The Hip-Hop Thread

Started by hbionic, May 15, 2006, 05:44:06 PM

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smeags

If guns kill people then spoons made Rosie O'Donnel a fatass.

Quote from: ice grillin you on March 16, 2008, 03:38:24 PM
phillies will be under 500 this year...book it

Diomedes

This just an rip thread anymore
There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists." - Yosemite Park Ranger

smeags

If guns kill people then spoons made Rosie O'Donnel a fatass.

Quote from: ice grillin you on March 16, 2008, 03:38:24 PM
phillies will be under 500 this year...book it

ice grillin you

i can take a phrase thats rarely heard...flip it....now its a daily word

igy gettin it done like warrick

im the board pharmacist....always one step above yous

ice grillin you

pretty cool ny times article from march 2, 1990....

Rap's Trip To a New And Surreal Territory

Tonight at the Ritz, the Next New Thing in Pop Music, subchapter hip-hop, will make its appearance. Three rap groups - Third Bass, a duo of white New Yorkers who have the highest-ranking rap album on the black charts; the Jungle Brothers, whose newest record, ''Done by the Forces of Nature,'' is one of the best new rap albums, and a Tribe Called Quest, whose single ''I Left My Wallet in El Segundo'' is a surreal underground favorite - will try to make a claim for themselves on the stage.

But instead of the standard-issue self-aggrandizement of many rap acts, the three bands plan to bring something new and less single-minded to their audience.

With the huge success of the group De La Soul last year allowing for eccentricity and individuality in rap, hip-hop's vanguard has moved into richer, more detailed territory, using humor, surrealism, politics, more intricate and literate wordplay, and even more arcane and nonsensical sampling to construct records.

Hip-hop has become a repository for nearly all recorded information. The form is capable of absorbing almost anything: a hip-hop album will use a message left on a rapper's answering machine, dialogue from B movies, classical-guitar strumming, excerpts from spoken-word albums, bass lines from a Parliament-Funkadelic album and music borrowed from just about every other source. It is the reproduction of the world, but on vinyl and under the ordering of a coherent mind. And in the similarities between groups, there is the mark of a movement.

'We Like to Sample'

''I see a lot of similarities between us and De La Soul and the Jungle Brothers,'' said Pete Nice of Third Bass. ''When De La Soul's record came out, our record was done and they had used a lot of the samples that we had used. It surprised me. But it makes sense, because we like to sample from things that are really out there.

''The rhymes and the word structures and patterns are more complicated now as well; we're all trying to be more ambiguous, so that a listener has to dig in more to get more out of it.''

Q-tip of a Tribe Called Quest said he agreed. ''Yeah, it's new,'' he said. ''We're known as trying to interject a new flavor alternative to the music. We don't just want to hit the hard-core crowd; we want to hit Middle America as well. Digital Underground, Third Bass, De La Soul, the Jungle Brothers: they're part of the genre. It's changing because everybody needs something different to break the monotony.

''Rap is a good medium; a million and one kids with a million and one ideas want an expression that they can use.''

The Jungle Brothers and a Tribe Called Quest are part of a loose coalition of rap performers with similar ideas about culture and politics. That association, called Native Tongues, includes Queen Latifah, Monie Love, De La Soul and Karen Wheeler.

''The whole thing just clicked about two years ago when we were touring with Latifah,'' said Mike G from the Jungle Brothers. ''We realized that we had a lot in common, shared the same thoughts about being ourselves and expressing it in our way and doing our own thing. We're all family.

''Other groups want to be like Big Daddy Kane or Heavy D, but deep down we all realize that what it is about yourselves that makes you an individual is important. And we're different because we weren't raised to be loud, and we're not for material values. We're for mental power instead.''

Race and Rap

Black nationalism and Afro-centric thinking has seemingly left out the white rap duo Third Bass. But the band, which is headlining the show at the Ritz, is respected by most rap performers, and it has produced music that is idiomatically accurate. More important, Third Bass's record is selling big in the black community. The duo's success and the integrity of its music point out that race in America is an endlessly complicated issue.

''Obviously, despite the similarities between us and the other groups, there are lots of differences,'' said Pete Nice of Third Bass. ''The Jungle Brothers have a more militant and Afro-centric approach, while De La Soul is just bugged out. We're white and harder than De La Soul, which I think is a reaction. We have different things to say. We've grown up differently.

''They grew up in different place, and while we've been heavily influenced by black culture - it's in our song 'Product of the Environment' -all these things have an effect.''

Among other things, the duo is actively political and anti-racist, putting it in the mainstream of the new movement. Though it is almost a novelty record, the band's newest hit, ''The Gas Face,'' is political. ''This kid Doom was saying 'gas face' all the time when he was talking about being dissed,'' Pete Nice said. ''He kept on saying it, and everybody we were hanging around with started saying it. So I decided we should do a record about it. My verse talks about record companies exploiting us, and we talk about how evil racial stereotypes can be when things like black cats are signs for bad things and the word 'black' is defined as dirty in Webster's.

''And we haven't had it easy, and neither has our black deejay, Richie Rich. When the three of us go into a store, security follows him around, and not us. Not too many white people have come straight out and said in pop music that whites are, in essence as the majority, pretty racist. It's not being said on a record. So it's important that we are saying what we are saying.''

A Showier Setting

That the concert is being held at the Ritz, hardly a bastion of black youth culture, is also an indication that things may be changing for rap. For the last several years, rap bills have been virtually banned from stages in urban centers all across the country. Fear of violence has made producers wary of booking rap acts. As usual, the economic consequences are felt esthetically.

Rap shows are notoriously threadbare, with little concern given to visual or performance values. Rap acts, used to playing in small clubs with little time or money, have suffered. But Third Bass puts on a good show, and a Tribe Called Quest says it intends to try.

''We're going to come out with black capes that I made, which will freak the audience out,'' Q-tip of the Tribe said. ''Then music drops. I can't tell you what will happen after that, except that we'll be wearing Afro-centric garments. We definitely have a big show, and it won't be violent. The type of people who will come aren't about violence: they're into listening and having a good time. People will be there with notes and pencils, taking down what we have to say.

''People are still throwing rocks at us: people like Peter Townshend and Wynton Marsalis. I can't figure it out. Townshend wrote 'My Generation' because people downed rock-and-roll, and now he's doing it to us. It doesn't matter, because they're going out like suckers.''

Show time at the Ritz (254 West 54th Street near Broadway) is at 9 P.M.; tickets are $17.50. Information: 956-3731.
i can take a phrase thats rarely heard...flip it....now its a daily word

igy gettin it done like warrick

im the board pharmacist....always one step above yous

ice grillin you

and a review of the same show from march 7, 1990

Reviews/Music; Racial Stereotypes Blur at a Ritz Hip-Hop Show

Friday night's hip-hop show at the Ritz was both bizarre and a self-affirming party. The group Third Bass, which headlined the concert, is white in a genre overwhelmingly black; backed by a supportive, racially mixed audience, it crashed stereotypes. And the audience coalesced in a show of real community.

The second act on the bill, the Jungle Brothers, got the show going about half way through its set. When it began its old hit ''Jimbrowski'' with the help of the old-school legend Kool D. J. Red Alert, the club started to shake. With the group's disk jockey putting together slamming beats that were all drum sludge with a shiny metallic hiss - like the music in most rap shows, it was missing much of the textural inventiveness of the original record - the audience and the performers edged toward the empathy that often defines special concerts.

The group did its house-music hits as well, and when a whole crowd of rap luminaries - including the group De La Soul, the English rapper Monie Love, Flavor Flav of Public Enemy, and Afrika Bambaataa, the head of the Zulu Nation and the primary influence on many of the most innovative rap groups - came out, there was pandemonium. Monie Love, in a high, self-assured voice, using insistent regular rhythms, rapped through riffs of ''Go Monie, Go Monie,'' while De La Soul put in its turn on the microphone rapping through its tune ''Buddy,'' and the Jungle Brothers chanted old hip-hop lines.

For Third Bass, this was a hard act to follow. Not only had Afro-centrism been a major part of the show so far - the interludes between the performances had been filled by short, funny skits on Afro-centricity by people wearing Afro wigs - but the sort of wall- and roof-shaking intensity generated by the Jungle Brothers seemed hard to beat. But then Third Bass, with the support of the crowd and friends onstage, rocked the house as well.

Unlike jazz, which has a history of white involvement dating back to literally its first recording in 1917, hip-hop has no serious precedent for Third Bass. The sight of idiomatically accurate white rappers was a shock. But rap is about bravery and the two rappers were fully assured and presented distinct images. One of them, Pete Nice, was dressed in a suit and sat slumped on a throne, cane by his side, while Serch, the other rapper, danced away in a hip-hop style.

Third Bass went through its tunes, rapping to the group's own voices on record, trading off complicated, hard-to-follow lines that seemed to drift into stream-of-consciousness rhymes. Third Bass's disk jockey, Richie Rich, broke up the raps with virtuosic, crowd-pleasing solos that had him scratching records behind his back, or with crossed hands, and had him using his mouth to manipulate the fader between his two turntables. Splitting the audience in half, the two rappers had their respective sides of the audience trying to out-chant each other.

The concert started with A Tribe Called Quest. Its two rappers, Q-tip and Ali, traded verses and rapped in unison, breaking up lines into fragments. Since half of its short performance wasn't yet available on record, the audience, not knowing the words and not being able to hear what was being said because of a badly mixed sound system, could only get excited over the swinging beats. At the end of its four pieces, the group worked through its tune ''I Left My Wallet in El Segundo'' while the crowd, knowing the words and ready to go, chanted along, turning the title into a strange kind of non sequitur that invited the audience to supply its own meaning.
i can take a phrase thats rarely heard...flip it....now its a daily word

igy gettin it done like warrick

im the board pharmacist....always one step above yous

hunt

driving home from dropping off my kid at track practice yesterday...listening to the bdp remix of steady b's serious...wondering if i'm the only person in the world with that song on my amazon playlist. 
lemonade was a popular drink and it still is

phattymatty

nice. I'm going to see KRS in bmore in a few weeks.  my first live music since march 2020.   


this was the first thing I heard when I woke up this morning.  Philly guy Eric Jamal, this verse been stuck in my head all morning.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lT3k5ZvT8nM

hunt

lemonade was a popular drink and it still is

hunt

original episodes of yo! mtv raps are now airing on paramount plus.  :yay
lemonade was a popular drink and it still is

ice grillin you

i can take a phrase thats rarely heard...flip it....now its a daily word

igy gettin it done like warrick

im the board pharmacist....always one step above yous

ice grillin you

i can take a phrase thats rarely heard...flip it....now its a daily word

igy gettin it done like warrick

im the board pharmacist....always one step above yous

ice grillin you

i can take a phrase thats rarely heard...flip it....now its a daily word

igy gettin it done like warrick

im the board pharmacist....always one step above yous

SD

On a Roots kick this week. Can't believe Phrenology was released 20 years ago.

Diomedes

yeah speaking of them, this track is great...been in heavy rotation this week at my house


https://youtu.be/wDCBQijV77I
There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists." - Yosemite Park Ranger