« September 2008 | Main | November 2008 »
Give it up for failure, everyone.
It was this time five years ago, during my "victory lap" in college, when I began this site.
I should give a speech, but I've never been good at that sort of thing. Plus, you guys know I'm lazy like that. That's probably why I'm still here in the first place, rather than out working a job that pays a living wage, and making love to a series of beautiful women.
Shout outs to everyone who contributed to my success, so to speak.
The hits just keep on coming!
This one's a bit dirtier than that last one, if not on the level of, say, Necro's "Who's Your Daddy?"
New Ghostface, ripping the instrumental to "Computer Love," as seen in Menace II Society, or perhaps The Show. Or how about that video where Dallas Penn dry humps a laptop computer? Nhjic.
Supposedly, Ghost has got a new album coming out next month that's like an odds and ends compilation. It's got a few new joints on it, plus some rare older stuff, plus some older stuff that didn't strike me as being all that rare. Not that anyone's actually gonna buy a copy of it anyway.
Check the tracklisting after the jump, courtesy of The Rap Up.
Checkit: Ghostface Killah "Computer Love" [zShare]
Q-Tip, The Renaissance (Universal Motown (heh), 2008)
Can you believe it's been damn near 10 years since a label let Q-Tip put out an album? It's been even longer since he put out something ridonkulous like two out of the top five of us bloggers' favorite rap albums evar, as I recall. He's definitely had the time to put together a decent album. Let's see if he actually did.
I've seen filthier uncut videos. But you have to keep in mind, this looks like found footage of actual broads getting it on in nightclubs.
Never mind the fact that, 30 years into recorded rap music, St. Louis has yet to produce a notable MC that's palatable to us boom-bap dinosaur types. St. Louis pretty much invented rap music. It says so in a story in last week's Riverfront Times about the early hip-hop scene here in the Lou.
For example, did you know that, while "Rappers Delight" was recorded by a bunch of dudes from New Jersey, the first person to play it on the radio was a guy over in East Saint?
Riverfront Times was unable to locate Sylvia Robinson to comment for this story, and her husband, Joe, died in 2000. But [East St. Louis radio DJ Jim] Gates is acknowledged in The Sugar Hill Records Story, a 66-page booklet published in 1999 along with a CD box set to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of "Rapper's Delight," and the Robinsons have credited him in several published accounts as the man who "broke" the song.
Or how about the fact that DJs here were rapping on the radio a while even before Kool Herc supposedly threw the very first hip-hop party, in the basement at 1520 Sedgwick?
Gates, the man who hired Jockenstein in 1979, says DJs on black radio stations had been rhyming over intros to songs since the early 1970s. One of his DJs, the Original Godfather, even performed entire rap sets for audiences while live on the air.
Someone needs to see if they can dig up audio of those guys rapping on the radio back in the early '70s. If they can, I don't know if New York really deserves credit for having invented rap music.
Checkit: Old School: Unearthed in a cluttered storeroom, a pair of vintage St. Louis hip-hop recordings help tell the history of rap [Riverfront Times]
And after the jump is an absolutely incredible video by early St. Louis rappers Dangerous D and Charlie Chan.
The Knux, Remind Me in 3 Days (Interscope, 2008)
The Knux fled New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and landed in Los Angeles, where some tall Israeli spotted them and thought they might work as a sort of hipster rap answer to OutKast.
Continue reading "The Knux - Remind Me in 3 Days: Album Review" »
Wanna hear a pro-Obama mixtape that doesn't suck balls? Try this new DJ Premier Time 4 Change mixtape.
I'm not even sure what this shit has to do with Barack Obama. At the very beginning of it, DJ Premier shouts, "It's time for change, motherfuckers!" Then he's all like, "The election's coming up soon. We're not actually gonna be in town to vote. But, you know, there's absentee ballots and shit." Then it's on to the usual bitching about how the industry has got hip-hop all fucked the fuck up, i.e. the kind of shit I like to hear in my rap music.
I notice Premier's been surprisingly prolific as of late, after falling the fuck off a while back, and then making himself scarce for quite some time. He's had beats on albums this year by a number of obscure white rappers, including Little Vic, Ill Bill, and Termanology, and he did scratches on a track on that Black Milk album I reviewed the other day. And I suppose there's whoever's on his label, Year Round Records.
I'm assuming this mixtape is like most other mixtapes, in that it's "for promotional purposes" and hence free to give away. At any rate, there's a tracklisting and a link after the jump, via The Smoking Section.
If I had a secretary, first I'd see if she'd be interested in performing a sexual favor for me, as a show of appreciation of the fact that I sign her checks.
Then I'd tell her to cancel my appointments for the rest of the month. Because something tells me I'm gonna be busy enjoying all of my favorite classic music videos on MTV's new site, MTVM.
I should have known something was up yesterday, when I checked Mixtape Monday, and I noticed the video player had been upgraded from the buggy, semi-useless one they've been using for years now. I didn't have any problem at all embedding to my Tumblr that hilarious video in which Fiddy Cent can't help but drop his mic while discussing how awful the new Kanye West album is almost certainly gonna be. Whereas, normally, I wouldn't even have bothered.
As it turns out, MTV's got an entire new website that's basically an archive of classic music videos. The videos are free and easy to browse, play, and embed. The picture quality isn't the best in the world, but it's probably better than the vast majority of shit on YouTube. As a matter of fact, it reminds me of what YouTube was like, back when everyone was uploading classic videos they'd ripped from old VHS tapes from back in the day - before the TIs caught wind of it and started siccing the junkyard dog on people.
Basically, it's what the MTV website should have been like years ago, back when they first started hosting music videos. If only they hadn't let somebody sell them on the system they've been using. (Watch it turn out that the guy who invented MTV Overdrive was one of these TIs' nephews.)
The archive seems to be incredibly deep, as far as stuff that actually came on MTV back in the day, and maybe not so much in terms of stuff that didn't. If you notice, the list of featured videos has obviously been purposely engineered to consist of at least 12% videos by black artists, almost as if there was a corporate lawyer breathing down the neck of the poor intern who put it together.
I checked to see if they had the clip for Jeffrey Osborne's "You Should Be Mine," aka the woo-woo song, just so I could relive the days of riding around in the backseat of my old man's Delta 88, but, alas, they only had one video by him, and it was for some shit I never heard of. They didn't have anything at all by Alexander O'Neal, another artist from that era that I wouldn't mind listening to again, provided it didn't require much from me in the way of effort.
I'm assuming that's because a lot of shit like that mostly only came on BET back in the day, and even though MTV owns BET, they figured, what's the market, really, for '80s-era R&B videos? Plus, I'm sure they'd never cop to this, but they might have a certain interest in having MTVM perceived as being a white music video site, despite featuring a number of videos by black artists.
You'll know if, a few years from now, BET launches its own, shittier version, with all black videos, and yet it somehow manages to become even more popular than its "mainstream" counterpart, probably because so many black people don't have shit else better to do than sit around all day and watch music videos - not unlike how TRL begat 106 & Park, and, if you notice, 106 & Park is still going strong, while TRL has since been canceled.
After the jump is a brief collection of clips I've put together from the proverbial days when MTV actually played music videos.
We have tickets to all the top 2007 Concerts. Check out these seats to The Cure, and the Dave Matthews Band. Don't miss the hot Smashing Pumpkins tour, or Linkin Park. We also have seats to Dallas Cowboys games, and Indianapolis Colts. Check out our amazing NFL selection.
Recent Comments