Archive for the 'Hip Hop' Category
An intimate night with DJ Shadow
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Loaded and Triple R present
An intimate night with
DJ SHADOW & MC Gift of Gab (Blackalicious)
Daddy G [Massive Attack] & Dexter
This is a rare showcase and tickets are strictly limited.
Full Live Visual Show feat. MC Gift Of Gab (Blackalicious)
Hailing from California’s Bay Area, the elite DJ Shadow is set to deliver a not-to-be-missed, distinctive live performance alongside longtime comrade Gift of Gab (Blackalicious) at Melbourne institution, The Forum, on June 7th.
Ensconced as one of San Francisco’s most instrumental personas in the Bay Area movement, DJ Shadow is the embodiment of the city’s spirit, a temperament paralleled by sister city Melbourne and articulated by Melburnians. Suitably, after his previous sell out Outsider tour, DJ Shadow invites MC Gift of Gab to be a part of a fresh, carefully crafted showcase for Melbourne, an audience armed with an artistic intellect to relish in the full spectrum of imagination and all it brings to light.
Shadow and Gift of Gab are a united creative force to be reckoned who share a sentiment for progressive independent artistry. They were fellow crew members in the early day and founders of the underground award winning hip hop label SoleSides later reinvented as hip hop collective Quannum Records; the label under which Gift of Gab (as one half of Blackalicious) released Nia (2000) and Blazing Arrow (2002) as well as first solo album 4th Dimensional Rocketships Going Up (2004).
Perched alongside the current dons of the hip hop world including The Neptunes, Dr. Dre and Timbaland; DJ Shadow’s gamut of creative works range from trip hop and ethereal soundscapes through to rocking west coast hip hop, including his most recent collaboration with Q-Tip (A Tribe Called Quest).
DJ Shadow’s legendary live performance is an amazing spectacle enhanced by visuals, coupled with MC Gift of Gab, this is definitely a show that will leave you in awe and aching for more. And this may also be your last chance to see Shadow on these shores for several years to come so best be quick.
Catch the Shadow before he disappears!
Supported by heavyweights Daddy G [Massive Attack], Dexter and Mike Hunt.
DATE & VENUE
Thu June 7, Forum Theatre, 154 Flinders St, Melbourne
Box Office: (03) 9299 9700
SUPPORT. Daddy G, Dexter and Mike Hunt
TICKET OUTLETS.
$79 + BF. Available through www.loadedentertainment.com.au
Available through Ticketek - All stores 132 849
Central Station Records - Melbourne, Click n Drag - St Kilda, D M C Beats - South Yarra, Mighty Music Machine - Chapel St, Northside Records - Fitzroy, Polyester Records – Fitzroy
Enter(tain) the meatmarket
I’m not a huge fan of house music, but Sampleslaya - Enter the meat market from house legend Armand Van Helden is a turntablist / producer / DJs dream. It integrates catchy and funky beats produced amongst classic hip hop samples that can be used by DJ’s / producers spinning hip hop, house or straight up funky turntablism (an album worthy of owning doubles of! Juggle it up!!). Check it out on Amazon to listen to some of the tracks.
It doesn’t seem so easy to find on vinyl but if you look hard enough you will find (I just stumbled across this in a Brooklyn record store after looking for years and almost giving up hope - actually I found it on gemm.com but it was a bit pricey. The copy I picked up was mint with a slightly damaged cover - for only US$5).
We live on a Hip Hop Planet…
I found this article from National Geographic when browsing Remix Theory the other day (check it out some time).
It makes for very interesting reading. The reason for posting this on a turntablism site may be obvious to some but not others so I thought I would justify it. Basically the backbone of Hip Hop is the DJ as we all may have heard. But Hip Hop is made up of a number of elements; MCing, DJing, Graffiti, B-Boying and Beat Boxing (not to forget the others named by KRS-ONE; street fashion, street language, street knowledge, and street entrepreneurism). So, basically, turntablism is an integral part of the hiphop culture and without hiphop there might not be turntablism as it is today. What follows is a quote from the first page of the article;
Text and Image source: National Geographic, Interactive Edition, April 2007
Whether you trace it to New York’s South Bronx or the villages of West Africa, hip-hop has become the voice of a generation demanding to be heard.
“This is my nightmare: My daughter comes home with a guy and says, “Dad, we’re getting married.” And he’s a rapper, with a mouthful of gold teeth, a do-rag on his head, muscles popping out his arms, and a thug attitude. And then the nightmare gets deeper, because before you know it, I’m hearing the pitter-patter of little feet, their offspring, cascading through my living room, cascading through my life, drowning me with the sound of my own hypocrisy, because when I was young, I was a knucklehead, too, hearing my own music, my own sounds. And so I curse the day I saw his face, which is a reflection of my own, and I rue the day I heard his name, because I realize to my horror that rap—music seemingly without melody, sensibility, instruments, verse, or harmony, music with no beginning, end, or middle, music that doesn’t even seem to be music—rules the world. It is no longer my world. It is his world. And I live in it. I live on a hip-hop planet.
High-stepping
I remember when I first heard rap. I was standing in the kitchen at a party in Harlem. It was 1980. A friend of mine named Bill had just gone on the blink. He slapped a guy, a total stranger, in the face right in front of me. I can’t remember why. Bill was a fellow student. He was short-circuiting. Problem was, the guy he slapped was a big guy, a dude wearing a do-rag who’d crashed the party with three friends, and, judging by the fury on their faces, there would be no Martin Luther King moments in our immediate future.
There were no white people in the room, though I confess I wished there had been, if only to hide the paleness of my own frightened face. We were black and Latino students about to graduate from Columbia University’s journalism school, having learned the whos, whats, wheres, whens, and whys of American reporting. But the real storytellers of the American experience came from the world of the guy that Bill had just slapped. They lived less than a mile (1.6 kilometers) from us in the South Bronx. They had no journalism degrees. No money. No credibility. What they did have, however, was talent.
Earlier that night, somebody tossed a record on the turntable, which sent my fellow students stumbling onto the dance floor, howling with delight, and made me, a jazz lover, cringe. It sounded like a broken record. It was a version of an old hit record called “Good Times,” the same four bars looped over and over. And on top of this loop, a kid spouted a rhyme about how he was the best disc jockey in the world. It was called “Rapper’s Delight.” I thought it was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard. More ridiculous than Bill slapping that stranger.
Bill survived that evening, but in many ways, I did not. For the next 26 years, I high-stepped past that music the way you step over a crack in the sidewalk. I heard it pounding out of cars and alleyways from Paris to Abidjan, yet I never listened. It came rumbling out of boomboxes from Johannesburg to Osaka, yet I pretended not to hear. I must have strolled past the corner of St. James Place and Fulton Street in my native Brooklyn where a fat kid named Christopher Wallace, aka Biggie Smalls, stood amusing his friends with rhyme, a hundred times, yet I barely noticed. I high-stepped away from that music for 26 years because it was everything I thought it was, and more than I ever dreamed it would be, but mostly, because it held everything I wanted to leave behind.
In doing so, I missed the most important cultural event in my lifetime.
Not since the advent of swing jazz in the 1930s has an American music exploded across the world with such overwhelming force. Not since the Beatles invaded America and Elvis packed up his blue suede shoes has a music crashed against the world with such outrage. This defiant culture of song, graffiti, and dance, collectively known as hip-hop, has ripped popular music from its moorings in every society it has permeated. In Brazil, rap rivals samba in popularity. In China, teens spray-paint graffiti on the Great Wall. In France it has been blamed, unfairly, for the worst civil unrest that country has seen in decades.
Its structure is unique, complex, and at times bewildering. Whatever music it eats becomes part of its vocabulary, and as the commercial world falls into place behind it to gobble up the powerful slop in its wake, it metamorphoses into the Next Big Thing. It is a music that defies definition, yet defines our collective societies in immeasurable ways. To many of my generation, despite all attempts to exploit it, belittle it, numb it, classify it, and analyze it, hip-hop remains an enigma, a clarion call, a cry of “I am” from the youth of the world. We’d be wise, I suppose, to start paying attention.”
Read the complete article at National Geographic, Interactive Edition. Definitely a great read for turntablists and hip-hop heads - check it.
(Posting theme music: DJ Goldenchyld - Ear Infections)
