrote:

Perhaps the most powerful image of despair at the beginning of the twenty-first century is not found in art, or literature, or even popular music. It is found in a single photograph.

I don’t think it’s an image of despair.  But it is a more powerful image of 9/11 than any I have found in art, or literature, or music.  Like so many of the thousands of images, we simply can’t comprehend it wholly.

Ten years on we have no definitive, or even adequate, artistic response.  Martin Amis gave us ‘Mohammad Atta was very constipated.’  Park Slope darling Jonathan Safran Foer went with some Haley Joel Osment bullshit…and a fucking flipbook of a Twin Tower jumper. Oliver Stone gave us Towering Inferno Redux. United 93 is nerve-racking, but not transformative.  Even Don DeLillo, whose The Falling Man is sampled here, only managed to give us 15 pages actually about 9/11, and the rest is about compulsive gambling and modern art or some shit.

I think this might be because the events are so impossible to comprehend.  Guys taking weeks of flight training, knowing it is all so they can kill themselves.  Slitting pilots’ throats with boxcutters.  Flying airplanes into buildings.  First, it seemed a tremendous and impossible accident–a plane crashing into the World Trade.  Then another?  What were we seeing?  Was it a replay of the first?  Listening to all the recordings in the first few minutes, no one knows what could be happening.  It seemed impossible that the towers could collapse–how could modern American skyscrapers just crumble like that?  Into nothing?  Then those unbelievably fast, unbelievably dark clouds of smoke.  The snowfall of ash, so much ash–all those buildings not reduced to chunks of rubble, but to all that unearthly dust.  I saw the vestigal steel frame they called The Shroud.  It was hard to believe that was all that was left of those two hugely massive buildings.

The World Trade Center was already an impenetrable part of the skyline.  From far away they looked flat, dominating and looming yet almost insubstantial, changing color throughout the day from orange to fishscale-silver to absorbent black.  Nearly featureless, brutalist, like monoliths.  Up close their dizzying height, the steel frontage flying up, straight up.

And the jumpers: how can you hope to understand having to choose between burning to death or throwing yourself from eighty, ninety, a hundred stories up?  About two hundred people did this.  So when I look at that photo I see something I can’t fathom.

If I see anything, I see Icarus.  So much of 9/11 is Icarus: Mohammad Atta, the planes, the jumpers, the towers, America.

This year’s remembrance swirls around what has changed, what hasn’t changed, what have we learned, what haven’t we learned.  Forget all that noise.  Listen.  Remember.  Try to grasp it.

Chapter 1 - A.M. Breakups / 005 - MHE / 9:03am - Clint Mansell/Kronos Quartet, Autolect, cLOUDDEAD / Clouds of Smoke (instrumental) - Call O’ Da Wild / Icarus Falling Reprise - PSY/OPSogist / 9:59am-10:28am - Chris Craft, Brain Damage / Dead Flag Blues - godspeed! you black emperor / Snow (instrumental) - Roc Marciano

Previously:

The Expiration Date [DL]

The Expiration Tape [DL]

My Pet Goat [DL]

This is the part where I write a witty ironic blurb plugging the Overlook Hotel as the perfect writer’s retreat, and then I don’t because it’s not that funny, my tooth hurts and I need a cigarette.  So instead I just run a bunch of links for new joints you should cop.

• Chris Macro :: Macro Dubplates Vol. 3: Brooklyn Vs Kingston [download]    Some more of that super chicken dub-hop shit.
• Ill Clinton :: The Antisocialist Kid got beats.  Gonna plow through the catalog and you should too.
• Danny Brown :: XXX Might be a few of ya missed this.
• Willie Evans Jr. :: Introducin’ [iTunes]     Sounds so much like MF Doom I had to check it wasn’t a new alias.  Dope regardless.
• The Black Opera :: Overture X-Clan righteousness over a Godzilla-theme sample?  All good.
• Elucid :: Super Black Chocolate Simian Chuck D robot ass-raping 8-bit glitch yowls.  In a good way.
• Concrete Sound System :: The Underbelly Elucid and his evil henchmen serve up a dub-glitch set.
• Adam Warlock :: Dark Weapons (from Mars) Evil spitting from Nasa.
• Bil Basmala :: Nobody Beats Vol. 1 & Vol 2. More superb beats from the Cat Formerly Known As Autolect.
• Ensilence :: No Good Thing Homegirl comes through again.
• Black-Tokyo :: The City’s Breathing This kid also got some beats.
• Paul White :: Rapping With Paul White ‘11 has been a great year for hyperkinetic glonky beats with drawling rhymes.

I don’t remember when I first came across DDay One’s stuff; I used to spend hours and hours scouring rap blogs for new shit and just hoover it all up.  See, I came up in the record store days with no pockets.  I’d agonize over which records I could afford to buy, and dream about being in an endless record store where they had everything and you could listen to anything.  Hey presto, papi: internet.

I got really into instrumental hip-hop a couple of years ago, and it seems like the ’00s were definitely their peak period.  Problem has always been separating the great from the meh. Partially, we got eighty gazillion Japanese DJs putting out so many instrumental jazz-hop LPs you could have a whole website built around nothing but.  Led by the late Nujabes and Fat Jon–to get opinionamated now–this shit mostly sounds the same, goes for the noodly-sounding bullshit, and when it does get a groove on ruins it with pathetic flute loops or weak-ass female vocal hooks.  And the beats?  The beats are weak as fuck.  Some of it is good, no doubt, but it’s not head-nodding.

Remember when illbient and trip-hop were actually a thing?  That made it easier, I guess, because the line’s really blurred between ‘electronic’ and ‘instrumental hip-hop.’  If I’m on the fence, I listen closely to the beats.  Do they go dit-dit-dit-dit-dit?  Electronic, get the fuck outta here with that.  Do they go boom-bop-bop-boom-bop-bop-boom?  Hip-hop.

Anyhow, in 2005 came DDay One’s Loop Extensions. And in 2008, Heavy Migration.

DDay One was born and raised in Los Angeles, CA. He has a double major in hip-hop as a turntablist and samplist. He also has a minor in graffiti art (as do most b-boys), noticeable by his signature. His obsession with manipulating vinyl records started in the early 1990′s, when at the age of 11 he began exploring the depths of Los Angeles’ thrift shops and record stores.

Without a sampler at the time, his first compositions were made by engaging in sessions of “dropping the needle” (placing the needle repeatedly in the same spot of a record to emulate the repetition of a break in a song) and repeatedly looping the desired sample segments on a tape deck. After using this method of creating beats and amassing stacks of records from years of beat mining, he furthered his manipulation of vinyl and love of music by utilizing the sequencing capabilities of a sampler.

Whoally shit.  This is one of those records I didn’t know I’d been waiting for until I’d heard it.  Taking on the dusty analog sound of old jazz records, weaving together jazz’ ability to move you and also mourn, DDay One doesn’t just move the soul but the body.  Because the beats?  The beats are hard as fuck.  The way he constructs his beats is really his greatest talent–the way he uses them as a real instrument, not just an underlying loop.

DDay lays down recognizable hip-hop loops, African layers, ambient noise…but I would say through it all runs an obvious primary influence of be-bop jazz, on which he’s both building and commenting.  There’s tracks like ‘Seeds of Revolution’ which come from some mystery 196X, where rock & roll never happened and jazz just kept growing and the first MPC has just hit the scene.  It’s the fat basslines, ma.  It’s those warm, unprocessed pianos.  It’s the scratching.  This is chill and head-nod isht, in actual fact it moves more than it cools.

I like a good amount of instrumentalist stuff, it’s part of a complete breakfast, but not many artists have such a defined sound that can’t be mistaken for anyone else–let’s give them the French honorific of instrumentaliste. There’s a distinct warmth and depth to DDay One’s tracks which doesn’t just come from their whole origin in vinyl samples, but some other alchemy from the man’s fingertips as well.  They are whole and organic in a way that makes them feel more recorded in session than built of samples.

A lot of instrumentalists–and there are more these days than you can shake a bandcamp at–don’t get that a loop is not a song.  A song builds, fades, weaves, ducks, bobs; elements are played off each other, there are counterpoints and melodies.  DDay One knows this.

The ’00s era of strong instrumentalists seems to have ended, and for me a handful have stayed relevant, had their sound stand up and stood out–I’d put DDay One in the crew with Mumbles, Villain Accelerate, Sixtoo, Odd Nosdam, PSY/OPSogist and maybe a handful more.  He keeps it fresh on his Rhythm Incursion podcasts as well.

Loop Extensions Deluxe drops soon.  Peep it out, you cannot miss.

Websight

Musical Shoppe

Soundcloud

So in Greek mythology, you had the Titans who ruled over the Golden Age.  Cronos was the king Titan, but because he heard this prophecy his kids would overthrow him, he’d eat them as soon as they were born.  This one time his wife gives him a rock instead and raises the kid in secret.  When Zeus grows up he cuts his pop’s stomach open and frees his siblings, who all grew up in there with only that baby-Zeus-sized rock to play with.  (That must’ve pretty much sucked.)  They establish the Olympic pantheon of the Greeks, Romans and all those paintings and sculptures of swan rape and flying sandal wearing naked muhfuckas from your high school art history class.

Where was I going with this?  Uh…shit.  Oh, right: if we cast El-P as the Zeus of the millenial indie-rap pantheon, the best and most overlooked MC from there is C-Rayz Walz.  He’s like the Hephaestus of that click, the blacksmith god: he stays underground steady pounding iron and steel.

Growing up in the Golden Age Titan’s stomach of the BX–you know what, I think that’s enough with the Greek shit now–Walz has steady dropped bombs on your moms for over a decade.  He never disappoints and always comes hard, with LPs chock full of lunchables and few deletables.  Even on guest shots he usually outshines his host and when he has guests of his own you just want them to pipe down so the man can spit.  When he goes mid-tempo he sorta sounds like Redman +100 I.Q. points but mostly his shit is unmistakeable and unfuckwittable.

Walz’ freestyle skills are legendary and his rhymes are packed tight with gems.  Peep this:

Walking Cerberus with a Raising Hell t-shirt

Crackheads get snatched up for stem cell research

Aside from knowing that Cerberus is the three-headed guard dog of the underworld in Greek mythology (see, I knew there was a reason I went with that), you need to know what a stem is…it’s on some cleverly complex shit, plus the ill rhyme scheme.

Is Walz unknown enough to qualify as Most Overlooked of All Time?  He most definitely gets a lot less shine than he deserves, so yeah.

His best LP by far is 2005’s Year of the Beast, which got a nice free remix treatment by the Beatnikz earlier this year.  The new free LP with Dub MD, All Blvck Everything, officiakally knocks…“an amuse-gruel for the main course All Blvck Everything LP” which is supposed to drop in the fall.  Amuse gruel?  Is that some kinda Greek thing?

Get yourself those and you’ll be straight.  Below is “All Blvck Everything,” produced by Labrinth.  Which is where the Minotaur used to hang.

All instrumentals. All neck-snappin’ bangers.

Like John Travolta said in that one movie, “Would you mind not shooting at the thermonuclear weapons?”

Jump Aroundtro / Mind Of An Ordinary Citizen (Instrumental) - Blade / The Game (instrumental) - Cut Chemist & DJ Nu-Mark / Cross Country - Oh No / Music Sucks - Noisy Stylus / Ronin - Serum / The Way I Feel - Boca 45 / Da Joint (Instrumental) - EPMD / Plane - Jultopia / Double Dog Dare You - Beat Rabbi / Fifty Ways To Bleed Your Customers - Alias / The Thing - Carleen & The Groovers / Invocation to the Gods - The Tattoo Connection / Rollin’ On Chrome - Aphrodelics / We Could Forever - Bonobo / Before Or Since - RJD2 / Radiohead - Blueprint

Previously:

• Part 1
• Part 2

I already said all I had to say about Autolect and then some last time.  Controlled by dendera light.

Props to Jazzpants, Tony Grands, Beatbox Radio Show, Under Emergent, and Haas Muhzak for upping Volume One.  Big old 1989 style gasface to all that didn’t.

This is the (mostly) instrumental volume, giving you the full taste of Auto’s power behind the boards.  It will seep into your bones.  Dusty bootsteps on cracked pavements.

Prize (vs. Derek Walcott) / Non Other (vocal) / Psycosis / The Differance / Others / Circumvent / Live / Supernova Combust / Shukem (elmattic loopstrumental) / Therapy (vs. Saul Williams) / Burnout (vs. Amiri Baraka) / Bb77 / Huh / Weekends / Collectors Choice / At One (vs. Ben Okri) / Evolve Or Die (vs. Langston Hughes)

Check out the new Bil Basmala isht here or on Souncloud…many, many new joints on the way and the catalog is mad deep.

A roundup of recent(ish) bangers.

I can’t embed other players up in here, so deal with it.  Not gonna break the list into cute categories like ‘eggs to order’ or ‘bacon tray’ because that’s stupid.  Also not gonna put ‘em up in one big zip file because I keep it legals.

Chill Moody, Tone Trump & Schoolly D :: ‘West Philly’

• Blueprint :: ‘Radio-inactive’
• Adam Warlock & Agartha Audio :: ‘1987 (A Conglomeration of Years)’
• Four Cornas (feat. Conscious) :: ‘Fire’
• Blame One :: ‘Blessed Weapon’
• Kyle Rapps (feat. Joell Ortiz) :: ‘Hard Knock Children’
• Junclassic :: ‘Stingray’
• Infinito 2017 (feat. Thaione Davis) :: ‘Stealth’
• Speed Dial 7 :: ‘Poker Faces II’
• P.L.O. (feat. Sonnyjim & Mudmowth) :: ‘The Heat’
• Willie Evans Jr (feat. Mr Lif) :: ‘Communication’
• Reservoir Sound :: ‘Chapter 1 Rhythm’ EP (MC Eleven, Billy Woods, Hype Wonder, Adam Warlock & V8 over an A.M. Breakups beat)
• 1stN3rd :: ‘Enslaved Circuitry’ (instrumental EP)
• Tenshun :: guest DJ on Walter Gross’ podcast It’s like getting eaten by a giant robot shark.  It’s like a car chase with drums.
• Dr. Holmes & Xunfusion :: 33˚ compilation LP with K-The-I???, Breez Evahflowin, Solomon Childs
• Shabazz Palaces :: Black Up [physical] [digital] If you haven’t copped this yet, I don’t even know what you’re doing here.
• Longevity :: ‘Tantrum’ [below] if you only peep one of these cuts, this is the one.  Knocks harder than this.

Really though, you ever had a hotel breakfast buffet?  You sit there like two hours, eat four breakfasts, you’re good for the whole day.  That shit rocks ass.

I’ve been meaning to do a series on M.O.A.T.s-the most overlooked LPs and artists of all time. Not talking about ‘oh Black Moon is so underrated’ or ‘oh Biz Markie is actually a very accomplished lyricist by Keatsian standards’ but cats who are incredibly talented and so under the radar they’re like those cyborg housefly Predator drones the C.I.A. wants to fly up Ahmadinejad’s nose. At the top of the M.O.A.T. list was Autolect: the greatest MC/producer you never heard of.

So I felt mighty blessed when Autolect himself reached out to me. I’m amped to be the DJ Whoo Kid of the underground, but for reals there aren’t many others I’d be this lucky to hook a mix up for. For one thing, not many have a catalog this deep-everytime people get wood over a new Jay Constipatica song I’m all baffled, because Autolect’s been doing that since 2004 and has about literally 15 times as much material.

I’ve been feeling Autolect’s stuff for about three years, and between Every Mans Universe and Between God And The Deep Blue I was no doubt finna collect every last track. This meant some Mickey Spillane isht to hunt him down under his different monikers-AHMM (Autolect & His Meltdown Movement), BSML77, Hasan and even that one record where he called himself Velox Nur (after his favorite housepaint and/or alien reptilian overlord).

The namechanges are a reason why you maybe haven’t caught on to his genius yet. But in the mains it’s because he’s a true iconoclast.  I don’t do the whole bio-blazhay-he’s-from-he’s-influenced-by-blahzay; it don’t really tell you nothing about the work, and the work speaks for itself. You want a logline? OK, imagine Butterfly or Jay Elecetcetera over Marcberg beats. If you like DDay One, Shabazz Palaces, Saul Williams (pre-rock star), Flying Lotus or RZA’s Ghost Dog score, you are feeling Autolect.

The flow. Autolect doesn’t really rap. He’s not singing, he’s not talking. I don’t know what to call it. You just gotta listen. It’s serious business. It has some Digable Planets flavor with a dash of Mos Def. It’s spiritual in the real sense, not the patchouli-smelling PM Dawn sense. It’s intelligent and conscious without being didactic or preaching.

The production. Dusty. Intricate loops and samples. It shimmers, not on some fairydust isht but like rain on concrete. Like neon through a tumbler of scotch on the rocks. Hard jazz, deep funk sounds, but taken so far and so deep from the source as to be absorbed and transformed. From some alternate reality where Dolphy and Mingus invented the MPC and jazz never ended, kept on going. Or some time traveler went back with a sampler and crafted some parachronistic Dendera light grooves, Bebop On The Edge of Forever.

So Autolect is being retired, as the man moves on to a new era of music under Bil Basmala. As per usual, he’s got a huge slew of material lined up which is bound to be dope.

Autology both celebrates and closes the books on the Autolect era. What you got here is 13 of his greatest tracks with some interview snippets which give you a little taste of his larger thought.

Soon enough we’re gonna drop a Volume Two to give a full flavor of his instrumental productions, but for now, sit back and marinate in this. Then pick your jaw up off the floor and hit his Bandcamp.  Welcome to Autolect.

Doorks / Lubrication / Autio Therapy / Accepted / Shukem / Equation (feat. Nac One) / Define / Coco Cloe / Heavy Duty / Bridge The Gap / Levitate / iAM (acurate mix) / Antidote: Out Of Space (feat. Megan Davis)

• Websight
• Band-de-camp

The thing is about the Twooter is that you get more insight into rappers’ lives than you might want.  I mean, these guys are like superheroes or demigods, I don’t really care what they think about the new X-Men movie.  And sometimes they drop straight crazy shit.  Shit that seriously fucks with my mentals.

Uh…you’re the guy who had that one skit on that album where you made your girl pistolwhip you while you jerked off, right?  But you also have a deep appreciation for Woody Allen’s late-period oeuvre?  OK then.  Just checking.

Yeah, that line on ‘On The Eve Of War’ when you said ‘THOSE WHO DARE OPPOSE US WILL STAND KNEE DEEP IN THE BLOOD OF THEIR CHILDREN’?  I was all: that’s totally a Hall & Oates reference.

Serious Paz?  Phil Collins? My wife listens to that Van fucking Morrison shit.  I look at her iPod and start weeping.  But even she don’t fuck with Hall & Oates.

Blueprint–triple threat: he can MC.  He can produce.  He offers sound auto maintenance advice.

I seem to be following the wrong Joell Ortiz, since this one is obviously a database manager from Scranton.

Following Flavor Flav is pretty much what you’d expect.  He, uh, wrote a book apparently.  Or allegedly wrote.  Or this book supposedly exists.  But anyway his Twooter I can deal with, it’s endless tweets of YEAH BOYEEE!!! and the above gnomic koans.  It’s having him pop up on Facebook…

…saying shit like this, in between pictures of people’s babies, that fucks with my mentals.

On the other hand though, I didn’t know that on the Twooter you get steady drops of the fat comedy gold chain that is Kid Mero of Victory Light:

And that I wouldn’t wanna miss on the regular.

For reals though, to be a musician right now you gotta grind this shit 24/7.  You gotta ‘connect with your fans on multiple platforms.’  Just seems like a drag…why not be in the studio instead?  Because you can’t.  Everybody’s competing for your attention.  Pampers.  Wendy’s.  Al-Qaeda.  Groupon.  Starbucks.  Sarah Palin.  That girl you went to high school with on Facebook.  The Revolutionary Council of Libya had a website before they had a council.

Everybody wants to be a trending topic.  Everybody wants to go viral.  I mean, why the fuck are The New Yorker and NPR covering hip hop all the time now?  To broaden their base and up the eyeballs.  Why do so many hip-hop blogs update 400 times a day with the same shit?  Gotta get those page views.  Shit is competitive as a motherfucker out there.

Not to get all Malcolm Gladwell on your asses, but it’s like we live in an information tornado. You could call it an INFORMADO. THAT’S RIGHT BITCHES: INFORMADO.  Shit rolls in outta nowhere, consumes everything in this huge fucking maelstrom, and then disappears. What happens when you’re the informado and it dissipates?  You be sitting in your wrecked-up double-wide crying and shit.  Like Odd Future gonna be doing this time next year.

Me, personally?  I gotta tone down all the chatter and stick to business, cause too much of it fucks with my damn mentals.

Can’t-stop-won’t-stop-ten-tracks-I-forgot edition.

Still Shook - Greenhouse Effect / Run - Rakim / Made You Shit Your Pants - Copywrite, Yakballz & Cage / How I Could Just Kill a Man - Styles P & Sheek Louch / Sucker M.C.s - Wu-Tang Clan / Rapper’s Delight - Erick Sermon, Keith Murray, Redman & Joell Ortiz / Vapors - Snoop Dogg / I’m Still #1 - Cypress Hill / I’m Housin’ - Rage Against The Machine

Your money’s no good here, B.  We got some free shit laid on.

One Eyed Kings :: ‘Distortion’

Fat track, let’s see what these cats do next.

6REME :: Tolv figurer Av Ondskap (Twelve Figures of Evil)

Nohmad (VA) :: Hybridz Vol. I

You know sometimes I like that dark, grungy-ass instrumental mutant beats shit. (Because Tyler made it safe to be “a fucking emo faggot who’s depressed.”)  Two free LPs off the netlabel Nohmad.

Death Grips :: Exmilitary

AAAAHHHH WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?  Jesus FUCK.  I think I just shit myself.  This is some serious punk rock shit.

Rubberoom :: Rebooted

Hey, remember that fat LP, Architechnology, these guys dropped in ‘99?  No?  You best catch the fuck up then.  This ain’t no frilly dance around the maypole.

No idea what happened to these guys over the past 12 years but this is a mad smushup of bad-ass rhymery and hard-edged beats…how many times we seen a one-hitter make a weak comeback–this is not one of those times.

Cage Vs Cons Soundtrack (VA)

Lineup on this comp is like the Legion of Superheroes.  Net result is like the Washington Generals.  Supposed to be for a ‘mixed martial arts/musical festival’…a what now?  Like Kool Keith cagefights E40?  Or some dude is doing muy thai while Too $hort is on the mic?  ‘Beeiotch, get the fuck outta here, you damn near kicked me in my face.’  Los Angeles, what will they think of next.  Cop two and skip the rest: Buc Fifty (feat. Zodiac) :: ‘4.5lbs of Pressure’ and Canibus & Killah Priest :: ‘Give It More’.

OK, I said free shit but the next two are pay to play.  Nothing’s free these days, ya know.

Vast Aire :: OX 2010

This is not a proper LP, but a bunch of tracks Vast’s dropped over the last couple…like those Way of the Fist bootlegs he used to drop.  Vast always got the hot tongue fire, but like any MC he’s only as good as the beat that’s backin’ him.  Some of the beats here are booming, like ‘Battle of the Planets’ and ‘Spy Vs Spy’ and some are…not.  I’m not gonna say Vast has fallen off, but I’d like to see more fire in the belly holmes.

KRS-One & Bumpy Knuckles :: Royalty Check

Jesus Christ, KRS has another album?!  Is he finna put some kids through college or something?  And are they, on a George Foreman stylee, named KRS-Two, KRS-Three and KRS-Four?  Sounds like a bunch of goddamn Dr. Seuss characters.  Really though, we had the True Master team-up, the Just-Ice reunion…and now this one.  It’s on some Marvel Team Up action.

KRS went through some weak spots in the late 90s/early 00s, but you know what, this is some godbody shit.  Taking it back to the Sex & Violence LP, which is where I felt KRS really came into his own after finding his way through the first post-Scott La Rock LPs.  Name another Golden Age MC who can still kick it like this on the regular.  While Cool J is off solving maritime-related mysteries, or whatever it is they do on that show, KRS walks the walk and talks the talk.  “Who Is It” bangs below.

Seems like every time I turn around we lose another legend.

Seems like we’re losing them a lot faster than we’re birthing the new.  Just hyperactive teenagers and dumbasses with tattoos on their faces.

They called him the Godfather of Rap and he didn’t like that much.  He preferred bluesologist.

I guess we lost Detroit.  I guess the revolution has been televised.  I guess no one survives in America.  I guess New York finally killed him.

Obitributaries:

• New York Times
• New Yorker 2010 profile
• Sach O
• Cold Rock Da Spot
• Hip Hop Is Read [1] / [2]

Used to be rappers didn’t cover each other’s songs.  That was biting.  (Even if the ‘original’ hip-hop song, “Rapper’s Delight,” was entirely bit lyrics.)  Fresh was the word.  DJs soaked the labels off their LPs so other DJ’s wouldn’t know what song it was.

Times moved.  MCs started out learning lyrics of whoever was at the top of their game.  Then you spit over another MC’s beats until you could get your own.  That was your apprenticeship, word to Johnny Tremain.  But hip-hop cover versions didn’t really start until the mid-’00s, because a cover is an homage, history for a previously ahistorical and new format–one which was always referential but not reverential, except for its dead.  And the ’00s was about that hip-hop nostalgia.  Hip-hop had no elders when it started out, just succession from one Crown Prince to another; until the ’90s there weren’t even long-term careers, you just fizzled away and went back to the car wash or accountancy school.

A cover version is usually a transformative homage–when Hendrix does Dylan or Sid Vicious does Sinatra, it’s a totally different song, like those cover versions by white people in their indigenous styles I forced on you last time.  Because hip-hop’s based on beats not bands, it’s hard to transform a cover, that’s why the remix is more paramount.  Even so, constant innovation causes expansion.  You don’t see 2 Live Crew tribute bands at your local bar off the interstate.

So now we got this Elzhi and his mixtape called, erm, Elmatic. This is the second take on Nas’ Illmatic after Fashawn’s poorly received and all-around ass version, Ode To Illmatic.  Some cats think it’s an instant classic.  Others are not so sure about that, B.  I agree most with Weiss’ succinct account.

Elmatic has got nice live versions of the beats by Will Sessions, but they’re not as interesting a take as the El Michels Affair Wu-Tang covers.  Elzhi hews pretty close to Nas’ cadences and a lot of the lines themselves, so it’s much more of a cover than a new take or transformation.  The whole enchilada tastes nice no doubt, but it’s got tofu not beef and salsa not Tabasco.  I like it, I just don’t really see the point of it.  I liked Joell Ortiz Covers The Classics and Malcolm & Martin’s Criminal Minded, both of which took pains to flip the scripts but also underlined the fire of the classics.  What the fuck, is hip-hop having an anxiety of influence moment, word to Harold Bloom?

Illmatic was a hood life panorama painted on a canvas of dusty, funky grooves.  A worthy update of that dropped last year–Marcberg.  As for a heartfelt audiobiography in rhyme which is a watermark for the future, well, that dropped the same day as Elmatic–it’s called Goblin (which admittedly has a lot, lot more in common with The Slim Shady LP than Illmatic.)  So yeah, Elzhi put in work here but I just don’t get it.  What was he trying to do?  It’s not updating Illmatic or particularly transforming it artistically.  It’s a nice little mixtape but I’m not sure I wanna see more of these.  What’s next, It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Jay Electronica?  Enter The 36 Sean Priceses?  As Ras Kass As We Wanna Be?  Licensed To Redman?  Paid In Curren$y?  Step In The Marciano?

Anyway, here’s hip-hop covers hip-hop.  Represent, represent.

Bring The Noise (Live) - N.W.A. / Criminal Minded - Malcolm & Martin / The New Style - Redman / Slow & Low - Run-D.M.C. / AZ’s Chillin’ - AZ / White Lines - Raekwon / Know The BK Ledge - Joell Ortiz / Mama Said Knock You Out - Street Sweeper Social Club / M.F. You Love 2 Hate - Mr. Dibbs (feat. Murs & Chris Awesome) / Kill A Man - Bambu / Ain’t Goin Out Like That - Yelawolf / No Sleep Till Brooklyn ‘04 - M.O.P. / Shook Ones, Part II - Everlast / Take Cover - Adjust & Product / Juicy - Tek (Smif-n-Wessun) / All A Dream - Remedy / Stranded In West Los - Malkovich Music / MCs Act Like They Don’t Know - Sha Stimuli, Promise, James Watts & Fashawn / Shimmy Shimmy Ya - El Michels Affair, Von Pea & Spec Boogie / No Half Smokin - Blueprint / PJ’s Remix - El Michels Affair & Diamond District / Detroit State Of Mind - eLZHi

• In a couple of paragraphs out of a 432-page memoir, Ashley Judd says hip-hop is misogynist, provoking hand-wringing and debate, because no one has ever said this before, and because Ashley Judd is a towering figure in the hip-hop community.
• Jay-Z, or at least an S. Carter software emulator, interviews Gwyneth Paltrow, who claims she knows all the words to Straight Outta Compton and reveres Eazy-E.  Cover version please.
• As funny as the ‘Fight For Your Right Revisited’ trailer is, I’m disappointed the Beastie Boys didn’t go the whole I’m Not There route and cast Cate Blanchett, a traffic cone, Mr. Sulu, Hulk Hogan, a caterpillar, Harry Dean Stanton, Tilda Swinton and Gilbert Gottfried as themselves.  Also the whole thing kinda drags on and on.  Nobody cares the ridiculous number of famous people you know, just be funny.  I don’t know, it’s the ‘international version,’ so maybe it’s all Herzog’d up or something.  ‘They all start peeing on each other, then they get beat up by cops’…that seems kinda European to me.
• Legendary DJ Mister Cee is busted for public lewdness in a ladyboy stylee, and mega-shit-talker/walking meme Lil B announces his new LP will be titled ‘I’m Gay,’ provoking hand-wringing and debate about homophobia in hip-hop, which no one has ever talked about before.
• 25 gazillion more words [note: estimate] are written about Odd Future, of which 50% have nothing to do with the music, 25% complain about the 50% which don’t talk about the music, and 25% are about Complex’s very morally and legally dubious tracking down of Earl Sweatshirt.
• Sadat X has a wine-tasting show.  Tony Touch and Crazylegs have a cooking show.
• Vibe runs a pictorial of 12 Celebrities Caught Picking Their Noses.
• Flavor Flav’s fried chicken restaurant is out of business after just four months.

Look, peoples: if Mister Cee likes to unwind by sitting in his car and nutting in a transvestite’s mouth, and Earl Sweatshirt’s mom wants to send him to a Samoan bootcamp to be beaten with wet towels instead of enjoying OF’s supersonic rocket to fame, that’s their inalienable fucking rights as Americans, goddamnit. Jesus H. Christ, you think you’re Walter Winchell?  You think you’re Mary Hart?  C’MON SON.

Meanwhile, actual music was released.

Billy Woods :: Cowardly Threats & Hideous Cruelty

By now you must know that Woods (lately of Super Chron Flight Brothers) is my favorite MC right now, or you ain’t been paying attention.  He’s a post-9/11, sardonic, ironic, bitter spitter of twisted street and political rhymes wrought from bile and lyrical skill.  I always think of him as sitting on his stoop in a tank top, drinking a San Miguel, smoking a Newport and reading the Washington Post or a dog-eared paperback of Dhalgren. He’s the guy who namechecks Edward Said, To Kill A Mockingbird, random Shakespeare couplets, the last hundred years of African politics, rhymes ‘Salieri’ with ‘Halle Berry’…see, this is why I can’t get with Curren$y or Big K.R.I.T., they just don’t stand up on the tongue twisting and the knowledge.

DJ Addikt’s put together a 40-track comp of snippets, best verses, guest verses, rarities and remixes to school you up before Woods drops History Will Absolve Me this fall.

Tenshun :: Bubonic Plague

Ahhh, a new Tenshun record…it’s like slipping into a hot bath.  Of lava.

Tenshun doesn’t fuck with Bandcamp or iTunes.  By the looks of the CDr package he sent me for eight bucks, he doesn’t fuck with laser printers either.  It looks like this (like all his releases) limited edition of 50 is sold out, but I’ll respect the man’s strange exclusive vision and not put up any joints.  You can listen to track #12 here.  Wait, why am I telling you about a record you can’t get?  Uh…wait a month or so and you can probably download it off some Russian forum if you dig hard enough.  Not like I would condone that.

I already talked about this cat before, so let’s just say the new LP is as strong as 2007’s Nihilism. The Hollywood pitch would be ‘Gaslamp Killer and El-P get dengue fever, are trapped in an abandoned switchblade factory, and collabo on the soundtrack to a Serbian torture porn movie.’

Shaolin Jazz :: The 37th Chamber

I said before the Wu can go in over any type of beat.  How do they sound over jazz samples?  They go in hard as usual.  Inspired by Logan Walters’ Wu-Note covers, Gerald Watson commissioned DJ 2-Tone Jones to rack up this pretty much flawless 13-track set sampling Donald Byrd, Grover Washington Jr., John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Miles Davis and others.  Get it here and slap a Wu sticker on your saxophone.

Here we got the eighth edition of Super Chicken’s own dub-meets-hip hop.  The phenomenon just keeps getting bigger.  Super Chicken’s got his own porn site now for some reason, a video game, and also writeups in The Weekly World News and Scientific American.  Here he is onstage with Odd Future at SXSW:

Dayumn.  This chicken’s gettin’ major.  Chicken swag, motherfucker.

Nosebleed (JBL The Titan Remix) - Vinnie Paz (feat. R.A. The Rugged Man) / More Or Less Dub - Talib Kweli (Max Tannone Remix) / Seven Eyes, Seven Horns - Scaramanga / Welcome To America - Resident Alien / Your Gospel -  Talib Kweli (Max Tannone Remix) / The Death of Chris Palko - Cage / Lucifer - B. Dolan / Hottabatch - Shabazz Palaces / Moment Of Clarity - Jay-Z (Studio One Remix) / Dirt Off Your Shoulder - Jay-Z (Studio One Remix) / L.I.’s Finest - R.A. the Rugged Man / Play By Play - Qwel & Maker / Norville Rogers (Oh Man) - Mike G. of OFWGKTA / Eat (Deadverse Language Barrier Remix) - Dälek (feat. Hevi) / Memories - Just-Ice & KRS-One / Who Killed The Chicken - Lee “Scratch” Perry / Best Dressed Chicken In Town - Dr. Alimantado / Ragga Zapp. Mania - The Two. Fifteens / Blow Treez - Redman (feat. Ready Roc & Method Man) / My Sound - DJ Blood1 / Shimmy Shimmy Ya - Prince Fatty (feat. Horseman)

Short Fuze & Nasa :: Toxicology Music

This is pretty much a post-record label age, but there’s still some I keep my eyes on–Backwoodz, Nature Sounds, Galapagos4, Babygrande, and Rhymesayers releases are usually worth a check.  Uncommon Records has definitely been blowing up the spot with some good shit lately, and this is their latest, a remix set of the Lobotomy Music LP.  Most of the time a remix version isn’t as good as the original, but this is one of the times it’s as good/better.

Short Fuze and the W.A.S.T.E.L.A.N.D.S. crew (no, I don’t know what it stands for, but I’ll guess: Walking Above Shit Times, Eating Long Andouille, Never Dumb Shit?  I bet it’s something like that.) haven’t really hit my radar before, but I gotta say Fuze brings heat on the mic here.  He posts his lyrics on this Tumblr which is pretty cool; I wish more MCs would do that, especially those who haven’t made OHHLA yet.

Nasa’s beats on the first 5 tracks are really hitting, sharp and punchy like…well, I guess like that long andouille sausage again, but also some solid, banging evil beats for evil streets.  Willie Green, Megabusive and Lou Cypher handle production on the last three, which I wasn’t as impressed with, but check this and Lobotomy Music too.

Check out “Master Peace (Nasa Remix)” here.

A.M. Breakups :: The Cant Resurrection / Clink Pieces EP

Instrumental hip hop’s come a long way from the 12″ dub B-side of “What Is A DJ (If He Can’t Scratch)?”  (Though come to think of it, Davey DMX’s F-F-F-Fresh still stands up, and was way ahead of its time…except for the title.)  The latter half of the ’90s took the grimy, rumbling darkness of RZA and Mobb Deep’s production into trip-hop and illbient, culminating in DJ Spooky’s and the Anticon crew’s best efforts.  Post-millenium, El-P shaped the Def Jux sound into solid hip hop beats overlayed with similar brooding crunch.

Since then, Spooky’s gotten more chin-stroky, Anticon’s become some kinda indie-rock label, Def Jux has folded in all but name, and others like Blue Sky Black Death have drifted more towards pop or simply run out of good ideas (Prefuse73, I’m raising my eyebrows at you.)  And DJ Krush went…where?  Into the sunset with his turntables and a baby strapped to his back like Lone Wolf & Cub or something.  There’s only been the guerilla underground of Tenshun, Orko and Third Sight out there to keep things going.

Producer A.M. Breakups, née half of 11:00AM with MC Eleven, brings back that staticky, blat/zap/blip crunchtime of Odd Nosdam, The Books, Cars & Trains, D-Styles and all that weird shit I like which hovers between noise and melody, without ever losing a hip-hop base of solid drums, scratching and samples.  The Cant Resurrection is a solid LP bringing A.M.’s beats on their own and with MCs like Billy Woods, Eleven, V8, Shortrock, Despot and Teddy Faley (yeah, I know–who?  But he’s good).  He’s hooked in with Backwoods Studios, Uncommon Records and has done some ill remixes for Super Chron Flight Brothers, Karniege, Mr. Len, and other cats.  Strong pedigree, we’ll overlook the vintage pimp coat, Polaroids and chin fuzz.

The second half of the 20 tracks are definitely stronger, but ‘Amphetamine’ with its wheezing accordion sound, ‘Forms’ swirled keys and ‘When Yr Eyes Closed’ whirlpool of fuzz all hit well.  The free EP Clink Pieces (A Prelude to The Cant Resurrection) is just as solid; both records end with a rising uplift (’Substance D’ remix with Despot and ‘King of the Hill (Version)’ with Adam Warlock & Shortrock of The Presence, respectively), a crack of dawn after a record’s worth of the dawn of crack.

Look peoples, you heard it on the podcast, you seen it on the computer screen: I don’t like dubstep or electronica or ambient or trillbient or witchsteptronica–I like beats, maybe beats that are out there, but beats for reals.  Give the boy a whirl.

Bandcamp

iTunes

Facebook

The story of Wu-Tang is a lot like Brideshead Revisited, with Meth as the guy with the teddy bear and RZA as the other guy. Or maybe Raekwon as the guy with the teddy bear and Ghost as the other guy.

Nah mean?

Or maybe the saga of the Clan is more like Enter the 36 Anna Kareninas. Or maybe the best way to describe the Clan’s history is in their own idiom, something like: Pinot grigio your DeVito, the Black Ronald Reagan cold countin’ peanuts in the crib.

Anyway, I been collecting Wu remixes for a while, got about 200 or so of ‘em.  What you realize is the Wu can go in over any type of beat: Chinese opera, 8-bit Nintendo, old school, dubstep, The Nutcracker…it really don’t matter, they go in hard.  This here is a mix of some rarities and remixes.

P.L.O. Style (Frankenstein Remix) / Apollo Kids (Raw Stiles Remix) / Real Shit (One of These Days Remix) / Astro (Lord Hakim Remix) / Verbal Intercourse pt. II (Kenzo Digital Remix) / Long Live (Mathematics Blend) / What’s Happenin (Showoff Remix) / Real Estate Breaker (Tcha Blend) / Associated (Bronze Nazareth) / Rec The Party (Perfecta Remix) / Mystery of Chessboxin’ (DJ Muggs Blend) / Pinky Ring (Magowl Remix) / Dirty & Stinkin’ / Wu Banga 101 (Mathematics Remix) / All Flowers (Exclusive Mix) / Daytona 500 (Tom Caruana Remix) / Lyrical 44 / Shimmy Shimmy Ya (Q-Fish Remix) / Run (Problem Child Remix) / Those That’s Bout It (Inna Blends Blend) / Publicity (Goodwill Projects Blend) / P.L.O. Style (Unknown Remix)

What we’re seeing across North Africa and the Middle East is a youth revolution, driven by disenfranchisement and a lack of opportunities.  Hip hop has always been the original soundtrack for that.  It started in the city Ford told to drop dead, and since “The Message” it’s been the theme music for angry young people whose rage is against poverty, ghettos and repression–political, racial and economic.  Public Enemy made politics and fist-up rebellion their sound, and the torch’s been carried by a handful since then.

Hip hop’s been international for years, go get a late pass.  I remember reading about Polish MCs in crumbling Soviet-era projects saying they couldn’t understand the words of hip-hop, but the beats and the message still spoke to them.  There are ghettos all over the world, and hip hop is there.  OK, sure, it gets watered down here and over there as party music, gangsta posturing and fake rebellion in fitteds and sagging shorts, but on the real it’s what Chuck D (in his Hannah Arendt moment) called ‘the CNN of the ghetto,’ now more than ever.

In the long hot Arab rebellion, more and more of what reaches us isn’t coming from CNN but from cellphone video and social media.  (Why you think Qaddafi’s troops have been confiscating SIM cards from those hitting the borders?)  Just as hip hop made itself from available technology and instruments–the turntable and the mic, in the absence of guitar lessons and studio time–these kids are using the internet as their mixtapes-from-the-trunk distribution system.  Free, instant and worldwide–it takes a nation’s kill switches to hold them back.

And this also allows them to provide instant responses to events which are unfolding on the daily; as soon as they cut the track they can pump it out there.  This gives them greater urgency and timeliness than we’ve ever seen before–the fourteen months between the first Iraq invasion and P.E.’s Apocalypse ‘91 didn’t make the LP any less hard-hitting, but it’s not how we roll two decades later.

Of all the Arab uprisings, Libya’s been the most bloody, where the people’s peaceful protests have had to turn into an armed rebellion. (As of today anyways…who knows what Syria, Yemen or Bahrain will look like a month from now…)

So now would be a good time to hip you to Ibn Thabit, Libya’s own Immortal Technique.  Not to make a lazy comparison; Thabit’s flow, spitting and even a borrowed beat or two (“Tripoli Calling”) and his own acknowledged influence join the parallels.

Technique’s pretty much the only and best political rapper we’ve got right now, and he was also the first to give it a more international view.  P.E., Paris, The Coup and dead prez were more concerned with Amerikkkan idols, but Tech always took a broader view, so it’s only right Ibn Thabit should use him as a model.  The more international hip-hop gets, the more it functions as Chuck D’s CNN of the ghetto–what he meant was it was ghetto kids giving reports to each other on what was going on in their hoods.  And the more international joints we hear, the more the gangsta fakery and Twitter beefs of Rawse and Gucci look empty and stupid.  Remember that K’Naan song, ‘What’s Hardcore?’  If I rhymed about home [Somalia] and got descriptive, I’d make Fifty Cent look like Limp Biskit.

Now lemme get this straight for y’all: I’m putting Thabit up here because his shit is fire, not for novelty value.  His beats are tight and he spits like a beast.  Of course, I don’t know what he’s saying, but I’ll put twenty he’s not extolling the syrup selection at the Misrata IHOP.  (’Call To The Libyan Youth’ lyrics, and two other songs, are here.)  In his own words:

Ibn Thabit has been attacking Gaddafi with his music since 2008. He has never been a member of any organized political group; he is just an ordinary Libyan speaking the thoughts of many Libyan youth. Of course he has had to remain anonymous to protect himself and his family in Libya, and prefers not to give very many personal details.

In case you thought this all jumped off on Feb 17th, Thabit cut a song called ‘Benghazi‘ in 2009 and ‘Momar The Coward‘ in 2008.  He’s from Tahruna, and his whole family’s in Tripoli at the moment–imagine what this cat’s going through right now, but he’s still knocking out songs.

“Some guys consider this a lot of fun, and they’re hoping the war lasts a lot longer,” said Marwan Buhidma, a 21-year-old computer student who credited video games with helping him figure out how to operate a 14.5-millimeter antiaircraft battery.

An hour or so before Friday’s headlong retreat, a gaggle of young men in aviator sunglasses and knit caps danced on military hardware, thrusting weapons into the air.

“Where is the house of the guy with really bad hair?” they chanted, referring to Colonel Qaddafi, jumping on spent cartridges and empty milk cartons. “Let’s go down the road and see it!”

–NY Times, 13.3.11

Say swag one more time.

Check the technique, and support the brother with a donation:

• Site
• Downloads
• YouTube
• Facebook
• Twitter

Also:

• “A New Arab Generation Finds Its Voice”
• “Libyans Hope Social Media Will Aid Their Revolution”
• “How Graffitti Stirred An Uprising”

Al’Tarba :: Lullabies for Insomniacs

I kinda stopped paying attention to instrumentals last year, but French beatmaker Al’Tarba has brought a pretty solid LP here.  Bringing in some guest MCs Q-Unique, Qualm and a few other cats I never heard of, the sound here is reminiscent of Kid Koala, Guts, Chinese Man, and DJ Cam and Blue Sky Black Death (before both disappeared up their own assholes of Enya-sounding suck)–some swing-influenced, uptempo beats; some Krush/Muggs type of eerie shit…good stuff.  Give it a whirl.

Ensilence :: Strange Fruit EP

Ensilence is a great young MC from the PA area, with the kind of raspy voice and smooth flow of Jean Grae, Ladybug Mecca from Digable Planets, and all the way back to MC Lyte.  She’s gone from strength to strength on her EPs of the last couple of years, and the new joint brings her spitting over some great beats.  All six tracks are definitely quality over quantity, and be sure to peep out her earlier work up on the Bandcamp too.  A standout track, ‘Sweet Confession,’ is up in here, but you gotta hear it all to get her range.

Tom Caruana :: Okay Player - The Bollywood Remake / The Rough Versions Remix Series

This cat caught a lot of love last year over his Wu-Tang Vs. The Beatles remix, but I thought his previous DOOM remixes were better.  Whatever, because now he’s dumped 7 entire LPs worth of remixes out there.  The Rough Versions includes the DOOM joints, J-Live, Large Pro, D.I.T.C., and Brand Nubian (which I thought was dope as hell).  Nothing too fancy, just straight-up nice new beats.

Okay Player is 2 LPs, The Bollywood Remake and Deleted Scenes, scrambling Bollywood beats with Talib, Mos Def, Badu, Jean Grae, Quasi, Black Thought, Q-Tip, Common, Gift of Gab…sheesh.  I got tired of the whole Bollywood remix thing around the time Madlib dropped Here’s Eighty-Five Thousand More Loops I Just Shitted Out While Tripping Balls, Bollywood Stylee Edition, Vol. XXIV, but TC really uses them more of a sample base to craft some wistful and/or funky tracks than the whole ‘Indian guys talk so crazy’ shit.  Actually, it’s the tracks with the most curry powder that are the weakest, partially because they make no sense–there’s a disconnect between the beat alliteration and the lyrics. You start to feel like, what I gotta do to get some korma up in here instead of nodding your head. At 40+ tracks between ‘em, there’s definite sifting needed, but some solid joints for real.

(The Blacula soundtrack was not very interesting, in case you were wondering.  I mean, if you’re gonna have a song titled ‘Blacula Strikes!’, you better bring more than generic funk.)

Some shit what’s been lighting up my earholes lately.  (Yeah, Shaolin Vs. Wu-Tang is dope, but you knew that, right?)

Skipp Coon & Mr. Nick :: Sophomore Slump Vol. 1: Independents Day EP / women revolution tennis shoes

A lotta rappers/bands go through that moment when they blow up and have to stick with their artistic sensibility or go for the dough.  Sometimes they just feel like doing pop music I guess, but the records are a lot less interesting.  So imagine if Outkast had never gotten big, and their sound got rougher and grimier, funkier and stankier, and they went back to the knowing sly politics of Southernplayalistik…and then hooked up with some crazy Orko Eloheem or El-P type beats.  That’s what you got here.  Shit is on some flipped grits fatback action.  (’Fight’ is the cut at the bottom.)

Lionheart :: Spanish Bombs

If you’re an old fuck like me, and stopped listening to rock music around the time 36 Chambers dropped,  The Clash is in your all-time top 5 bands.  (Unless you’re more into Van Halen, in which case…seriously?  Van Halen?  Fuck outta here.)  And aside from the occasional rip-off of ‘Sean Flynn’ (I hope to hell M.I.A. is putting Strummer’s kids through college now), there’s a definite lack of Clash sampling going on.  Until now.  Lionheart dropped Spanish Bombs, a mixtape of Clash samples and his lyrics.  Definitely check it.

Passion Junkies.it presents :: Dolphyn Surround

If you’re an old fuck like me, you also listen to bebop jazz, and you know your Dolphys from your Cannonball Adderleys.  Come on, son, Premier listens to this stuff, it’s not just for goatee-strokers.  Anyway.  Eric Dolphy was that dude.  I know actual jazz musicians who won’t fuck with him because his shit is too crazy…and dukes died in 1964.  Passion Junkie’s put together a comp of Dolphy remixes which has got some great tracks on it; some of it is too glowsticky electronica for me, but check it out.  You know you wanna peep the skills of some Italian beatmakers.  (I need to make a Bebop for B-Boys mix.)

Aight, I’m out.  Gonna go check out the Blacula soundtrack.

What we’ve seen across the Middle East and North Africa is inspiring.  After a decade where the only option to fight against hopelessness seemed to be to put C4 in your underpants, the hashtag revolutions of 2011 have been unprecedented and unforeseen.  If anyone had said six months ago ‘gee, maybe there will be mass demonstrations which will overthrow governments in half a dozen countries,’ they’d have been the laughingstock of the Rand Institute, CNN and the State Department.  BREAKING NEWS: MIDEAST ANALYST IS A DREAMY HIPPIE, POSSIBLY HIGH.

I’m a little bit dubious about how much social media drove these uprisings.  I mean, I make probably more than a gaggle of Tunisians, and I can’t afford an iPhone.  I don’t check my Facebook that regular.  It’s probably a lot more complicated than that.  But smarter people than me argue about it here, here, here and here.

Simultaneously, across the US mass protests are taking place at state capitols against budget cuts and depowering unions.  In Europe, the same.  Why are all these cuts taking place and screwing us?  The financial crisis, brought about by the bankers and stockbrokers.  The issue in the Middle East and North Africa isn’t democracy, it’s living standards, oppression and corruption.  It’s the same damn thing, but we’re falling for the rope-a-dope.

Don’t tell me we live in a democracy in the West.  We live in a kleptocracy.  It’s just our corruption, greed and stealing from the people is legal.

My beloved, let’s get down to business–lemme hear you say…

The Hashtag Revolutions Mixtape:

Looking For Freedom - Ibn Thabit (Libya) / Last Days - The Arab Summit / We Protest - The Are / Ana Fhemtkoum - Mohamed Ali Ben Jemaa (Tunisia) / Poverty & Corruption - Ibn Thabit (Libya) / Not Your Prisoner - Arabian Knightz (feat. Shadia Mansour & Fredwreck) (Egypt) / Wa2t El Thawra Gaya - Revolution Records (Egypt) / Ta7ya Tounes - El General (feat. Mr Shooma) (Tunisia) / Back Down Mubarak! - Master Mimz (Egypt) / Land Of Yemen - Dirty Flame / Yalla Back to Yemen - Loki da Trixta / Ded El 7koma (Against The Government) - Ramy Donjewan (Egypt) / #Jan25 - Amir Sulaiman, Omar Offendum, The Narcicyst, Freeway, Ayah & Sami Matar (Egypt) / Awakening - Badawi / Justice Tomorrow - The Arab Summit / To Be Continued - Raz Mesinai / #fightthepower

Peep these out:

• Khalas Mixtape Vol. 1 - Mish B3eed (also at DatPiff): “Khalas” means “enough”, “stop” or “end” in Arabic. It’s also the title of this new mixtape featuring a group of hip hop artists from Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria and Libya who are fed up and have gotten together to spread their message that oppression must end, regardless of nationality and borders. Mish B3eed, or ‘Not far,’ refers to the sense of solidarity that these youth feel across borders, the similarities of their causes and the oppressors they face, their physical proximity and the sense that our ultimate goal is within sight.”

• Davey D - Beats For the Revolution
• Hip Hop & The Tunisian Revolution: A 21st Century Affair
• The Global Reach of Hip Hop
• To Egypt: Abdallah’s Address

The traditional whitebread Western is antithetical to hip-hop, but the spaghetti Western intersects in a bunch of ways–the general badassery, stone-cold antiheroes, grimy rough operas, strict codes of honor, a heartless, lawless landscape, and of course Italian guys pretending to be Mexicans vs. Black guys pretending to be Italians.

And of course the gunplay.  Always the gun clappin’. Spaghetti Westerns, like most hip-hop, are pretty much about guys shooting each other over money or disses.

If the action in spaghetti Westerns is the lyrics, Ennio Morricone’s operatic, mournful scores are the beats–counterpoint and juxtaposed to the cowboy/b-boy attitude. Think about Mobb Deep’s beats; underneath the nihilistic braggadocio is the same sadness.

They’re both stylized forms loaded down with rich imagery and violent, iconic signifiers, like Noh plays, because they don’t play.  If you think about it, all’s the same with hip-hop’s other richly tapped vein, kung-fu flicks.

On the other hand, when hip-hop tries to make actual Westerns, it turns out like Posse, or this, or God help us, this.

So saddle up, motherfuckers.  It’s the spaghetti Western mixtape.

The Good, The Bad & The Intro / Draw - EPMD / Hang ‘Em High - Sadat X / Black Tequila - Ghostface Killah (feat. Cappadona & Trife) / Tequila Sunrise - Cypress Hill / 1-2, Here’s What We Gonna Do - KRS-One & True Master (feat. The RZA) / For A Few Dollars More - Morricone, Material / Chamber of Fear - The RZA (feat. Rev. William Burke) / Some Crazy Flamenco Shit - DJ Shadow & Cut Chemist / Dump The Clip - Army of the Pharoahs (Planetary, Esoteric & Celph Titled) / Apache - Incredible Bongo Band (cuts by Grandmaster Flash) / How The Bronx Was Won - B.D.P. vs. Santa Esmeralda / The Ecstasy Of One Mic (DJ Erb Mix) - Nas / Land of the Gun - Immortal Technique & Breez Evahflowin / Raw Is War - Jedi Mind Tricks / The End Intro - Alien Army / Bodyguard - Scotty Hard / Front Page - Compton’s Most Wanted / Cry Freedom - General Steele (feat. dead prez) / Beneath The Surface (Inna Blends mix) - GZA / Joany Loves Stringy - Animal Crackers / There It Is - Just-Ice & KRS-One / Blue Leaves Showdown - EarDrumz / Wild Wild West - Kool Moe Dee

A little roundup of recommendations and club sandwiches while the next mix keeps kicking my ass.

• Open Mike Eagle :: Helicopter Podcast Episode 1 OME spins some of his most loved tracks, speaks on Project Blowed, what’s coming in 2011 and suchlike.
• Uncommon Records :: Podcast [subscribe here on the iTunes]  Def Jux graduate, engineer extraordinaire and founder of Uncommon, Nasa and friends hook up this meaty show.
• Pure and crew have been hooking up Pitch Control Radio, and it’s dope.
• Third Sight and Tenshun have a bunch of new tracks streaming on the ol’ Soundcloud (which I still don’t understand why it’s not taking off.  Maybe it’s the Howard Johnson’s color scheme.)
• L*Roneous :: The Roller Coaster EP got slept on, but now everyone’s playing catch up…some definite ’90s style head-nodders on here.
• Mister Cee :: Best of Mobb Deep mixtape takes the grimy way to QB.
• The Dirty Sample :: The Insane Chessboard is an 11-track Ghostface remix set…goes well with the hilarious faux-Face Chronicles.
• Memory Man :: I Am… (The Unauthorized Autobiography) takes on Nas’ weakest LP and gives it newer, better beats.
• Nocando’s ‘Hurry Up And Wait’ [below] was definitely an MMX Honorable Mention I missed.  You can also hear him flip verses over El-P’s ‘Time Won’t Tell’ instro here.

‘Black Christmas’ :: Army of the Pharoahs (Yazza Remix) [below]

Ace The Creator (Tyler of OFWGKTA) - ‘Fuck Santa’

Every Xmas Rap Song Ever

[via Steady Bloggin’]

So here’s the best of MMX mix, all the juiciest bangers.

Danger - Remedy / Never Fail - Adjust / Reasons - Grey Matter / Brainstorm Troopah* - Serum / General Patton - Big Boi / Gunfire - DJ Muggs & Bambu / 911 Is Still A Joke - Analog Amazon (Cas Metah & Mouth Warren) / Brolic - Killah Priest (feat. Empuls) / Chase Manhattan - DJ Muggs & Ill Bill (feat. Raekwon) / Philaflava Possecut 2010 - Blockhead, Self Says, Godamus Rhyme, Cadence Weapon, Rob Sonic, Ardamus, Tayo, Piff Tannen & Open Mike Eagle / It’s So Hot - 4th Pyramid (feat. Greg Nice & Cosmo Baker) / Wallys & Pringles - Raekwon / Movement Music - Malcolm & Martin / The Radar Remix - Large Professor & Marco Polo / International Hitman - Lewis Parker / Who I Be (Marco Polo Remix) - Diamond District / Birds & Bees - Oddisee (feat. Diamond District) / Orange Juice - Earl Wolf aka Earl Sweatshirt of OFWGKTA / Strangers With Candy - Super Chron Flight Brothers / Shadow Temple - Bloody Monk Consortium / Silver Mountains Remix - Qwel & Maker / Unified Field - KRS-One & True Master (feat. Dr. Oyibo) / Smile - Greenhouse (Blueprint & Illogic) / Taxi - Ski Beatz (feat. Mos Def & Whosane)

Side A is here; download here.

*Fuck.  I just saw this actually came out in 2009.  Well, if that bugs you, replace this track with any joint off Apollo Kids, because that dropped too late for me to put it on.

So yeah, Wiz Wacka Cudi Kanye Weezy Drake Nicky Minaj blah blah blah.  I just don’t give a flying fuck about that stuff.  If My Beautiful Laundrette Fantasy Island is your bag, go for it, but my mission is to hype the unhyped and underhyped.

Anyway I must have listened to about five, seven thousand songs this year.  It’s like a sickness.  I can’t, I won’t, I don’t stop.  I went kinda overboard sifting out my favorites for y’all; next year you’re on your own.

• Super Chron Flight Brothers :: Cape Verde / DirectTV If you don’t know how much love I got for SCFB by now, you got rocks in your head.  This third LP has the best beats yet, word to Bond and Willie Green.  Cape Verde is a dissonant, addled and jumbled look at Amerikkka through the lens of TV–or maybe vice versa.  Woods & Privilege drop more deadly one-liners than there are magic marshmellows in Lucky Charms; the songs are so stream-of-stoned-consciousness that each listen brings out another gem.  Yeah, they let the samples run way long; yeah, the TV concept drifts in and out…because they were high.  Woods spits every line like it’s the last, a pissed off, hungover Chuck D; Privilege brings his sly, sing-songy jokester sound in counterpoint.  This is political rap without sloganeering, ghettoism without nihilism, intelligence that doesn’t pat itself on the back (when Woods says it’s ‘a Titus Andronicus moment,’ he leaves it to you to Cliff Notes that shit).  Dropping references from Boo Radley to Ally Sheedy, The Shining to Foghorn Leghorn, and about a million other things, Cape Verde is somewhere between PTSD High & Rising and Fear of a Black Sarcasm. Cop that shit and bump it in your soon-to-be-repoed ride.

• KRS-ONE & True Master :: Meta-Historical KRS meets the Wu-Tang sound…it’s like chocolate and bacon, you wonder why no one thought of this before.  Best KRS in about twelve years.
• Iron Lyon :: The Foundation EP Just some plain old dope shit.  What can I say.  This ain’t Pitchfork.  I ain’t gonna go all metaphor on your ass.
• Greenhouse (Blueprint & Illogic) :: Electric Purgatory Part 2 I already showed love for Blueprint, and this was a definite top play for the year.
• June Marx :: Body of God / Core of Vengeance Daaaayumn this shit came hard, like some RZA-produced Mobb Deep.  Don’t sleep.
• Ski Beatz :: 24 Hour Karate School Pretty damn dope and not making other people’s end-of lists.
• Ghostface Killah :: Apollo Kids Holy fuck, after the majorly lazy Wu-Massacre, Ghost springs back hard with some rock-solid Iron Man shit.  The Wu were kinda on the wane in 2000, but definitely picked up speed the last couple of years and stayed on top.
• Grey Matter :: Grey Matter Straight from the heart, Grey Matter’s debut was sometimes too sincere to the point of didactic, but definitely on point and bringing back a deep, deep love of hip-hop.

• Open Mike Eagle :: Unapologetic Art Rap Funny, deft, smart…I wish it had better beats but this was one of the most interesting records of the year.  I know I called OME out on owing Rammellzee, but actually he’s more a direct descendent of Basehead (…who I’ll get on to next month).  While the hipsterati were all emolliating their privates with Das Racist’s Essence of Williamsburg, O.M. Eagle brought a more intelligent, thoughtful, playful, diverse and honest record.

…plus the records I picked in June.

Back in the lab, the Large Hip Hop Collider produced some interesting scientifical theorems.  The Pro-Tools Imbalance proved that advances in software means you get a lot of records with great beats and mediocre-to-shitty rapping (c.f. eighty thousand white rap duos).

Shame On A Weed Carrier Theorem a.k.a. Self-Etherization Phenomenon had a lot of MCs getting murdered on their own shit by guest spots (see Hell Razah, Virtuoso, Ill Bill et al.)

Piff’s Law states that the mixtape is always better than the album, which is disappointing ass.  Unlistenable, horrifying, smelly, stinky ass.  But the mixtape is fire.

• Joell Ortiz :: Project Boy/Farewell Summer/Belly of the Beast > Free Agent
• DJ Muggs x Bambu :: Los Angeles, Philippines > DJ Muggs & Ill Bill, Kill Devil Hills
• Cypress Hill :: The Uprising > Rise Up
• Mr. Dibbs :: Inducing Panic > Dead World

The Bandcamp Paradox encapsulates the unexplained phenomenon of free and inexpensive shit being better than what’s released by record labels.  Not like you pay for that either.

• Malcolm & Martin :: Criminal Minded Off the back of the Movement Music mixtape, this track-by-track cover/reimagining of BDP made me stop hating on the ‘classic album remake’ concept (since it always just shows the new MCs aren’t as good).  Definitely feeling this.
• Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All :: Radical This was definitely Odd Future’s year.  With that name and the hype around ‘em, I was expecting some kinda Panther Moderns/Clockwork Orange/4chan Clan thing, like Burroughs’ Wild Boys but with less salamander butt-fucking.  In reality it’s a crew of talented teenagers with straight-up teenage attitudes, a lot more debut Beastie Boys than debut Geto Boys.  Yeah, there’s a lot of rapping about rape and other ’shocking’ stuff, but they’re so obviously fucking around it’s pretty hard to be offended.  No question Tyler the Creator makes some incredible beats.  The lackadaisical, rambling, drawling lyricals don’t always meet up to that, but the lack of calculated bullshit and raw honesty bring heat.  Pure energy.  Also, how can you not like a crew whose de facto leader comes with tweets like this:

• Bloody Monk Consortium :: Burden of Truth EP Sounds like somebody locked Killarmy in a dark basement for five years with nothing but PCP and Chinese opera records.
• Two Ton Sloth :: Siphoning Dreams I don’t know if this is on outer edges of hip hop or not.  Not even sure if it’s music.  But it’s dope on that what-the-fuck-am-I-listening-to tip.
• PSY/OPSogist :: All The Absent Voices Honestly PSY/OPS’ best work since The Cathode Ray Tube, and best instrumental shit I heard this year.

• ‘Ebony Godfathers’ - John Robinson & Lewis Parker Another all-round nice head-nodder.
• ‘The Carpenter’ - Homeboy Sandman I’ma keep my eye on this cat, he’s got some interesting flows.
• ‘Action’ - Solomon Childs Already said I wasn’t crazy about Pollen: The Wu-too-many Titles, but this was a standout.
• ‘Return Of The Renaissance’ - Hell Razah (feat. R.A. The Rugged Man) This LP wasn’t as good as I was hoping, but R.A. eats that beat.
• ‘Two Africans And A Jew’ - A.R.M. Yeah, I’ll admit it.  I had to peep it because of the title.
• ‘Paradise Life Relaxin’ - Creed Chameleon (feat. Bambu & Geo)
• ‘Stop Fuckin’ Around’ - Amad-Jamal (feat. Maaya Ota aka Lady Dragon)
• ‘Gutter Water’ - Gangrene (feat. Raekwon) Rae came hard this year on the guest spot tip.
• ‘How We Live’ - The Left (feat. Hassaan Mackey)
• ‘Capital Murda’ - Nems
• ‘Everyday In The Street’ - El Da Sensei & The Returners (feat. Sean Price & Bekay)
• ‘A.D.I.D.A.S.’ - Ras Kass & DJ Rhettmatic (feat. Frankie Finch)
• ‘Unapologetic’ - Open Mike Eagle (feat. Nocando) Best cut off of a best-of-year LP.
• ‘Sit Down, Man’ - Das Racist (feat. El-P) I can’t really get with Das Racist.  It’s like they’re for people who think Aesop Rock is too sincere or something.  They can flow, but it’s enough already with the internet references all over the place and the Ellen DeGeneres jokes and the beats are kinda grating.  El-P kills it on this track though.
• ‘Tijd’ - Ciph Barker Wish I knew what homeboy was talking about, because this song is dope.  And mostly in Dutch.
• ‘Chain Swinging’ - Gangrene
• ‘Step Correctly’ - Celph Titled & Buckwild Buck’s done better beats and Celph’s definitely dropped tighter verses with better punchlines.  Disappointing LP of which this was a standout track.
• ‘DC Joint (Guru Dedication)’ - Damu The Fudgemunk
• ‘From The Top’ - Stik Figa (prod. Oddissee) If I’d done that Fitty Songs/Fitty States series, this would definitely represent Kansas.
• ‘Snow’ - Roc Marciano Ill beat.  Love to have the instro of that.  The remix is also pretty nice.
• ‘Spear of Destiny’ - June Marx
• ‘Cool’ - Earl Sweatshirt & Mike G Tyler’s beats are really out there.  Earl brings a flow to it that’s sloppy in a good way.
• ‘The Gift (Oh No Ethio Remix)’ - Whitefield Brothers (feat. Edan & Mr. Lif) It’s that ill.
• ‘How To Make Fire’ - Virtuoso
• ‘Barkside Corners’ - Shabazz Palaces I’ma speak on Ishmael Butler’s (née Digable Planets) new crew in the new year.  Peep this below in the meantime.

…why not to 50?  Because fuck round numbers, and this is too goddamn laborious.  Fat link in the comments.

• ‘Now’ - Breez Evahflowin
• ‘Reunited’ - The White Shadow of Norway (feat. Strange Brew & Bobby Brewski) This LP was like a 99¢ store Army of the Pharoahs, but it had this one nice cut on it.
• ‘Fingerprints’ - The Narcicyst (feat. Omar Offendum)
• ‘Goin’ Back’ - Statik Selektah and Termanology (feat. Cassidy & Xzibit) Wasn’t really feeling the 1982 LP, but this track banged.
• ‘I Got Mines’ - Ski Beatz (feat. Tabi Bonney, Nikki Wray, Ras Kass, Stalley)
• El-P’s Remix of That Justin Bieber Song I Don’t Know The Name Of Kinda a waste of a good sample, but whatever.  Bangin’ Bieber, who’da thunk it?  El Producto thunk it.
• ‘Genesis ‘85 Intro’ - Ensilence
• ‘No Game Around Here’ - Suga Bang Bang, Hell Razah, Killah Priest & Tash Mahogany From Pollen: The Swarm: Part 3: The Wu-overtitling
• ‘Fight to the End’ - Krookid Hooks
• ‘I Got ‘Em’ - Vado Vado came hard this year, no doubt.
• ‘War Zone (Remix)’ - Sunz Of Man & 60 Second Assassin (feat. RZA, La The Darkman, Prodigal Sun, Timbo King & Da Division)
• ‘Bay of Pigs’ - Virtuoso (feat. Del Tha Funkee Homosapien, Vast Aire, and Pidi T) [Produced by Blue Sky Black Death] With that lineup, Virtuoso doesn’t have to carry much weight, so we’ll see about his LP later.  Meantime, look at that fucking lineup!
• ‘Boom Bap’ - Iron Lyon (feat. Craig G) Does what it says in the title.
• ‘The Boogie Down Bombers’ - The Incredible Funk League (feat. Diamond D & Sadat X) The boom-bap revival continues…
• ‘Kill Devil Hills’ - Ill Bill & DJ Muggs (feat. B-Real & Vinnie Paz) Remember when Stoupe was aping Muggs’ style, and not the other way around?  Remember when Muggs used to produce the illest beats, so many he’d just stick in 30-second interludes of extra ones between songs?  Remember when he didn’t team up with 2nd/3rd-rate rappers?  This LP was on some bargain-basement Jedi Mind Tricks, with two good tracks only–both of ‘em where the guest stars outshone the headliner.
• ‘Knock Knock’ - Mr. Dibbs (feat. Dose One & Jel) The underunderground bangs too, y’know.
• ‘No Shots’ - 7L & Esoteric 7L & Eso make some good tracks, but like High & Mighty and other ’90s-flame-keepers, never quite rise to true greatness.  Make some bangers though now and again.
• ‘Bust ‘Em In’ - Army of the Pharoahs Unholy Terror had like two good songs on it, but they were both straight fire.
• ‘Overdose’ - dead prez Remember when dead prez was actually good, and not some posturing, empty copy of themselves making bad records?  Yeah.  This track was fat though.
• ‘Slick Money’ - Senor Kaos (feat. P.So) (prod. Large Professor) All-around nice joint.

I’m sure somebody will be a big chief and upload this as one zip file, and leave the link in the comments.

I don’t want love.  I don’t want forgiveness.  All I want is out of here.

–Burroughs, ‘White Subway’

Evil Streets (Remix Instrumental) - Onyx / Departure - Jay Electronica / Dead Flowers - Bronze Nazareth (feat. 60 Second Assassin, Killah Priest & C-Rayz Walz) / Sleeping Giant - Epsilon Project (feat. Dopamine Rush P.O.E.) / Loves Gonna Getcha - Boogie Down Productions / Dreams - MoBonix / Paradise - C-Rayz Walz / Dream - Rob Swift (feat. Breez Evahflowin & Noam Chomsky) / Down - Ensilence / Gunbeat Falls - Shabazz Palaces / Will I Get Shot By A Dope Fiend? (Instrumental) - Third Sight / Memoirs of Tragedy - Killah Priest / Hock - 6RME / Vast Hope - DJ Bootsie (feat. Vast Aire) / Ruffturrain - Call O’ Da Wild / Open Doors - Super Chron Flight Brothers / The Edge of Never (feat. Jodie Foster & Frank Sinatra) / Shadows - The Reavers

Candle, that is.

Blue Scholars - “50 Thousand Deep”

» abnormL Injustice hit me up on his new instrumental joint, Beauty of the Seduction, showcasing beats from the Ode series.

I studied DJ Pain hard to see how, when and how long he drops in dialogue samples, and I’m always trying to cut mine back to the shortest and punchiest.  But on Odes, abnormL is just like, fuck it, run that shit from start to finish.  Let Chomsky or Thompson or Cooper say their thing, let it ride, and it will seep into brains whether you’re paying attention or not.  Subliminal action, kid.

Also peep out Melting Ice, another instrumental joint.

» DJ Blood1’s got a free instrumental album I’m feeling, New Motor Control.  He’s had some tracks on Tablist.net comps.

» Melodica Deathship :: Doom Your Cities, Doom Your Towns.  Irish pirate rap?!  You know I had  to check that out.  It’s not bad, more Blue Sky Black Hornpipe than Pirates of the Crooklyribbean.  Dukes doesn’t sound Irish, that’s the problem, shit needs more brogue.

» Odd Nosdam :: live @ WE Artspace Oakland 4|4|10.  Fucking genius, like Sonic Youth jamming with John Cale but with the one thing both of ‘em’s always been missing: fat MPC beats.

» PSY/OPSogist been dropping mad bombs for your ass.  By which I mean ears.  Everything Passes: 01, 02, 03, 04 & 05 and All The Absent Voices, which is hands down some of the best shit he’s ever done.

I really been meaning to do a writeup on PSY/OPS, but how do you describe what its maker calls ‘no music’?  How do you speak on his melange of hard drums, melodies and anti-melodies, and loops twisted into sine waves of regret?  Just peep it, and hit his blog for his other records.  Today’s enclosed track is his ‘No Solace In Liquor’ off the new EPs.

» Got loads of tracks of the day over at the new Tumblr.  Come on down.

This ain’t funny so don’t you dare laugh.

Intro / Children’s Story Freestyle - Shabazz the Disciple / I Can’t Go Broke - Joell Ortiz / Children’s Story - Everlast (feat. Rahzel) / Catacomb Kids (AspeQt Remix) - Aesop Rock / Children’s Story - Black Star / A Gangsta’s Fairytale - Ice Cube / Hood Lullabye - The Black Market Militia / This Child - Joell Ortiz / Say Our Goodbyes - Grey Matter / Dead Like The Young - Pasobionic / On Coming From A Broken Home (Part 2) - Gil Scott-Heron / Kids In The Street - Hell Razah / Things Done Changed (Simple & Memory Lane March 9 Remixes) - The Notorious B.I.G. / Boys To Men (Instrumental) - Greenhouse (Blueprint & Illogic) / Our Father - Saul Williams / Synopsis Two: Mother’s Day - The 24 Carat Black

Part 1

Must not sleep.  Must warn others.

Beast Vision - Nephlim Modulation Systems / Delirium #3 - Tenshun / Psychic Dictatorship - Red Ants / Government Secret - Mix Master Mike / On Your Retina - PSY/OPSogist / Slaves - Presage / No Masters - DJ Blood1 / Necessary Illusions - Abnorml Injustice / #35 - The Gaslamp Killer / Delirium #6 - Tenshun / Notice The Spirit - ATMA, Apakalypse & Illuminati Congo / Zombie [Counter] - Alphabethead / Operation World Domination - Spectre / Channel Assign - Jel / They Hate - Dockta Valkus / Reptilian Agenda - B. Dolan / She Watch Channel Zero - Public Enemy / Wake Up (Bubblegum Edit) - Rage Against The Machine / Full System Station - El-P / Emmanuel Goldstein - Super Chron Flight Brothers (feat. Bigg Jus) / Outro

Bonus track: ATMA & Illuminati Congo - Reptilian Body Snatchers

So this got me thinking about conspiracy theories.  It’s just a pessimist/paranoid’s flip on the unified world view of religion–makes you feel better because everything’s under one central control, except instead of Jesus it’s the Annunaki.  It’s comforting to the extent that all your problems (which if you believe in this shit, are many) can be blamed externally: lost your job?  Socialist conspiracy of the New World Order.  Couldn’t get a gun permit (because you’re batshit)?  Illuminati master plan.  Feel like the world is too complicated to understand?  Fear agenda of the reptilian overlords.  Haiti earthquake?  MJ12 experiment.  Can’t comprehend/process the horror of 9/11?  Bush did it.

Here’s one reason I can’t get with conspiracies: human beings are just not that good at being organized, keeping secrets, and not fucking up.  I can’t think of more than a couple of people I’ve ever met who could be trusted with Roswell UFO technology.  And they would tell their wives, no doubt.  Who would tell their best friends.  And then, you know.  But here’s one reason I appreciate alien/Illuminati/9/11 conspiracies: takes the heat off the Jews, which makes a nice change from the past 1,500 years.

But it’s still hard to fathom how people buy into this stuff.  I looked at a lot more ‘evidence’ of the reptilian agenda on YouTube than is really worth it, and it consists of: people sticking their tongues out, people with bad eye-tuck surgery blinking weird, reflections of lights in people’s eyes momentarily making them look slitted, and a crazy woman who thinks she’s an alien.  Seriously, that’s it.  More evidence: ancient Egyptians didn’t wear long, egg-shaped hats, their heads were actually shaped that way. Because they were fuckin’ aliens, dog.  Really though.

Then there’s all the secret clues which our evil overlords leave around in the most obscure places because…uh, it’s not really clear why they do that.  But 9/11, for example, was predicted on the Simpsons:

…and on your money:

So let me get this straight.  Bush, or whoever the fuck, as part of the Annunaki bloodline or whatever, planned 9/11 in 1996, and then secretly had our money changed so that when you folded it into a paper airplane just so it would look sort of like what was coming five years later.  In order to…something or other.  But wait!  What happens if we turn this secret message sideways!?

Oh.  The Illuminati wants you to smoke blunts.

You feel me?  It’s easier to believe in a vast evil conspiracy than that the world is all chaos, randomness, hatred, stupidity and greed.  It’s more comforting to think that aliens secretly control the world than to face the frightening fact that it just spins on and on.

Doing this mix, I started thinking maybe the thesis of TV as the means for total brain control is outdated, what with this internet thing I keep hearing about.  Is the internet just another form of extreme zombification?  Yes and no.  Its exponential rise hasn’t coincided with political apathy: the left and the right have been extremely mobile and active this decade.  But who’s agenda has that been?  Who’s driving it?  Well, the left has been driven by intellectual elites.  (Wait, that means Jews.  Damn it.)  The Tea Party has been driven by Fox News, so TV is still brain control.  And the Tea Party has secretly been driven by corporate interests like Koch Industries.

There is a battle for your consciousness.  There is a control agenda.  There are conspiracies to control the world, or large parts of it.  Just don’t buy into the stupid and recognize the real.

1. Basquiat Reeboks!? Who wears these?  Artistic Bay Area chicks?  Those Das Racist guys?

They’re kinda fresh, sort of, but not as cool as my Picasso Pumas.  Or my Kandinsky New Balances.

2. Thirstin Howl the 3rd’s Jail Recipes Cooking Show – Episode 1: Pulpo & Calamares In Rice

You can get octopus in jail?  And cook it with what, a toilet seat and a clothes iron?

Be sure to check out the mail call at 6:35, where Riker’s inmate Larry Robinson says:

Your show is off the hook kid…your recipe for Walkman tape deck into tattoo machine is genius.  I made one and the C.O. found it on a search down after somebody snitched.  I’m in the box now and I’ll be here for a while so I won’t be able to catch the show.  One love.

This show is for people who don’t get the Food Network I guess.  Like if you’re in jail.  Wait, then you wouldn’t get YouTube either.  Wait, if you’re in jail, you’re not reading this.  Unless you’re on an iPhone smuggled in someone’s ass.  Wait, if you are in jail, reading this on an iPhone smuggled in someone’s ass, how many cigarettes is a blow job going for these days?

3. Where can I get one of these rings and would I look stupid wearing it?  Fuck it, I’d rock that.

4. ‘Mossman’ - Bomarr & Circus [below]

Mossman?  What the fuck are you talking about?

Joell Ortiz is pretty much my favorite normal rapper right now (i.e. does not rap about the Bilderburgs, spaceships, Halliburton, or just string beautiful nonsense together). Dude is always on point, great with little details, has a good flow and one of those fat-guy-boricua voices. At first I thought he was like a skinnier Fat Joe, but now I think he sounds more like Immortal Technique’s little brother who didn’t go to college and just likes to hang.

I used to live down on Stanton St. before it got overrun by hipsters (no pomo), and when it rained, the Dominican cats used to set up their dominos under the bus stop.  Ortiz is one of those kinda guys. One Sunday morning I saw this hungover guy sitting on his stoop with a Heineken in one hand and a Clamato in the other.  Ortiz is that dude.

He reminds me of that kid Mikey from the Life cereal commercials who’ll eat anything.  I wouldn’t say he kills any beat, but he does his damndest.

• Project Boy mixtape [via Dot Got It]

• Farewell Summer EP [via Ortiz]

• “Murder” (produced by Statik Selektah) [below]

So, how’s your recession going?  Yeah, mine too.  Being an old school head, I preferred the first depression when the bankers and stockbrokers threw their monkey asses out the window instead of giving themselves huge bonuses.  And inventing the Commodity Index to make my groceries more expensive.

In honor of how much things are sucking, and this article about rappers’ worst-ever jobs, here’s the recession mixtape.

I Get Money (Goldman Sachs Remix) - Apex / I Ain’t With Being Broke - Geto Boys / It All Comes Down To The Money - Whodini & Terminator X / Fuckajob - Soul Position (Blueprint & RJD2) / 9-5ers Anthem - Aesop Rock / Lunch Money - Qwel & Maker / Clockers - M.A.D. (Dr. Monokrome, Thrill Gates & Billy Woods) / Money - KRS-One (feat. MC Lyte) / The Ka$H - Malcolm & Martin / Funds - Blockhead / Get Rich or Try Dying - Despot / Valet at the Players Ball - Kentucky Prophet / $ (aka Cash Rule) - Bronze Nazareth / Pimps (Free Stylin’ At The Fortune 500 Club) - The Coup / The Financial Crisis Song - Open Mike Eagle / Money (Dollar Bill Y’all) - Jimmy Spicer / Get Rich Quick (Marmaduke Remix) - Super Chron Flight Brothers (feat. Tom Vu) / Outro (feat. Patrick Bateman)

Blueprint is one of those wickedly talented, underrated and undercelebrated cats, just as nice on the mic as on the boards, which is rare indeed.  (RZA, I’m looking in your direction: Please. Stop. Rapping.)  Coming hard off the Greenhouse joints, he’s dropped a free sampler for y’all:

In preparation for the release of the new Blueprint Who EP that I will be dropping next week, the upcoming tour w/ Atmosphere, and my upcoming full-length album Adventures in Counter-Culture scheduled for release on Rhymesayers Entertainment later this year, I created this free “Best of Blueprint” mix.  I hope it will serve as a refresher for those who are already familiar with my music, and a good introduction to those who are new to my music. [props to Bloggerhouse]

Get it here.

You can grab a couple more free DLs and breathe deep:

• Blueprint Vs. Funkadelic EP [if that link don’t work, it’s on his Myspace.]
• Electric Purgatory Part Two EP (Promo Version) - Greenhouse (Blueprint & Illogic)
• Who EP new drop; free or paid version.  Give the guy some money, you just downloaded 2 EPs and a sampler off him, for fuck’s sake
• Down below we got “Keep It Live” (Greenhouse feat. Aesop Rock).

Now you see what I’m talking about?  Get over to Weightless and cop some CDs.

There’s a lot of bitching going on about the internets and music…aside from the business/pirating side, cats complain that the ease of putting stuff out there electronically makes for too much material to sort through. Bitch, please. You want record labels to decide what we should listen to? Radio stations? Bloggers? What what?

Sure, you could spend your whole life listening exclusively to Japanese instrumental hip-hop, or digging through Bandcamp, but that’s a whole lot better than being force-fed Rick Ross like a goddamn foie gras goose, ain’t it?  Yeah, there’s more out there than anyone could physically listen to, and a lot of it’s garbage, but it gives a voice to anyone who wants to make themselves heard.  And the bigger the digital crates, the more the hidden gems.  As the warrior-poet Ice Cube once said, the bigger the cap, the bigger the peelin’.  So here’s some beatmakers who begin with ‘A’ as a taste.

Alphabethead hit me off with his 33 track instrumental LP, N37 Modulations (click to download). Ooh, that’s fresh.

I haven’t really been keeping up with the instrumental scene lately; feels like I’ve copped the best talents and finding it harder and harder to find beats that aren’t not-quite-good-as-Mumbles/Krush/Son of a Bricklayer/The Nothing/PSY/OPSogist etc.  But I gotta say, this is some dope.  I’m all obsessive compulsive about pruning tracks off if they’re not absolute fire, and out of these 33 they’re all good.  Don’t let his New Zealand origin fool you, this is no…uh, what comes from New Zealand again?  Sheep.  Lord of the Rings. Katherine Mansfield.  Um, that’s all I can think of.

You know I likes me some good beats, some funky loops, some good ol’ fashioned scratching, and some wacky vocal samples.  Alph got it.  None of that bleepy bloopy, glitchity-glatchety shit.  Think Cut Chemist, Kid Koala, DJ Shadow, DJ Frane, DJ Cam’s older shit…this is right up there.  He’s got a few other beats over on his site which are worth peeping.  Nice range of sounds, unique samples, good drums–it’s all good, my peoples.

Alph’s other joint is a fine, fine mix of soundtrack cuts called OST ABC. About 20 minutes in he fucks that Cat People theme right the fuck up, to use the proper medical terminology.

Allah Universal is another master craftsman who’s resisted the whole dubstep/glitch-hop trend and sticks with hard beats, ethereal samples and haunting loops.  The challenge for this kind of beatmaker is to hold your attention, hypnotize you to feel the spaces between the beats and call up feelings of nostalgia, loss and a larger world of unspoken beauty.  Not every track does that, but the way he rides the beat and acoustic guitar on “Read Between The Lines” is as good as anything you’ll hear from Four Tet, Bonobo or pre-disappearing-up-his-own-ass Prefuse 73.

Peep The U-N-I Verse and Pro-Me-The-Us, and a clutch of others, over at Jamendo.  His newest joint is 21 Days Around The Universe, over at iTunes, and he just started a bandcamp.

(OK, I’m not really describing these joints well, but writing about music has only two modes: nonsensical hype (”Flips the script on the boom-bap for a bap-boom stylee.”) and overstretched metaphors that might as well be wine writing (”Hints of Oak(land), traces of (Like Water For) Chocolate, and textures of early Mantronix.”).  By now you either trust my picks or you don’t.  Download and decide for yourself.)

I could have sworn I hyped Abnorml Injustice before.  Musta been some Illuminati/MJ12 kill switch that deleted it.  Anyway, nice beats and extensive samples for these hip-hop portraits: Ode to Noam Chomsky, Ode to Hunter S. Thompson, and an Ode to Bill Cooper…what’s not to like?  Next up an Ode to Slavoj Zizek maybe?

Today’s hosted track (below/on ya feed) is Airnino’s “Vermont”.  Listen to what he does with a two-note piano sample, shimmering jazz drums and a scratched horn loop…it’s the kind of jazz-hop that’s gotten buried under the softer, noodly Nujabes/Fat Jon kinda shit. He’s giving away an LP called Spacesuite Radio, but I have to say I wasn’t really feeling it, and there’s some more tracks on his Soundcloud.

This track is so hot I got all inspired to do a Fitty Tracks for Fitty States series, but then I could only think of about three other songs (”NY State of Mind,” “Baking Soda in Minnesota,” Eminem’s “Sweet Home Alabama” freestyle in 8 Mile) and then wasted a bunch of time on the internet trying to figure out the Alaskan hip-hop scene or if there even was one besides stupid jokes about MC Eskimo and You Gots To Chill.  Then I was all, stop fucking around for Christ’s sake.  Just play the damn song.

When people rate their ’90s producers, I never understood why Pete Rock came close second to Premier and Prince Paul way down the list.  (Not to be confused with this Prince Paul, or this one or this one, though it’s typical wacky PP stylee that they all share the same name.)  I mean, Pete Rock’s done some great joints, no doubt, but he kinda defined a sound in the way Nathan’s defined hot dogs.  It’s just a type of frankfurter.

Prince Paul produced a steady string of some of the most creative and groundbreaking LPs before going for the gusto and cutting loose with the best (and only successful) concept records in all hip-hop, and some of the most innovative.  And the funniest.  Not too many actually funny cats in hip hop.  And I mean check the man’s credits–Stetsasonic, 3 Feet High & Rising, Gravediggaz, Chubb Rock, Big Daddy Kane, Latifah, 3rd Bass, B.D.P., remixes galore.

Anyways, two of his unreleased LPs have seen the light and coming from his best era, they’re slammin’:

Resident Alien - It Takes A Nation Of Suckers To Let Us In (1990) [via Bloggerhouse]

Horror City (1995) [via T.R.O.Y.]

And if you don’t have Prince Among Thieves, Psychoanalysis or Gold Dust, you should go buy them.  No money?  Paper route, motherfucker, paper route.

So for some reason I started collecting acoustic covers of hip hop, some amateur and some professional.  Jet from the Overdrone hooked me up with some, and others came from this insightful post over at Cover Laydown.  Then I found the vast trove of Youtube covers.

A lot of people get really pissed off at these; I guess they think they’re insulting or mocking.  But it’s far too much work to learn to play a song just for a stupid joke.  The literally thousands of covers you can find on YouTube are sincere in their own way; they’re not blackface or wiggery, they’re covers on the ukelele or $15 Target guitar.  This is not appropriation but, like any good covers, transformation and re-working within the musicians’ (sic) genre, instrument and voice.

There are some covers I don’t like, like the Ben Folds cover of “Bitches Ain’t Shit” or the Obadiah Parker “Hey Ya”, and most heavy metal covers.  There’s a lack of contrast, or not enough cognitive dissonance, or something, that makes them uninteresting.  Then there’s Duran Duran’s “911 Is A Joke”, which is just…too what-the-fuck.

I know I said last post these are not hip hop, but transforming music into something your own, and feeling it so much you gotta spit it–well, that is hip hop.  Look at the ukelele kid.  Holy shit, that is one un-gangsta motherfucker right there.  I especially love the comments:

Fallenknight155: You Fagget motherfucker why would you disgrace that song it’s a rap song not one of your gay club songs. If I ever see you in the streets I’ll deck you you in your chin

ChrisWestaway: i am ready to fight you.

But he loves “Bring The Noise” that much…?  That’s the power of hip hop.  It makes some cats uncomfortable that kids at North Springfield Middle School know all the words to every song on Liquid Swords, but that didacticism is 20 years out of date and does not dilute hip hop one bit.

I keep thinking about that line in Michael Herr’s Dispatches where he says “I saw a platoon [of Marines fighting in Vietnam] done up in Batman fetishes, it gave them a kind of dumb esprit.”  There’s a dumb gravitas to, say, “Gangsta’s Paradise” which becomes a dumb mournful gravitas when it’s remade into something off the Liquid Sky soundtrack.  There’s a root in the blues in “The Message” which isn’t apparent until it’s covered as a blues song.  Is there an essential quality to “C.R.E.A.M.” that is lost, or retained, when it’s covered in the style of John Cougar Mellencamp Unplugged?

Or, you know, not.  I don’t know, maybe I’ve lost my fucking mind.  They are pretty hilarious though.

Wu-Tang Clan Ain’t Nuttin’ To Fuck Wit - Joey, In The Dining Nook / Tubas Ain’t Nuttin’ To Fuck Wit - ThatKidsFine / Acoustic Wu-Medley - Sam The Recordmann / Cash Rules Every Acoustic Melody - Joe Reilly / Bring The Boise - Chris Westaway / Fuck The Police (Karaoke Version) - Joe & Derek / You’re Gonna Get Yours - Joel Badeaux / Fight For Your Right (To Party) - S-Word / Gangsta’s Paradise - Battery / Straight Outta Compton - Nina Gordon / The Message - Willy Mason / Gin & Juice (Deep Thoughts Mix)

I’m not one of those irritating purists who complains about what hip-hop used to be and blahzay blahzay, but you gotta draw the line somewhere.

1. Kanye tweeting about goblets and carpets. I specifically ordered persian rugs with cherub imagery!!! What do I have to do to get a simple persian rug with cherub imagery uuuuugh

2. E-mails from PR Assistants to micro-audience podcasts / Branded water.

Hi!! My name is Karin Wolok. I am the assistant to Alvon Miller, CEO of Burnitdown Group, and National DIrector of Marketing at Shady Records. … I have the link for the new Eminem & Rihanna video if you want it. I can put together an Eminem package for you… with the album, Tshirts, a case of Eminem “Recovery” water, etc. So let me know if you want that…

3. Acoustic bedroom Wu-Tang covers.

4. Being a cognac spokesmodel. Back in the day a lot of rappers did radio ads for malt liquor.  Malt liquor is hip hop.  Then cats dropped the names of the brandy or champagne they drank in their songs to show how classy they were.  Bling is hip hop.  But being a ‘global creative consultant’ and ‘help[ing] with promotions, merchandising and digital media campaigns for a variety of the Rémy Martin cognac marques’ is just a fucking sell-out.

5. Arguing with bloggers. Some blogger writes that Talib Kweli is no longer a conscious rapper for doing a song with Gucci Mane.  Talib Kweli feels compelled to write a long-ass rebuttal.  Talib, if you read this, do not respond.  Get your ass in the studio and make records.  If you want to prove how conscious you still are, go run for Vice-President of Haiti on Wyclef’s ticket.

6. Dissing washed up folk-rock singers for insulting your acting ability.

7. Drake. I like Degrassi as much as the next guy, but.  Just go away, bitch.

People really seem to be digging that Distant Relatives joint with Damian Marley & Nas, but to me it was on some shiny, overproduced, Starbucks-barista-playlist, somethin’-ta-bump-in-ya-Volvo shit. (Except for that one joint on here.)

Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry used to bury his master tapes in the ground to make them sound more rich.  Distant Relatives sounds like it was run through Pro Tools and Autotune and maybe even a German dishwasher.

So as a grimy antidote, here’s some more of that dub-hop.  Super Chicken murdered you on your own shit.  Foghorn Leghorn murdered you on your own shit.  What.

Pinky Ring (Perfecta Reggae Remix) - Wu-Tang Clan / As We Enter - Nas & Damian Marley / Ether Train (100 Akres Mix) - Nas vs. Bob Marley / Busted In The Hood - Cypress Hill / Say Somethin’ (100 Akres Mix) - Nas vs. Bob Marley / Jungle Brother (Drumsong Remix) - Jungle Brothers / Ready Or Not (Dancehall Remix) - Fugees / Our Guide - Abstract Rude (feat. Lil Aaron) / Skip Town - Aesop Rock / Pressure - The Protege (feat. Deto 22 of Phenetiks) / Culture United - X-Clan (feat. Damian Marley) / In My Math (Max Tannone Mos Dub Mix) - Mos Def / The Boston Top - Prince Paul / Black Star Line - Brand Nubian / Vexual Healing (Vacillation) - Prince Paul / Mr. Universe (Max Tannone Mos Dub Mix) - Mos Def / Shook Ones Pt. 2 (DJ Swindle Bobb Deep Remix) - Mobb Deep vs. Bob Marley / Lucky Tarzan - Lee “Scratch” Perry & Adrian Sherwood

Beat Bop (1983) - w/K-Rob / Lecture (1987) - w/Shockdell / Equation (1989) - w/Material / Hisstory (1999) - w/Material / His Stories Crockery (2002) - w/New Flesh / My Horizon (2003) - from This Is What You Made Me / Sigma 1 (2004) - from Bi-Conicals of the Rammellzee / Beat Bop, Pt. 2 (2004) - w/Shockdell / Revelations Part 2 (2008) - w/Praxis / Uncommon freestyle (2007) / On Iconic Panzerism

Rammellzee, The RAMM:∑LL:Z∑∑, The Quantum Equation, The Gothic Futurist, Iconic Panzerist, The Master Alphabiter, King of the Garbage Gods, All-Around Crazy-Ass, moved from the material(ist) plane to one of pure graffiti on June 30.

Ramm started out as a graf writer and that informed everything he did.  The late ’70s, early ’80s–there was nothing we’d call hip-hop.  Just graffiti.  When downtown came uptown he got down with the art scene.  He was in the movie Wild Style and dropped “Beat Bop” with Schockdell and Basquiat.  Over the years he moved between making strange records, making strange artwork, and making very strange costumes–Iron Man by way of the garbage can.

He was one of those autodidact, true original, is-he-genius-or-just-talking-shit types.  Hip-hop’s Sun Ra, George Clinton or Lee Scratch Perry, except his shit was too advanced to be as well-known and influential.  Why not more famous?  Well, the Museum of Modern Art owns some of his work, but in hip hop as usual the godfathers are left behind.  He wasn’t really that interested in making records, and I think he was too unironic, too ghetto and too out there for the Soho scene to big him up.  I mean, wine and cheese gallery openings don’t go well with homemade doll-head-covered Kabukitron outfits.

Kool Keith, K-The-I???, DJ Spooky, Killah Priest, Sir Menelik, Buck 65, Company Flow, Cannibal Ox, Super Chron Flight Brothers, Madlib, Lil B, Lil Wayne, all Anticon and Def Jux artists, and anyone who ever rapped about outer space, extreme/supreme mathematics, alien autopsies, Egyptian mythology, or any other kind of weird insane cryptic type shit, or rapped in highly coded messages of fractured language, all these people owe Rammellzee ten million dollars.  Because he invented that shit in Nine. Teen. Eighty. Three.

MF Doom wears a mask?  Rammellzee invented that shit.  RZA stands for Ruler Zig-Zag-Zig Allah?  Rammellzee stands for RAM plus M for Magnitude, Sigma (Σ) the first summation operator, first L - longitude, second L - latitude, Z - z-bar, Σ, Σ - summation. I say it stands for: Rap’s Ascended Master Mad Eloquent Lectures Landing Zone Earth Elevated. He legally changed his name to Rammellzee, for Christ’s sake.  Top that, P. Diddly Oodly.  And Wacka Wocka Flame my ass.

Open Mike Eagle just dropped a nice LP called “Unapologetic Art Rap.”  R:L:Z invented unapologetic art rap in 1983.  Open Mike Eagle owes him ten dollars.

The obits keep saying he ‘influenced the Beastie Boys and Cypress Hill,’ by which they mean Ram’s ‘Gangsta Duck’ nasal rhyming style made it OK for B-Real and Ad-Rock to be all nasal.  The Beastie Boys and Cypress Hill do not owe Ram ten dollars.  Maybe five dollars.

When you first saw The Matrix and got your mind blown in 1999, Rammellzee just shrugged and said: ‘Told you.’

While today’s no-talent rappers cozy up to cognac executives, Rammellzee invented some 2083 shit.  You best catch up.

This concise XLR8R review of his Bi-Conicals LP sums him up well:

Sometimes the album art says it all: some growling homeboy in a Beijing Opera mask, rainbow ski boots, with what appears to be a travel version of Connect Four dangling from his belt and, in the mirror, his opposite reflection. I don’t know quite how it’s happened, but Bi-Conicals sounds exactly like iconic hip-hopper Rammellzee looks–not quite insane, not quite clown. This album is full of gothic videogame hip-hop tunnel-scavengers that aren’t quite demented enough to be truly fun, yet crazy enough as to be totally confusing to listen to.

Giovanni Marks sez: The dude was so far ahead of his time, no one even knew what it looked like when we all caught up to it.

Will Luckman sez: In a culture born of a desire for fame, RAMM∑LLZ∑∑ put on a mask and forced his way outside—transforming himself into a true god, an unseen force manipulating the world he dominated as he looked down from above, laughing.

He was one of those cats who dabbled in lots of media because the artform he specialized in hasn’t been invented yet: a combo of graffitti, hip hop, sculpture, costumes, lectures, writing:

Q: Music or art? Which inspires you the most?

A: NEITHER ONE. ARCHITECTURE DOES. THE GOTHICS. I WOULD RIDE THE TRAINS TO CLARA BARTON’S IN BROOKLYN NEAR PROSPECT HEIGHTS & BOTANICAL GARDENS ON MY WAY FROM CUTTING SCHOOL, I WOULD CUT-OUT & TAKE D TRAIN & I WOULD HEAR A GUY NAMED DYNAMITE D ON THE MICROPHONE AS A CONDUCTOR OPENING & CLOSING THE DOORS. I DID NOT CALL THAT INSPIRATION BECAUSE I ALREADY KNEW HOW TO RHYME. I WAS JUST STUDYING THE DIFFERENT ROLLING PAGES ON THE TRANSIT SYSTEM. I CALL THEM ROLLING PAGES, THEY CALL THEM SNAKES.

A lot of the time rappers who act crazy and talk shit, it’s just an act.  There’s no thinking behind it.  This is why I got tired of Kool Keith a few records ago and, like I said earlier, get frustrated with DOOM.  Rammellzee thought so much about grafitti and what it could mean, he sounded nuts, but he drops mad science if you listen.  He keeps going until ends up at pure mathematics.  It’s hard to unpack it.  The Iconic Treatise is as dense and insane and brilliant as P.K. Dick’s Exegesis.  The ideas about how language uses us, language’s independence and domination, the need to free it from its own boundaries to reach enlightenment…these are all Burroughsian-like concepts in a wild style frame.

Q: You initially made your reputation in graffiti?

A: No, I was involved in gothic futurism and gothic text. Graffiti is a word that society placed on people it did not possibly understand. Before we could grow up and make our own determination of what technique or iconic statement we were doing, they decided - instead of saying we were abstract and have a whole society built on non complete information and these guys are about to scare the shit out of us with the biggest culture since futurism 10000 strong - to call us scribble, scrabble artists which is a contradiction right there. They called us something that eventually wiped us out.

So how does an all-city bomber end up in a handmade robot soundsystem suit making wildstyle Voltron skateboard sculptures?  Graffiti emerged from the dead zone, the war zone of ’70s New York.  It was the disenfranchised taking back the trains.  You take the trains, you take the city.  They took the trains with their names, with letters.  The alphabet became the weapon.  The trains were the tanks.  The terminology was already there–bombing, burning.  So trains are ‘rolling pages’–blank of writing, public transit papyrus.

My inspiration was my curiosity of why people wanted to write on trains, the biggest distribution gallery for any art form known to man…JESTER did what we should call now, the “signoverture.” a letter with a harpoon on it. I based most of my style on that. I often wondered why JESTER armored the “letter” with a barbed arrow…

The letter music notes and weather notes that were done down there reached a point where you didn’t need to kill a person. The piece itself became a weapon: the letter itself. So fame was the most interesting to take out. How do you know George Washington? You know him through a name. You shoot the letter on the train at the other name and it takes out that name. So therefore homeboy has no identity. Why should I kill him? He’ll just be dead anyway because nobody will know who he is.

My style did not break away from any traditional art form of the illuminations. I just went further, did what people wouldn’t. We all painted three dimensional letters. I just finished mines by building them. Those rolling pages in those wind tunnels showed everyone what to do. Those who chose to complete “that” competition of the five boroughs of New York City, had their reasons to finish or not their studies. Even if their studies were rolling at the speed of 35 miles per hour.

Wild style.  Three-dimensional letters–illegible unless you’re initiated.  Coded language.  Electricity straight down the third rail.  These are also armored letters–protected from interpretation and exploitation.  “The letter is armed to stop all the phony formations, lies, and tricknowlegies placed upon its structure…” as Ram put it, “…how a letter aerodynamically changes into a tank.”

Rammellzee is a military function formation… I am ramming the knowledge to an elevation and I am understanding the knowledge behind the Zee. Since we are dealing with Roman letters, we have to go back to the day when the Romans were using the ram to break down doors. Our situation today is to break down a door of knowledge hidden behind society. We’re going to work our way around it instead of breaking it straight up. Whereas before you’d be trying to break through and you would be on the bottom of the pile. We’re talking about where graffiti originated, where hardcore war went down, with markers against markers and letters against letters. You think war is always shooting and beating everybody up, but no, we had the letters fight for us.

From there it gets even more obtuse.  He started thinking about the connection between graf and illuminated manuscripts (gothic script).  And he decided he was continuing the work of medieval monks whose illuminations were banned by the Catholic Church.  Then he got into the idea that language is mathematics, and electromagnetic forces, and all this is preventing us from moving out into space…into Burroughs territory but also into Time Cube territory.  But there was always a coded Afrofuturist agenda there, his Five Percenter past keeping it relevant.

In 2001 R:L:Z said:

We failed what could have been “our” culture. I went to the Puck Building (Guernsey’s Auction) in June of the year 2000 and offered my services. Everyone who was anyone in this “subculture” had works for sale. No one sold, except for a few. I felt that the “culture” died right there. There was too much “mannerism” not enough “burner”!!! Our futurism! We should have only stuck to doing the “letter” and joined together to fight the light dwellers. but, we will always be Kings From the Dark Continent. The veins of this Gotham! Remember this the next level, as you said, is the third dimension. I hope.

Born in Far Rock, Away.  He took the A train.

Source Codes:

• Iconic Treatise Gothic Futurism
• 1988 Sleezy Blue Interview - Q: Why are you like this? A: I just told you I’m an insect.
• 2001 @149St interview
• 2004 article from The Wire by Greg Tate
• 2006 What You Write interview - I DON’T LIKE MUSIC. I JUST DO IT BECAUSE IT’S ANOTHER SCULPTURE TO ME. SOLID ROCK, I BREAK THINGS OFF, THE SOUND VIBRATES THE SCULPTURE & THEREFORE, I STAND THERE IN THE DIFFERENT ASPECTS OF ALPHAS BET.
• 2007 Uncommon Radio podcast
• 2008 Cocaine Blunts interview - I don’t really do music. I never ever really did music. I build tanks, I design letters to fly, I was building my dolls, building my masks.
• R.I.P. at Grand Good
• Noz on Ram in the Village Voice
• R.I.P. in 555 Enterprises
• R.I.P. at Impose
• R.I.P. at Uncommon Records
• R.I.P. by Jeff Weiss
• R.I.P. at Blogue w/lots of pics of his art
• Alpha’s Bet video
• Targeting Battle Stations video
• Facebook Tribute Page (lots of rare photos/art)
• Canticle For Rip Cord Rex - Q: Are you going to see the new Transformers movie? A: I don’t need to see it. I am it. Why do I need to see me?
• NY Times obit - “He legally changed his name to Rammellzee — which he described as not a name but a mathematical equation — when he was younger, Mr. Ahearn said. As to the name he was born with, Mr. Ahearn said that he knew it but would keep it to himself, as his friend would have wanted. Ms. Zagari Rammellzee likewise declined to reveal it: “It is not to be told. That is forbidden.””
• Rammellzee Invented Myspace in 1984
• Rammellzee on the Wicked Pedia

It’s been a good year for hip-hop joints so far this year…but not so much albums.  Lotta LPs dropping with only one or two good tracks on ‘em (Cypress Hill, I’m looking in your direction…Distant Relatives is too shiny-sounding; Reflection Eternal and Wu-Massacre both got that Same Shit Different Record Syndrome…)  Is it the pressure to keep pumping out product–if it ain’t blogged it ain’t right?  I don’t know.

Anyways, here’s the 20 bangingest cuts for the first half of the MMX.

Spaz Out - Army of the Pharoahs / Fifty Ways To Bleed Your Customer - B. Dolan / Death Penalty - Marco Polo & Ruste Juxx (feat. DJ Revolution) / Criminology 2.5 - Method Man, Ghostface & Raekwon / No Shorts - Smiley the Ghetto Child / Kick In Tha Door - Vado / Rock the Spot All-Star Remix Bash Bros & DJ Osk (feat. Sean Price, Rakaa Iriscience, Reef the Lost Cauze, Verbal Kent, Motion Man, Chali 2na, Big Pooh) / Warning Shots - Rah Digga / Beautiful Love - Vinnie Paz / Queen Latifah - Neak (feat. DJ Moppy) / Get Down (Remix) - Jern Eye (feat. The Pharcyde) / Never Lost Control - The Seed (feat. Blame One) / Birds & Bees - Oddisee (feat. Diamond District) / Introduction - Idris Goodwin / Wolf - KRS-One / Dot Dot Dot (Dirt E. Dutch Remix) - Breez Evahflowin / In The Red - Reflection Eternal / Circle - Graves / Horizont S9 - Marrow / Dirt - Shahmen

My picks for ‘09 were here if ya missed it.

Records Worth Copping So Far:

1. B. Dolan : Falling Down Drunken Tiger or whatever it’s called
2. Rob Swift : The Architect
3. Gil Scott Heron : I’m New Here
4. Marrow : Copper for Optimists (if you dig that Sons of Co Flow sound)
5. Vinnie Paz : Seasoning of the Assassin (if you dig Jedi Mind; he changes it up a bit so it’s not the same old same old like the last two LPs)
6. KRS-One : Back to the L.A.B. (Lyrical Ass Beating) (kinda the same old Kris Parker Show, not his best rhymes, but some interesting beats…and when Kris threatens to beat another rapper’s ass, it still sounds serious.)

So Guy Fawkes over at Illcuts asked me to mix his side of this best of 1988 vs. best of 1994 mixtape.  I told him a duck with the right iPhone app could do what I do (I would pay money to see that.  Especially if it was wearing a fat gold chain.)  But he wasn’t having it, so I handled the ‘94 side.  It came out OK, but I wish I’d hunted down some shout-outs or barber shop commercials off my NYC radio tapes from that era, but time is time.  You can cop the mix here.

The ‘88 flipside is handled by DJ Grandman for Dot Got It, and though a) it was only supposed to be 10 songs, so he’s got more fire to play with than I did and b) I hate DJ drops, he fucking kills that shit. ATL all day, he cuts it up for real.  Like being back with a boombox pumping Chuck Chillout on a Friday night. No question 1988 was a stronger year–classics were dropping weekly.   Get it here.

Guy Fawkes’ official hype

Clubba Lang’s official hype

We lost one of the greats on April 19th.  Guru had a voice like an oak barrel of Bushmill’s lined with fine grade sandpaper.  He wasn’t bling, or gangsta, or mystical or polemical.  He just dropped gems on our melons.  He was a solid MC, and one of the best. He had a flow that (after the first few joints) became almost metronomic on the beat, but the lyrics were so dense and well-planned–the def(t) rhyme schemes, the hanging and internal rhymes–that combined with that voice made him a great MC. He also was a great storyteller, not something many MCs can do, and it’s too bad he didn’t do more of it.

Musicians’ deaths always seem tragic, especially when they’re young, but even when they haven’t put out anything good for a while–because although they only cut the record once, every time we play it it’s new again; every time we play it, we’re back to the first time we listened to it.  Music defeats time in a way other art does not.  And because music is timeless and eternal, we infer immortality for musicians.

The Japanese regarded the Emperor as part of the godhead until after World War II, when MacArthur forced Hirohito to publicly abdicate his holy status.  A line from a Yukio Mishima poem about this goes: How can the Emperor now simply be a man? So how can Guru be dead?  Lemonade was a popular drink and it still is.

The story of hip-hop is the story of men becoming gods on the mic and the tables, gods becoming men, and sometimes dying. It’s on some Greek tragedy shit. Mishima’s suicide note, in its entirety, reads: Human life is limited, but I would like to live forever. Keith Elam is dead, but Guru lives forever.  Step In The Arena and Hard To Earn will live forever, as long as we keep listening.

It seems pretty stupid to cut a Guru mix when Premier and so many other world-class DJs have dropped theirs, but I had to do it.  It’s part of the hip-hop grieving process for those who don’t feel like wearing R.I.P. t-shirts.

The Planet / The Place Where We Dwell / 2 Deep / Soul / Check The Technique / Battle / Not Tryin’ to Hear That (w/Prince Paul & Planet Asia) / Fed Up (Remix) (w/House of Pain) / DWYCK (Spinbad Blend) / Words I Manifest (Jazzy Jeff Mix) / Loungin’ (w/Donald Byrd) / The Piece Maker (w/Tony Touch) / Where’s Our Money?! (w/Biggest Gord) / What You Expected (Original) (w/DJ Honda) / Floor Chalk (Best Reprise) (w/Blue Sky Black Death & Chief Kamachi) / Tony Touch Freestyle / Behold (w/J-Love & Ric Nice) / The Meaning Of The Name / Looking Through Darkness (w/True Master) / Above The Clouds (w/Inspectah Deck) / Moment Of Truth / Mostly Tha Voice

More tributes:

DJ Premier

DJ Premier Live from HeadQCourterz [via T.R.O.Y.]

Conspiracy Worldwide Radio

DDay One

Mister Cee

Tony Touch

Statik Selektah [via HHB]

DJ Critical Hype: The Art of Guru Blends

Original Underground Hip Hop

Hip Hop Is Read: #1, #2

Cold Rock The Spot

“Whether the ideal society patterns itself upon the family, church, school or army it tends to approach the model of a prison. Thus the quest for individual freedom may figure as an escape from a realized ideal.”

-Eric Hoffer

Parole - Immortal Technique / Escapism - Qwel & Mike Gao / Escapism (Instrumental) - Pete Rock / Freedom - Jurassic 5 / Release (Parts 1, 2, 3) - Blackalicious (feat. Saul Williams & Zack de la Rocha) / First Day of Freedom - The Psycho Realm / Freedumb - Orko Eloheem / Escapee - DJ Krush (feat. asa) / Freedom - Lexbeats (feat. Mumia Abu Jamal) / Way To Freedom - Die Young / Price Of Freedom - Dday One / Liberation - Outkast (feat. Cee-Lo)

The US has the largest prison population in the world, with 1 in 31 adults in the corrections system–double 25 years ago, and the largest prison population per capita. Eight hundred and forty-six thousand–40% of prisoners–are Black men.

Court is Now in Session - Chill Rob G / Locked in Spofford - Mobb Deep / Handle Your Time - Prince Paul, Sadat X, Xzibit & Kid Creole / Jail Saga - T.H.U.G. Angelz / Lick a Shot - Super Chron Flight Brothers & Hi-Coup / Prison - X-Clan (feat. Christian Scott) / The Rage Of Angels - Jedi Mind Tricks / Lil Ass Gee - Ice Cube / The Phone Tap (Welcome to State Prison) - Prodigy & Sid Roams / The Tower - Ice-T / Incarcerated Scarfaces - Raekwon, El Michels Affair / Another Day In The Beast - Brand Nubian / Claimin’ I’m A Criminal - Brand Nubian / Behind Enemy Lines - Dead Prez / Nathaniel - Supa Nate / Lock Down - DJ Muggs / Cell Therapy - Goodie Mob / One Love - Nas / Attica Blues (The Chief Xcel Remix) - Archie Shepp / Black Steel In The Hour Of Chaos - Public Enemy

It’s not that I don’t like cops, I just feel a lot better when they’re not around.  As I’m sure Professor Gates would agree.

Cop Killin’ - Looptroop / Pigs - Cypress Hill / Fuck The Police - Jay Dee, Bone Thugs N Harmony, N.W.A. / Coffee, Donuts & Death - Paris / Sound Of Da Police - KRS-One / F.T.P. - X-Clan / The Beast - The Fugees / The Men In Blue - Everlast & Prince Paul / U Ain’t Gonna Take My Life - Ice Cube / From the Files of Police Squad - Black Tobacco / Crooked Officer - Geto Boys / Another Friendly Game Of Baseball…Xtra Innings - Main Source / 41 Bullets - Rob Swift / 41:19 - Public Enemy / Fuck Officer Wahl & The SDPD #1 - Tenshun / Kill Me First - Blueprint (feat. CJ The Cynic) / The Other White Meat - Immortal Technique (feat. Soul Purpose)

It’s the Overlook Hotel, because you slept there.  Also, blood coming out of the elevator.  I gotta get the maintenance guy to look at that.

Here’s a roundup of some sweet mixes I’ve been bumping lately.  All of ‘em are free and legal, so stay off my dick, DMCA cops.  Click the titles to download.

Tenshun :: Scabz & Bruises Mix

Tenshun’s beats are sick and grimy on some Natural Born Killers shit.  He makes the Gaslamp Killer look like Mr. Rogers.  All his stuff is released on cassette or 7″ vinyl in runs of 500 for some reason, very punk rock, but also pretty weird for 2010 where there’s 50 easy ways to get your stuff out there on the internet.  This cat, his shit is so hard, but not devolving into ear-bleeding noise, but it’s still like…

TENSHUN: I really like you. I’m gonna make you a mixtape to express my love for you.

TENSHUN’S GIRL: That’s really sweet, but you know what? Please don’t.

Check out his very sparse Myspace page.

This mix was for Vertebrae Records and it’s a good introduction to his post-industrial turntable sound.

Tenshun :: Freestyle Mix

Another grimy, deadly mix of his and other people’s ill beats, recorded in 2006.  Like I said, Tenshun’s stuff’s not readily available but you can buy it here and here.

Jimmy Green :: Brooklyn Dust - The Beastie Boys Mixtape

Super fresh mixtape of the Beastly Boys and their beastly toys from Jimmy Green. Not a wack track in the house.  Even better, now I don’t have to do a Beastie Boys mix.

Waajeed :: The Patty Hearst Beat Tape

Fat, grimy beats with news samples telling the story of Patty Hearst.  Serious fire.  Via The Mechies.

Peanut Butter Wolf :: Chrome Mix

Dope little mixtape of Stone’s Throw stuff from 2005, with Madlib, Guilty Simpson, Percee P, Georgia Anne Muldrow, Oh No, Aloe Blacc, Diamond D and others.

100 Akres :: Nas & Bob Marley - Relatives Abroad

While we wait to see if the Nas/Damian Marley LP is a trainwreck, Soul Train or Soul Plane, 100 Akres has hooked up a superb 8 track mashup.  Blaze one for this.

Happy birthday, Johnny Cash.

Ring Of Fire - Z-Trip Remix / Folsom Prison Blues - Everlast / Walk The Line (Remix) - Snoop Dogg*

*(So bad it’s good or just bad?  Can’t decide.  Also can’t think of a more mismatched pairing.  Dolly Parton & Method Man?  Nam June Paik & Eminem?  I mean, even the Immanuel Kant vs. Dr Dre mashup I did one time made more sense than The Man In Black vs. The Doggfather.)

Anyway, nobody hates on Johnny Cash.  He’s just too cool.

Run-DMC had the hats.  Flavor Flav had the clock.  Kool Moe Dee had those stupid wraparound sunglasses.  The Fat Boys had their, uh, fat…ness.

DOOM has the mask.  It’s iconic; maybe the most iconic piece of hip-hop regalia.  It’s like Van Gogh’s ear–it defines him, has only a little to do with his work, obscures the work, and everyone reads a lot into it.  But it’s that killer symbol everyone knows.  I bet you right this minute at a university somewhere, someone is typing a paper about how Doom’s mask subverts and reclaims minstrelsy (c.f. the Black Bastards cover; sending out impersonators is just like something Al Jolson did or some shit; and “From their point of the view, we‘re the villains. But I‘m the Super-Villain. All caps.” see, he’s commenting on the demonization of the Black male and blah blah blah…).

I’ve wondered why Doom overtook Kool Keith a few years ago…every time Doom puts out another re-tread/remix EP/re-release/40-minute-album-where-he’s-only-on-a-couple-of-songs everyone falls all over themselves.  Kool Keith?  Put out 3 records last year too.  Didn’t see that on everyone’s blog or in the goddamn New Yorker.

See, Van Gogh and Gauguin ran tight like that.  Then Van Gogh cuts his ear off and Gauguin bops off to Tahiti and paints a bunch of naked native chicks.  And who’s got a whole museum in Amsterdam?  It ain’t the guy who painted the equivalent of Sex Style and Bikinis N Thongs.

Granted, Doom is better at making and picking beats than Kool Keith.  He has one of the best flows in all hip-hop.  He’s got that Biggie’s-wino-uncle voice.  Lyrically though, it’s all beautifully internally rhymed total fucking nonsense.  Yeah, I said it.  Listen to this reverent spoken-word rendition and tell me otherwise.  His songs rarely have a subject; they’re just clever lines strung together (even in his rhyme books, according to the goddamn New Yorker.)  Could be reading out his shopping list: Minute Maid for the meter maid, she likes that lemonade, sour, bag up the all-purpose flour; zucchini, macaroni, pass that Rice-A-Roni. (This is also true for Zack De La Rocha: EGGS! AND! DON’T FORGET! THE! ENGLISH! MUUUUUUUUUUFFINS!)

Look, Ghostface and K-The-I???, to name two, also spit straight up don’t-know-what-he-said-book, but you always feel there’s meaning behind it.  With Doom, he just spits.  But as Noz pointed out, hop-hop was built on incomprehensible gibberish.  Fine.  He’s the Black John Ashbery.  It’s free association.  It’s word salad.  All caps and all tangents.  But there’s too much talent there–he could do rap’s Finnegan’s Wake if he wanted to.  If hip-hop is Black America’s CNN (© Chuck D)–and these days more like QVC–Doom is, obviously, Adult Swim cartoons.  All good I guess, but I guarantee that schtick is gonna get old…

So I say, Doom: take off the mask.  Give it to us from the heart. Peep it:

Q: Has anything ever come close to equaling how you felt when Scott LaRock died, and then Subroc died?

Doom: Everything else is grey.

Q: Why don‘t you just put out an album that says, Shit is fucked up for twenty-something people of color? Why go through the mask and the characters and outer space?

Doom: Can‘t say it like that. Out here it‘s been so desensitized, that‘s not going to… everybody just turns their back on that shit. I had to figure out a way to get the point across, still make it interesting without making it corny, or making it seem like a race thing.

Oh.  Right.  Which explains the three-headed outerspace monster Ghidra thing.  You might wanna work on that, Doomy.

Whatever.  Don’t overthink it, let the fat guy with the mask do his thing.  The flow is too sick to hate on.

So here we gots some remixes, official and unofficial, released and unreleased.  Big ups to PSY/OPSogist for hooking me up some new ones; props to the Sleepy 5 Orchestra and sorry I couldn’t jam your Hoe Cakes in there.

Who Is DOOM?! / It Ain’t Nuttin’ (The Dirty Sample Mix) / Monday Night At Fluid / All Outta Ale (Blockhead Mix) / Change The Beat (DJ Phonetic Mos Def Mix) / My Favorite Ladies (Inhumanz & Latina Mixes) / Ghostwhirl/Rock Co Kane Flow (PSY/OPSogist Mix) / Rhinestone Cowboy (Doom & Four Tet Mix) / Vomitspit (Problem Child Mix) / Melody (PSY/OPSogist Mix) / Distant Star - Heliocentrics (feat. Doom) / Strange Ways (Koushik Mix) / Melody (Komsik Ridiculoid Mix) / Gazzillion Ear (Dr. Who Dat? Mix) / Air (Black Cat The Mouse Trainer Mix) / Impending Doom (Clutchy Hopkins Mix) / Rock Co Kane Flow (Tom Caruana Mix) / Melody (Black Cat The Mouse Trainer Mix) / Change The Beat (Q-Fish Mix) / Air (Clutchy Hopkins Mix) / Blacklist - Prefuse 73 (feat. Doom) / Experience Accordion - Daedelus & Madvillain  / Great Day (Four Tet Mix) / My Favorite Ladies (Zhierut Mix) / Hip Hop (DJ Phonetic Mos Def Mix) / I Hear Voices (Live) / Is This The End Of DOOM?!

So it turns out that ‘dubbing a chicken’ is an actual livestock thing, where you cut off its comb and wattles so they don’t get frostbite. (That’s those red crinkly things on their heads.)  Who knew?  The guy at Ultimate Fowl Blog, that’s who.

Meanwhile, here’s some more dub-hop for y’all, just like the first set.

People been asking: why Super Chicken? It’s like The Upsetter’s Super Ape, except with a chicken. I thought it was obvious.

Super Chicken Returns / Satisfied? -  J-Live / Back Stage Pass - Qwel & Maker / The Jam - Shabba Ranks (feat. KRS-One) / Made I Look - June22 vs. Nas / Dub Explosion Interlude - Lyrics Born, DJ D-Sharp & DJ Icewater / Dubbing It Raw - King Tubby Vs. Ol Dirty Bastard (Macro Dubplates Mix) / Who Can Get Busy Like This Man… - Brand Nubian / Melody (Tom Caruana Remix) - DOOM / Truth Be Told - DJ Babu & Defari / Shinin’ - Billy Woods / Money Rules Everything Around - King Tubby Vs. Wu Tang (Macro Dubplates Mix) / Hotter Reggae Music - Welton Irie / Is It Because I’m Black? - Ken Boothe / Tomorrow Dub - Gorillaz / Last Words - Ras I. Zulu vs. William S. Burroughs / Doom’s Day Machine - Brain Damage / Clint Milkwood - Audio Two vs. The Upsetter vs. Rose, Age 9

Yeah, we all liked Cuban Linx 2 and Born Like This (even Time magazine and the New Yorker showed them love, for Christ’s sake). But there was a lot of other freshness this year you might have slept on.  There’s many styles in hip hop these days…lotta fingers but it’s all one fist.  So many, it’s maybe three or four fists.  Punching you!  Right in the fucking piehole!

Scott Rinse Receipt - Iller Than Theirs / Runnin’ Wild - Dead Prez & DJ Green Lantern / High Hater - Super Chron Flight Brothers / Supermagic - Mos Def / D-Up - Hail Mary Mallon (Aesop Rock, Rob Sonic & DJ Big Wiz) / Habitat of the Gasmask - La Coka Nostra (feat. Vinnie Paz) / When The Sun Goes Down - Stoupe (feat. Saigon) / Welcome To Chicago - Qwel & Maker / The Preacher - Brother Ali / Reach In - Khingz / Let’s Start (Messengers Remix) - J.Period & K’Naan / So & So - Jern Eye (feat. Guilty Simpson) / Outta Control - John Robinson (feat. DJ Rhettmatic) / Strictly the Bizness - Joell Ortiz / I Be Fresh - Project Pat / Pride and Glory - Black Tobacco / Luck vs Skill - Breez Evahflowin (feat. Swave Sevah & Ike P.) / Survival Skills - KRS-ONE & Buckshot (feat. DJ Revolution) / Train Tussle - U-God (feat. Ghostface & Scotty Wotty) / Say G&E! - The Grouch & Eligh / The Natural - Sadat X / Iron Tongue - Advanced Placement / Get Smokes - P.O.S. (feat. Jessey Greene) / Good Night - The Narcicyst

Best Albums Of The Year (De Gustibus, Bitch):

DJ Signify :: Of Cities

PSY/OPSogist :: Kings of Sleep [free]

Super Chron Flight Brothers :: Indonesia / Deleted Scenes [free]

dalek :: Gutter Tactics

Other people’s best-of lists: Passion of the Weiss, Cocaine Blunts, The Mechies, AllMusic, Philaflava, Jump the Turnstyle, Metal Lungies 1 & 2, Hold The Throne and The Message.  Check the diversity and how much you missed–I know I did, and I listened to about two hundred new albums this year. If hip hop is dead, we’re being overrun by zombies out there.

The size of these lists is kinda astounding…50 best songs of the year? You couldn’t pare it down a little, ese? 100 best albums of the decade? Pre-iPod/Rapidshare era, that’d set you back about fifteen hundred bucks. Also got me thinking, if you did this twenty years ago? The 25 best albums of the year would’ve been about…all of them. To paraphrase Matt Cook, it was pretty easy to make the greatest hip-hop album when there were only about fifty hip-hop albums.

Catch you across 2010th Street…

DJ Spooky, a.k.a. That Subliminal Kid, has got his own iPhone app:

“JG Ballard once said ‘history is a stage that needs to be swept clean.’ I agree. When I first heard Grand Master Flash’s ‘Adventures on the Wheels of Steel’ from 1981, I was blown away. Afrika Bambaata’s ‘Death Mix’ was cool, but Flash took things in a whole different direction…Through the prism of my new album “The Secret Song” and the app on my cell phone, I just wanted to show how you can rock a party using material from your iTunes library and mix it with your record collection…Check it and enjoy - remember - it’s from a cell phone, and records mixed!!!

Talk about clearing the stage, eh!? With mobile media, there is NO stage, it’s basically about creativity, on the spot, anywhere, anytime… Check the frequencies!!! You can download the mix from HERE …And you can download the App from HERE

No word on whether the app also allows you to GPS-locate grad school girls who get wet down there when you mention Flash and JG Ballard in the same sentence.

The mix has some good shit on it; it’s a lot better than Spooky’s latest, The Secret Song, which is not-so-secretly ass.  Spooky’s problem increasingly is he’s all:

“it isnʼt really an album: itʼs a manifesto about the place of history in our modern collaged, scrambled, sampla-delic to the core, mega info overloaded digital culture. With references stretching from Thorstein Veblenʼs “Theory of the Leisure Class” and John Maynard Keynes classic in the field of economics “The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money” over to hip hopʼs relationship to psychoanalysis and a la Edward Bernayʼs concept of the “manufacture of consent”…

…and he keeps going on and on, and on, and on.  People listen to music because it sounds good, not because you’ve got pomo game. Spooky: I got love for you, but when I’m checking your tracks, my man, I can’t hear the fucking footnotes.

Not to over dis.  Spooky’s made some great records, and he’s got two books out which look pretty interesting…though I’m always a sucker for academic hip hop tomes, even though they’re usually lame (Michael Eric Dyson, your three names can’t save you.)

Anyway, in 2010 I predict we’ll see additional hip-hop iPhone apps, like:

1. MF DOOM LYRIC GENERATOR: Randomly uses a wifi rhyming dictionary, Little Rascals dialogue, and key words like ‘meter maid’, ‘pancake,’ ‘catsup’, and ‘hoogly-moogly’ to create authentic-sounding Doom lyrics.  If it ain’t incomprehensible, it ain’t Doom!
2. WU-PHONE: Only Built 4 3GS…the first smartphone designed by the Wu-Tang Clan. Features Weed Carrier Locator app, iPinky Ring, VirtualDirtyBastard, Raekwon the Chef restaurant locator, and MicrosoftGZA for Wu-Phone.  Fully compatible with Bobby Digital.
3. iBEEF: Tracks the latest meaningless rapper beefs from Twitter, Facebook and MySpace feeds.  Get alerts on who’s calling who a crying little bitch, instantly!
4. SCARPHACE: Did you know that there’s 6.7 seconds of Scarface dialogue that hasn’t been sampled yet? Find it and drop it into your latest track! (Pacino 2.1 or higher required)
5. TWIGGA: This is what Busta Rhymes calls his Twitter followers.  Seriously.

Ten years in the waiting, The Seventh Seal has dropped…

…and goddamn, that is one bad record.  Really awful.  I guess every single top-shelf producer and same-weight-class-MC was in Barbados or Minnetonka that week, so he had to settle for a bunch of cats he found at the bus station or some shit.  It’s like Marlon Brando making his big return to acting by guest starring on Everybody Loves Raymond.

So instead, just get yourself ‘Holy Are You’, cool out to some more unreleased cuts and remixes, and let us never speak of it again.

Eric B. For President (DJ Showtime Remix) / Let the Rhythm Hit ‘Em (DJ Ayres Remix) / Hypnotic / Addictive (Remix) - w/Truth Hurts / Let The Rhythm Hit ‘Em (Omega One Remix) / Take the Train / New York London Paris - w/Art of Noise & Spleen / Buffalo Gals (Back To Skool) / Once Upon A Time in Japan (Remix) / Shades of Black / Living For The City (Remix) / Cold Feeling / Man With A Gun / We All Got Plans (Original Mix) / I Know You Got Soul (Z-Trip Remix) / The Saga Begins (Desert Eagle Discs-You Scare Me Remix)

I read this thing saying smartphones have created a race of cyborgs by making the internet extensions of our bodies, even though it’s not sewn on.

My question is: if I want to smack people who diddle their iPhones all the time, does that make me a racist?

This is Robots Will Fuck Your Shit Up, v3.0.

Exit Multi Mode - Jel / Farewell To The Flesh - Jedi Mind Tricks / Untitled #17 & 18 - Mr. Dibbs / Error Data - Powell / Robot Reality - Taborshell / Do It Like A Robot (Hell Rocks The Equalizer Remix) - Princess Superstar / Cyborg - DJ Quest / We Can Build You - Techno Animal (feat. El-P & Vast Aire) / Cyborg Dread - Techno Animal (feat. Dr. Israel) / Les Petits Yeux Métalliques - Brain Damage / Deshominisation (I) - Alain Goraguer / Robots Forever - Lil B / She Scanned - Four Tet / T-electronique - Faust & Dälek / 0101001011001101011 - Attacks The Darkness / Man Or Machine - K-The-I??? (feat. Mestizo)

The word robot was coined by Karel Capek in his 1920 play, R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). Know what it’s about?  Robots rise up and kill the whole human race, that’s what.  Y’all been warned.

This is Robots Will Fuck Your Shit Up, v2.0

Straight Outta Skynet / Stupid Robot - Company Flow / African Robotics - Super Chron Flight Brothers / Dirty Robots - Exile / Bladerunners - Mike Ladd (feat. Company Flow) / Blood of the Robot - Rick Rude, Phree Wil, Jewels Hunter, DJ WD4D & DJ Able / Mechanical Advantage - Deepspace 5 / Fuckin’ Robots - Sick Symphonies / War With Robots (feat. PW Singer) / Please Disperse Immediately - Nephlim Modulation Systems / Annihilator Robot - DJ T-Rock / Digital War Lessons - Rouh & Qrazsirs / Humanity Vs Technology - Orko The Sycotik Alien / Programmed To Hunt - Jel / At War With Robots - Solaris Earth Pipeline / Attaque Des Robots - Alain Goraguer / Dominant Species (Instrumental) - Rheturik / Y’all Been Warned - The RZA

It’s been 90 years since the word robot was coined, and they’re firmly embedded in our culture, art and subconscious…and they still don’t exist yet.

Most robot stories have the theme of empathy–of bridging the uncanny valley.  Either the robots are more empathetic than us, and we treat them like slaves, or they’re less empathetic metal killing machines.  Robots represent the idea of our highest achievement, to create something better than ourselves, but also reflect our worse failings–cruelty, xenophobia, hubris, exploitation.

This is Robots Will Fuck Your Shit Up, v1.0.

‘…In Love With Another Robot…’ - Jel / The Mechanikal Man (Scratch Robot) - DJ Grazzhoppa / Bboy Robot - Rouh & Qrazsirs / Robot - Marc D & JRAY; Fourward; KRS-ONE & Buckshot / Robot Love (Medicine 8 Remix) - Popular Tyre / Do It Like A Robot - Princess Superstar / From Tragedy - DJ Krush (feat. Tragedy) / Robot - Proe / Robots - Clokworx / Do The Robot In Cyberspace - Giant Panda / Robot - Dockta Valkus / Anything You Can Do My Robot Can Do Better - Close My Eyes / Vote Robot Remix - Climax Golden Twins / Do Androids Dream of Electric Boogaloo? / Theme From Automatons / Sympathy For The Database / The Robot Has Got the Blues - Worm Is Green

Just like the first one, this is some funky shit, on a suiting-up-montage tip and some climactic-fight-scene-ripping-through-all-the-bad-guys-like-butter type of grooves, finishing up with some says-something-sassy-and-cool-like-’Always bet on black’-and-drives-off-before-the-credits-roll beats.  Ya feel me?  It’s cinelmattic beatsploitation.

Mr. Holland’s Intro - Rob Swift & Richard Dreyfus / Rip Rip - David Holmes / I’ve Never Seen… & Boing Boing (Instrumentals) - The RZA / Killing In The Name Of - The Apples / Baseball Furies Chase - Barry de Vorzon / Troglodyte (Cave Man) - Jimmy Castor Bunch / The Stretch - Detroit Sex Machines / Get Up & Get Down - The Dramatics / Know How (Solid Steel Mix) - Young MC / Jimmy James (Original Original Version) - Beastie Boys / Nite Stalker - Afrika ‘Baby Bam’ / If I Had Wings - DJ Frane / Claim To Fame (Instro) - Oddisee / North By Northwest - Blue Scholars / Collie Stuff - The Chosen Few / Bonus Bill Beat - EarDrumz / Blowin’ Up The Spot (Instrumental) - DJ Premier / Key Master - High & Mighty / House of Rising Funk - Afrique / Double Dog Dare You - Beat Rabbi / Aural Pleasure (Instrumental) - Blackalicious / Cold Blooded (Instrumental) - Common & The Soulquarians

My boy MZW hooked me up with this link: “Jay-Z vs. The Game: Lessons for the American Primacy Debate“, in which this think tank type of guy supposedly explains what other foreign policy think tank cats could learn from rap beefs. Or something like that, it doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense except to run down the history of beefs.

But it’s another mind-blowing session of hip-hop’s 2k meta-ness (see also: DOOM sampling Charles Bukowski), especially because in the comments Lynch’s colleagues turn out to also be pretty knowledgable hip hop heads. Although they do say things like:

“That may be the modern realist’s advice, but I’d imagine that Kissingerian Realist would advise Jay-Z to identify and strengthen potential third-party agents against The Game. That way, if a conflict becomes necessary, it can be a proxy conflict, thus limiting Jay-Z’s vulnerability. And given Jay-Z’s hegemonic role in the hip-hop world, there are plenty of talented rappers who’d happily take up his battles in return for his eventual favor.”

Uh…yeah…word to the deuce fuck the one, my nephew.

But it creates this week’s hip hop blogging match-up game…

If Rappers Were Countries (Strictly From A Foreign Policy Viewpoint, Nahmean), What Country Would They Be?

Jay-Z = America (according to Lynch)

The Game = Bolivia (according to Lynch, I think, I got confused)

Wu-Tang = China (highly populated, centrally controlled, dangerous economic superpower)

Ol’ Dirty Bastard = North Korea (insane, eccentric, ally of China/Wu-Tang, danger to itself and others)

Eminem = Germany (Aryan powerhouse whose influence is on the wane)

Public Enemy = Cuba (once championed and highly controversial and reviled by the right wing, totally ignored now but still clinging to their ideals, even as it drags them into poverty, and either maligned or celebrated for this depending on your politics)

Flavor Flav = Turkmenistan (crazy, comical and geopolitically isolated)

Canibus = Panama (ill-advisedly directly challenged the hegemony of the US (in 1989 = LL Cool J), smacked down and now generally ignored/irrelevant)

Gucci Mane = Spain (looming deflation due to declining industrial infrastructure)

Beastie Boys = New Zealand (because I got more rhymes than New Zealand got…zealands)

Goodie Mob = Finland (just go with me on this one)

OK, so you get the idea…c’mon you Risk-playing hip-hop heads, what else ya got?

In honor of The Seventh Seal dropping-any-minute-now-really-honestly-really-it’s-coming-out-this-time, here’s some remixes and rare cuts.

What’s the deal with Rakim?  Greatest MC of all time to anyone not fucked in the head.  Your favorite rapper’s favorite rapper. Originator of spiritual MCing and the internal rhyme scheme.  And no new album in ten years.

Reading the few interviews around, all I can tell is: the death of his father really messed him up; he’s enjoying raising his kids; and Dre really jerked him around.  I’d bet he also has a really, really bad manager, probably his goofy brother-in-law or something.  I mean, what label is gonna turn down The God Himself?!

So I’m wondering how come the album is late.  Maybe he’s giving us time to get the last six straight.

The Coronation of Rakhnaten (Opening Ceremony) / I Know You Got Soul (Dub) / Put Your Hands Together (Parkside Mix) / As the Rhyme Goes On (Pumpin’ the Turbo - Chad Jay In Effect) / Follow The Leader (RJD2 Remix) / Complicatem (Pass The Hand Grenade Pt 2) / You Don’t Fool Me / Bring It (Turn It Up) / Casualties Of War (Jazz Version) / Don’t Sweat The Technique (Original) / Let The Rhythm Hit ‘Em (Brixton Upso Mix) / Heat It Up / Run (Freestyle) / Last Resort (a.k.a. Paid Off) / When I Be Flowin (King Tech Remix) / After U Die (feat. Truth Hurts) / Guess Who’s Back (Buckwild Remix) / I’m Back (feat. Lil Fame) / Let The Rhythm Hit Em (Z-Trip Remix) / Microphone Fiend (Rage Mix) / The Coronation of Rakhnaten (Closing Ceremony)

Peep out Rap Dungeon and Hip Hop Is Read for more.

New single ‘Holy Are You’ just dropped; you can check it at The Message or here.

Nas has released 10 albums in 15 years, but everyone pisses and moans because 9 of them weren’t Illmatic. That’s like hating on George Washington Carver for not inventing something better than peanut butter.

Compared to a lot of MCs, Nas is still dropping steady heat (Exhibit A: “Queens Get The Money”).  But really though, every album has some weak tracks–and not just the horrible, horrible radio singles.  Nas’ problem has always been beats.

A solo rapper lacks the consistency a DJ brings to the sound and keeps the ego in check–the strength has always been in the triumvirate (Run-DMC, Cypress Hill) or the duo (Gang Starr, Eric B. & Rakim) or the everyone-into-the-phone-booth-thing (The Roots, Wu-Tang). Relying on beats-for-hire has made Nas’ direction waver all over the place; it’s that lack of a defined sound that makes people hate. Every Cypress Hill record is pretty much the same (just in ever-decreasing quality); every Nas record is different. To me, that’s a strength.  It’s just too bad he didn’t hook up with the right DJ early on and drop steady solid.  When he does pick a good beat, it’s fire.  When he doesn’t…that’s when the remixers step up.

So here we got an hour’s worth of Nas remixes, freestyles and unreleased cuts. Peep it.

Hope (Kenzo Digital Remix) / Sucker MCs 2007 / Made You Look (#900 Remix) / Stillmatic (Paid In Full Mix) / DJ Clue Freestyle / The Foulness / Talk Of New York (Hard To Earn Mix) / NY State Of Mind Pt. 2 (Meaning of the Name Mix) / Made U Look (DJ ABD Run Remix) / Got Ur Self… (MIDIMarc Remix) / No Idea’s Original (Kenzo Digital Remix) / Thief’s Theme (Q-Fish Remix) / Streets Disciple (Original Version) / The Setup (Q-Fish Remix) / Affirmative Action (Man Mantis Remix) / One Love (MF Doom Remix) / Every Ghetto (Goodwill Projects’ Minority Report Remix) / Ghetto (feat. Joell Ortiz) (DJ Green Lantern Remix) / Life’s A Bitch (DJ ABD C.R.E.A.M. Remix) / The Game (Dirty Harry’s Biggie Remix) / Silent Murder / Get Down (Nick James Remix)

Here we got some Biggie remixes, mostly from other mixtapes. If that’s too meta for you, get with the times.

Why do we celebrate Biggie on the day he died instead of today, his birthday? It’s that gangsta cult of death. Ask yourself: When Big was in that car, broken glass in his lap, bleeding out, do you think he was ready to die? Or did all that gat-poppin’ nihilism fly away and he would’ve given anything to keep breathing?

Mishima wrote: “Human life is limited, but I would like to live forever.” Big didn’t leave behind a huge body of work (just a huge body). But every time it gets remixed, flipped around over a new beat, the lyrics become new again. They even become more iconic, like words cut in stone. And Biggie lives again.

Microphone Murderer / Where Brooklyn At? (Live From Madison Square Garden) / C.R.E.A.M. Freestyle / Things Done Changed (vs. Wu-Tang) - DJ Semi & DJ KG / Party & Bullshit (vs. LOTUG) - DJ Semi & DJ KG / Party & Bullshit (vs. Nas) - DJ Vlad & Dirty Harry / Party & Bullshit (vs. Jimi Hendrix) - DJ Doc Rok / Party & Bullshit (vs. David Bowie) - DJ Muggs / Hypnotize (vs. Joan Jett) - TRVS DJAM / Frank White - DJ Sane720 & Dantana / Going Back to Cali - Se7en Productions / Everyday Struggle (vs. Dr. Dre) – Filth / Real Niggaz (Original West Coast Version) / If I Should Die (vs. 50 Cent) - Dirty Harry / Victory - DJ Rukiz / Young G’s (Remix) - Astronote / Things Done Changed - Golddragon / Can’t Knock The Hustle - MIDIMarc / Ten Crack Commandments – Kenzo Digital / Hypnotize (vs. Frank Sinatra) - DJ Cappel & Smitty / Kick In The Door - DJ Sane720 & Dantana / Hypnotize (vs. Boogie Down Productions) / Nasty Girl (vs. Big Daddy Kane) - Mick Boogie & Terry Urban / Everyday Struggle - DJ Lennox / Dead Wrong (Stop Schemin Remix) - Renegade / Sleepwalkers - Cooking Soul / Things Done Changed (vs. El-P) / A Dream (vs. MF Doom) - DJ LivingDead / You’re Nobody Till Somebody Kills You (Original Version) / Juicy (vs. Aphex Twin) - Spin Doctor Zaeus

…something something something, broke my sacroiliac.  Which means ‘ass-bone’. Only time an MC’s used proper medical terminology.  Kinda surprising since there’s so many ‘doctors’ (Dre, Ice, Octagon, etc.). But I guess nothing rhymes with things like ‘pancreas.’   Except…blancreas.

Really though, “The Message” is the well from where all conscious hip hop flows. 27 years later the beat is still tight. The lyrics drop some serious poetical gems. It’s real art and therefore eternal.

The Message - Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five / Hard Times - Run-D.M.C., Vordul Mega, Onra, Baby Huey / In The Ghetto - Eric B. & Rakim / Ghetto Misfortune’s Wealth - The 24 Carat Black / Dead Homiez - Ice Cube / I Been There - KRS-One / Streetlamp Confessions - WindNbreeze, Cryptic One & Alaska / Minimum Wage - Redshield / Rent Control - Super Chron Flight Brothers / A Tribute to Melle Mel - Breez Evahflowin / The Message - Nas / The Message (Remix Suite) - Roots Manuva, Cutting Edge, Ice Cube, Richie Rich, El-P, Mobb Deep, Willy Mason

Fetus - Nas / Birth - Ice Cube (feat. Khalid Abdul Muhammad) / The Birth - The RZA / Children of Children - The Black Market Militia (feat. Oscar Brown Jr.) / Wear Clean Draws - The Coup / Snoop Interlude / Grew Up Hard - Trife Da God & Solomon Childs / Young Man Grown - The Narcicyst / Message To Young People - Double Dee & Steinski / The Product - Ice Cube / Concrete Jungles - The Psycho Realm (feat. Crow) / Finger Painting - K-The-I??? / Home Work - Themselves / It’s Just A Playground - Dday One / Little Child Running Wild - Curtis Mayfield / Children’s Story - Slick Rick

[Update]

Really dope re-telling of ‘A Children’s Story’ by Hell Razah & Killah Priest here.

Reminiscing of another time: Parkside Ave and a bottle of wine…

Rain Dance - Arrowax / Make It Rain - Ultramagnetic MCs / Rain Drops - Jojo Pellegrino / Rain men - Deep Puddle Dynamics / Rain men (Remix instrumental) - Deep Puddle Dynamics / Rain Edit Interlude - Prefuse 73 / Rainy Dayz - Raekwon (feat. Ghostface Killah & Blue Rasberry) / Stormy Weather - Billy Woods / This Is It (Ain’t Gonna Rain) - Schoolly D / Rain - RJD2 / The Name of Every Raindrop - Tracy Jones / Rain - Autolect / The Levees Broke - Jay Electronica / A Sudden Rain Storm / Flood The Block (Instrumental) - Havoc