The crew over at has given us a heads up about Lupe Fiasco’s latest effort.
Although he denies it, Fiasco’s been linked to Japanese Cartoon, the latest awful rap-rock hybrid beast. And Lupe is the lead singer. With a faux-British accent as his alter-ego Percival Fats.
That just seems hard to believe.
Although I’ve got mad love for Lupe (Food and Liquor was an amazing album), this band is not very good. Frankly, I think his skills as a lyracist are better suited to hip hop than to rock.
But you can see for yourself by checking out the
Check out Army, it is…something. To be fair, Heirplanes isn’t that bad, but it’s really not great either.
Our boy fu-quon posted the full-length film Wild Style the other day, a pinnacle of hip hop film achievement. If you haven’t had a chance to watch it yet, you totally should. This classic movie has just hit the 25 year anniversary mark and the has run a little piece trying to analyze it’s impact.
Charlie Ahearn, the creator, was basically inspired to make this movie after talking to Fab 5 Freddy back in 1980. Amazingly enough, the movie would never have happened without the financing of two European TV channels. There just wasn’t any funding for the film in the States.
This is the nuttiest part, I think.
Mr. Ahearn was drawn to real people, rather than professional actors, for many of the roles. He enlisted three men hanging around one club where the production was shooting and gave them roles as stickup men. They took the roles, but not the prop starter pistol Mr. Ahearn gave one of them for the scene.
“I was excited because it had some weight,” Mr. Ahearn recalled. “I gave it to Pookie and he said he wouldn’t use the gun.” (Pookie actually said something most definitely not fit to print.)
“I was so crestfallen,” Mr. Ahearn said. “Then Pookie leaned back, and without even opening the door or looking, he popped the seat of his car. He reached in and dragged out the most raggedy looking sawed-off shotgun. My eyes were twinkling. I am a documentarian by aesthetic, after all.”
That became the weapon that Lee and Patti Astor encountered outside the club, along with the line uttered at the beginning of this post.
That was a REAL gun they were held up with in the film. MAN!
is a documentary film that traces the rise and fall of the infamous Wu-Tang clan.
It looks like a pretty interesting take on their storied career. NPR reports that the film is partly a biography, and partly just a kick ass hip hop movie.
I appreciate their focus on the fact that the Clan came from Staten Island and did their best to represent it wherever they were. At that time, hip hop was clearly more territorial than it is now, and there was a major feud between East and West Coast rappers.
Beyond just their various personalities, this film does a fantastic job of showing you all the ways Wu-Tang changed the game. Both from an artistic perspective and a business standpoint. Without their influence, emceees these days wouldn’t be able to hold all the copyright, or necessarily produce for others freely. Hell, these kids apparently were all allowed to have their own solo deals on other labels.
Maybe the most professional of the early hip-hop film classics, was released in 1984 and tells the story of aspiring superstar* b-boys from the South Bronx. Unlike its contemporaries – think Wild Style and Krush Groove – Street transcends camp and, even today, remains more than a mere curiosity of hip-hop’s original Golden Age. A genuinely decent film, it will make you wish you were present for that fleeting period when being a b-boy meant dabbling in all four of hip-hop’s elements and fights were settled on the dance floor rather than through .
And even if you ain’t feelin’ the film for its artistic merits, it’s worth watching for appearances from a host of early hip-hop luminaries, including Us Girls, The Treacherous Three, The System, Rock Steady Crew, Soul Sonic Force & Shango, The Magnificent Force, New York City Breakers, Furious Five, Tina B., Afrika Bambaataa, and Johnny B. Bad.
Check it out:
* From maybe the best line in the film:”Charlie, superstar is not a profession.”
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.
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.”"
So we haven’t reported on any kind of hip hop art in a little while, and I’m beginning to feel like we’re a little overdue.
The project, on display now at New York’s The Museum of Arts and Design, is titled Sound Wave and is by
has a pretty good (and brief) biography on her. Shin was born in South Korea and has spent most of the last 20 years studying and working in Brooklyn. Her focus is on collecting a lot of old objects and repurposing them in a way that’s unexpected. I do have to say that I quite like her piece below. As long as she used bad records.
It may not be groundbreaking news, but we have a policy here at 4080 that any time the CBC uses the phrase “fresh rhymes, beats” in an article title, we have have to blog about it. And if you don’t believe this could ever happen, head over to the and prepare to be amazed.
The story itself is actually a pretty positive one. Thanks to a large government grant the Inuvik Youth Centre in Inuvik, Northwest Territories, brought in four “hip-hop artists” from British Columbia to teach the kids about the creative process. The grant also allowed them to purchase some fairly heavy duty recording equipment.
So now kids near the Arctic are learning about making beats and writing rhymes. Even better, they’re gaining an appreciation of the beauty of art:
“At first reluctant, students in the English class were reciting their own rhymes by the end of the 80-minute session.
“I heard at the beginning of the class, a few of the girls were like, ‘Aww, I don’t really like poetry. I don’t want to be here.’ And then by the end of that class, watching their performance was really beautiful,” said Emma Tius, another artist and facilitator.”
Check out in the Wall Street Journal about a class of second graders in Queens who were introduced to the music of John Coltrane by their teacher, Christine Passarella. Apparently, Passarella wanted her students to explore different kinds of intelligences. She began “mixing great works of art with classical music; and over time [she] introduced rock, the blues and jazz.” The kids took to Coltrane immediately, enjoying even the jazz great’s “more avant-garde recordings, such as .’”
The kids also learned that Coltrane’s home on Long Island, where he composed, among other things, , was in danger of being demolished. Along with a long-time jazz enthusiast, Ms. Passarella’s students launched a grass-roots campaign to save the property. As a result, in 2005 the town bought the property and turned it into a landmark. However, it still needs extensive renovations, and the kids have taken it upon themselves to raise funds by holding raffles, cake sales and a book fair. To contribute to the campaign, visit
It’s always cool hearing about things like this. Visit their website for sure, then check out one of my favourite Coltrane tunes – “My Favourite Things” – below:
The crew over at has given us a heads up about Lupe Fiasco’s latest effort.
Our boy fu-quon posted the full-length film 
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:
