Hip Hop Stories, Videos, Interviews of Note

here's yr answer btw: http://www.fibre2fashion.com/news/fashion-news/newsdetails.aspx?news_id=150272

this is kind of a dope shirt except for the huge ugly logo
http://www.stussy.com/us/de-la-soul-tee

gangstarr one is nice
tho http://www.stussy.com/us/gang-starr-tee?color_item=210

i ain't paying 36 bucks for a tshirt in any case

yeah no

It's weird to think of wearing a shirt that has three separate brands converging

What's your personal style

tbr i like the stussy logo

about the only fashion logo i like is versace's but i'm not exactly going for that look

and xposting from the gmob thread for posterity: http://www.npr.org/2013/08/20/213531470/goodie-mob-on-hip-hop-made-by-and-for-adults

Love the stussy logo, always have. My signature from like 91-94 was in the exact same form.

did someone say stussy?

stussy brand always aligned itself w/ hip hop even though rappers didn't wear stussy.

going to the taping on this, lookin forward to it

[NPR Music’s Microphone Check presents "Eight Million Stories: Hip-Hop in 1993," a storytellers evening about one of the most singularly productive and creative years in hip-hop culture.

Panelists for the evening include* GHOSTFACE KILLAH (Wu-Tang Clan), RALPH McDANIELS (video director and host of Video Music Box), PRINCE PAUL (producer and DJ), FAITH NEWMAN (former Columbia Recs A&R who signed Nas), and MIKE DEAN (producer/engineer & frequent Kanye collaborator).

The “Eight Million Stories: Hip-Hop in 1993” event is part of the yearlong NPR Music series Hip-Hop’s Golden Year. An edited version of the conversation will be made available as an episode of Microphone Check.

NPR Music’s Microphone Check, hosted by Frannie Kelley and Ali Shaheed Muhammad, offers audiences commentary on hip-hop and interviews with its leading artists, as well as a 24/7 music stream that plays the full breadth of rap music.

*scheduled to appear, subject to change

Cool, link it up whenever it comes out.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/MicrophoneCheck/2013/09/11/221440934/marley-marl-on-the-bridge-wars-ll-cool-j-and-discovering-sampling

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkEPtuLGnEQ
"You turn on the radio now, it's all like one big long-ass song. Only thing that change is a different artist's name on it."

love these dudes but some of those complaints are kind of ... off

I dunno about the complaints about radio (why the fuck would I ever listen to the radio) but I don't think you could say that Earl Sweatshirt and Kanye and Chief Keef sound the same, or that they don't express a political viewpoint (well maybe Keef doesn't I can't make it through any of his bullshit)

also weird to hear the head of Def Jam South complain about labels (or does he no longer have that job)

There's some nice stuff in the Combat Jack interview with Big Daddy Kane:

http://thecombatjackshow.com/show/the-combat-jack-show-the-big-daddy-kane-episode/#.UmKIupQ54V8

like Doug E. Fresh teaching him how to be a stage performer by showing him video tapes of James Brown and Pink Floyd concerts

and how he was better friends with KRS than Shan during the BDP/Juice Crew conflict

lots of good Biz Markie stuff too

marley seems like a great dude

http://www.spin.com/articles/wu-tang-clan-enter-the-wu-tang-36-chambers-oral-history/

The making of Gang Star - Hard to Earn interview with Premier
http://nahright.com/news/the-making-of-gang-starrs-hard-to-earn-with-dj-premier/

Also this grantland wu piece should be itt:
http://grantland.com/features/wu-tang-clan-20th-anniversary-reunion-rza-gza-ghostface/

http://www.nytimes.com/1996/01/14/magazine/does-a-sugar-bear-bite.html?pagewanted=all
kind of an amazing article from 96

"It's sort of hard to keep up with the apocrypha on Suge," says Warren Beatty, who has become quite friendly with Suge while researching a movie project set in the rap world. "I mean, Puff Daddy, Muff Daddy, whatever. I know Suge was very close to the man who died. And I know he was very upset. The apocrypha is just talk, even when it's pungent."

great article!

lol Beatty

it's even better when you read it because the beatty quote comes out of nowhere

lol this guy
http://beatsandrants.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8342039be53ef0133f149e81d970b-200wi

yeah, the danny boy sidebar is kinda wow

it's crazy they've never really been able to pin anything serious on Suge. I mean, it seems kind of inevitable but at the moment he's free on "unsupervised parole"

http://www.crazyhood.com/diggin-files-eric-b-rakim-bill-adler/
amazing stuff

it's wild how little respect rakim gets in those old articles; the emcee used to be an afterthought to the dj

Oral history of Rawkus

https://myspace.com/discover/trending/2014/04/16/the-oral-history-of-rawkus-records/

I never linked this!
http://www.npr.org/blogs/MicrophoneCheck/2013/11/11/239941174/eight-million-stories-hip-hop-in-1993

Nice, gonna to dive into these (at some point)

I listened to one of those NPR Microphone Check interview podcasts hosted by Ali Shaheed Muhammed and some other person and they basically let E-40 talk about contract details and publishing royalties for an hour.

which was awesome

Yeah that was linked to in the e40 thread I think, one of the best things I've read this year
There wasn't an E-40 thread

definitely gonna read that Rawkus one, thanks.

a bit afar of topic but interesting
http://www.archdaily.com/501449/the-fifth-pillar-a-case-for-hip-hop-architecture/

http://www.crazyhood.com/diggin-files-wu-tang-clan-bill-adler/

http://www.crazyhood.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/wu-tang-rap-pages-1.jpg
http://www.crazyhood.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/wu-tang-rap-pages-2.jpg
http://www.crazyhood.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Source-4-93-VV-6-94.jpg
http://www.crazyhood.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/source-editorial-by-cheo-8-94.jpg

ha those illustrations!

when the illustrations are bad enough that they get the writer punched

lmao at all of this

Man those ODB and Raekwon illustrations bear such little resemblance to the men in question.

the follow up story is interesting as well:
http://www.crazyhood.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/toure-1-10-10-95.jpg

These days we know Toure as a fairly ubiquitous talking head on tv. He is the host of Fuse’s “HipHop Shop” and “On the Record” and co-host of MSNBC’s “The Cycle.” Back in the Nineties, he wrote not only for The Voice, but for The Source, XXL, Rap Pages, Spin, Essence, and for the English magazine The Face.

Here Toure goes deep. in his opinion, The Wu-Tang, J.U.N.I.O.R. Mafia (a/k/a Biggie Smalls’s crew), and the Suge Knight’s Death Row clique each comprised a hiphop family. All of them were following in the wake of “the first true hiphop family,” Public Enemy, differing from PE’s model “only in character, not structure.” He calls this phenomenon Blockism.

Cheo had suggested something similar in his piece for Rap Pages. “The rules for survival” in the hardrock section of every sprawling metropolis – Staten Island’s Stapleton Projects, in the Wu-Tang’s case — “are quite simple: Never travel anywhere without a crew of brothers ready to fight alongside you like the group’s collective ass depended on it. And never, ever leave home without your sword, kid.”

Cheo then went on to quote Inspector Deck as follows: “We on some real family shit, and if you don’t have your family, you’re fucked, man.”

But here’s Toure:

These families conform to the classic matriarchal African American family structure except that here the matriarchs are men – which is also traditional, since in African American families, roles are always adaptable. That black men organized themselves into largely female families speaks to sexism…but also to a hunger to experience maleness.

Toure ends with a very sympathetic, even lyrical, appreciation of the hip-hop-crew-as-family, by way of explaining why RZA decided to keep the music business at arm’s length and to rely on his homies instead:

Blockism, then, is a more pragmatic nationalism and the hiphop family a comfort zone for strangers in a strange land. A mobile home to make your trip – through the industry, across the Atlantic, from the cradle to the grave – a little mo better.

Whether or not this theory strikes you as deeply insightful or wildly fanciful, it is not standard hip hop critical discourse. I emailed Toure recently wondering why it didn’t earn him a punch in the eye when it was first published.

“I heard, much later, that some folks wanted to beat me up for that. But they never did. Maybe they didn’t know where to find me,” he replied. “Also The Voice was not a prime concern for those folks and their friends. That same piece in The Source would’ve been war, but The Voice was largely invisible to them.”

http://www.redbullmusicacademy.com/magazine/bob-power-interview
I like the comparison of dilla to monk, that feels right.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/microphonecheck/2014/07/31/336885624/cormega-i-just-want-to-be-a-soldier-for-my-culture

Probably the wrong thread, but Houston has a classic hip-hop station now. 92.1 - I heard Warren G, JJ Fad, Snoop, Too Short,

Wish we had one in DC

this is a good watch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08rPLhdBpQI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hw4H2FZjfpo

the story of kool herc extending breaks comes up in a lot of birth of hip hop celebration articles, but the way the story is told doesn't really make sense to me... beat-juggling relatively short breaks is extremely tricky, and ime generally done to impress a crowd (or win a DMC championship) - cool as it is the groove suffers and it's not something you dance to (I'm also uncertain abt the chronology of this because it seems to me that the craft of beat juggling is a much more recent development, maybe something from the golden DMC days of the... 90s?)

so... maybe he was doing this with longer breaks? or maybe the whole merry go round/beat juggling between the same record thing is not the key as much as the novelty in itself of using a double turntable setup?

what kind of mixer would be availabe for him? not something with a crossfader I imagine

I really would like to hear a recording of one of his sets from that era, but I guess it didn't make sense to tape it (although tbh if your primary goal in 1973 was to extend and repeat breaks then tape would probably be the easiest way to achieve this, I believe that's what they did on a lot of classic 4/4 disco kick beats)

I've always been under the impression that the breaks early hip-hop DJs played were typically several bars long, and so wouldn't require super fast technique to work with.

I believe they did have mixers with crossfaders, or approximately equivalent functions, by the mid/late-70s as well

And I also think the ability to "cue" records with your headphones via mixer is a Flash innovation

according to this article Kool Herc at some point acquired a GLI 3880 which has a crossfader, but it appears to have been after 1973
https://djmag.com/news/dj-kool-herc-soundsystem-sells-over-200k-christies-auction

in an interview in The Record Players: DJ Revolutionaries (by Bill Brewster, Frank Broughton) Grand Mixer D.ST (Derek Showard) recalls that Kool Herc did not "cut", explaining that the transitions "would be all off-beat"

https://i.imgur.com/Pi6VsHr.png