Hip Hop Stories, Videos, Interviews of Note

Yeah love that one.

love bill adler's opening on the yo mtv doc

why are all these clothing companies paying all this money to fund these documentaries that not a lot of people actually watch and don't have the same quality as actual TV?

there's a whole music nerd niche content/????/profit thing going on with a lot of companies' online presence right now but i'm not necessarily mad at it. you saying 'same quality as actual TV' like visually it all looks crummy or it's not up to the theoretical bar of if MTV or Fuse was doing docs about this stuff?

VH1Docs are a lot more tightly edited and have access to a lot more music and archival footage, so yes

presumably stussy is just paying a marketing "social media" company to create content and they okay'd this as it's evergreen, nerd chic and cheaper than creating a national ad campaign by a damn sight?

Yeah probably about right. Stussy wasnt even a part of hip hop fashion during the Yo Raps days iirc? Was more of a surf/skate/rasta thing I remember anyway. I dont remember it aligning with hip hop fashion until DIlla was immortalized wearing a stussy shirt.

i think of stussy as skateboardery from that era

I think in 5th-6th grade all I wore was stussy pants, gotcha jackets and jordan VI's

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!

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