We’ve been hyping the Mr Green Live From the Streets project for a while, but now you can listen to the full album thanks to the official stream. The sick line-up of features includes KRS-ONE, Vinnie Paz, Malik B and more, so do the right thing; listen below and then go buy it.
Now that he’s officially a Jamla employee, Young Guru is getting stuck in with production duties on new Rapsody track Don’t Need It, from the extended version of her Beauty and the Beast project, out now.
Mr Green has released another track from his intriguing Live From the Streets project, which blends sounds from urban America with raps from some of the game’s finest.
If I Don’t Go To Hell features Pacewon and Vinnie Paz, and its dope. Listen on the link below, and look out for the album coming soon.
https://m.soundcloud.com/greenhiphop/2-if-i-dont-go-to-hell-1
UPDATE: So it looks like the whole thing was a hilarious April Fool’s joke. Thanks for playing with our hearts, fuckers. Part of us STILL thinks it might be real though. Stranger things have happened.
Its no secret that we wet our pants anytime there’s new music from MF DOOM, and so its safe to say the news about an upcoming album with Flying Lotus has us very excited. The collaborative Mask of the North Star album will drop May 5 on Lex Recordings, with a host of guest appearances. Incredibly, the list includes El-P, and Quasimoto, which is surely a good sign for that long-awaited new Madvillain project. The coming together of Fly Lo and DOOM also explains why they are set to share the stage together in London on May 5, a show which we are happy to say we’ll be at. In the meantime, he’s the only bit of music from the new album we’ve had so far; Masquatch.
The latest episode of the DJ Premier series Bars in the Booth features Ras Kass, and the Cali vet is on absolute fire. Watch the drama below, and go get that Ras Kass/Apollo Brown album out now.
The recent news that De La Soul have launched a Kickstarter campaign to get their new album out is part awesome, part sad.
Its awesome for obvious reasons. De La are one of the greatest hip-hop groups of all time, and have never released a bad album. No matter how it ends up making its way to us, there’s little doubt that the new album will likewise be worth it.
Its also for obvious reasons why its sad. The group has been on a noble anti-record label crusade for years, which has earned them respect for way more than just their music. But in all honesty, when a group as stellar as De La cannot get a budget for a new album, the music business has really become a fucked-up place.
It’s true that Kickstarter is one of the many new ways that music now gets to market, and its a process that is incredibly liberating and empowering for both the artist and the fan. As listeners, we get to be part of something we love, and are even rewarded for taking part.
It’s this community spirit that De La are pushing with their campaign, highlighting how this is a collaborative project between them and us fans, with some impressive items for those that pledge anything from $5 up to an eye-popping $10,000 (too late if you were thinking of splashing out that ten grand – its already gone).
For the artist, a successful campaign means getting their music out, usually in the hope of getting noticed on a wider scale, or in De La’s case, re-noticed. The sense of fan empowerment and of sticking a middle finger up at the industry only holds so much weight though, and it would be perhaps naive to think De La would likely have chosen this route had a label been willing to give them the cash.
In the campaign trailer the group looks genuinely passionate about this being a fan project, and they have certainly been the champions of new innovation and doing whatever they can to get music to us, from long legal battles, to recently giving away their entire back catalog for free download.
But despite all of the above, its hard to shake the feeling that we shouldn’t have got to this point at all.
We’ve already donated to the project, and as we write this, the funding target looks to be comfortably in sight. We encourage you to pledge money too, and support these three legends of hip-hop.
Click here to read more about the project, watch the video, check out the rewards, and pony up your cash.
UPDATE: De La Soul managed to smash the funding target in a matter of just hours. Congratulations to the group. We can’t wait to hear it, and get our copy on vinyl.
The legendary Pete Rock will soon be dropping PeteStrumentals 2; the follow-up to his classic 2001 beat tape album. It’s set to be released on the insatiable Mellow Music Group label, and you can listen to a taste of what we can expect with new track One, Two, A Few More.
We could listen to Phonte all day long, and so we were pretty excited when he recently showed up as guest snob on the always-brilliant The Music Snobs podcast. The subject is Lauren Hill, with Phontigallo somehow managing to drop references to Project Pat, Mark Morrison and Mike Ehrmantraut. Incredible.
There’s no other art form that has been spoofed and lampooned as much as hip-hop. It was the butt of everyone’s jokes for decades, and even now, after years of mainstream exposure, the wider world’s lack of understanding of the music still makes us feel like we are being laughed at whenever a rapper appears on a network talk show, or in a serious debate piece.
The world of advertising has always been wise to the power of hip-hop’s popularity though, and that’s why seeing rappers get paid to sell products has been happening for years.
But while sponsorship is one thing, using an artist’s music in a commercial, on a TV show or in other marketing campaigns is a whole different thing. Flattery is nice, but for the most part, when a rap song is used in an advert, its as a pastiche, and chosen for irony.
A recent example is a price comparison company in the UK using Snoop Doggy Dogg’s What’s My Name to soundtrack a commerical of a nerdy white man riding through the hood in an imaginary low-rider full of ghetto chicks. Snoop himself makes an appearance, suggesting he was more than OK with his music being used, but lets face it, there isn’t much that Snoop won’t do for money.
Snoop isn’t alone either, and that’s where the lines get blurred. Bruce Springsteen is one of the wealthiest musician’s in the world, but still rakes in millions of dollars from long and epic world tours. He does have integrity however, and on several occasions has turned down lucrative offers to use his biggest songs in commercials because he didn’t like the ethics of the company.
But few rappers have pockets as deep as Springsteen, and are therefore less likely to turn down a huge paycheck to use one of their songs. As a result, some of the best hip-hop tracks of all time have been used and abused and taken completely out of their original context in commercials, promos, TV shows and trailers, to the point where they have lost much of their original power.
The Message by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Can I Kick It? by A Tribe Called Quest, Time 4 Sum Aksion by Redman, Sound of Da Police by KRS-ONE, and countless Run DMC tracks have all been used to death, and their legacy is now somewhat diluted.
We know you can’t stop the profit, and as long as the permission is being granted and the artist is making their money, it’s relatively acceptable. But as fans of real hip-hop, it might have been nice to keep some of these classics as ours only.
Dr Dre interviews are rare as fuck, so this recent appearance on Big Boy’s radio show is worth a listen. Dre breaks down how Nuthin’ But A G Thang came about, how NWA was formed, and how he managed to make peace with Eazy-E just before he died. Watch the master in session below.
