The PJ's at Sherwood Heights: A Del Webb (TM) Hip Hop Retirement Community

I saw the LL Cool J/Run DMC show at Barclay's and Eric B was sitting in front of me

― (extremely quan voice) My Lifestyle (Whiney G. Weingarten), Monday, January 26, 2015 2:30 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

how big of a crowd do they draw nowadays?

hey guys Baz Luhrmann is on top of things for us: http://www.wonderingsound.com/netflix-baz-luhrmann-the-get-down-hip-hop-drama-south-bronx/

that's amongst the worst pairings i could think of

more DiCaprio breakdancing I hope

this should be ....something

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/02/09/nyregion/at-50-slick-rick-a-hip-hop-pioneer-still-has-stories-to-tell.html?_r=1

slick rick in NYT

started reading Charney's Big Payback. v entertaining so far, a couple of irl lol anecdotes (like Big Bank Hank receiving a call during the Rapper's Delight recording session that he's been fired from his pizza parlor job). Sylvia Robinson is predictably hatable (also lol at Bambaataa calling Joe Robinson "Joe Rob-a-nigga"). I think in most other genre overviews I would be bored/uninterested in Charney's business-end angle, but the business dealings in this particular genre history are kind of insane enough to justify it.

yeah i just was looking at that at the library

Piskor goes deeper into the details of various songs, people, etc. but Charney's covering a wider sweep and a longer time period

esp curious about this episode Charney mentions where Lou Reed brought Run DMC onto some tv show to perform and they got heckled by white teenagers...? 1984 I think?

Lol I don't think "their father had envy so I shot him in the head" is the real line, Charnas

Still hoping for a day when every major city has both a contemporary rap station and a classic rap station

not much to add other than i have been CANING gang starr and group home and jeru this weekend and would like you to join me in worship at the church of dj premier

finished the Charnas book. it has its virtues - comprehensive historical sweep, a strong central argument, loads of inside baseball/behind the scenes stuff. But it left me a bit cold. Beyond getting tired of his penchant for Paul Harvey-style narrative setups ("and that lowly unpaid intern with the goofy accent turned out to be.... Lyor Cohen") somewhere around halfway through, at some point all the rhapsodic marveling at the structure of soda endorsement deals and vicious management deal backstabbing began to get kind of gross. I just don't share his enthusiasm for the subject, the "business is AWESOME!" undertone made me more depressed than excited. While Charnas doesn't seem blind to the drawbacks of rap and corporate America getting so thoroughly in bed together, his overarching argument is that this was a net positive because it contributed to the "browning" of America, it desegregated media, it made us more multicultural, and (of course) it gave us Obama. 6 years on though, it's clear that Obama is not the transformational president he (and many others) hoped he would be, America is still really fucking racist, rap is basically dead/no longer the hot cultural commodity on the receiving end of corporate America's rapacious greed, and most black people's lives are still beset by poverty, lack of opportunity, institutional racism, etc. To be fair, Charnas does note in his closing epilogue about Obama that the "economic coattails" of rap's billionaires have turned out to be be pretty short, and it is feel true that a lot of my peers/generation's attitudes about race have been shaped (for the better) by rap ... but I dunno, I'm more cynical about it than he is. I can't really read about 50 becoming a millionaire off the back of Vitamin Water and think that that was a cool or good thing.

his point about rap desegregating pop music, charts, media etc. made me wonder what Charnas would think of that "Billboard marginalization of black music" thread, or the fact that rap seems to have largely receded from the pop forefront since Obama took office

(not that I'm positing a causal relationship about Obama, duh. Just that the book ends in 2008, with rap fully integrated into massive corporate machinery)

anyway, lost gem:

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

oh man i forgot about that good stuff

did not know about this:
https://medium.com/cuepoint/how-cool-c-and-steady-b-robbed-a-bank-killed-a-cop-and-lost-their-souls-d24d404f120a

Remember this story can't wait to read that

missed this thread's existence! The Backspin - which plays old school hip-hop, has evening shows run by Afrika Bambataa and Ed Lover - is one of the sirius stations i flip around on my commute. Even though it's all 15-30 years back now (jesus) it still feels weird to hear whodini and notorious big on the same station, as i still feel that division between "old school" and "new school". I wonder if that's part of the problem with this being a larger market. compare "pop hits from the 60s, 70s and 80s" "rock hits from the 70s, 80s and 90s" "rap hits from the '80s, '90s and '00s" - imo the last feels the hardest to connect

Whodini (along with Run-DMC, T La Rock, and others who came after them) were considered the new school!

I mean that just underlines my point

New song from Camp Lo and Ski Beats, the guy who produced almost all of Uptown Saturday Night: Black Jesus

ooooh give it to me

I like it a lot. Short and sweet.

they don't fuck with the formula

That's great

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6pSqO0JGDA
somebody give that guy a billion dollars

lol there's footage of that?!

two things i think prevent the emergence of "classic hip-hop": first, "classic" anything relies upon a narrative of cultural stagnation- the notion that there isn't any rock music better than zep, or classical music better than beethoven, or jazz better than _kind of blue_, or whatever.

second, "classic rock" is fundamentally a bourgeois institution, and black culture is simply not bourgeois (due to factors including e.g. massive american institutional racism, the most prominent advocate of black bourgeois culture being a serial rapist, etc.)

there are some "Old School" R&B stations in big cities. The one here plays 80s/early 90s hip hop mixes during drive time.

"classic rock" is fundamentally a bourgeois institution, and black culture is simply not bourgeois

care to elaborate here? Like how do these economic and cultural factors intersect

funnily enough a classic hip hop R&B station just started in minneapolis

btw I made a Spotify playlist that puts the EPMD "Jane" saga in chronological order

https://open.spotify.com/user/matthelgeson/playlist/4IUtkiGCTmkOHhk1UqXn4Y

haha nerd

by which I mean awesome

It's sort of a weird thing I can't really think of a parallel in any other group

going back to the last revive I recently discovered this 1985 Dr. Dre mix album where's he's playing Egyptian Lover and 2 Live Crew before they moved to Florida

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhGkP9TCdgU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSfxXqg7txI

d'oh, i never published the spotify link:
http://open.spotify.com/user/forksclovetofu/playlist/6K4aVwluqiVYsNJikx2NhQ

The Jane thing is p unusual, and weird that the narrative didn't grow chronologically

9xp)

oh wow rev i had that on cassette, some of that weird macola stuff would make it's way into the wal-mart in my small town's cutout bin of cassettes

wait what is the actual Jane chronology? I think I'm missing one or two songs

there's one on every album, so i figured that was the chronology unless one was a prequel

Ah I was wondering if I was missing something in 4 and 5. I do have Who Killed Jane

http://www.egotripland.com/gallery/worst-rap-songs-mix/23267/

man this is rough sledding, hilarious though

o wow this is a gift

matt you mind if i start a thread / poll? this needs more ears.

got to the happy birthday song, can't wait any longer; THE WORLD MUST KNOW

holy shit

I remembered Joey Lawrence's musical career, completely forgot David Faustino's

this brian wilson track is among the worst things i've ever heard under any circumstances including personal tragedies

that one's not new to me. Now this "A to the D" track otoh

blurb is right that the beat is fine but his rapping and that voice are so wtf

ha I've always liked that Dragnet rap

i can still kinda remember the bridge

so to reply to that post i missed on the last revive, time and the development of cultures over time is a basically bourgeois concept because poverty leaves one mired in the everlasting now. it's difficult if not impossible to conceive of a radically different time when one spends most of one's time struggling to meet basic needs.

listened to the first four EPMD albums in a row yesterday. was thinking of doing an E vs P poll

but i figured this being ILM parrish would get crushed because of "react"

jesus christ this thread title is impossible to search for

I had never heard of this documentary before, looks awesome:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kSsqWNSQqs

Yeh it's really good, love the live footage and the Lovebug Starski bit near the end

god this thread is nigh impossible to search for

watched the first four eps of Netflix's "Hip Hop Evolution" - some good interviews/footage. Nothing particularly revelatory except for maybe the Schooly D part where he refuses to do an interview unless they bring him a chocolate cake with "STAR OF THE SHOW" written on it

haha I just saw that want to check it out this week

btw all my posts on this thread are going to be prefaced w how difficult this thread is to search for fyi

ha

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLr2K3v34uc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXC9oyNMhcI

Group Home LP about to get a vinyl repress

Blu gets a rare CL Smooth guest verse

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

also Dare Iz a Darkside still fucking rules so much, jabbering drugged out funk

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

Was just thinking that while hip-hop reissues have been a steady lil business for a minute, no one has really done Rhino/Numero-style discography box sets. The only ones I can think of are the Sugarhill set from 1997 (which was Rhino) and the recent Eric B and Rakim box (which was vinyl only w/ 1 CD of rarities)

yeah not a ton in general, there's a bunch of different def jam ones but none of them outside of the original silver one (which had a few early gems) really feature anything too rare

all eyez on me - full dynamic range edition licensed by earache

Like why can't I get CDQ of the 2nd through 6th Kurtis Blow albums?

sadly that early era is in most need of preservation and least likely to get it