Saturday, January 24th, 2004

Whoa.

And thanks to Oliver (thanks to Jay Smooth): hey ya!

posted by @ 5:46 pm | 0 Comments

Saturday, January 24th, 2004

More embarassing news about Keyshawn Johnson. Forgot to mention earlier that dude was booed out of the Oakland Arena two months back when he tried to get on court between Stanford and Cal basketball games. Heavy rotation on the block: Tom Petty.

posted by @ 4:50 pm | 0 Comments

Thursday, January 22nd, 2004

Oh hell no. I spoke too soon. Here’s your real MP3 of the week, courtesy Notes from a Different Kitchen.

posted by @ 8:58 pm | 0 Comments

Thursday, January 22nd, 2004

I WANT TO BE YOUR PRESIDENT, YEAAAGHH!

Jay Smooth comes through with the MP3 of the week, just head here. There’s also this one that sounds like it was made for vintage Playstation. Howie zowie!

posted by @ 6:27 pm | 0 Comments

Thursday, January 22nd, 2004

NOT IN MY BACKYARD

Keyshawn Johnson got jacked while waiting for a haircut right around the corner yesterday. What can I say? Fools in South Berkeley do NOT play!!!

posted by @ 9:36 am | 0 Comments

Thursday, January 22nd, 2004

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

I think I wrote this earlier but Years of the Monkey are straight bananas. Revolution years. I mean check this out:

1968–French student uprising, Columbia University takeover, MLK assassinated, Chicago Democratic Convention, return of the gangs in the South Bronx

1980–Iran hostage crisis, Reagan Revolution

1992–LA Rebellion, “Cop Killer”, Gang truce movement goes national, Clinton’s “centrist” victory

Whoa. Enjoy, or better yet, per Tanya Stephens, handle the ride!

posted by @ 8:01 am | 0 Comments

Wednesday, January 21st, 2004

MORE DIZZEE-NESS

Not talking Gephart’s stunning fall. Oh yeah, Jon Stewart’s line of the night, on John Kerrey: “They don’t call him Mr. Excitement for–well, they don’t call him Mr. Excitement.”

Anyway, the time-killing topic at hand is Ben Williams sez critics don’t know where to place Dizzee in relation to American rap. Resisting the snarky urge to say it’s because they don’t know how to, while not resisting the urge to beat this topic into the ground (because for us bloggerati Dizzee is so, you know, ’03), let me float a few comparisons…

*”I Luv U” updates Ice Cube’s “You Can’t Fade Me” topically (you remember the aggravating track in which narrator imagines “kicking the bitch in the tummy”–another irresponsible lad not dealing well with the consequences of casual sex) with the dialogical method of “It’s A Man’s World” (tho the woman goes uncredited here, wow). A double-whammy. (Actually a triple if you figure in the college-girl turnabout thing of “Look Who’s Burning Now” from DC.)

*”Sitting Here” recalls Nas’s “Life’s A Bitch”–life as a mask or a front, the strange in-betweenness of trying to detach from the street while having to engage it to survive, the feeling of time slowing down and speeding up at the same time, everything bad happening in John Woo slo-mo at the same time youthful innocence is stolen prematurely. (Plus there’s AZ’s oh-shit-I-got-the-mic-first enthusiasm which brings us to the next thought…)

*Rascal’s delivery recalls young LL Cool J (or if less generous, MC Shan)–excitable, high-pitched, aggressive. Downside of this analogy: Britrap still awaits its Rakim.

posted by @ 1:30 pm | 0 Comments

Monday, January 19th, 2004

RAS DIZZEE & THE FUTURE SHOCKERS +

THE HIP HOP STATE OF THE UNION

If you’re in the Bay, here’s an event to get excited about…

What: The Hip Hop State of the Union

When: Tuesday, January 20th , 6:00-9:00 pm

Where: Progressive Nerve Center, 1751 Mission Street, San Francisco CA

The Dennis Kucinich for President campaign in San Francisco will host the Hip Hop State of the Union address on Tuesday, January 20th, to coincide with President Bush’s State of the Union address. Adisa Banjoko, AKA The Bishop of Hip Hop, host of One Mic hip-hop and politics talk show (910 AM KNEW), will MC the event, and DJ Rob Reyes of M1 Promotions will spin records throughout the evening.

The event will begin with a live talk back to President Bush’s State of the Union address, followed by a viewing of Dennis Kucinich’s “State of the Nation” speech, taped earlier in the day from the campaign trail in New Hampshire.

After the televised speeches there will be a panel of prominent activists and artists speaking on the Hip Hop State of the Union. Panelists include Billy Upski Wimsatt, author of Bomb the Suburbs and the forthcoming How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office; the Reverend Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou, National Director of Community Outreach for the Kucinich for President 2004 Campaign and the author of Urbansouls; and Mr. Taylor of the Who Ridas. The speakers will address issues of importance to the hip hop community as we mobilize to pick a presidential candidate to represent our interests in DC.

Mike Stern AKA Think will be doing live graf canvases throughout the event. Other invited guests include Paris, Lyrics Born, and E40.

posted by @ 6:00 pm | 0 Comments

Monday, January 19th, 2004

FEELING DIZZEE

Here’s something on Dizzee Rascal in the Voice. Enjoy the text and hypertext.

OK, back to the manuscript. Got 25 pages cut. Only 175 to go!!!

———————

Dizzee Rascal

Boy in Da Corner

XL

Was only yesterday when London’s Black dance music scene seemed to cast off history’s weight and speed toward the millennium. To Black British music critic Kodwo Eshun, sociology, biography, and a fixation on “the real” had shackled Black music. While hip-hoppers strained to keep it real, Eshun wanted to take the brakes off the breaks. Black Atlantic Futurism had arrived, and promised great leaps forward into “possibility spaces.” The tempos rocketed, the colors blurred, and the streets disappeared beneath the clouds.

Turns out the real future shock is Dizzee Rascal, the U.K.’s 19-year-old Mercury Prize winner. When the sun rises on Dizzee’s “Brand New Day,” he is kotched up in the flat, punching out riddims into cheap PC software, beats born of ringtones, video games, and staticky pirate-radio sounds. They quiver and throb, struggle for internal equilibrium, and often refuse to groove. His processor works differently–on “Jus a Rascal,” for instance, he pulls together T.O.K.’s hysterical dancehall harmonies, a synthesized guitar line halfway between death metal and the English Beat, stuttering Southern hi-hats, and a kick drum retarded to a crawl. His is a William Gibson mirror-world, patterns de/recontextualized at the edge of recognition and seen in syrupy slo-mo. Dizzee’s sound of Young Britain doesn’t torque up and go, it just turns round and round.

When he opens his mouth, words pour out at a high pitch and pace, as if syllables are the only thing that can hold back a scream. Ms. Mills’s only son tells what he calls “the same old story”: fatherless child coming up in the East London council estates, aimless youth failed by the schools and the shitstem but saved by music, bedroom beat-head who went top of the pops by representing his streets but can’t escape their judgment. Right outside his front door, mates have turned predators. The future, he admits, “ain’t right.” On “Sitting Here,” what he sees burns his eyes. Police and thieves. Shottas and hotties. Childhood school chums who grow up to knife and shoot each other. There are no great leaps here. The daily is never routine. There are only moments for Dizzee to capture, encapsulate, and preserve, griot-like. East London calling, futurism is dead. Millennial velocity has crashed.

By now the scene has dumped both “speed” and “garage,” dragged its asphalt-gummy bass down to half-speed, and embraced the term “grime.” Where the futurists wanted a hermetic world of sound, grime’s voices attract the masses with sociology, biography, and the real. So Solid Crew’s members are hounded by coppers. Beefs multiply. Dizzee shows his stab wounds to interviewers, and British music writers and the global bloggerati hail him as the British 50 Cent or 2Pac. He represents the same old story told from Vallejo to Kansas City to Kingston to Cape Town, rap that talks locally and connects globally. Boy in Da Corner’s one concession to the hip-hop motherland–the Billy Squier “Big Beat,” back-to-the-Funhouse freestyle of “Fix Up Look Sharp”–is far too eager to please. Blame that one, and an assortment of other battle-rhyme clichés, on youth.

But when Dizzee thinks very deeply—worrying about growing up, about those around him who won’t grow up, about dying before he grows up—he sounds like, what else can we call it, the real thing. He delivers threats with KRS-style meta-awareness. “Just remember this: I am you,” he shouts on “Cut Em Off.” “So if you think you’re real, do what you gotta do.” Like Tricky or Massive Attack, the boy is best at taking you inside, at internalizing rather than externalizing. He can be even more specific and desperate. His breakout “I Luv U” describes two teens in a high-stakes stalemate over an unwanted pregnancy. Locked in the estates’ web of relations, they use sex as blackmail. By the end, the boy is reduced to fantasizing about a college girl, someone who has escaped but still gives ghetto head. Then the frenetic beat seems to take over and the boy freestyles his last lines as if once the music fades he too might disappear. Dizzee manages to make this all sound funny and horrifying at once.

It’s a measure of just how much Brit-rap has matured that a year ago, Home Secretary David Blunkett and Culture Minister Kim Howells turned the bully pulpit on Black music, blaming rap for “glorifying gun culture and violence.” Hysteria followed–same old story. Perhaps Dizzee’s Mercury coronation late last year should be read as the redemption of Brit-rap and Black British music, and a sign of the permanent American-style culture war to come. In the U.K. press, Dizzee’s line is quoted everywhere: “I’m a problem for Anthony Blair.” If he remains this compelling, that’s one boast he will undoubtedly be called upon to back up. His future–and that of Black British music–isn’t the one Eshun envisioned at the millennium. But it’s full of possibilities.

posted by @ 3:33 pm | 0 Comments

Friday, January 16th, 2004

A HIP-HOP GENERATION AGENDA: WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

Brilliant discussion between Davey D and Cedric Muhammad of Black Electorate.com here, regarding the stakes for 2004 for the hip-hop generation. Definitely check it out, debate, and circulate.

posted by @ 8:19 am | 0 Comments



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