Hip Hop Stories, Videos, Interviews of Note

Sweet!

Netflix Stretch & Bobbito doc is great fyi

I assume you are all listening to the podcast Mogul: the Life and Death of Chris Lighty

Another one from me: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/salt-n-pepa-our-life-in-15-songs-w500728

Man, really sad about Combat Jack. I'd listened to him a little bit before, but really enjoyed his podcast about Chris Lighty this year and was starting to go back through his radio shows. Seemed like a really great dude.

this has a lot of good nuggets. what a life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqKCqmD213M

the interviewer/narrator dude in Netflix's Hip Hop Evolution is a total clown but there's some good clips/bits from various folks in there. The south and Bay Area ones were v good. The more recent one about the "underground" was... odd. I really never thought Freestyle Fellowship was that big a deal?

flow innovators
kinda awkward to go straight from a Puff/Jiffy era hagiography to "ok now here's a whole episode about ppl who hated that shit" lol

I like the series ok but it focuses almost exclusively on MCs & lyrics. Has he even mentioned the concept of sampling?? I can only remember producers showing up on screen to talk about MCs.

that hadn't occurred to me but that's an interesting point. You'd think that would have come up re: like, PE/Bomb Squad or Organized Noize (or even Puffy lol)

Yeah exactly. I think narrator dude said in initial episode he was a (failed) MC so I get that would be the lens he primarily views the genre thru but cmon now.

I feel like there's a clear from Freestyle Fellowship to Kendrick

Btw Season 2 of the Mogol podcast is running now, this time about Luther Campbell

It's really good so far

https://www.amc.com/shows/hip-hop-the-songs-that-shook-america/full-episodes/season-01/episode-04/elevators-1996

lol is that just where Big Boi does interviews now? For the Netflix Hip Hop Evolution segment on Outkast he was in the same seat/backdrop

prob his studio?

I assume so

I enjoyed this

https://theundefeated.com/features/oral-history-shaq-shaquille-oneal-shaq-diesel-the-making-of-rap-hip-hop/amp/

Loving the Open Mike Eagle podcast that's just him interviewing Prince Paul, it's called What Had Happened Was. Three eps out so far, on Gravediggaz, "Three Feet High & Rising" and "A Prince Amongst Thieves". Paul is a really funny, engaging speaker.

It’s so great! I just posted about it in the Prince Paul thread yesterday.

Yeah, it's really great - I'd love a version with more production and longer excerpts of the music, but Paul is such an entertaining speaker that it makes sense they're keeping a light touch.

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