This episode of “Gangland” is a crazy documentary about gangs in the Third Ward of New Orleans which get’s even crazier when Katrina hits. It’s definitely pretty sensational but also a compelling and candid portrait of a place and a group of people on the edges of society in a dark moment. It’s 45 minutes, stream it when you’ve got some time.
Blog (2008-2018)
VAST LIL B VS MR & MRS INTERNETS
wholesale chop from Cocaine Blunts:
It turns out Lil B’s “My Baby†wasn’t an isolated instance of lunacy but just one small part of a grand experiment. The 19 year old Pack frontman currently maintains 114 myspace pages… all launched over roughly the last eight months and each showcasing five or six original songs and freestyles.
The pages are numbered chronologically and listening to them in order is like reading an abandoned space journal, a slow descent into madness. Except it’s the good kind of madness.
read more! it’s hard to fathom. There’s a greater narrative to explore here (ref. Lil Wayne) about what happens when a compulsion for content outstrips all editorial filters. FWIW, Shoot the Bitch Bra sounds like ‘golden era’ Lenny Dee / Industrial Strength. And not The Pack.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2bK8YwVCI0[/youtube]
New York Tropical 3
This Friday, the Dutty Artz crew is servin Brooklyn all u can eat bass to ya face from an underground bunker just below the earth’s surface.
Our tropicaliente beats and bassline party, New York Tropical, is back with resident dj’s Geko Jones, Matt Shadetek and DJ/ Rupture. This time around, live and inside the place we’ll be joined by Brooklyn’s hometown heroines Bunny Rabbit. This is your last chance to chance to check Bunny out before they head to Eastern Europe to spread their Cult of Miracles gospel in March.
NEW YORK TROPICAL 3: OUT N’ BAD
FEB 20th @ Kodeez
834 Myrtle Ave @ Marcy (G Train to Myrtle-Willoughby)
$3 PBR, $4 Mixed Drinks, $4 Wine
$2 Hotdogs, $3 Hamburgers, $4 Cheeseburgers
!0pm – $10
Reduced $8 dollar before 11pm
This location is RIGHT IN FRONT of the G Train (literally!)
Don’t hate on the G, it’s 25 minutes or less from Union Sq!
Bunny gets the party hoppin…
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQXKs6BJQ_M[/youtube]
SHE’S NOT SMILING ENOUGH, AND SHE STILL LOOKS FAT
Who says late-capitalism isn’t violent? Look what they’re doing to these women! Or at least their photos. When real just isn’t real enough, go on then, go on then draw for the Photoshop. Some of these are just snarky nerdery about clone tools and bad compositing but some are just… EEK. Like this one:
How did that get past the many layers of corporate approval and get published into the world? The only conclusion I can draw is that these people are on drugs. This was another favorite of mine. Body issues anyone? Seriously, you just need to diet more, go to the gym instead of sleeping and get all of your internal organs removed by someone with a Wacom tablet.
And now that I think about it? What is she doing? Standing next to a couch tipped on its end? Sexxxxxxy. Many more at Photoshop Disasters.
ERYKAH BADU VUDU PT 1
[[U know who will be vibrating our pixels & stimulating neurotransmitters here at DA blog from time to time, ladies and gentlemen pls welcome MC SMEAR. this post is strictly visual but truss, there’s a biiiig story behind it, where Common & Andre3000 are just the iceberg’s suddenly feminine tip…–Rupture]]
http://youtube.com/watch?v=HNJt5ADHzIY
YOUR BOY ABOUT TO PEAK
I’ve been loving this tune since I heard Sinden play it a while ago on his show. It’s weird when I hear about more hot American music from English people than I do from my homies, but whatever.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPtC7HbtD9U[/youtube]
Jackie Chain is an Asian dude with long hair who raps about taking ecstasy, smoking weed, and chilling with girls and sounds sorta like Paul Wall. The track has a nice hype but mellow vibe, a good combination.
I wonder what Simon Reynolds and the blogerati will have to say about this. Does it fit into their whole MDMA-as-transformative-cultural-force industry that they’ve created? I don’t really think so, but then, I didn’t write books and a million articles about it. I’m not really a drug romanticist, I don’t actually think that drugs have that kind of big picture transformative impact that a lot of people seem to want to believe in. I think people take drugs to get fucked up, in a variety of different ways and while some insight can be gained I think the main thing people are thinking on any of these drugs is “Holy shit, I’m really fucked up man.” Also, just on a public service announcement vibe, I’d like to point out that if you ACTUALLY were rolling for weeks and didn’t sleep, you’d die.
The video is wicked though. Some really bad camerawork of them performing in some place with no stage in the middle of a crowd of people with a lot of superimposed random footage and occasional crazy video effects. This is what budget rap videos are all about. My only criticism is that it could have had more girls in it. I love the phone number of the radio station at the end telling you to call in and request the song. Grass roots marketing pressure.
ALICIA PIANOTUNER KEYS
put the piano in molasses, kid. put it in.
Alicia Keys – No One (chopped & screwed by DJ Michael Watts)
word.
it makes sense in retrospect: Alicia sounds GREAT overweight.
Trey Songz – Can’t Help But Wait (c&s’ed by DJ Michael Watts)
WHEN THE DRUGS ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO GET THERE
They say that drugs make you dumb, but if that’s the case then what the fuck are these police taking? They must be in and out of the evidence room all day. I just saw this piece by ABC News and actually laughed out loud.
“Savvy criminals are using some of the country’s most credible logos, including FedEx, Wal-Mart, DirecTV and the U.S. Border Patrol, to create fake trucks to smuggle drugs, money and illegal aliens across the border, according to a report by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.”
In my mind this just goes to show that when people are hungry and committed enough, they can do almost anything. US Drug Warriors: you’re losing, you losers, think up another plan. I recommend some kind of controlled legalization. At least then we could have quality controls, cheap clean needles and people would not be killing each other over this stuff quite so often. You don’t see the executives of the Altria group going and shooting up the corporate offices of Anheuser Busch do you? I know in an election cycle this will be an unpopular idea due to the huge number of American jobs that would be lost (hustlers, smugglers, prison guards) but still, from my soapbox over here it all seems very clear. In the meantime, if the ganja pays your rent, keep on hustling!
WARM HEART TURNS COLD
I remember the first time I heard slowed down, or screwed music. I
was in an old lincoln towncar, driving through Orlando, FL with a dude
named Cleon. It was hot as hell, and me and some guys from NY were
down there shooting a no budget gangster flick. We shot in the hotel
we were sleeping two to a bed in and used real guns for ‘props’.
Driving around during the day in the heat Cleon would play these
slowed down CDs that this dude Pookie Duke (who was also acting in the
film) would make using a cassette machine and a CD burner. Anything
was fair game, erika badu (sounding like a man talking about tyrone
slowed down, yikes), michael jackson, and lots and lots of southern
rap that I had never heard of. Usually just bare drum machine beats
and people saying violence. Slowed down, high out of my mind as I was
most of that week, in that heat, it sounded absolutely satanic. I
asked Cleon about it and he explained: “Well, during the day, when
you’re driving, you listen to the slowed down one. Then at night at
the club you listen to the fast one. But boy, if that DJ in the club
played the slowed down, he would have a riot. People would just get
TOO crunk.” I went to that club (still cant remember the name) and I
could see what he meant. Certain songs couldn’t get played halfway
through, even at regular speed. People would get too hype and start
fighting. Sort of like grime raves in the UK, and why they banned
“Pow”. But after hearing that stuff, and how demonic it was, I
couldn’t get the slowed down idea out of my head. Afterwards I
learned about DJ Screw and the whole codeinated Houston slowed down
scene, and got pretty into that. My two favorite from that style if
you’re looking for something to check are the S.L.A.B. – The Anthem
album slowed down, and David Banner’s first album slowed down by Michael 5000 Watts (jpeg on link is wrong but tracklist is right).
The slowed down hook has now become a staple of American commercial
rap, and lately some American Dubstep producers have started using
slowed down voices in their tracks too. I was out at Dub War and
heard some of these played and decided to make one of my own. I
picked one of my most favorite songs of all time, Mobb Deep’s “Shook
Ones”. I originally just wanted to use the acapella phrase that my track starts with.
“I’m only 19 but my mind is old and when things get for real my warm
heart turns cold”
I was gonna take that, make that a hook and give it to one of my 19
year old grime mc friends in London. But then I got bored with that
idea and felt that the drop wasn’t quite hard or deep enough and just
decided to sample the whole chorus, slowed down, with the beat in
there, and give the track a bit more of a opiated houston vibe. The results
are here, in 320 mp3 format.
Download it, play it, voice on it, do whatever you want with it.
It’s a big bait illegal sample so you’ll have a hard time making money with it, plus I just don’t care that much.
Lately I’ve been pretty down on the whole music industry, and
especially making money inside it. It’s kind of pathetic. Some
people I know fight and struggle so hard to make a living from music,
and I did that for a few years too. Now that I’m back in NYC though I
make non-music money, and it’s so easy compared to music it’s like a
bad joke. And because I’m not putting economic pressure on my music,
I’ve been enjoying making music again. It’s kind of a fucked up. The
most fucked up part about it is, considering the amount of money most
people I know make selling copies of their music (cd, vinyl, mp3,
whatever), it’s basically not even worth it. The only money worth
making is performance money, and the occasional license to TV or a
video game, and for those reasons it may actually turn out that giving
away all your music for free on the internet will actually make you
MORE money. Hopefully the whole industry will collapse in one final
fit of coked up executive self-defeatery very soon and we, the
artists, will be able to figure out some new way that actually works
for us economically. My best idea so far is something like the TV
tax in the UK. Everything is free on the internet (like it already
is) and iff you own a computer or mp3 player you pay a yearly tax to
the government and they pay publishing money to the artists. Either
that or build that tax into mp3 players and internet service charges.
iPods for example, have been making Apple a SHITLOAD of money based on
the non-advertised idea that the player is expensive, but the music is
free. I want some of that money Steve Jobbs.