Chicago . . . wow! The Chi might be putting out the freshest underground music, artists & producers in the nation right now. Kid Sister has been making noise for 2 years or so. Her previous highlight had been being anointed ‘the Next 100′ with a cover story for URB magazine in 2006 (along with her brother’sDJ group Flosstradamus). Her act and her star has been rising, but much of the online media on her was inhibiting her growth. It didn’t really capture the essence of what’s so electric about her performances and music. Well . . .
Her new Pro Nails video kills it. She won’t be underground for much longer. Stay around long enough to catch the vamp in the last :45 seconds of the video. For those unfamiliar with Chicago’s Juke Scene, it’s a hot little glimpse.
It hasn’t been announced, the sales data doesn’t even show it yet, but Kanye West will win the sales battle with 50 Cent. Stronger is currently the US #1 and he’ll get another #1 for Good Life (you read it here first).
*** Note: After writing this blog, I discovered that MTV has chosen to only allow you to view its videos on their site. Apparently, the extra 1 / 100th of a penny they earn for each view is more important than the blogsphere being able to promote their content for free. How could a network so on the cutting edge get everything so wrong? I left the non-working videos in place.***
I’m old enough to remember a time when the word ‘bad‘ meant ‘not good‘ or ‘horrible‘. Pop culture thought it would be cute to blur the meaning. ‘Bad‘ came to mean ‘Good‘ and being a ‘goody, goody‘ or a ‘Good Girl‘ became an insult. Things have only gotten worse over the years, today ‘Hot‘, ‘Stoopid‘, ‘That’s What’s Up‘, ‘Bangin‘ and other words and phrases have taken bad’s place implying good.
Nothing personifies pop culture more than MTV which announced today the ratings for the 2007 VMA broadcast. As reported by PR newswire, MTV said the show’s ratings were “up 23% from last year” (2006 was one of the worst rated VMAs ever). Traffic to MTV.com was up as well, setting a record for the most visitors in a single day to the site. Continue reading »
Another week in commercial hip hop’s slow decline into irrelevance has passed. Was there anything worth talking about?
We learned that Kanye and 50 Cent’s feud over who would sell the most records was nothing more than a publicity stunt (yawn!). XXL, a leading hip-hop rag, shared the news that the two would be posing on the cover of Rolling Stone Magazine together.
The Billboard Top 10 singles chart this week was high on samples.
“The more things change, the more they stay the same.”
– Alphonse Karr
Is your favorite ‘new’ song, not really that new? No matter how hip, new school or bleeding edge you are, listen to the radio these days and you can’t avoid samples, interpolations and re-works of the classics. Imagine if commercial radio were formatted the way a DJ mix-show might be, playing the originals and the original ‘inspiration’. I experiment with this premise every now and then in my live sets.
DJing has always been an interesting activity for me, a balletic, high-wire tightrope act, balancing the desire for creativity with the public’s desire to dance to the ‘hits’. A pride surrendering, (often) thankless avocation, nearly every club-goer thinks they can do a better job than the DJ. How much better they think they are is often proportional to the ounces of alcohol imbibed.
Increasingly, crowds pressure DJs to spin the 20 to 30 ubiquitous songs being played on commercial radio and TV at the moment. Many people want to hear exactly what they’ve been listening to in the car on the way to the club and will listen to again on their ride home. They want the DJs to not only play the songs, but to play them all back to back and when the DJs played them all through, well, play them all over again.
what do you think