This video is what the best MC ever to pick up a mic looked and sounded like when he was 17. Seventeen! Brooklyn's Biggie Smalls was born forty years ago today. Ego Trip has ten rarer videos up to mark the occasion. But this one always blows my mind when I watch it. The way he carried himself, his posture, his enunciation, the control he had of that booming voice—he knew how great he was already.
"Jean-Michel only wanted drugs, sex, and rock n’ roll. He didn’t have no science. He didn’t know what to talk to no critics and if he wanted to talk he didn’t have enough to say. When I talk everybody tells me to be quiet. [laughs] Do you know why? Because I have information that comes to you either from [science], or it’s from something that comes from other people – from my peer group. Whether it came down to rap music, hip-hop music – which is slightly different, or whether it comes to break dancing. After the fight and everything like that then everybody tried to say I was [...]
Herman Cain's chief of staff Mark Block has made a new campaign ad.
Just kidding. Actually, that's a new video from Detroit rapper and producer Quelle Chris, whose album Shotgun & Sleek Rifle comes out next week. The first single from album, "Symbolic (Basquiat)" came out a few weeks ago. And it's good, but not as good as its B-side, "Shotguns" (sort of a title track to the album, I guess) which features Chris's friend and frequent collaborator Danny Brown and long-toiling Long Island MC Roc Marciano.
"Fif states he’s on 'it' But whatever 'it' may be 'It' is not the beat" —Ego Trip reviews eight new rap songs in haiku and it is just the thing today.
"When you have that many people over, the garbage container seems to fill up to the point of over flowing every 10 minutes. Taking the garbage outside in the dead of winter requires me to get my coat, skully hat and boots because of all the snow we have been getting. There will be a minimum of seven trips to the garbage cans outside. A garbage run during a commercial time out in the 4th quarter turns into a longer than expected mission as the bottom of the bag breaks on the way to the can. I spend the next 15 minutes getting latex gloves and picking up all the [...]
Our friends at ego trip count Jay-Z's comments to CNN Monday as the fourth example of a notable rapper to have "publicly voiced some progressive opinion on the issue." (After Chuck D, El-P and Fat Joe.) But there have been more! 50 Cent, Eminem, Prodigy, ASAP Rocky and Lil B have, too. And N.O.R.E, who last year told XXL magazine, “If a gay person bothers you, that’s because they know something about you that you don’t know about yourself yet… Nobody should really care what happens in someone else’s bedroom… That’s their lifestyle. It doesn’t bother me. I live my lifestyle my way. It doesn’t bother me.”
Nice! This new Nas song (co-produced by the late Heavy D!) would indicate that the excellence of last year's "Nasty" was no fluke, and raises the hope that the new album, Life Is Good, is going to be good indeed, when it ever comes out. (He should change the album title before it does, though. Because, come on, hasn't he read that article in Wired, or the new report from the OECD? Life sucks.)
"As part of a promotional campaign for his The Darkside Vol. 1 album, which was released last year, the PR/Cuban rapper shot a series of webisodes called 'Fat Joe’s Tales From the Darkside.' For Part 3, he tells about the time he was visiting R&B sensation R. Kelly in Chicago and how he didn’t believe Kellz when the crooner told him he was a real bona fide thug." —Awl pals Ego Trip being Ego Trip, they have once again unearthed an amazing bit of hip-hop to share with the world.
Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow! As they so often do, the guys at Ego Trip have discovered something amazing.
Lots of people loved president Obama's speech calling for civility Wednesday night. It was a great speech. (Except the line about "jumping in rain puddles in heaven.") And in that spirit, and because I think it's good to note when people you often disagree with say something you do agree with, I very much like what David Brooks writes today: "The truth is fragmentary and it’s impossible to capture all of it. There are competing goods that can never be fully reconciled. The world is more complicated than any human intelligence can comprehend."
But not everyone is in that kind of mood.
If you'd like to read what is "bar none the worst piece you will read about MCA," you can do so here. But I warn you, it's about as disgusting an example of politicizing something that should not be politicized as you're likely to find. It was written by the Washington Times' Joseph Curl and it is racist. If you do choose to read it, for awareness-raising reasons or something, you can wash the taste out of your mouth with the above wonderful, previously unreleased video that Chappelle's Show co-creator Neal Brennan put on the internet over the weekend—and that our friends as Ego Trip [...]
The culture (and TV) experts at ego trip bring us a wonderful ghost of Christmas past. Run-DMC, performing one of the very best Christmas songs ever by anybody, on TV, in 1991. It's a bit mysterious (as most ghosts are, I guess), because no one seems to know what program this was on. Does anybody recognize the backdrop? Chevy Chase' show didn't come on til '93.
"Happy 53rd Birthday, Prince Rogers Nelson. You are definitely one of the world’s 'Favorite Blacks.' We know this not because of all the joy your music has brought your millions of fans. But because in 1985 you and your band, the Revolution, were presented the honor 'Favorite Black Album' at the American Music Awards (by Huey Lewis and Madonna, no less). The irony of this is that you didn’t even win that award for your raw-as-hell The Black Album (which didn’t come out till a few years later and scared all your pop fans who never heard Dirty Mind; we had to buy that shit on a bootleg cassette behind [...]
Sad news for hip-hop last night, as word spread that the groundbreaking graffiti artist and MC Rammellzee had died of as-yet-unknown causes. Born in Far Rockaway, Queens, a fixture of the fertile downtown New York scene of early 1980s, the mysterious figure known as Rammellzee is probably most famous for appearing in three films: Henry Chalfant's Style Wars, Charlie Ahearn's Wild Style (that's him rapping in Wild Style in the clip above) and, playing the role of "man with money," Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise. And for "Beat Bop," a song he made with his Bronx cohort K-Rob that was produced by Jean-Michel Basquiat
