On a weekend road trip to Newport Beach in June, a friend and I made a well-timed stop in LA and caught the first show in almost a decade of the recently reunited Freestyle Fellowship, hip-hop icons and forebears of the art/jazz rap movement of the ’90s.
I’d seen Aceyalone back in the day, but never FF in full, and it turned out to be quite the show. With Nocando and Busdriver opening, the impact of Freestyle Fellowship’s 20 years in the game was readily apparent.
And judging by the reception, fans were eager to embrace the reunion of Aceyalone, Myka 9, P.E.A.C.E. and Self Jupiter. I have yet to see a release date for the new album, The Promise, but the group released a single off it this week, On This Earth.
For as bleak as El-P’s music can be, there’s a strangely uplifting ending to this video for Time Won’t Tell, a track off the recently released Weareallgoingtoburninhellmegamixxx3.
The official info tells us that the video “is inspired by a childhood memory of director Shan Nicholson, who grew up in the ‘Old New York’ during a time when necessity often bred creativity. This video depicts a young boy innocently finding a way to embrace his imagination amid an urban wasteland.”
At the risk of absolutely jinxing it, I’ve been exchanging emails recently with Zilla Rocca, working to extract him from Philly and introduce his talents to the Phoenix scene. If nothing else, I want to meet in person the man who can find it in his heart to name-check Toni Kukoc in a verse.
Until that day comes (late September maybe?), there’s plenty of Zilla’s material to familiarize yourself with, especially his work in 5 O’Clock Shadowboxers, the long-distance, rap noir collaboration between his rhymes and Douglas Martin’s on-point beats. (Fact: Even after releasing last year’s debut The Slow Twilight, the two have yet to meet face-to-face. Thanks, Internet, for making this possible.)
Earlier this year, the Shadowboxers unveiled Broken Clocks, an EP comprised of remixes and new cuts that’s been on heavy rotation around here.
One of the tracks, No Resolution 2 – featuring Has-Lo, Elucid and Nico the Beast – now has a 12 Angry Men-themed video companion.
If you’ll indulge me in a song I’ve posted about before – twice. But my wife and I spent most of Wednesday cleaning out what we call the “computer room,” our catch-all space where we keep everything from the primary computer to an elliptical machine to a bookshelf with my (unopened!) Michael Jordan Starting Lineup figure (this one).
It’s a room that was a comfortable mess – until it became an uncomfortable mess. It was the type of room in which you only remembered where something was in relation to the clutter around it: “Oh, that unused checkbook is in the same drawer as the three-hole punch!” (Why do we own a three-hole punch anyway?). There was just stuff everywhere – CDs, wires, papers, 45s. I’m not talking Hoarders-style mess, but it became overwhelming enough that we were inspired to purge. And it became readily apparent as we were cleaning that this room was an electronics graveyard, a dusty museum of dated technology. Long-dead hard drives and orphaned AC adapters finally met their maker. RIP.
Still, like anything, there’s a certain trepidation to letting go. Oh, sure, we hung on to our fair share of cables (“I’ll need this some day”, you tell yourself), but we finally took a stand, and god damn it we’re going to recycle those cell phones from 1998! Why, though, did I feel a certain loyalty to these inanimate objects? For the past month, I’d been cursing that good-for-nothing, motherfucking scroller ball in our Mac Mighty Mouse that absolutely refused to respond when I wanted to scroll down. (Strangely, it didn’t respond either when I slammed it on the desk two or three – or 10 – times.) But when it came time to, uh, pull the plug, something felt odd. You invest money and faith in this technology only to throw it away like an ATM receipt? I expected more, I guess.
All the while, I could only think of the Meanest Man Contest song, Throwing Away Broken Electronics, a fitting soundtrack for the day. And I remembered what emcee Eriksolo told me when I asked him about the inspiration for the track:
“I was cleaning out my house one day and I came across all this old gear that I used to make music on but was no longer really working right. It made me really nostalgic and sorta melancholy. But then it also felt really good to get rid of it.â€
As I sit here, typing from the cleanest I’ve ever seen this desk, no truer words have ever been spoken.
It hardly seems fair, all this talent sprouting from Los Angeles’ fertile underground hip-hop scene. From Project Blowed to Low End Theory and spots in between, LA fosters original and progressive movements that are the envy of other cities.
One of the rising stars of the scene is Open Mike Eagle, a former third- and fourth-grade special-ed teacher and Project Blowed alum who in May released his debut full-length, Unapologetic Art Rap on Mush Records. In placing it fourth on his list of Best Rap Albums of the Half Year, embedded LA scribe Jeff Weiss describes UAR as “the rare contemporary rap record that rewards (and demands) repeat listening.” He’s right, of course. Open Mike Eagle raps with contextual depth and mature self-reflection. In other words, he makes you think … and stuff.
Check out I Rock above, a song that lays out the cruel realities of trying to make a living as a teacher by day and rapper by night. Neither seems a very financially solvent path, even when combined. So do yourself – and Open Mike Eagle – a favor and plop down $8 on Sunday at the Hidden House (607 W. Osborn in Phoenix) to see him open for Canadian emcee Moka Only on the Fake Four Summer Tour, brought to you buy Universatile Music.
For more on Mike Eagle, read Weiss’ Q&A with him at LA Weekly.
If you blinked, you might have missed Cut Chemist’s three-second cameo in the 2009 movie Up in the Air, which I finally saw a few days ago. But Cut is about to ramp up his visibility this year, starting with the July 27 release of a new mix, Sound of the Police.
Originally intended to be a one-time performance for the Mochilla Timeless series, Sound of the Police was created using just one turntable, a mixer, a loop pedal and original vinyl pressings.
“The music chosen for this mix goes quite a bit deeper into the crate than his other contributions. Driven by his passion for Ethiopian, Colombian, Sudanese and Afro-Brazilian sounds, this mix also features a few classic tunes you might recognize. Sound Of The Police puts it all in context to help the listener remember that hip-hop culture is indeed rooted in Africa.”
Harnessing the democratic power of the Internet, legendary hip-hop producer Prince Paul has unearthed a previously unreleased album – Horror City – to share some 15 years after its creation. Is 2010’s best hip-hop album actually from 1995?
Thanks to Twitter and Sendspace, a producer with one of the most impressive resumes in the game dusts off a gem that apparently was slept on (foolishly) by labels back in the day. And I’ll just echo what The Fader had to say: If this is material Prince Paul has been hanging onto all this time, can you imagine what else we haven’t heard?
The download for the 11-track album includes cover art and a brief history about the project from Prince Paul (copied without edits below):
This was a project that I wanted to put together with Amityville MC legend Superstar . as I thought about it more I wanted to recruit more Mcs we knew to make it diverse . Superstar already had the name “Horror City” so wen recorded under that name . This project was recorded right after the first Gravedigga album ” 6ft deep” in 1995 . I shopped the demo but unfortunately it got looked over and never got signed . I sat on this project for a while but it always had a dear place in my heart because I thought it was really good and the talent was there . I stripped some of the music from the demo and put it on ” a prince among thieves” and actually had a few of the guys perform on the ” Thieves ” album as well but to be honest I always liked these originals better . So now I have decided share these songs with all of you because holding on to them made no sense .. why not share great music . Hopefully you the listener will enjoy this project as much as I do . please share it , thats why I made this for free download . For more group info please log on to http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000981527022 for a proper bio of “Horror City “
Horror City tracklisting: 1. War Party Intro
2. Play it Close
3. Pain
4. You Got Flow
5. Take it How You Want it
6. Big Sha
7. Tattles Tale
8. Horror City Terrorists (freestyle)
9. MC Hustler (original)
10. Headbounty
11. War Party Outro
Lifting a four-minute nugget out of an instrumental LP probably isn’t the best way to get a feel for the big picture of the artist’s vision. But this leak has me eagerly anticipating the Aug. 3 release of El-P’s Weareallgoingtoburninhellmegamixxx3 on Gold Dust.
The 15-track album contains original and remix instrumentals – including his Kidz in the Hall Drivin’ Down the Block remix. Physical copies of Weareallgoingtoburninhellmegamixxx3 will include download links to the first two volumes, which were previously available only at live shows. (Though El did once give away Volume 2 a couple years back.)
And as El-P explains, this is more than some banal jumble of cutting-room material:
“its not just a collection of beats. there are transitions, breakdowns, blends… instead of throwing some shit on there and calling it a record i instead ended up crafting a record that (i think) actually makes sense sonically.”
So in that regard, it’s hard to listen to Meanstreak, a three-part suite, without proper context of the full album. But I’ll say this: It’s intense and dark and, even sans vocals, El-P sounds paranoid as ever.
ALSO: I’m headed to Chicago for the weekend, so it’ll be quiet around here (more so than usual!) for the next four days. In the meantime, enter to win that Radar Brothers CD to keep yourself entertained.
Feels like it’s been awhile since I’ve been to a proper hip-hop show, and I’m excited about this one from the Universatile Music guys, even though I keep hearing horror stories about the heat inside the Clubhouse.
But, hey, what’s a little back sweat amongst friends, especially with the chance to see Murs, who’s touring in support of his new album Fornever.
I’m sorry, but some 15 years later, I can’t help but be excited by a Native Tongues collaboration. Black Sheep’s Dres (above) has brought together Q-Tip of A Tribe Called Quest, Trugoy of De La Soul and Mike Gee of Jungle Brothers for the track, Birds of a Feather, for his new album From the Black Pool of Genius (due out June 29).
I was so entrenched in the music of the Native Tongues crew that even still it’s hard for me to be an objective critic of this song in the current context of my own musical tastes. Nostalgia trip or not, it seems like accomplishment enough just to get four of these guys together on the same track.
Frankly, I think this song is on point, but, hey, these guys have earned a lifetime achievement award from me, so you can be the judge.
