Last week the hip-hop world celebrated the life of Jay Dee aka J-Dilla. Both his birthday and date of death fell in the same week. I first heard his music in 1996 when he began working with A Tribe Called Quest on their fourth album Beats, Rhymes and Life. He had already been working with his group Slum Village in his hometown of Detroit, and apparently stepped to Q-Tip with a tape while Tribe was in town with Lollapalooza. From that point on, Jay Dee became the “producers producer”. Highly acclaimed he worked with the likes of Pharcyde, Busta Rhymes, De …read more

Sampled is a new series of posts I’ll be doing that takes my favorite hip-hop songs and compares them to the original song they sampled. Growing up listening to rap I was curious about where producers got their records and what genres they’d dig through to make their tracks. This opened up a door for me to a whole bunch of other forms of music, soul, rock, jazz, even obscure international stuff. For this first edition, I picked Gang Starr’s Just To Get A Rep. Who else could I have started with besides DJ Premier? In 1991 Primo somehow got his …read more

Preeeetty stoked on this one. Yep. Off the off the upcoming album Rise Up dropping April 16th. Directed by Matt Alonzo.
Here’s the video for It Ain’t Nothin’. New Cypress Hill!

Got a new video here from Brooklyn’s battle MC OG, Poison Pen. The Money Shot is Pen’s 2009 release featuring the guest stylings of Immortal Technique, M.O.P., Silkk Da Shocker and others. Check out the album artwork below.

Image: Amazon.com
Brand spanking new, here’s the video for My Dude, check it out.

Beef is a pretty common thing in hip-hop, amongst the biggest are Biggie and 2Pac, MC Shan and KRS, Roxanne Shante and the Real Roxanne. Tonight I was reminded of a pretty down low beef that included Naughty By Nature and a lesser known Jersey cat named Tony D. When Naughty’s debut single OPP dropped in 1991, they blew up pretty fast, that jam was playing everywhere. It Probably took one day for Tony D to hear and and start laughing. See the thing is, Tony made the exact same beat two years prior called Adam’s Nightmare on Sure Shot …read more

It’s no life altering discovery but I just want to draw a quick comparison:
to…
and…
to…
Cannot take either one of these dudes seriously! You can’t do the most hilarious stand-up ever and then bust out the pop/ R&B expecting us to switch over like that. I keep watching the video expecting a laugh track to come in at the end. I guess I better warm up to it, Jamie Foxx has been in the music game for a minute now. Eight years to be exact and he’s stockpiling awards. This year he’s up for three Grammy nominations. Let’s see how he does …read more

Still cold?

Think back to A Long Hot Summer in 2004 and run out to grab this by Masta Ace. The highly acclaimed concept/ follow up album to 2001’s Disposable Arts. Pump this under your hat and instead of walking through a snow storm you’ll be following Ace and Fats Belvedere through Brooklyn in the heat.
Or you can stay in where it’s warm and buy it here.
image: amazon.com

Hey what’s Brand Nubian been up to lately? It’s been a minute since their classic One For All album dropped. Puba went solo after that, I’m kind of glad he did. Lord Jamar did something, Sadat did Wild Cowboys, I know all this. I mean recently where have they been… Well I know what Sadat X is doing! Drinking lots of wine and sounding like ODB! Sadat’s True Wine Connoisseur is a Youtube series, where he rates wines that are under twenty dollars. In this episode, our favorite Five Percenter rapper opens up a bottle of Castle Rock ($12.99) and …read more

I’ve got the leak off the The Damian Marley and Nas project here for you. From the upcoming Distant Relatives album the track is called Strong Will Continue, listen to it here. The official word on the leak from Dan Dalton of Red Light Management, Marley’s Manager.
“We are extremely happy with the response that we have been receiving from the leaked version of Strong Will Continue, while it is not the initial single we planned to release these things happen. The first track we really want everyone to sink their teeth into is ‘As We Enter.’ This is it, the ball …read more

I was listening to more Juan Epstein podcasts yesterday, a second one with Pete Rock. I really like nerding out to these because it makes me go back and listen to tunes I haven’t pulled out in a while. I forgot that Heavy D was Pete Rock’s cousin, and how Pete produced a lot of the songs on the Blue Funk album. Pete also talks about songs he produced, but never got credit for. He talks about how back in 1993 he was chilling with Biggie when he put on the beat for Juicy. Biggie tripped and was like “yo …read more