After seeing the Outsidaz' Young Zee drop a random verse on an alt rock song with Kelly Ripa, hearing him now attempt to recreate Tom Petty's Free Fallin' doesn't come as that much of a surprise. I'm on the fence as to whether this is wack or just on some next level ish that I'm unable to fully appreciate, a feeling that I get with a lot of Zee's recent material like the psychedelic acid anthem "Drugs". Nevertheless, I'm looking forward to Young Zee's new album, Forever Young, which is supposed to come out this fall.
The producer of that Weed Ballin' track also put up video of Zee freestyling about PCs, Windows' file copying functionality, Musiq Soulchild and white boys. Or something. Check it out:
Fat Beats NYC: 406 Avenue of the Americas, NY, NY.
The door to the store is tiny and fairly nondescript, with just a Xerox marking the entrance. If you don't know to look for it, you'll likely walk right by it.
When I first graduated from college, way back in the days of Y2K, I got a job working for a startup in NYC. Initially it was pretty exciting; I got to hang out in the city every day, and I was getting paid to do something I would've done anyway, namely work on computers. That excitement quickly faded, as I soon found myself working fifteen hour shifts seven days a week in an attempt to cash in on what was left of the dotcom boom. Within just a few months I was completely stressed out (word to Faith Evans). One of the few things that kept me going was my weekly trips to Fat Beats, which happened to be just a couple of train stops from my office, where I spent my lunchbreak digging through their records and listening to dudes at the counter get into heated arguments over the lyrical qualities of underground emcees I had never heard of. Eventually some things happened to the city that led me to leave it for good, forcing me to give up my Fat Beats visits.
As I've mentioned a few times, I began taking classes at Scratch a few months ago. Scratch is a block away from Fat Beats, so after a nine year hiatus I once again found myself making weekly trips to the store, this time around buying old school vinyl for my dj classes. As Dallas Penn mentioned, the area's changed a bit from the old days, but Fat Beats itself isn't all that different from how I remember it.
At this point, you've likely heard that Fat Beats is finally closing the doors to its remaining retail outlets. The NYC storefront is closing next weekend, September 4th. I'm told they'll be having in-store performances every day from now until its closing, however since the last class of my semester at Scratch was this past weekend I made my final trip to the store on Saturday. My experience was about as close as it gets to the authentic Fat Beats experience: out front two random dudes were handing out flyers for their record label and hawking their latest mixtape, while upstairs one of the customers in the store broke into a word-for-word recital of Smif N Wessun's Bucktown when the instrumental was played on the store's speakers. As a final memory, I could have done a lot worse than that.
While I was there, it occurred to me that despite the store's legendary status in hip hop, most of you have likely never been there. I took a few pictures (from a very old cellphone, so forgive me for the relatively low quality) to give you some idea of what the store was like. One of the guys at the counter was ice grillin' me as I fumbled with the camera on my phone, so I only managed to get one shot off in the store itself.
The stairs up to the store, which is on the 2nd floor.
A listing of the in-store events from the past week. Interesting to see a myspace era rapper on the list with some of these older artists.
This is the one shot I managed to take while in the store itself. At the time of this photo, the guy in the red polo is in the middle of reciting Bucktown. Classic album covers are tacked onto the walls and ceilings, old school records are on the back right, new vinyl on the left wall. Cds and assorted other vinyl fill the middle racks. Unfortunately I don't think this shot really gives a sense of how compact (or cramped, depending on your point of view) the store is.
I've long since given up hope of ever seeing an official Pellegrino album, but it's good to see that Joey is still on his random street single grind. The expiration date on the Entourage sample (or, more accurately, Jane's Addiction's Superhero sample) is about four years past due, and it would be nice to see JJP break with Italian tradition and go with something a little less stereotypical than "Penne alla Vodka," but overall I'm not mad at this one. Dude can still rap circles around just about anybody out right now.
In further Pellegrino news, it seems he and Wu-Tang third stringer Remedy hit it off after partnering up in the video for R.A. the Rugged Man's Posse Cut last year. So much so that they recently collaborated for a song off of the latest Wu album Pollen, The Swarm: Part 3. It's not quite up to JJP's usual standards, but at least he's getting some work:
For some reason or another, I found myself today searching through youtube for videos of Boogaloo Shrimp, one half of the legendary jheri curled breakdancing duo from the 80's flick Breakin' (the other half being the equally amazingly named Shabba Doo). This in turn led to a further search for Fred Berry, a.k.a. "Rerun from What's Happeninng!," who during the 70's was part of a dance crew with Boogaloo and Shabba called The Lockers, the crew that originated the bboy style of "locking" and taught Michael Jackson a few of his dance moves. Not much more to it than that, it seemed like a good excuse to throw up some Rerun videos.
That last video is great not only for the fact that Berry is making some amazing facial expressions for the camera (beginning at the 1:08 mark), but also for the fact that in the comments to the video one youtube user discovers that his mother was not lying when she told him she was on Soul Train back in the day.
When I was growing up, in the dark days before mp3 blogs existed, Funkmaster Flex's radio show on Hot 97 was the spot to hear the latest in hip hop. Mainstream singles, underground joints, freestyles, whatever - if it was new and it was hot, Flex had it first. This was before the commercial mixtapes, before the car shows and before the payola really started to influence his playlists. Since then, Flex's show has (d)evolved into something that isn't much different from any other hip hop radio show on any other station. The dj who once rewound M.O.P.'s How About Some Hardcore for 20 minutes straight in the middle of primetime has since been reduced to playing half hearted bomb drops over the latest milquetoast offerings from the likes of Drake.
Every now and then, however, Flex still manages to get an exclusive worth getting excited over. Case in point: the above "freestyle" from Joell Ortiz over the DJ Premier beat Sing Like Bilal. Joell originally put out one verse over the beat about a month ago, at which point Flex began playing it every night. Eventually he convinced Joell to go in for one more verse, which he played for the first time a couple of days ago. I'm not sure if this has gotten any play outside of the NY area, but this is easily the most "hip hop" joint I've heard on the radio in quite some time.
"New rappers is cool, but we still bump Biggie." Truth.
Earlier today, Small Pro, rhetorically, asked where Dr. Dre got the mask that he wears in the above commercial for his new HP laptop. Being the closeted comic book nerd that I am, the answer seemed rather obvious to me: DC Comics' Mr. Terrific, a somewhat obscure character from the "Justice Society of America." Check it out:
The similarities between the two go well beyond the T-shaped masks that they both wear, however. Let's take a look:
Code Name:
Mr. Terrific
Dr. Dre
Superpower:
Invents gadgets that are years ahead of current technology
Invents beats that are years ahead of current production techniques
The connection is undeniable, right? Were Dr. Dre actually taking cues from DC Comics, it would be a bit of turnabout as Aftermath labelmate Eminem unwittingly served as the inspiration for the comic book and film Wanted. And it wouldn't be the first time Dre dressed up as a superhero, as he portrayed Batman in the video for Eminem's Without Me.
And for those wondering, the beat from the HP commercial is from a song off of Dre's upcoming Detox album:
Though I haven't had a chance to write about it as much as I originally anticipated, I recently started up another semester over at Scratch. This current semester has focused on battle style scratch routines, something that even during my most prolific turntable days I was never particularly good at. On Saturday DJ Spictacular showed up as the guest instructor for the class and, after watching me and several others fumble through chirps, transforms and military scratches, he proceeded to show us all how to properly put together a routine worthy of the DMC's. After ten minutes of a virtual assault on wax - at one point he started cutting up a Lady Gaga record and even managed to make that sound hard - he dropped in the instrumental for the above song, Lady of Rage's Unfucwitable, produced by DJ Premier. I'm not sure how this 8 year old song managed to stay under my radar for this long, but hearing it for the first time over the weekend reminded me just how great Premier can be when he gets his hands on the right sample.
The "Fe Fi Fo Fum" chopped up sample is what makes this beat so tremendous, and as soon as I got home I started digging to find out its source. Thanks to youtube, my search quickly turned up the following:
Off of Yvonne Fair's album The Bitch is Back, the song opens up with the sample used in the Lady of Rage song. Keep listening until the :57 mark and you'll hear what should be another very familiar sample, the main ingredient for Jay-Z's Where I'm From:
Produced by D.Dot Angeletti (aka The Madd Rapper), I used to think this was one of the most genius samples ever, a flip of what was essentially a brief bit of feedback from Fair's microphone into one of the greatest beats Jay's ever rapped over. As I did a little bit more research, however, it turned out that D.Dot was far from the first to make use of the sample. The exact same sample was used for almost the exact same beat some six years earlier, on Fat Joe's Bad Bad Man produced by the legendary Diamond D. Peep:
A few years prior to that, DJ Cool V and Paul C used the same sample for Biz Markie's Check it Out. Youtube wouldn't let me embed the song, so here's the direct link:
Biz liked the beat so much, he recycled it a couple of years later to get production credits for his protege Grand Imperial Diamond Shell's Captain Speakin'. Unfortunately I couldn't find the song anywhere on the internet so you'll have to take my word for it.
As much as it's been used over the past two decades, however, the sample didn't officially earn the label of "played out" until earlier this year, when Diddy got his hands on it for the autotuned monstrosity of Angels:
Above is the 5 O'Clock Shadowboxers' new video for No Resolution 2, off of their latest EP Broken Clocks. Last time out the gate, the 'Boxers managed to put out the best independent video of 2009 with High Noon, a hip hop crime caper that seemed to be heavily influenced by Tarantino. No Resolution continues to develop the group's film noir thematics, using footage from the classic 50's jury flick 12 Angry Men. Conceptualized by Curly Castro, with production from 5846 Films, the video is significantly higher in concept than what you're likely to find on MTV Hits these days.
The Shadowboxers have made the single available for free over on their bandcamp page, so go cop it!
And while we're on the subject of Shadowboxing, the group recently put out their take on Cannibal Ox's Life's ill. The song's great, but what puts it over the top is Zilla's name dropping of the late, great Drazen Petrovic (RIP!). Peep:
You can read Zilla's thoughts on the song over at Clap Cowards. The artwork for the single, which is absolutely amazing, is from Adam LaMonaca. I've never heard of him before, but I highly recommend that any of you rappers out there looking for a dope album cover should reach out to him. Check it out:
The setup: Cut Chemist, preparing for an outdoor screening of Saturday Night Fever, asks Biz Markie what records he should play at the event. Naturally Biz responds by singing and beat boxing his suggestions, and debating the date of Disco's passing. This in turn apparently inspired the second half of the video, a random collage of Cut Chemist scratching up old 45 records in a cemetary, with R2D2 as his audience. Bizarre and random, yes, but oddly entertaining all the same.
For no reason in particular, I decided this afternoon to see what Jimmy Giambrone had been up to since we last checked in with him. Under his Vimeo listing, there was an "Untitled" video that, despite being uploaded a week ago, still had yet to receive any views. Not expecting much, a click of the link revealed some dude rapping along to a surprisingly good, video game sound effect-laden beat, while walking through the streets of Philly with a baby strapped to his chest on some Zach Galifianakis steez. Sounds ridiculous, but the guy - Snuff of Karma Response Unit - turned out to be kind of nice with his rhymes. The video, as always with anything related to Giambrone, was sufficiently entertaining.
