Heavyweights Talib Kweli, Pharoahe Monch and 9th Wonder today announced a new collaborative venture named Indie 500. It’s not clear yet if it’s set to be a record label, a group or just a movement, but with these three involved, only good things can come from it.
The aim seems to be to uphold the quality and tradition of the Native Tongues and that classic A Tribe Called Quest/De La Soul vibe, and the legacy of it that has lived on through artists associated with the good people at Okayplayer (J Dilla, the Roots, Little Brother, Mos Def, Q-Tip, Common, Slum Village and others).
All three artists have spent their careers in and around this creative circle anyway, so it’s likely just a case of quality business as usual. Which of course is no bad thing. Any project that combines two of the most gifted rappers of all time with one of the best producers will definitely equal incredible music.
Watch the video below from Okayplayer for the full lowdown.
Producer 9th Wonder recently tweeted about how today’s rap fans are uninterested in female rappers with proper skills, and how an artist like his own Rapsody can struggle to break into the mainstream. As one of the most respected voices in hip-hop, pretty much everything that 9th Wonder says is spot on, and, somewhat sadly this time, he’s dead right once again.
When LL Cool J released the video for his 1996 hit Doin’ It, something wasn’t right. The usual over-cooked hallmarks of a Hype Williams visual were all there, but there was something funny about the appearance of LeShaun, who sings the hook. It didn’t look like her at all, and that was because it wasn’t.
It later transpired that she was pregnant when the video was shot, but rumors at the time had it that LeShaun had been replaced by a bunch of models because she wasn’t deemed hot enough to get busy with Uncle L in a Hype Williams joint.
Whether true or not, it’s this type of misogynistic bullshit that keeps truly talented female rappers out of the mainstream, and it always has. It seems as though at some point in the career of all female artists, a cruel decision hast to get made: Let their writing and rhyme skills be what gets them noticed, or use their femininity and sex appeal as the gimmick. Unfortunately there seems little scope to do both, and we all know which artists have chosen which path. Remember those early videos of Nicki Minaj spitting absolute fire in freestyle sessions on the streets of NYC? Didn’t think so. Not many people do.
For those that don’t take the route we’ll traveled by Nicki, Lil Kim and the others, there’s little in the way of longevity to be had. And that’s a damn shame. The true hip-hop fan doesn’t care if a good artist is a man, woman, straight, gay or anything else. As KRS-ONE once said, a dope emcee is a dope emcee. If they do happen to be a woman, it also makes no difference what they look like.
Sex sells in the real world though, and that’s why pretty much every skilful female rapper of the past twenty years has all but disappeared. If they are still around, their chances of new success seem to be fading fast. Bahamadia, Jean Grae, Apani B Fly, Lady of Rage. All of them chose to stay true to the art instead of selling their body, but have little to show for it today. For what its worth by the way, if we are going to be forced to judge them on looks too, every one of the women on the list in the sentence above are talented emcees AND beautiful.
It’s a depressing truth to face, but the artistry of women artists will never be judged as important as T&A by millions of teenage fans. It’s a problem not just in hip-hop of course, but it’s probably the one specific form of entertainment where it’s at its worst. In the meantime, quality artists like Rapsody and the next generation will continue to find it hard to breakthrough.
Few artists have released as many consistently great albums as MF Doom. Partner him up with one of the most gifted rappers of the new generation, and this could have been a classic in the making.
Sadly, it isn’t. NehruvianDoom is a very good album, but never quite lives up to the promise. The biggest problem is Metal Fingers himself, or more specifically, the lack of him. He’s absent on all but four tracks, and Om only has him doing the hook. To be told we are getting a new project by one of the most skillful artists of all time, to then find he’s not on every track is frustrating, especially when the album has been packaged with the same mashed-up naming convention as MF’s other great collaborations (GhostDoom, DangerDoom, JJ Doom, Madvillian).
When he does feature though, he’s on point as ever, effortlessly dropping gems like “A game winning strategy/support your favorite charity/playing with polarity could drain a whole battery”. He also produces every beat, and there’s little to fault here either. He can even still just about get away with having long skits.
As for Bishop Nehru, it’s the perfect showcase for a talented emcee that seems to grow in confidence and skill each outing. There’s no denying the kid has a bright future, although his lyrics can start to wear thin over the course of a full album, even one as short as this (NehruvianDoom is just 10 songs deep, weighing in at a slender 36 minutes).
It’s by far the best thing Nehru has achieved in his short career, and will help keep him at least a tiny bit rooted to the underground scene when the inevitable major league debut comes.
For MF Doom, its falls some distance from the quality we got with Madvillian, Viktor Vaughn and other Dumile classics, but still a better album than most other artists are capable of. As an elder statesmen of the game, it’s refreshing to see Doom passing the baton to the young Nehru. Fingers crossed he doesn’t go and drop it.
Writing about an album made from cat sounds probably isn’t the best way to start a new hip-hop blog, but fuck it. Cats and hip-hop go way back anyway. Just ask Naughty by Nature. And even today, Tyler, the Creator can’t get enough of Photoshopped felines.
Now though, with the Meow the JewelsKickstarter hitting its funding goal with days to spare, that rap and cat relationship is about to be taken to a whole new level. What started out as a joke is happening for real, and it looks set to go down in rap history as either the dumbest album ever conceived, or one of the most brilliant.
It began a few months back, when Run the Jewels (aka El-P and Killer Mike) announced there would be a special ‘remix’ edition of their new album RTJ2, recorded using the sounds of cats. With a price tag of a modest $40K, it was taken as nothing more than joke, and a nice little pop-shot at the drama surrounding that not-so secret one-off Wu-Tang Clan album.
One fan took it to heart though, and set about making sure the remix album came out for real. The Kickstarter appeal to raise the $40K soon got the backing of Run the Jewels itself, with El-P stating that his slice of the crowd-funded cash would get donated to the families of Eric Garner and Michael Brown.
Before long the campaign had caught the attention of the hip-hop world and beyond, with some of the biggest names in the game pledging to work on the album, including Dan the Automator, Prince Paul, Just Blaze and Alchemist.
Who knows what the project will actually sound like, but the end result is less important than the journey towards it. Musically, hip-hop has never been shy to blur reality with fiction, from the mostly made-up violence of classic gangster raps, to the stories told by the alter egos of artists like Ghostface Killah, MF Doom and Quasimoto. It’s also a genre well-versed in crossing over to the weird side, even something as weird as making beats from cat noises.
But Meow The Jewels could also end up having a deeper meaning beyond the music. A project as crazy as this will always cross-over into mainstream news media, helping introduce Run the Jewels to a wider audience, which in turn is good for independent hip-hop as a whole.
It’s the charitable donation and connection with the situation in Ferguson that is key though. Hip-hop has always had a serious image problem to the outsiders that don’t understand it. Many of those same people have also likely struggled to keep track of the full extent of the aftermath and fallout from the deaths of Garner and Brown. But with rappers having been reporting from the front line, especially artists like Talib Kweli and Run the Jewels’ own Killer Mike, the true scale of the issue has been getting through loud and clear not just to their fans, but further afield thanks to news outlets and social media.
El-P’s Meow the Jewels donations will only help to further raise the profile of hip-hop as a creative movement with enough power to make a difference, which puts the whole project way above the status of cheesy gimmick. If we end up getting some decent music out of it too, that’s merely a bonus.
It’s unclear when Meow the Jewels will drop, but peep the trailer below in the meantime. RTJ2 is released later this month.
Heavyweights Talib Kweli, Pharoahe Monch and 9th Wonder today announced a new collaborative venture named Indie 500. It’s not clear yet if it’s set to be a record label, a group or just a movement, but with these three involved, only good things can come from it.
