The Kickstarter-funded Entitled album from Torae is finally out tomorrow, but there’s just enough time to drop a video for the Pete Rock produced Get Down, originally released back in November. Watch below.
Category: Kickstarter
Torae – ‘Let Em Know’
Torae has dropped the latest single from his new, Kickstarter-funded album, Entitled. Watch the video below.
Torae – ‘Get Down’
Torae gives us a taste of his new, Kickstarter-funded album Entitled, and its a banger, courtesy of Pete Rock. Listen to Get Down below.
Run The Jewels – ‘Meow The Jewels’
After months of teasers and snippets, it seems that Meow The Jewels is finally upon us. Its hard to know what to say about a hip-hop album made from the noise of cats, so best thing to do is just download it for free and listen. Don’t forget that this is for a good cause, so make sure you buy the vinyl version too.
Get it here.
Torae – ‘Saturday Night’
Torae is currently running a Kickstarter campaign for his new album, and today has rewarded fan’s efforts so far by dropping this unreleased DJ Premier joint. Listen below, and click here to pledge to the Kickstarter.
Meow The Jewels – Oh My Darking (Don’t Meow)
Constant touring has made it hard for El-P to get busy on that crazy-ass Meow The Jewels project, but things are now progressing nicely with this contribution from Just Blaze. He’s tackled Oh My Darking (Don’t Meow), and you can hear the madness below.
Here’s why the Stretch Armstrong & Bobbito Kickstarter is worthy of your money
Hip-hop radio icons Stretch Armstrong and Bobbito Garcia have launched a Kickstarter campaign for contributions towards the launch of their anticipated documentary film, Stretch & Bobbito: Radio That Changed Lives. Its a project worthy of your cash, and here’s why.
Goofy, sometimes ridiculously immature, but always bringing the freshest music from new hip-hop artists, the Stretch & Bobbito show on Columbia University’s WKCR radio station ran for the best part of the 90s.
Much has been made about how the show was influential in helping to launch the careers of many who would go on to be huge, most notably Jay-Z, Nas, Biggie Smalls and the Wu-Tang Clan.
More importantly, at least in our eyes, the show also supported independent and alternative hip-hop artists, championing the likes of Kool Keith when he reinvented himself as Dr. Octagon, and showing much love to groups like Company Flow, Juggaknots, J Treds, Godfather Don and countless more.
Bobbito even founded his own label to release a lot of the underground material that was appearing on the show. The much-missed Fondle’em Records helped to introduce the world to MF Doom, and laid the foundation for labels of a similar vein, including Rawkus, Stones Throw and Def Jux.
It’s therefore no exaggeration to say that Stretch and Bob played perhaps the most important role in creating that classic mid-late 90s indy boom of creativity that many of us are still stuck on today. And that is surely reason enough to throw some money their way.
Donate here, and read more about the documentary here, including upcoming screenings.
Meow The Jewels – ‘Meowrly’
And so it has begun. After months of painstaking work, we’ve finally got the first taste of Meow The Jewels from Run The Jewels. Its a reworking of Early, and you can listen below. Actually turned out better than you might imagine.
De La Soul – ‘God It’ feat. Nas
New music from De La Soul is always good news. When it has Nas on it, even better. You won’t find God It on the new Kickstarter-funded album, but it is being presented as a teaser of things to come. Check it out on the link below, and let us know what you think.
http://www.audiomack.com/embed4-large/2dbz/god-it
Thoughts on the De La Soul Kickstarter
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.