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These days most artists, both deejays and emcees alike, treat mixtapes as just one of many ways to keep their names buzzing in the (virtual) streets. Along with tweets, facebook updates, email blasts, myspace posts, and youtube video diaries, the mixtape has devolved into a mandatory, yet hardly memorable, marketing tool of the hip hop artist in the age of social networking. So many mixtapes come out on a daily basis that it's hard to keep track of, let alone listen to, all of them. The disposable nature of today's mixtape is apparently something that many artists are aware of and have even embraced, as very little effort seems to go into the average tape (or perhaps the lack of effort is why mixtapes are able to be churned out on such a constant basis; I'll leave the resolution of that chicken-and-egg dilemma for another day). If the sole purpose of a mixtape is to merely keep one's name at the top of the stream of constant media updates that we're all inundated with, there's little incentive to do anything creative with it.
Thankfully, there remain at least a few artists still able to realize the potential of the mixtape, to take risks they wouldn't otherwise be able to take on an official album, make use of samples that they would never be able to clear, and build around concepts that might otherwise be too narrow to make sense for a full LP. Brooklyn DJ J.Period is emerging as one of those artists, as his last two projects - the Q-Tip retrospective and his latest tape with K'Naan, The Messengers - have significantly raised the bar for what can be achieved with a mixtape.
The concept behind The Messengers is to offer up a series of collaborations between Somali rapper K'Naan with three musical Messengers - as K'Naan explains in one of the tape's interludes, "Messenger" here is being used in the Islamic sense of the word, referring to a socially influential man who is just below a Prophet in the hierarchy of important figures - Bob Marley, Bob Dylan and the Nigerian Fela Kuti, all of whom accomplished as much through their music as they did through social activism. Mixed in with several remixes and remakes of each artist's original music are several audio snippets detailing their lives and the social impact that each man had. The result is something that manages to be entirely entertaining while adding in just enough historical and musical knowledge to border on the educational. It's a package that is entirely more substantial than even most retail albums that come out today.
Had DJ Swindle not beaten him to the punch by a few years with the outstanding Bobb Deep, J.Period's hip hop twist on various Marley classics would have been rather significant. As it is, though, the highlight of this tape is the Fela Kuti section that will leave you wondering why more artists haven't been sampling his work. Here are three of the best songs on the tape, one from each artist:
K'Naan and Fela Kuti - Let's Start
K'Naan, Netic the Rebel and Bob Marley - Johnny Was
K'Naan and Bob Dylan - Relationships Lay
Here is the link to download J.Period and K'Naan's The Messengers Trilogy mixtape
Further Listening:
J.Period on 33Jones
K'Naan on 33Jones
Finally, it should be also noted that while Fela Kuti has become somewhat more mainstream recently with his Broadway play, Jeff over at Passion of the Weiss was showing his music love long before a lot of other blogs began to pick up on him. My google skills are failing me at the moment, but you can see some of Weiss' writings on Fela over here.
9/22/2009 9:00:51 AM posted by Fresh