Posts about Hip Hop (RSS, JSON)

6PM — The Guardian on Hip Hop group Digable Planets, who are celebrating the 30-year anniversary of their seminal album “Blowout Comb.”

9AM — For Madvillainy’s twenty-year anniversary, the 4K remastered music videos of Madvaillain’s “Accordion” and “Rhinestone Cowboy.”

8PM — The Hieroglyphics spit their legendary lines over instrumentals from the uber-talented OMA. Has my head bop like it’s 1998 again.

11AM — Stones Throw releases the Madvillainy demos on vinyl later this month.

In 2002, before Madlib and MF DOOM finished Madvillainy, the first demo sequence of the album leaked online – early vocal cuts from DOOM, recorded then quickly mixed in LA at Madlib’s Bomb Shelter studio. The leak spread around the world, and while the tracks may have been unfinished, it was clear that this was a hip-hop album unlike any other…

8PM — The Internet Archive now hosts more than 350 thousand hiphop mixtapes from DatPiff. Kids, before Spotify started numbing you with algorithmically curated playlists, we used to discover new music through other humans. Rap music had very little airplay on the Radio or music television; sharing mixtapes from friends and popular DJs was the only way to find new stuff. Mixtapes are an essential part of Hip Hop culture and this is an invaluable archive of the genre’s history.

5PM — The Wu Tang Clan are planning a Las-Vegas residency. Just four shows so far; a full Celine-Dion-like residency would break my heart.

7PM — 50 Years Later, Is There Anything Left Of Hip Hop?

Now there’s a universal voice, and the verses sound and feel like a string of buzzphrases. Any song could be by anyone from anywhere. The songs convey a shallow, one-size-fits-all black cool. It’s hip hop muzak. On another podcast JPEGMafia and Danny Brown talked about how impossible the old methods of beat-making were, and how layered the rapping. Hip hop these days can be made more quickly, easily, and cheaply, and can spread farther faster. Anyone, anywhere can do it, without vetting, and find an audience.

This resonates a lot. I don’t understand today’s rap music. Today’s rap is cheap, both musically and lyrically. It’s created to sell, not to create or to educate. Rap has lost its soul.

8PM — How Hip Hop Conquered the World “Wesley Morris traces the art form from its South Bronx origins to all-encompassing triumph.”

(I swear this is the last post about Hip Hop’s 50th)

4PM — The 150 greatest Hip Hop music videos according to the Rolling Stone. So many brilliant hip hop videos have been produced over the years: The Pharcyde’s Drop, Beastie Boys’ Sabotage or Tyler, the Creator’s Yonkers. And you end up with Missy Elliot on number 1? The artist dancing in front of a fish-eye lens, big cars, half-naked women dancing in the rain, didn’t every music video look like that at the time?

4PM — The greatest Hip Hop movies, according to The Guardian’s Radheyan Simonpillai. Beat Street is clearly missing from this list. And if you include The Forty-Year-Old Version, you might as well include other movies that explore the social environments from which rap music originates, such as Menace II Society or Boyz n the Hood.

8PM

Watch Jonwayne make a new beat from next to nothing. Gosh, I hope he’s got a new album coming out soon.

5PM

Nineties hip hop, mostly instrumentals, mixed by Andrew Weatherall. (via)

11AM — Understand rhythmic patterns—straight, swing, and shift—with these interactive explainers from The Pudding; inspired by the most excellent Dilla Time.

11AM — Madlib is playing a rare Australia DJ set in Melbourne next week on 17 June.

3PM

Killer Mike, EI-P – Don’t Let The Devil ft. thankugoodsir

3PM — The Blog Era, a new podcast series, explores the world of hip-hop blogs, which shaped the whole industry and media coverage during the form’s hey day from about 2007 until its beginning demise around 2012.

4PM — Old School Flyers posts flyers of early-day hip hop parties.

8AM — The big Dilla Time playlist is now complete. It is now a whopping ten hours long, containing over 150 songs, spanning all sorts of musical genres and eras.

5PM — Datpiff, a central archive for historical and contemporary hip-hop mixtapes, is pivoting but will hand over its library to the Internet Archive. It’s nice that sometimes good things just don’t disappear from the Internet. (via)

4PM

De La Soul on stage with a classic track, The Roots as the background band, Black Thought standing in for the late Trugoy and a wonderful tribute to Trugoy—this De La Soul performance is perfect and utterly moving.

3PM

El Michels Affair & Black Thought – Glorious Game

2PM

What a band: Some of the members have played with Marc Ronson, Amy Winehouse, Sharon Jones, or Charles Bradley; they are members of the infamous Menahan Street Band who are also behind many releases at Daptone Records. And Freddie Gibbs is a wildly underrated MC.

9PM — Of course, after posting the Dilla Time playlist, I wanted to find pictures of J Dilla’s record collection. What I found was this incredible story of a Detroit record dealer who bought a storage unit full of records, which turned out to be J Dilla’s collection.

5PM

A grand tribute at the Grammy awards marking 50 Years of Hip Hop. It perfectly recreates the time when Hip Hop took the final turn off the street into show business: Missy Elliot has her moment. After that, everything is less about words and mostly about choreographed dancing.

6PM — A new book by Will Hagle celebrates Madvillainy, the legendary album by MF Doom and Madlib. It will be available from 9 March. The book part of Bloomsbury Publishing’s 33 ⅓, a series of books about classic albums, each with a specific place in the history of popular culture.

7PM — Caleb Mason, a law scholar, dissects the lyrics of verse 2 of Jay-Z’s 99 Problems, explicitly considering the Fourth Amendment. The paper is surprisingly well-written. Even I, not trained in law jargon, can follow the argument. (Via kottke.org)

5PM

I’m loving Vibin’s Boom Bap instrumental mixes. They remind of the olden days, driving to the Baltic Sea in my friend’s VW Golf III. Now they are great background music for work.

6PM — When exposed to music by A Tribe Called Quest whilst it ages, cheese develops a “funky” flavour, “remarkably fruity, both in smell and taste, and significantly different from the other samples.” This applies to humans, too; the more Tribe you listen, the funkier you become. (via)

12PM

I have been a fan of both Loyle Carner and Madlib ever since. Now I want an entire album between the two.