Getting back to The Roots, who were involved in a scary bus crash a few months ago, the rumors are indeed confirmed.
Let me see if I can put this simply.
The Roots will be the house band on .
Tragic.
Our boys, including the irreverent ?uestlove will be backing up Jimmy Fallon when he takes over for Conan in March. Conan’s moving up to take over for Jay Leno.
Watch his video blog announcement below, just so you can see it for yourself.
Personally I think it’s a huge loss to have the Roots give up touring to stay behind the scenes like this. Hopefully they’ll have a high profile on the show, and somehow I can imagine ?uestlove laughing along with Jimmy the way Kevin Eubanks laughed along with Leno. But it’s a sad day for hip hop.
My goodness it’s been a while since I’ve done one of these posts, but thanks to little extra free time, 4080Records is proud to bring back the ever-popular MySpace Monday posts.
So everyone, put your hands together and welcome . This trio from California is all about the party jams and really don’t attempt to hide it. Well, sort of trio. it’s Shwayze, Cisco Adler and DJ Skeet Skeet coming together to from some sort of so-cal hilarity.
It all depends on the vibe you’re going for and the track you choose, but these guys traverse the gambit from roller disco to a little more ballady.
Rich Girls sounds like the type of jam you expect to hear in a Starsky and Hutch flashback sequence, but definitely gets your head nodding along.
Check out Rich Girls here:
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Now, I wanted to make it clear that we here at 4080 have nothing against party jams or silly dance music. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Despite my rather scathing review of Common’s latest effort, my hate is more frmo the fact that he’s abandoning his previous history for something more mainstream. If you’ve always been about the party, then it’s not really so much of an issue.
To give you a taste of something a little different that’s more croony than anything else. Here’s Corona and Lime. Definitely not lyrical genius or anything like that, but may be fun if you’re looking for some summertime music in the middle of this cold, dark winter.
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Definitely check these guys out, it may be a good thing to pass on to friends who aren’t so into hip hop,
If you want to hear more check out or grab their .
Despite our hype, it doesn’t look like Common’s Universal Mind Control is getting too much love in the hip hop community. That doesn’t mean it’s not a commercial success for Common. In case you haven’t seen it, Common and Afrika Bambaataa have a little TV spot for Microsoft’s Zune media player.
All tangents aside, I’ve gotta say I just can’t get excited about this album. And the readers over at seem to agree with me. Some of the comments are reproduced below:
ans says:
Man, coming from Common, this album is garbage. “I be on top of her like a philosopher.” Honestly…
I gotta be honest and say that Common trying to come hard just plain doesn’t work. In Announcement, he actually says “When it comes to hip hop it’s just me and my bitch.” That is not a lyric I expect from Common, and it pretty much dissapoints me.
Just compare this, a verse from Announcement:
representen shaw town to the fullest
raps are bullets
see those rappers they be dunken
when comm be bucken in the kitchen f**ken
on the sink got my momma a mink
common is the link
thought the game was extinct
And there’s always this little gem from the same track, which I guess is targeting people like me who think he’s still cerebral:
Brah’s say are you a philosopher?/Yeah, yeah, I’ll philosopha on top of ya.
Or this, from The Sixth Sense, a killer track from a while ago:
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want millions
More than money saved, I wanna save children
Dealing with alcoholism and afrocentricity
A complex man drawn off of simplicity
Reality is frisking me
This industry will make you lose intensity
The Common Sense in me remembers the basement
I’m Morpheus in this hip-hop Matrix, exposing fake shit
That’s like Walt Whitman sitting down and writing a Harlequin romance novel. Just a complete and total sellout. If you haven’t had a chance to hear much of the album, here’s Announcement.
is clearly on my side in this fight too. In fact, they take it a step further:
Designed as a feel-good summer album, its release was delayed for several months because of the rapper’s burgeoning Hollywood career. Arriving on the doorstep of winter, its tone isn’t just out of step with the season, but with the unprecedented sense of possibility in the African-American community.
calls this album pandering. They talk about how Common’s always wanted to move units and gets fed up being pigeonholed as a backpack rapper. Here’s my favourite quote:
As superstar producers the Neptunes deliver some of their weakest, most cliched and most phoned-in tracks ever — heavy on the generic techno thumps, synth burbles and played-out vocoder backing vocals — one of hip-hop’s most accomplished freestylers drops one leaden rap after another. Most are about sex, although there also are a couple of uncharacteristic “ain’t I great” boast-fests via “Gladiator” and “What a World.”
Even other newspapers are getting in on the action. has picked up on the fact that this album, and Common’s general trend towards the mainstream may be partly due to Jay-Z’s backhanded compliment from a few years ago. On the Black Album’s Moment of Clarity, Hova rapped: ‘If skills sold, truth be told, I’d probably be / lyrically, Talib Kweli / Truthfully, I wanna rhyme like Common Sense / But I did five mil/ I ain’t been rhymin’ like Common since”. And I guess this was the world’s most successful diss. Not only did it make Talib fall off, but it’s gotten Common all crazy as well. Money is power, I guess.
Even though he’s gotten bitchslapped by his own hometown papers, the folks over at have posted a full review of the album that’s quite positive. In fact, they state that it’s a “necessary departure” from Common’s last two albums. Frankly, I disagree. Be and Finding Forever both had heavily commercial aspects to them, and nececssarily got the Kanye pop flavour as well. This let them cross over into mainstream appeal but Common still kept his lyrics tight and didn’t have to make tracks that sounded like someone having a seizure on a midi keyboard.
Now I’m not even saying that Common should only be restricted to making deep tracks, I get that club bangers have a place in hip hop and everyone’s entitled to a little artistic freedom. He shouldn’t be pigeonholed. However, I think there’s a big difference between making a club track and making a whole club album when you’re reputation is built on being a lyracist. And gave it 3/5 stars, so I guess they’re on board.
The worst part is that I know he still has it in him. Changes, the one old-style track on the album is a anthem for Obama and not a bad track by any means. it’s more traditional Common, which I obviously like, but more importantly it just shows some thought and effort. The rest just sounds hastily cobbled together off of internet keystyles.
If you need any more proof, the final nail in this album’s tiny plastic coffin has to be the god-awful Sex 4 Sugar which is an awkward, cornball track and an embarassment to anyone involved in it.
Raise your hands if you’ve heard of Busta’s new track. If you haven’t, you’ll hear about it soon. This thing is catching fire, and not for good reasons.
First of all, having a track with a chorus that says “We’re getting A-rab money” is just silly. Second, if you’re going to do it, at least be smart enough not to sample the Qur’an in it. Worst of all, they Kanyed the sample (a new term I’m trying out for the gratuitous use of auto-tune). Now, Islam is pretty strict about using the Quran for music (while you can record a recitation of the Quran, you cannot do so to music).
has covered this and noted that at least one radio deejay has already been suspended for playing the track. Listeners complained and lo and behold, bye bye Steve “Smooth” Sutherland. At least temporarily.
Now, the remix is even worse. It features Diddy, Akon, Lil Wayne, and T-Pain. Pretty much the axis of suck. And they’ve somehow managed to make it MORE offensive, by rapping some the lines in butchered arabic. In fact, Lil Wayne actually busts out the lyric “Al hum du‘Allah with my billions pilin’”.That’s just plain awful.
Here’s the first video real quick.
And here’s the remix.
And yes, Busta and his boys do look like morons doing that dance.
Back in 2000 there was a pretty amazing hip hop documentary that came out called . This video features some of the biggest names in hip hop (amongst others).
Our man Mos Def is there, Supernatural, Craig G, the Freestyle Fellowship and tons of others.
There’s footage from Notorious, 2Pac, John Coltrane, Muhammed Ali, Kool Herc, J5 and lots of interesting interviews.
Once more, I love google video, and here is the full length documentary for your viewing pleasure.
Yeah, it’s a terrible pun. Which is unfortunate considering how dope Paul Dateh and his unique take on hip-hop are. A classically trained violinist, Dateh attended Los Angeles’ Thornton School of Music where he was introduced to improvisational jazz and eventually hip-hop. Check out the video to see his unique, but undeniably ill, take on a number of hip-hop classics by Tribe, J5 and Ghostface.
If you’ve been following the news at all lately, you’ve heard about the .
Details are still sketchy, but the latest news seems to indicate a group of terrorist gunmen came ashore on rubber boats and attacked six different locations in Mumbai.
The Taj Mahal Hotel, the Oberoi-Trident Hotel, Leopold Cafe, a train terminus, an orthodox Jewish outreach center, and the Cama hospital.
It’s such a tragedy, and one of the most abhorrent things in a while. Beyond the mere barbarism of a suicide bomb, this was carefully and methodically planned. What makes it most terrifying is that it was done with almost sociopathic precision. The gunmen were prepared with tons of ammunition, bags of grenades, and some reports are even saying they carried bags of almonds because they knew they needed the energy. And, they were smart. They used to watch the horror they caused and get a sense of how the media was reporting it.
It’s almost like something out of a movie. They stormed in and opened fire. They lobbed a grendate into a crowded cafe. They fired mercilessly and aimlessly into a crowded train platform. So many people died, and for what?
No one knows what these idiots wanted. No one even knows what group they belong to. There were early reports that they were rounding up British and American expats, and that foreigners were being targeted. But most of the dead ended up being local Indian nationals. There’s no political agenda to be seen. No statement. Nothing. are being thrown around that accuse of being behind it. it’s Pakistani-based. .
The Boston Globe has (some of them extremely graphic), and there’s one (non-graphic one) which I’ll repost below.
That’s what one of the terrorists looked like. A young, well-dressed, man. This is one of the douchebags who opened fire into the crowd and killed many. But the on one of the gunmen. The mob overpowered one of them and until police arrived. He was the only one taken alive. It is through his interrogation that these allegations of Pakistani-based backing is emerging.
Could anyone have seen this coming? According to them, India was warned of the possibiltiy of an attack more than a month ago. That is a rather scary thought, and one I hope is not true. But I can only imagine how impossible it must seem to try and monitor a country of over a billion people. Mumbai alone has 12 million people in it. That’s bigger than some countries.
There are that are coming out of this. As always, ordinary people have been stepping up to try and save lives left and right. The announcer at the train terminus helped guide people to safety. Hotel employees helped hide guests and protect them, even as their own lives were threatened. The security forces did their best to stop these gunmen, storming the hotels and other locations.
The thing I think is most fascinating, and I think sends the strongest message of disapproval is the . Their statement? “”People who committed this heinous crime cannot be called Muslim,” said Hanif Nalkhande, a trustee. “Islam does not permit this sort of barbaric crime.”" According to Islam, even criminals must be accorded the right to be buried in a Muslim cemetary. The refusal simply means the cemetary does not believe they are actually Muslims. It may be mere semantics, but it does send a strong message. Further, since it is unlikely that anyone else will come forward to claim the bodies, they may lay in the morgue until they can find a place to bury them. Since this is outside the traditional burial period, and the place may not be a Muslim cemetary, I wonder how this will affect their progression. Assuming, of course, that they are truly Islamic militants in search of martyrdom, does this failure to be buried in accordance with the rules of Islam mean they do not achieve this martyrdom? I kind of hope so.
I think it is a powerful message for the Muslim community to send, to say that those who perpetrate heinous acts like this aren’t true Muslims and will not receive the blessings and salvation that they seek. This may actually have a bigger effect at deterring terrorism than many other initatives.
I guess, in summary, I hope these evil men pay for what they did. I’ll leave you with a paraphrase I find appropriate.
This is creepy. I can’t even tell you how much it disturbs me, especially because it looks like a lot of time and effort went into syncing this together.
It’s a mashup of Lil Jon and , an Icelandic children’s program. It’s aired in Canada on YTV and in the US on Nick Jr.
Still, it’s taking the internet by storm and really starting to get some notice. Check it out.
is an American painter who was born and lived in the Soviet Union. Detroit’s Museum of Contemporary Art has a brief little biography of Melamid, and the results are pretty surprising:
Melamid (b.1945) is long-known in the art world for his partnership with fellow Russian artist Vitaly Komar, with whom he founded the Soviet Realist Pop art movement, Sots Art, which satirized Soviet Socialist Realism.
This is pretty fascinating. Melamid is most well known as, essentially, a Soviety art rebel. He frequently faced criticism in the Soviet Union for his work which satirized and challenged conventional norms. In fact, some Melamid and Komar’s installations got them expelled from various art associations.
Now, Melamid (thanks to his son, a hip hop video producer) has turned his eye to painting the hip hop scene. The picture you see here is Melamid’s version of the Reverend Run and is a pretty amazing job.
His focus was on drawing the individuals in the style of the old masters, as he says “”I thought it would be interesting to paint the men of hip-hop using the traditional European style I have been perfecting for 40 years.”"
My goodness it’s been a while since I’ve done one of these posts, but thanks to little extra free time, 4080Records is proud to bring back the ever-popular MySpace Monday posts.
If you’ve been following the news at all lately, you’ve heard about the .
is an American painter who was born and lived in the Soviet Union. Detroit’s Museum of Contemporary Art has a brief little biography of Melamid, and the results are pretty surprising:
Man, coming from Common, this album is garbage. “I be on top of her like a philosopher.” Honestly…