My entry into Qwazaar & Batsauce’s “What Love” remix competition. The 1st half of the tune was the one I submitted, the 2nd half was just another beat I was messing around with for it that I never completed.
Another street shot, click it to go to flickr.
Mr. Atari Blitzkrieg wrote a short text a little bit back about who he is, about hip-hop & being hip-hop; you can check it here. I also got into a discussion about the term real hip-hop and what hip-hop is (music/mentality wise) with Mr. Digital Fiend & Atari a while ago.
Both of these things stuck in my mind and I’ve been pondering about them, sort of semi-consciously, for a while, just on a personal level. And I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m not hip-hop from a mentality standpoint, that I’ve never really been.
What I mean by that is, although I’ve listened to hip-hop since I was a child and made beats & been involved with (still am), and cared about (still do), it since the late 80s/early 90s, I was a graffiti writer first and the writer mentality has always been there, it still is today, and I doubt it will ever wash out completely. To me it’s much more of a “I don’t give a …” attitude combined with extreme freedom of expression governed by pretty clear rules of conduct where individuality and skill is paramount (I guess, if you try to boil it down to one sentence).
I think this mentality has always colored my music (and probably most other things I’ve done for that matter) as I’ve never felt bound by the rules of beatmaking, I’ve always done things the way I want to; which I guess is both good & bad. But as graff has de-assimilated (for those that don’t know, graffiti predates what we call hip-hop by at least a decade and was assimilated into it) itself with “modern hip-hop” I to feel disconnected with it, the pop side of it in particular because I have nothing at all in common with it. One reason being that I value the things I mentioned above (individuality & skill), which large parts of the people pertaining to represent this genre don’t care about any more. With that said, there are still underground and progressive hip-hop (and other genres) I can connect with, where those things are still important, like the previously mentioned Atari & Digital for instance.
Anyways…
So, just as Atari says I am hip-hop, I’ll say I am a writer. And again, I’m/we’re talking about mentality here, not music, or writing, as such. Well I am anyway, I shouldn’t really speak for Atari, he can speak for himself :), that’s just how I interpreted what he wrote.
Finally got some snow…
as usual click the pics to get to flickr where you can check them out in lager sizes.
I was out digging through some crates yesterday, had (have) a cold and a fever but I couldn’t stay cooped up at home, had to go out and do something. I picked up 10 vinyls, 4 which are in the photo above. We have some US psychedelia, French chanson, Russian trad jazz (with crazy synths in a couple of the tunes!), UK fusion and of course the soundtrack to Carl Sagan’s excellent tv series Cosmos; plus a couple others. I did have to go through 25-30 crates to find these ones tho, it was pretty picked through already, but all in all a pretty decent dig in the end.
Click the pic to go to my flickr where you can check it out in bigger sizes.
Why did I do the list? Well there was a post on facebook about the prices on certain “old” hiphop releases and I thought I’d just check mine to see if anything was worth anything.
Anyways…
This was based on the median of the last 10 sales on Discogs. If I took the ones that has gone for the highest price (but with a lower median) the list would look a little different.
Also, this is just based on the vinyls I’ve added there so far, so there might be some more surprises down the line. I was surprised that a couple in my collection didn’t make the list, but hey, that just shows you what I know… Although the biggest surprise so far was the Sherlock LP & 12” I have to say, I had no idea they were worth that kind of money, being Swedish hiphop and all…
For a second there we had some snow…
Click the pic to get to my flickr where you can check it out in bigger sizes.
We’re a couple of days into the new year now and I thought I’d put together a short (probably going to be long) photo/music year in review.
Yup, it got quite long so I split it into several pages, you’ll find the page links just under the title on all the pages as well as down at the bottom. Unfortunately it placed itself below all the sharing and related posts stuff down there; I wasn’t able to change it’s position, shouldn’t be too much of an inconvenience though.
Crazy amounts of snow and cold as… was the keywords. I joined a couple of good friends out on the countryside for new years, and we had a really good evening.
