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Filed under: download., go., interview., listen., news+tourdates., watch. | Tags: appreciation, it's a celebration bitches
10,000 people have visited our lil ol’ blog since May of this year.
Holy crap.
THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR READING!
We love you all!
Just to warn you, it’s kind of painful in the beginning.
M.I.A. and her husband…Kanye..? Interesting parts of the interview are bolded.
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Genre-bending performer Maythangi (Maya) Arulpragasam, known to many simply as M.I.A., is making the most of her current U.S. concerts.
The 2930-year-old British/Sri Lankan singer, who released the smash sophomore album Kala last year, will be leaving her New York City apartment when her one-year work visa expires in June.
M.I.A.’s father was once a soldier in the Sri Lankan terrorist organization Tamil Tigers, hence the problems with U.S. immigration officials, who previously denied her entry in 2006.
“I figured I might as well do a few more shows in America before I may not be allowed back in or ever get a chance to come back again,” she says. “It’s nice to tour around America and do every gig like it’s your last gig.
“I might have to move to Canada,” she adds. “I’m thinking of moving to Montreal in June when I leave my apartment. Basically at the moment I can choose between Montreal and London. My mum’s like, ‘I want you here!’ I haven’t seen her in, like, forever, so I have to choose between my mum and Montreal.”
M.I.A., performing Friday at the Burton Cummings Theatre, says she might already have a suitor willing to walk down the aisle to keep her Stateside: Kanye West.
“I was at his show four days ago and he was like, ‘You have to make this song with me,’ ” she says. “I turned him down for the last album (West’s 2007 release, Graduation) so he’s really pissed off about it. (But) I think he’ll marry me to keep me in the country. He was really dead serious about it.”
Perhaps the reason for the alleged proposal is how well Kala came across to critics and fans alike.
From the infectious groove on Paper Planes and Bird Flu to tunes such as Boyz and the marching band percussion-driven XR2, M.I.A. says she knew she was on to something great.
“I knew that being calculating about what makes a hit and stuff would be easy,” she says.
“You just have to find the right producers and the right hooks that sounds like the song that’s another hit in the other club. But I wanted to make a document that respected the art of making an album because it’s a dying breed.”
And while M.I.A. is getting offers to collaborate with Beastie Boys and West, she’s also branching out into other realms, including starting her own fashion line.
“I have it on at the moment,” she says.
“I made loads of stuff and at the moment there are boxes of it in my mum’s living room which I have to get out of there. I think the label thing is going to be really good. It’s the thing I’m most excited about, just making limited editions of clothes that come out whenever I make something.
“It’s not like a proper label, like how J. Lo or Jay-Z does it with Rocawear. It’s something a lot more underground.”
CREATIVE PLUS
Concentrating on the fashion line might temporarily take away from her music side, but M.I.A. says getting away from it for awhile could end up being a creative plus.
“The thing is, if you’re making music, you have to keep your imagination fresh and be excited about something,” she says. “You shouldn’t feel like you have a factory and you’re turning stuff out. And there’s so much pressure in America, especially in the hip-hop mentality, to work like that 24/7.”
Beside the fashion line, looking for a new pad and working on a record label which Interscope Records chairman Jimmy Iovine created for her, M.I.A. says she’ll also work on some art projects.
“I’m not thinking entirely about an album, it’s just a matter of what I sing and keep writing and if it turns into an album then that’s cool,” she says. “I think you always have to make music as if you can walk away from it tomorrow.”
Filed under: interview. | Tags: ?uestlove, hip-hop, interview., the roots, watch.
This weekend, I got the new June 2008 issue of Spin (Weezer’s on the cover) and found a great piece by Charles Aaron. He interviews the Roots’ drummer and coleader and star producer, ?uestlove. The Philly native has revised the hip-hop landscape for the last 15 years by incorporating live instrumentation, jazz, soul, and rock influences, and most presciently, the Internet (cofounding the Okayplayer website back in 1999). The Roots are basically the reason I started exploring new genres of music and reaching out to all different styles of hip-hop. The first time I heard that beat by ?uestlove on the drums live, I got effing chills. The fact is, I don’t know any other artist who has influenced my way of “taking in” music nor any artist I have more admiration and gratitude for. Everyone has that one artist. For me, it’s the Roots.
All in all, a stunning industry retrospective, here are a few of my favorite tidbits of the interview. My favorite part is when he mentions the time when Stevie Wonder was on the Cosby Show- one of my favorite episodes. Buhbaby Baby baby… Juh juh jammin on the one… Rrrrobert.
Anyways, onto some excerpts of the interview…
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CA: Did you have any real recording equipment?
?: I had my dad’s broken-down four-track machine and a little Casio Sk-1 sampler. After The Cosby Show, when Stevie Wonder was on [in 1986], everybody had to have one of those. Bill Cosby really jumped started hip-hop culture. That one Cosby episode, every well-known producer I know, that’s the event that changed their lives, but everybody is just ashamed to say it. That was the first time America got to see a sampler.
CA: That’s wild, considering how Cosby has made it his mission to blame hip-hop for destroying black youth.
?: It’s his own fault. He never should’ve had Stevie on.
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CA: It’s taken awhile for hip-hoppers to come around to Obama. The initial reaction was to be suspicious or cynical or feel like it doesn’t matter who’s president.
?: But there’s a hopeless romantic in everybody, and what Barack says is beautiful, and it’s executed in such a way that you just believe. And people need something to believe in- bad. Faith is the evidence of things not seen and sorta hoped for. And because we’ve been let down so much, I guess it’s better to protect yourself. But I don’t think people can survive without something to believe in. We’re all not atheists.
CA: The hip-hop stance generally seems atheistic.
?: I think we’re more nihilistic. It hink to be an atheist is to be indifferent, to the point where you just don’t care. If you’re nihilistic, there’s still some passionate anger in there. I still consider anger an offspring cousin of love. The opposite of love is indifference, and that’s where you really just don’t give a fuck, you truly don’t. And even though rappers say, “I don’t give a fuck!” that’s used more as an expression of passionate anger to show that they really do care.
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CA: Still Do You Want More?!!!??! was critically acclaimed, as was the next album, Illadelph Halflife. And sales weren’t terrible.
?: By 1996, ‘97, some hip-hop gatekeepers were like, “Okay, we’ll let you play some of our reindeer games.” And at that point, an underground hip-hop scene had formed, inspired by the Stretch Armstrong & Bobbito [radio] show at Columbia University. That’s sort of when Rich Nichols said the only way our music was really going to make sense was if it was contextualized and compared to something else- we basically got to do some Moses/Noah type shit. So we made this list of everybody in hip-hop we needed to associate with. We went to our A&R and said, “Look, in order for us to work, we have to have a movement. This is more that just a single and the right song.” So we spent all of 1997 and all of 1998 building. That meant us going to Common, saying, “Yo, don’t you wanna be on a real major, where they spend money on you?” And he’s like, “Oh yeah.” So our first priority was getting Common off [indie label] Relativity, bringing him over by any means- that was number one. Then [Geffen] signed Black Star, plus Mos Def and Talib Kweli separately. And D’Angelo and I had cemented our relationship, so it was starting to look like a movement. Then, the second wave of the alternative hip-hop thing arrived in 1999. A lot of it was the commercial backlash to Puffy, a lot of it was the promise of something new. Erykah Badu comes through, Jill Scott. Suddenly, we make sense.
Filed under: interview., listen. | Tags: funk, interview., podcast, sharon jones, soul, the shiny
{from the rhapsody blog by Toshitaka Kondo}
The Cool Kids are hip-hop babies — for real. Evan “Chuck Inglish” Ingersoll, 23, and Antoine “Mikey Rocks” Reed, 19, weren’t raised on classic soul or funk like many of rap’s older stars. Instead, they grew up in the suburbs of Mount Clemens, Michigan and Matteson, Illinois, respectively, on a steady diet of Nas, Jay-Z, Slick Rick, and Eric B. and Rakim. They’re more than familiar with the music that today’s “hip-hop is dead” purists yearn for. Their video for “Black Mags” is an ode to BMX bikes and rap’s golden ‘80s — with fly girls rockin’ huge doorknockers and d-boys donning crisp kicks and Starter hats. It’s far from a gimmick though: the Chicago duo channels the carefree and energetic essence of that era rather than trying to recreate it. 2008 should see the release of an EP or full-length from these critical darlings, who Rhapsody recently tapped for a starring role in a commercial with Sara Bareilles. We reunited with the Kids in New York. Warning: Artists who don’t support downloading won’t be too happy with the interview that follows.
Rhapsody: What would you say is the most trouble you guys got into coming?
Mikey: I was 16 on Halloween and we were driving around egging people and throwing water balloons. We had on all-black and ski masks in my friend Mike’s Dodge Intrepid. We threw eggs at this Explorer. Then the headlights came on and we were like, “Oh sh*t.” We sped off and then they start chasing us. They rammed us from behind and wouldn’t stop. I think it was this girl that went to our school’s dad and he was a known drug dealer, so he might have thought it was something else. At one point we stopped and dude hopped out the back with a baseball bat and shattered Mike’s back windshield. Then we got to a dead end somehow. I was like, “Yo, everyone might as well run ‘cause this dude is trying to kill us.” And then we heard shots. The same night the cops came to all our houses. We came back the next day. And the car was totally totaled. I was grounded for, like, ever.
Chuck, when you were young, your father made you memorize “Paid in Full”…
Chuck: My mom was upset like, “Why do you have a three year old rapping this song about money?” But my dad liked the song. My grandfather used to have me do it anytime there was a family function. I just came to love the cool songs that made me feel like I was the popular kid. It also goes into the point, what song out right now would a dad make their kid memorize? There’s not too many. It’s sad. When people ask, “Why do we make music?” It’s because there aren’t songs that [are] cool to teach your kid. Half of the time, it’s crap or inappropriate.
You guys obviously have a heavy old school-influence. How far back does your musical frame of reference go?
Chuck: His is more like the beginning of Jay-Z and Nas. Mine was more towards the end of where all those crews like the Get Fresh Crew were splitting up. It doesn’t make sense for people to think that we couldn’t know [that music]. If that’s the first thing you hear, then that’s all you know — it’s like your language. Are people gonna say, “Hey, those kids don’t know anything about English because they weren’t around when the language was developed.” We came up on it. It wasn’t like, “Let’s do the old school thing because it’s cool.” Nobody is gonna tell Jack White he doesn’t know what’s going on when Led Zeppelin was poppin’. I’m stubborn. I don’t wanna sound futuristic. I wanna sound like [when] it started because that’s what made it such the phenomenon. Back then, they were bringing people together. It was punk kids coming to Afrika Bambaataa shows.
How do you guys feel about your “Ringtone Rap” peers, like Hurricane Chris and Soulja Boy Tell’ Em?
Mikey: A lot of people give dudes like that flack because it’s like, “Oh, you’re not a true lyricist.” That stuff is fun. If it’s making the party jump and it’s a dope song, why hate on the dudes?
Chuck: Hurricane Chris can rap. I actually get mad that people throw him in that category. “A Bay Bay” was a dope song if no one knew what it meant. Bay Bay was a DJ. That was some real New Orleansbounce club that popped off. “Crank That (Soulja Boy)” was a song that was two years old.
Mikey: People are thinking these songs are for you to sit in your room while you’re reading your book and analyze. These are songs you play at a party and have a good time.
Chuck: I don’t wanna hear Talib Kweli at a party.
Mikey: I’m not trying to hear “Ether” at a party. That would make me feel weird. Their stuff is made for certain situations.
How did “Black Mags” come about?
Chuck: The dude that did the video, Joe Esquivel, he comes over and we wanted to do a little short, “How Chuck Makes Beats” video. I was just going through sound banks and I found the snare that was in there and I had just got some velocity sensitive pads, like MPC pads. I started playing on them and then I hit the bass. … I listened to it and couldn’t stop thinking about a rap to write to it, and the first line of the song just came to me.
Mikey: He had his verse and then I was thinking about what would be ill for a hook concept. Then he started leaning toward, “Pedal down the foothill,” from “Gold and a Pager,” and then I was thinking, “Damn, that line I said in ‘1,2,’ ‘I’m on the Dyno with the black mag’ — put that with the half you already have in there.”
How long did it take to shoot that video?
Chuck: Three days. Joe got a couple of his boys he shot skate videos with to help out. We did some shows to get $2000. Some kid that went to the same school I went to was like, “We should put these animations in there. At first, I was like, “Why?” Next thing you know, we saw the test shots for it and we were like, “Damn.”
One of the first things that stuck out about the video were how tight Mikey’s jeans were.
Chuck: We’ve heard that shit so many times. [Laughs].
Mikey: Yeah, it’s more or less a shocker because I’m black. A lot of other ethnic groups rock tight jeans. It wasn’t really anything new to me. I guess people didn’t know what to think. It’s just a weird first impression for some people. I sometimes forget that there’s a whole rest of the world that doesn’t live in a city.
Chuck: You get those people that are like, Oh, this video sucks ‘cause the dude’s pants are tight.
How hard was it to translate your strong online presence into actual airplay and shows?
Mikey: The online community is such a credible source of finding new stuff that it was kind of like our mixtape. Nowadays, a blogger is more credible than a huge hip-hop magazine.
Chuck: Before the blogs, we made sure to get all our joints to the DJs that mattered. We came through Flosstradamus. So with them having the plugs they had, other DJs would be like, “What’s that?” [DJs] were trying to beat other people to playing it. So we knew we had something. We don’t wanna be a part of the old formula. … The music that we’re making [is] for this first “album” that is not an album. Songs that will get put on a disc, so you can either have or not have. What we’re doing right now is what we want people to know first.
Mikey: The right format to present it to the public.
Chuck: Packaging, format, how we tell you about it, all that. Everybody is like, “Aright, so when’s the album coming out?” We’re probably just going to keep leaking songs till we figure this thing out. Why not? Who cares? If we have a song and you want to hear it, you can get it. So what is the point? I’m just really rebellious toward what I can and can’t do. I can do whatever I want. If it was up to me, I’d just make CDs and put them out. You can’t sell music, man. It’s not possible. You can sell tickets to a show so you can do those songs. We’re past selling music. It’s boring. Saying, “Here, buy my CD,” is like saying, “I hate you.” Just give me it. What are you going to do with my $12?
Did you see Ghostface’s blog entry where he was mad that people didn’t buy his new album?
Chuck: It hurts to hear Ghostface say that. Artists that wanna protect their music or [say] don’t bootleg or don’t download, what are you gonna do? It’s like trying to stop everybody from doing drugs. You gonna tell somebody to not smoke weed? It’s not gonna happen. We have this Totally Flossed Out EP that we didn’t do or put together or even name that people are downloading. For a while, we tried to stop all the downloading sites. And then as you put one down, there’s another one that pops up. So it’s like that [arcade game] — bang one head, the other one pops up. You gonna keep on doing that?
Has your label Chocolate Industries been telling you guys not to leak songs?
Chuck: It has nothing to do with the label. People might criticize us for it like, “Oh, you’re stupid. You should want to get your money.” This is why our whole generation of entertainers is so out of their mind right now. Everybody is cracked out ‘cause of that greed. If you’re good and you’re true to yourself, money will come. First of all, I didn’t know what else I would ever do.
You had no other aspirations?
Chuck: I had no other aspirations. People are like, “Are you guys gonna make a clothing line?” I would never want to be a part of a business where I had to develop clothes. I like to wear them. A fragrance line? I wear soap. The only thing we really like doing is making songs and meeting other musicians that like to make songs. There is an industry where we can all make music and live comfortably. No one understands that we’re on the brink of not having that any more because there’s nothing good left. I don’t know what happened. You got actresses making albums. There’s no way that should be happening.
Mikey: Everybody wants to be the quarterback when you might be a good lineman. Nobody wanna be the manager of the zoo.
via sdsu.
The latest installment in the Bobby Digital saga comes out July 1st (Koch) and it’s called Digi Snacks. What can we expect and how does it relate to the previous BD albums?
The title says it all really, Digi Snacks. It’s a snack for the people. Like sometimes you’re looking for your scooby snacks? Well, here’s your Digi Snack. (laughs). It’s a little tease to get you back into that world of Bobby Digital.
Now if this is a little tease to take you back into that world, what direction should we imagine the next episode taking us into?
Oh we’re taking you into a lot of different directions. We’re working on a comic book, but I don’t really want to talk about that yet. We’re planning to bring a lot more fun to the game. You know how you love Hip Hop, and you wanna play it at the house but your girl is around and you have to turn it down?
Yes, I definitely had that moment with ‘Domestic Violence’ off of the first Bobby Digital album. It didn’t go over so well. (Watch the classic video for ‘Domestic Violence here.)
Because it’s too much of the truth! (laughs) Well, the next episode, I’ll have some more of your shit (laughs), but this time around I also have a couple of tracks on there that your girl will actually wanna turn up. We focused on just having fun with it. A lot of stuff I’ve done before is heavy and serious and this time I was like “f*ck it”. Lets have some fun.
What kind of people should we be thinking of as far as collaborators on Digi Snax? People from inside of the Wu-Tang Clan circle or more so outside?
I want to kind of keep that a surprise so when you pick up the album you’ll have that experience. But Bobby Digital kind of lives in his own world, you know? He has his own crew. People like Holocaust always show up, and others like him. But there’s some surprises for sure.
Even though it went platinum, I feel the first Bobby Digital album was somewhat under-appreciated when it came out. It’s been ten years and I was wondering how you felt about the life-span and initial reception of that album.
You know, sometimes an album comes out and people miss it the first time around, but they discover it later on. It’s like movies, a lot of the classic old flicks maybe didn’t do that well originally. Some people got into it early, and they talked about it to their people, and slowly they’d come around to love it. I feel Bobby Digital is like that.
Just to switch gears for a second, what can you tell us about your contributions to Raekwon’s upcoming album Only Built 4 Cuban Linx 2.
Well, I don’t really know how that’s going because Raekwon is in charge of that project. I haven’t talked about it in like a whole year. All I can say it’s going to quite a bit of Gambino. (laughs) We did a lot of songs together, and I’m on there in my Bobby Steels persona and there’s some dope lyrics on there. But Rae is in charge so I’m not sure what he is keeping.
Now I hear you also contributed a track to the Dr. Dre’s elusive Detox album. What can you tell us about that?
No comment! (laughs)
Annnnnd moving right along to your upcoming Digi Snax tour (see all dates here). What’s a solo RZA tour like in the context of Bobby Digital?
Just a whole lot of fun man. A good time for everything, a real good time. One thing I like to do is that when I can get together with the people, and we can share that little bit of time, I want to make sure they know I’m thankful for buying my albums through out the years and for supporting us. So I want to make sure when we hang out, we have fun together. I mean, I’m still also going to embed some teachings, lyrically, like I always do, and things about society, but I’m mostly there for us to have a great time together. I’ll be bringing Bobby Digital, but also some of my Bobby Digiteks (laughs). Expect to see Black Knights out with me, and Stone Mecca too.
I heard Digi Snax goes slightly beyond most albums in how the dirty and the clean version of the album differ aside from edits in language?
They have different cover artwork, and some songs are included only on the dirty version, or there actually two different versions across albums. Let me give you an example. There’s a song called ‘Old Day’, which is only on the dirty version, and there’s a song called ‘Ice Cream’ that’s on both, but each version really flows from a different concept with a different angle lyrically.
So it’s a lot more involved than the tradition clean vs. dirty versions. Is that a conscious choice this time around or is that something that you’ve always been concerned with?
I mean, in Hip Hop you always have a clean version also, so I’ve always been like that, but this time around I was just a little more deliberate about it.
Any last words for the readers about the new album?
As far as the album goes I also want to let people know again that it’s a lot of fun and I want them to take time to have fun. I don’t know if you drink, or smoke, but get what you do first, and then pop my CD in (laughs). And if you’re underage, if you’re under 16, then get yourself a lollipop, some bubble gum, and pop in the clean version and get that sugar high. (laughs)
