Entries associated with the tag "Hip-Hop":

Kidz in the Hall seem like pretty chill dudes, so the news that MC Naledge was arrested in Tempe, Arizona, "on suspicion of interfering with a police investigation" took me by surprise. A Phoenix-area newspaper gives a fairly sketchy account of an incident in a Tempe nightclub involving "a melee . . . between [Kidz in the Hall producer and DJ] Double-0 and bouncers at the club, and Naledge was reportedly arrested on suspicion of photographing the incident." Hiphopdx.com has a couple more details, including eyewitness reports that Naledge was taken in for snapping pictures of Double-0 being handcuffed by police. Apparently Tempe cops are a little camera shy?

I'm waiting for an official statement from the Kidz' management about the incident, but considering Naledge's brains and the big-ass grin he's wearing in his mug shot (above) I'm guessing he feels confident he's in the clear.

(via Fake Shore Drive)

Fake Shore Drive's Andrew Barber got an interesting pseudonymous e-mail this morning from someone called "Prometheus," who claims to have lifted Rhymefest's iPod from a public appearance and found his long-delayed album El Che on it. Prometheus is now promising to leak the album a track at a time over the next few weeks.

Records are leaked online all the time and for all kinds of reasons: to generate buzz before a legit release, to get revenge, or just because a copy got left within arm's reach of someone who shouldn't have it. Prometheus's reasoning is new to me, though. In a lengthy screed accompanying the first two leaked tracks, he (I'm guessing from the language) puts Fest on blast for his poor choice of record label, his tour cancellations, and his lax iPod security, and complains a lot a lot a lot about El Che's repeated delays. Contrary to all obvious logic, he promises that this is going to be a good thing for Fest:

I got songs from your iPod. I'm going to leak a record from EL CHE every week until you drop a single or a video or some shit. The people have NO FUCKING IDEA how hot this shit sounds. Well, I'm going to show them. You had everything on your iPod. Even old, vintage shit. I'm gonna drop that, too. Until you or your weak-ass label keep your word and start dropping some fucking music. And, I'm not playing. I'm going to make you a better artist. I can't wait to see what you do.

Some of FSD's typically salty commenters are speculating that this might be a hoax, but if it's for real it might represent a brand new kind of Internet-facilitated artist-fan interaction: management guidance via online capitalist blackmail. 

Who says there's no innovation in the rap world in 2008?

Experimental Jetset's "John&Paul&Ringo&George" design is a streetwear classic that's lent itself easily to tributes and parodies galore. (The Dipset version, which I'm having trouble Googling, is a personal favorite.) The latest iteration features some of the most talked-about (and most shit-talked) personalities in the new school of Chicago hip-hop, including Mic Terror, who models it here.

It's currently coppable at Leaders1354 or online from co-designers Enstrumental and Eschmitte.

In the history of written language there have been few combinations of words as beautiful as "Dr. Dre Swap Meet Mix." Dre put together this party-rocking slice of vintage bump, which combines electro and hip-hop, way back in 1987, shortly after his sequin-tastic days in the World Class Wreckin' Cru but before his Raiders-cap gangsta makeover. I just found this download link, and I had to share.

For proper playback quality, turn the bass all the way up and make sure that you are in a 1989 Jeep Wrangler with a handbuilt speaker box in the back and a Slurpee spiked with vodka in the cup holder.

One weird development in the Internetization of music is that the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim has become one of the best online distributors of really well-made compilation albums. Ghostly International's Ghostly Swim comp has replaced most of the stuff I've skimmed from Discobelle on my electro playlist, and Chocolate Industries' new World Wide Renewal Plan looks equally solid, with contributions from the Cool Kids, Diverse, and Hollywood Holt, who doubles as a pitchman in commercials for the comp.

I'm not about to make any wild claims about WWRP stealing spins from Tha Carter III or anything, but in terms of easybreezybumpin nice-weather mix tapes this one's pretty quality.

(Video via Fake Shore Drive)

I'm still trying to figure out the series of events leading up to New York magazine's Grub Street food blog running part of an interview with Chicago/LA rapper Yung Berg, but this bit about his food phobias makes me so glad that it happened:

"Sandwiches. Anything between two pieces of bread, I'm not good with it. That's my fear," the "Sexy Lady" singer confessed at the AMC Magic Johnson theater in Harlem. "Hot dogs, hamburgers--I've never eaten a hamburger, hot dog, or sandwich in my life," the 23-year-old told us. He does eat bread and is not a vegetarian--Berg's preferred nomenclature is "chicken-nugget dude"--but won't eat meats commonly found in sandwiches. "Never. I don't like cold cuts and lunch meat, none of that," Berg asserted.

(via Fake Shore Drive)

Recently New Yorker pop critic Sasha Frere-Jones pulled off a rare and fully bragworthy music-critic trick--that is, he may very well have coined the colloquial name for a nascent subgenre. Specifically, S/FJ gave the name "lazer bass" to the emerging hybrid of hip-hop, electro, dancehall reggae, and eight-bit video-game soundtracks. The style's brightest lights so far are the duo Megasoid, whose party-rocking ways I profiled in a Montreal scene report last summer.

Of course the term "lazer bass" has already attracted some criticism, mostly for being kinda goofy--to which Frere-Jones replied, "I will work day and night to coin a less stupid name: something like, I don't know, 'hip-hop.'" But I like his name, seeing as it combines three of my favorite things: bass, lasers, and misspelling the word "laser."

As Frere-Jones noted today, "somebody whom I do not know liked the name enough to create a video mash-up and title it 'I Love Lazer Bass,'" so at least a few people are cool with it. The video also happens to be a heavily bumpin' survey of exactly what kind of stuff falls under the lazer-bass rubric.

For about half a second I was like, "I can't believe Lil Wayne thinks the world's going to end in 2012 and that Barack Obama is a sign of the apocalypse," and then I remembered that Lil Wayne is basically made out of drugs at this point and the only really surprising thing is that it's taken him this long to go on the record with his predictions.

"The world is about to end as we know it. You can see it already. A planet doesn't exist--there's no more Pluto. Planes are flying into buildings--and not just the Twin Towers. Mosquitoes bite you and you die. And a black man and a woman are running for president."

I can't help but think that Lil Wayne and Mayan prophecy is the best combination since shoes and socks.

(Via the Wayne-iacs at From Hungry to Greedy)

In the future, tape scratching will be the centerpiece event in the Summer Olympics.

Via the TTL Estoy con Estupido blog

On his personal blog today New Yorker pop critic Sasha Frere-Jones discusses a not-too-rare phenomenon in mainstream hip-hop where vocal substitutions for radio-unfriendly lyrics--rather than dropouts or backward masks or bleeps--actually improve the song. Using Jay-Z's "Can I Get A . . . " as an example, Frere-Jones points out that often "the fig leaf ('what what') is better than the skin ('fuck you')."

One recent case in point is Snoop Dogg's "Sensual Seduction" (or, as it's known in its unedited form, "Sexual Eruption"). Writes SFJ: "'Sensual Seduction' is funny because it is redundant and stupid. 'Sexual Eruption' is a euphemism for something I don't need to know about Mr. Dogg and his day." The other reason it's a bad move to release the track as "Sexual Eruption": since the bowdlerized version leaked first, clubgoers know the song as "Sensual Seduction," and when you're dancing to a jam you love you don't want to be distracted by changed-up lyrics.

I think the first time I noticed something similar was during that brief period, right after "Country Grammar" dropped, when it seemed like Nelly might be somebody worth paying attention to rather than an unrepentant cheesedick. In edited form the song's wickedly catchy chorus--"I'm goin' down down baby / Your street in a Range Rover / Boom boom baby / Cocked ready to let it go"--has an excellent little rhythmic nugget in the "boom boom" bit. When I finally heard the unedited version I was totally bummed that it substitutes "street sweeper"--a type of shotgun--for the infinitely more pleasing "boom boom." The insertion of just one extra syllable--plus the gratuitous addition of gangsta posturing to a nearly flawless good-time party song--ruined the track for me.

I'm all for swears and guns and everything, but why would you fuck up a perfectly good "boom boom" like that? Putting "boom boom" in your song is a foolproof way to make it better.

In case you weren't aware, 23 Chicago public school students have been killed so far this year. That is completely fucked-up, to say the least. 

Local rapper Pugslee Atomz is doing his part to call attention to how fucked-up it is. He's recorded a new song about the situation, "You and Me," and it's one of the funkiest political jams I've heard in a long while. On Sunday night Pugs performs at the Cubby Bear with KRS-One, who's in town on a Stop the Violence publicity junket. Before the show the Teacha is doing a press conference at the Thompson center and appearing at a BBQ at the Flawless Cuts on Halsted; afterward he's doing two days of lectures at Chicago public schools and a few radio appearances. More information and updates are available here.

I'm not going to try to say that KRS-One's recent material is great, but as a social activist he's tougher and smarter now than when he was blowing up with Boogie Down Productions. He and Pugs are going up against a terrible problem with high stakes and no one solution. It's a heavy position to be in. You could do plenty worse things with your Sunday night than go out and show them some love.

I don't even know how to decide if it's an extremely brilliant or wildly stupid idea, but I have to respect the insanity of video-game developer Swordfish Studios' decision to follow up the critically unpopular but popularly popular shoot-em-up 50 Cent: Bulletproof with a sequel, 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand, wherein the sketchy actions of a concert promoter in a fictional Middle Eastern country escalate into Fiddy and his weed carriers going to war with some sort of criminal paramilitary organization. Over a diamond-encrusted skull. Though unfortunately not Damien Hirst's (pictured). And you have the option of playing as Lloyd Banks.

Those who have moral qualms about shooting up Arab types in a bombed-out, extremely Iraq-looking fake country, don't worry--the game's written by "one of the few Muslim writers in Hollywood," according to producer Aaron Blean. So it's gonna be all politically correct, right? Possibly not: "Basically, 50 takes over a helicopter via a gun to the pilot's head and 50's manning a turret, raining death from above into this forsaken, war-torn area. It looks fantastic."

I thought I loved Bun B about as as much as humanly possible, not only for putting out such excellent records--months into listening, I'm only beginning to wrap my brain around UGK (Underground Kingz)--but also for being a one-man smooth-talking refutation of the stereotype that rappers are all ignorant animals.

Somehow, though, I found a little more love for him after seeing him talk to the Fader at SXSW about his forthcoming II Trill and our main man Barack Obama while wearing a hat from local sneaker-fetishist boutique Saint Alfred--a store where, all told, I've probably spent more money than in any other place in Chicago.

Somebody has plotted the geographic distribution of hoes in Ludacris's "Area Codes." According to her analysis, "Ludacris's ideal 'ho-highway' would be I-95."

Via Metafilter  

Quoting from a press release I got today:

Once up on a time in Dinosaurland, there were Dinosaur kids, who had a Dinosaur band / And they played music, and it wasn’t jazz, or rock. It was Dinosaur hip-hop, and it couldn’t be stopped!

On April 1, Baby Loves Music will release the first ever album of prehistoric hip-hop with ‘Baby Loves Hip Hop’. Following the adventures of five paleolithic pals as they gear up for the big school talent show, ‘Baby Loves Hip Hop’ is an thrilling blend of music, rhymes, poetry, storytelling, and beatboxing.

I'm not bummed out that Prince Paul, under the name DJ Stegosaurus, produced this kiddie record by the so-called Dino-5--even when he makes beats for babies, I'm sure they're still really good. And as far as I'm concerned Chali 2na can't do himself any harm by pretending to be a T. Rex that says shit like "When you see me, you gotta think twice / I may be big and scary, but I’m really pretty nice!" because I never liked him or the Jurassic 5 in the first place. My main problem with the PR for Baby Loves Hip Hop is that it claims this album is the first release ever by a bunch of rapping dinosaurs.

True, a quick Google search for "rapping dinosaur" mostly turns up rap about dinosaurs, and I'll admit I might not be thinking of an actual album but instead of my friend Tim's prank where he convinces people that Jurassic Park III had a rapping dinosaur in it. Seriously, though, am I supposed to believe that in 25 years or so no one else has put out a record by rapping dinosaurs? Either someone has their facts wrong or I'm gonna have to reevaluate the faith I've placed in novelty rap.

Whenever I get a promo of an upcoming Fabriclive mix I tend to put it on without stopping to really examine the packaging--none of them has been bad, and some have been among the best mixes I've ever heard. I didn't even look at the name on Fabriclive 38, and the first time I listened to it I could've sworn that on the drop at the beginning the dude says "DJ Crate." That blew my mind, because the only DJ Crate I've ever heard of was a sorta-crazy middle-aged guy in my neighborhood back in Kalamazoo who wore the logo plate from a Crate amp as bling and to my knowledge never actually DJed anything. I'm not even sure he knew how. 

Turns out that it was DJ Craze who put together Fabriclive 38. It's a pretty decent mix, centered around the hipster party-rap axis, with the Cool Kids, Bangers and Cash, Pase Rock, and Blaqstarr each appearing at least a couple times. There are also a few surprising cuts--an Earth, Wind & Fire joint, Jan Hammer's "Miami Vice Theme"--thrown in for flavor. It's great and all, but I wonder what DJ Crate could've done with it.

Actually he'd probably sing-rap into a Walkman for half an hour and then try to sell me the tape.

Craze is spinning at Zentra tonight. I'm guessing booties will be shookened.

Say you're a computer-stuff company, one with an extraordinary-sounding product that can translate recorded speech from one language to another while retaining the original speaker's voice. Maybe you see a potentially lucrative application of this product--the translation process is time consuming, so it wouldn't be practical for face-to-face conversations across language barriers, but it could be used to tailor English-speaking American pop music for non-English-speaking markets. Which artist are you, the computer-stuff company, going to get for your premiere release and proof of concept? How about one half of an insanely talented but commercially unpopular rap duo who just got sent to prison for three and a half years? You genius!

Although part of me is rooting for Voxonic, not only for having what appear to be giant balls of steel but for holding it down for Prodigy, this plan looks like a disaster in the making. Do Urdu speakers really want to hear Prodigy rap at them in their native tongue? UCLA anthropology professor H. Samy Alim thinks not:

"Who wants to hear a poorly translated version of their favorite American song?" he said.

Besides, he added, "How do you translate 'fo shizzle' in a way that retains its creativity and humor for a global audience?"

I can't remember the last time I was as excited for an album to come out as I am about Erykah Badu's New Amerykah, due in late February, but I suspect it was sometime in the 90s. I'm actually so pumped it's making me kind of anxious--I'm afraid this record's going to burn me like Alien: Resurrection, which I was convinced would be the best movie ever made but turned out to be, well, not. Winona Ryder as a robo-babe seemed like such a foolproof concept.

Everything from New Amerykah that's made it to the Web, however, has been completely excellent. First there was the Madlib-helmed "The Healer," which is just the latest argument for recognizing J Dilla tributes as their own subgenre, one that will eventually either redeem hip-hop or secede from it entirely and go live on a wilderness compound in the Pacific Northwest. And now there's "Honey," which flips the dark narco-drone of "The Healer" to do a little glowy, synth-spiked late-70s soul-funk. The video is a special shout-out to crate diggers, but the song itself is one of those rare universal jams, the kind of tune whose appeal can reach across any demographic demarcation.

I can't even tell which part I like best. The double-whammy Ohio Players/Okayplayer pun? The shout-out to the Japanese import of Minnie Riperton's Perfect Angel? Or maybe the several-layers-deep incredibleness of the "Hey Ya" video parody that comes from out of nowhere? I figure making hilarious and un-mean jokes about your ex-boyfriend's mega-smash puts you officially on the next level.

After spinning more than 170 shows in 2007, Flosstradamus is taking some well-deserved time off. While the duo's laying low, J2K is cleaning out his room and running an eBay side hustle. Most of his offerings are things you'd expect from a hipster-beloved DJ, like spare Oakleys, a lot of ten Mishka T-shirts, and one of those confusing Japanese watches from the future. The real surprise is his recently retired iBook, which went through all those shows with him. To quote the item description, there are "about 25 gigs of music on it, lots of Flosstradamus exclusives, along with serato, ableton, and flossy fx, our patented effects program." That means it could end up a pretty good deal, unless some maniacal J2K fan goes bonkers because he autographed it and bids it through the roof. At this very moment the top bid is $213.83.

Oh, and here comes a press release telling me everything I just typed. Also, and I quote, "Flosstradamus are currently at work on their debut album to be released in Summer 2008. Including fellow Chicago-based artists such as Kid Sister, The Cool Kids, and Philadelphia-based MC Amanda Blank, Flosstradamus will be handling production duties, showcasing their signature party-rocking expertise in the studio as well as the club." So there you go.

Pretty much every MC raps over a Meters sample sooner or later, but how many kick it with actual guys from the Meters? Well, when they found Pimp C dead in his hotel room last month, that number got a little closer to zero.

According to a post that just went up on one of XXL's blogs, when Pimp was alive, he and Meters guitarist Leo Nocentelli were bros. Nocentelli played on UGK's Super Tight and worked on tunes with Pimp. "[H]e was a Meters fanatic," Nocentelli says. "He would come up with songs that I forgot, and different guitar riffs and significant things about the song and I'd say 'I don’t even remember that song.' But he knew 'em all." Plus Nocentelli even took Pimp's phone calls at five in the damn morning. That is bad as hell.

Hey Tony Yayo, I know I've never said anything nice about you, but on the other hand I haven't really said such bad stuff about you either. The jokes about you allegedly smacking up a 14-year-old kid were just jokes! And some other dude confessed to the smacking up and you're filing to get the charges dismissed! We're all good!

So tell the G-Unit rep at Glaceau to hook me up with one of those dope-ass Vitamin Water hats. Come on, dude. I drink enough Vitamin Water that I would say it's unhealthy, except that stuff's supposed to be good for you so I guess that doesn't compute. And a lot of my intake is Formula 50, which I, unlike most human beings, do not think tastes like mutant chemical ass. I love that shit. Let me rep for you guys. I'll ride with you, Tony Yayo. We will ride together, totally refreshed and hydrated and vitamin enriched as a motherfucker.

Someone call the MCA. I have the next major acquisition for their video art collection.

Is Straight Outta Compton really turning 20 years old next year?

LA Weekly is celebrating a little early, and has posted a cover story on N.W.A that they originally ran in May 1989. It's a portrait of a more innocent time, when wearing Raiders caps felt really badass, Ice Cube was rapping about Olde English instead of making movies about driving an SUV, and Eazy-E was throwing punches at doormen instead of being dead. It's also one of the only contemporary accounts of the group that approached their gangsta posturing with a healthy skepticism and an understanding of how show business works rather than simply swallowing their schtick and turning "OMG BLACK GUYS WITH GUNS" into feature-length copy.

I think I might be getting a contact high just by reading Weezy's words on a computer screen. Seriously, I just read his interview in the new Complex and now I feel sort of dizzy and confused. It may have been this passage that did it:

Lil Wayne: [Oscar de la Hoya], Tom from MySpace and Bill Gates, I just wanna smoke three blunts with them, just three, just three blunts, I bet you I'll come back high, whoo, them niggas are beast.

Complex: What about Mark Cuban? 

Lil Wayne: He's a G for real, I saw him coming out of my condos one day with an iPod on him and two big niggas with him, ain't no security. They were just rocking, three together. I ain't got no racist issues, but when you see a cracker with two niggas, you know that cracker got all that money, he don't even need to see a nigga, no black people ever need to come in his eyesight he's so rich--and these your homeboys? I respect the fuck out of him for that, you know, and he ain't see me but he saw my homie, he asked him what's popping tonight, he's a G for real, so I fuck with Mark Cuban heavy. I love a nigga who do what the fuck he want, just like I told you, Martin Luther King said we can do what the fuck we want, he do what the fuck he want, him and Bam Margera. What will Bam do next? Whatever the fuck they want...that's one of my favorite shows.

I'm trying to imagine Wayne, Bam Margera, MySpace Tom, and Mark Cuban all meeting up to go out for drinks and . . . I feel like maybe I have to lie down. Someone please make Mark Cuban a shirt that says "I'm a G for real" and mail it to him. And bring me a glass of Kool Aid. Thank you.

Remember my column from a while back about Kid Sister shooting her first video? Well it's finally all edited and it's funny as hell. There's way more finger dancing than I was prepared for, and apparently I think people making their hands act like little people is the funniest shit in the world because I can't stop cracking up during those parts. Keep your eyes open for the cameo by J2K from Flosstradamus and for A-Trak trying to look cool while DJ-miming from inside a large potted plant.

This morning our Web editor Whet Moser forwarded this piece of advice that Jay-Z dropped during his recent VH1 Storytellers episode, which I either missed while watching it or else my brain just couldn't handle it:  "You know the scene where he's successful and he's buying stuff? And he buys a TIGER? That's when he's doomed. Never buy a tiger."

Rhymes with Snitch has a rundown on Dr. Jan Adams—the plastic surgeon who worked on Kanye's mother, Dr. Donda West, before she died—and the assload of legal problems he's had, including six malpractice suits in the last two years and a restraining order from an ex-girlfriend. I would hate to be in Dr. Jan's loafers right now, staring down a mega-rich superstar with a known aversion to backing down from fights and a mama complex of extreme magnitude, even for a rapper.

I did get to spend some time with Dr. West a while back at a fundraiser for the Kanye West Foundation. She seemed exceptionally intelligent, caring, and strong as hell, and it was easy to see why Kanye worships her the way he does. I think everyone in the room at one point or another during the event thought to themselves, "Wouldn't it be great if she was my mom?"

A girl just called in to Power 92 looking to beg for tickets to Jay-Z's sold-out-in-a-minute show at the House of Blues next week. It wasn't ticket giveaway time yet, but Donnie Devoe offered to give her a ticket if she'd go up to her boss—she was at work—and slap him across the face with her thong.

She declined, but I imagine there are more than a few women out there who'd go through with it. Actually, if they played it right, I'm sure the Power 92 DJs could easily turn much of Chicago into their own personal army by dangling Jigga tickets in front of them. I'd kind of like to see them use said personal army to pull a Chitown coup and overthrow the city government. I'm sure that a bunch of DJs from the station that's Number One in the Streets couldn't do a worse job of running things. Then again I'm the guy who wrote in "replace everyone in city government with a drawing of kitties" on my ballot in the last election, a decision I still stand by 100 percent.

I don't think this is what Sasha Frere-Jones was talking about.

Eternal Damon Locks, a professional-quality distributor of syncopated rhythms and lingering low end, posted the above video on his MySpace blog, followed by the following question:

Is this an example of...

A. The facination of black culture and an attempt at a sincere homage

B. Simple ironic appropriation without any cultural subtext

C. Classic Pat Boonerism (white artist covering black music making it more palitable for white audiences)

D. Covering the song minus all sexual and rhythmic dynamics with the addition of white self-deprication the remake reforces a feeling of white superiority.

I would like to add an option E along the lines of, "Probably a complicated and seemingly self-contradictory combination of all four, plus it's not even an original idea by any means." I would also like to be able to erase that video from my memory as easily as I can erase it from my browser history.

So either half the rappers in town got together and decided to just take over October, or else it's just a coincidence that they've all clogging the Internets with new stuff. Either way, it's a pretty nice situation.

Hollywood Holt's following up on his unexpectedly blown-up tribute to the moped lifestyle with a full-length mix tape, available as a free download at his new site. He's got the energy and attention span of a Ritalin-amped six year old, and bounces from Dirty South-style ringtone joints to neo-hip-house club tracks to throwback shit that can remind you of a time when LL Cool J wasn't a complete embarrassment. There's not a lot of nuance going on here, but it's a partywrecker, and who wants to think about stuff at a party?

Vice has more good-times rap from Kid Sister on a Sinden remix of Chromeo's "Tenderoni." That latest Chromeo album is near the top of my "most listened" list for the year, Sinden consistently slays with his remix work, and Kid Sister is pure fun, so if someone wants to blend it all up into one big hedonistic electro-funk mess, that's fine by me.

The Cool Kids just dropped their new video for "Black Mags," strengthening the connection between Chicago rappers and unconventional forms of transportation. In this case it's BMX bikes, but they throw in some mopeds to keep themselves covered. I was given "Black Mags" while I was working on my Cool Kids column, and somehow without my noticing it's gone from being my least favorite of their songs to maybe my most favorite. The video looks completely professional. We'll see how it competes with the moped hit.

I've been through Oh Word's Osama bin Laden joint three or four times now and I'm still counting the number of levels it works on: so far I've been offended, entertained, and inspired. I've also learned a couple things, one of which is that Photoshopping sunglasses on ObL is an easy way to get me to ROFL. I wish people were sending it around as much as the Onion's Pitchfork thing, but the Osama joke is way more subtle and troubling, two qualities that don't usually get you far in the meme race.

Is hip-hop suffering from 9/11 amnesia, or does getting wrapped up in Curtis vs. Graduation fever show them terr'ists that they don't have any power over us? 

The new issue of Spin showed up at my house today, and after giving it a cursory flip through I'd say it looks like the magazine has a serious boner—that's a journalism term—for the City of Chi right now. The Spin Mix lists Miss Alex White & the Red Orchestra's sugar-thrash treat "Squeaky Clean" and the bumping remix of Matt & Kim's "Yea Yeah" that Flosstradamus (described here as "DJ gremlins") did a little while back. A few pages later there's a picture of Kid Sister alongside a description that makes her come off as some sort of club gangsta rather than a fun-time lady who raps about getting her nails done. Then Office shows up with a full-page profile that's oddly focused on their drinking abilities. It's a full-on Chicago party up in there.

Just as I was thinking how weird it is that I've probably seen half of this month's Spin together in the same room, I got an e-mail alerting me that the Mannequin Men—local purveyors of "tight-pants swagger"—are today's band of the day at Spin.com. You can and should download the track "Boys" from their upcoming Fresh Rot here. (Full disclosure: I wrote the bio for Fresh Rot's press materials and those guys are my bros.)

I smell a "Chicago is the New Seattle Austin Portland Montreal New York" trend piece in our near future.

I hate to give Bill O'Reilly's brain-dead jihad against hip-hop any more publicity, but I do get a good schadenfreude buzz off of watching him get taken down when he fucks up. So if you haven't already seen it, here's O'Reilly getting ethered by video blog superstar Jay Smooth.

For a minute I was going crazy over this Yo! MTV Raps-flipping T-shirt with a fun-but-cranky "old rap guy" vibe to it. But it's got absolutely nothing on the absolutely bananoid Yo! MTV Raps sneakers that Puma's dropping on September 15. There's one model each for Doug E. Fresh, Big Daddy Kane, MC Shan, and Doctor Dre and Ed Lover. Each shoe also has coordinating tees and jackets and, in the case of Shan, a Kangol-style hat.

I didn't have cable growing up, but Yo! MTV Raps had a huge effect on me thanks to a compilation tape I accidentally got in the mail after signing up for a record club. It still stands as one of the albums I've listened to the most over the course of my life. So I sort of feel like I owe it to Doctor Dre and Ed Lover to rock their gear. But their shit is merely fly, whereas Big Daddy Kane's sneaks are almost unspeakably cool, which is to say they're not too different from the man himself.

I think I'm gonna try to digitally reassemble that original compilation while deciding if I'm willing to become one of those guys who camps out on a sidewalk overnight to buy shoes.

OK everyone. Episodes 13 through 22 of R. Kelly's Trapped in the Closet are dropping on DVD August 21, and I'm going to suggest that everyone get their hopes way, way up for it. Kells just released a new clip to review the happenings so far with a new song with an "Oh shit!" every two seconds or so. It's like one of those, "Previously on Lost" intros, but much stranger than anything Lost's done so far. And then, seemingly as an afterthought, he hits you with 15 extremely insane seconds of preview material from the upcoming episodes. There is no way anything I see or do today could top this sneak peek. I should just go back to bed.

Seth Cohen PR recently sent me an e-mail entitled "Hip-Hop in Iraq" that I clicked on with interest. Generally I'm all in favor of Americans learning more about the cultural scenes in countries we've bombed the shit out of. Actually, I'm in favor of us learning about them before we bomb the shit out of them, but to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, you go to hell with the foreign policy you have, not the one you wish you had.

I don't doubt that there's probably some really intense underground hip-hop acts in Iraq, even if they have to deal with martial law and no electricity (just like the metal band I blogged about a few months ago). But the e-mail wasn't about that stuff at all. It was a plug for American Voices: "The U.S.-based non-profit organization American Voices literally transported a faculty of U.S. and European music, dance and theater instructors into Erbil to create a nine-day educational opportunity for nearly 300 aspiring, young Iraqi artists. This was the first such initiative of its kind in the history of Iraq."

Nice, but am I missing something? Is there some way in which this is not blindingly naive head-patting at best and imperialist propagandizing at worst? "See, Americans aren't so bad! We'll hold a concert in the Green Zone with a small invited audience (per this interview with founder John Ferguson), play some Duke Ellington for you, and you'll see we really do care! And look: hip-hop dance workshops!" Way to brown-wash the White Man's Burden, guys. Workshops for Iraqi youth, great. But I tried to find a way in which the "cultural diplomacy" didn't seem ridiculously one-sided, and I just wasn't finding it.

By the way, a quick google of "Iraqi hip-hop" brought me links related to Euphrates, an Iraqi group currently based in Montreal, Timz, an Iraqi-American rapper, and an Iraqi's blog that mentions hip-hop on the soundtrack of the 'Voices of Iraq' documentary. Not a lot of info on the Web. That's a real shame: I worry a lot more about homegrown artists who might want to get out of a war zone than well-fed ones wanting to get in.

Like just about every other hip-hop fan in town, I love to bag on Kanye for repping Chicago so much without ever seeming to actually kick it here. But he's doing the city a solid through his Kanye West Foundation, which will be launching the Loop Dreams Teacher Training Institute next spring. The institute will train teachers to incorporate hip-hop into their curricula as a way to engage kids on a different level, with the intention of increasing literacy and graduation numbers. (For info on the Loop Dreams charter program in LA, go to the KWF site, click on the tab marked "The Foundation," and then on the one that says "Loop Dreams.")

Kanye himself will be in town on August 24 for a night of fund-raising (tickets go on sale 10 AM Saturday); $125 will get you in to his show at the House of Blues, which promises "surprise celebrity guests." (I'm guessing one of them will be a certain beanie-loving Gap spokesrapper.) For the show plus a gift bag it's $250; for $500 you get  the show, the gift bag, and a preshow reception at Hotel Sax, where there will be a silent auction with Kanye material up for grabs, including a wardrobe's worth of preworn Louis Vuitton neckerchiefs. (OK, that's just a guess on the neckerchief part.) Yeah, it's a little spendy, but if you know anything about Chicago schools you know their current situation is all kinds of bogus. Help them out a little. Plus you know he's going to do that Daft Punk song, and that's going to be bad as hell.

Jessica Hopper and I have Internet beef over the new Lil Jon/Gucci Mane/some other guys track, "I'm a J." (You can listen here, if you're into hearing awful bullshit.) Hopper calls it "phenomal bad goodness." I say that it makes me want to take my ears to court and sue them for all they've got for emotional anguish and lost income that exposure to it has caused me. I've always thought that critics who claim that Southern party styles like crunk, snap, crank, and bounce have a dumbing-down effect on hip-hop in general were just overreacting, but "I'm a J" is giving me some reason to think they might be on to something. The song is like the audio equivalent of huffing paint. You can almost hear the fizzy sound of your higher brain functions dissolving. I'm guessing that since I hate the song so much it will become inescapable by the end of the summer. Cruel world.

If you're interested in some real good-dumb Southern-ness, I recommend hitting up Soulja Boy's MySpace page and listening to each track about a dozen times. I have mad respect for his janky-ass customized sunglasses.

I'm just finishing up a long weekend in Montreal, the City of High Tolerance for White-People Dreadlocks. Whenever I take a trip to another city, I invariably arrive at or near the beginning of a live-music dry spell, and the past couple of days were no exception. But Friday I did end up at this new club, Gymnase, and caught a pretty en fuego set by local DJs Megasoid and Sixtoo.

Sixtoo threw down a bunch of decent dancehall, which was a treat for me, as Chicago seems to have a deep-seated inability to get down with anything remotely dancehall outside of Sean Paul, so I only ever hear it in clubs when out-of-towners come spin. If you're curious, Jamaica is doing things to "This Is Why I'm Hot" that make the original seem trifling in comparison.

Megasoid's playlist was a lot like what you'd find in any hipster-ish sort of club in any city around the world—some Jay-Z throwbacks, a couple more recent rap jams, a grip of Ed Banger bangers—but dude is niiiice to the tracks. While most DJs see Serato mostly as a way to avoid lugging around heavy-ass crates of vinyl, Megasoid uses the whole digital interface thing to chop, flip, and twist on the fly, remixing in real time and generally turning even worn-out tracks into bananas central.

It was Sixtoo and Megasoid's first night at Gymnase, and the crowd was pretty sparse (although, strangely, almost 100 percent female). The duo is better known for hosting illegal outdoor happenings, like the one captured in the following video. It looks fun as hell:

Flosstradamus-affiliated rapper Hollywood Holt—you might know him better as the hype man to about half the parties around town—just got posted up to Discobelle with his moped-obsessive take on Rich Boy's "Throw Some D's." Taken by itself, "Throw a Kit" might be a little too obscure for most listeners who aren't pushing a two-stroke; there are a bunch of shout-outs to Chicago moped gangs like Murder Club and Peddy Cash, while most of the lyrics are about cruising low-cc-style around the Chi, rattling off a laundry list of manufacturers only the real obsessive types would know. But the video's got enough of the hilariously unlikely combination of hip-hop and moped love for anyone to get with.

Tonight's Flosstradamus party up at Sonotheque should be pretty bonkers, even compared to the usual Floss joints. The event is sponsored by Colt 45 and Vice magazine; Colt 45 is going to be on special. And Chicagoist is reporting that the first 200 people to show up get in for free. Which means that by midnight or so, the club is going to be chock full of kids going incredibly apeshit on malt liquor. I have a feeling that the event is going to be equal parts sweaty, dangerous, and fun.

Tomorrow night's the third installment of the recent Fly by Night DJ series at the Underground Lounge in Wrigleyville. The headliner this time is East Coast duo Certified Bananas, who've been getting some heat off of indie rock/hip-hop blend sets that are supposed to have all of the fun of a Girl Talk show without all of the suckiness of a Girl Talk show. Party-starters the Cool Kids and Fly by Night main man Willy Joy open. Should be live.

On the rare days that it's updated, Gabe Said "We're Into Movements" is far and away the best hip-hop blog on the blogoweb.com. Oh Word describes it as being "actually too next level to follow at times," which I would have to agree with, but GSWIM's dizzyingly abstract epistles usually pay off with some deep insight into the nature of the rap game. Plus they're hilarious.

The latest entry, "Go Now, Brother," breaks away from the usual future-level snaps for an elegiac but funny portrait of Stack Bundles, the third-string Dipset affiliate who was gunned down near his home in Far Rockaway, Queens on Monday. A lot of commentary on Stack's murder has worked in some not-too-subtle digs on his lack of commercial success, which the Gabe Said post acknowledges but also embraces. It's sad, kinda goofy, and reads like Joan Didion on assignment for Ego Trip. 

Considering Lil Wayne's beyond-bonkers release schedule—he puts out tracks and mix tapes more often than most of us brush our teeth—it's surprising that everyone isn't completely burnt out on the guy. But he still lights up the blogosphere every time he moves, and that's a good thing for Chicago rappers the Cool Kids. They just got tapped by DJ Benzi (site may be NSFW, depending on how thong-friendly your work is) to jump on a Weezy track for his upcoming album, and the song's already making waves. It's a low-level burner, an early favorite for the "Funkiest Cowbell Usage" and "Most Handclappy Song" Grammys. And with their confident flow and breezy disses—"Say your ABC's / Not 'Ay Bay Bay'"—the Cool Kids hold their own against the "Greatest Rapper in the World," setting the stage for some major moves in the future.

My suggestion: follow it up with a Web-generated duet with R. Kelly through the (shudder) "Double Up with R. Kelly" sing-along contest. 

For the past couple years there's been a trend where companies put streaming audio jukeboxes on their Web sites for no apparent reason. Usually they're programmed to reflect some quality of the business, some level of "extremeness" or "family-friendlieness" or whatever they're trying to project. The one thing they all have in common is that they're utterly useless. I only ask for a limited amount of information from the Domino's Pizza Web site: what's the number of the closest location to my house, and do they still have that Garlic Bread pizza? (They don't, sadly.) I definitely don't go there to get tipped off to "hot new sounds" and I can't imagine why anyone else would either. But that didn't stop Domino's from launching the dTracks Music Player. 

The image that Domino's seems to be projecting with their song selections is "absolute blandness"—befitting a company that ditched the Garlic Bread pizza—with a dash of "hopelessly out of it." The player has three playlists: the "Clubbin Mix" combines Euro-club dance music and neutered hip-hop in a way I haven't heard since 1990. "Summer Road Trip" seems like it was programmed in an alternate universe where John HPopper and Tom Cochrane have been THE musicians of the past 15 years. The only really modern-sounding channel is the "Party Mix"—a misleading title, given that the whole thing is shitty emo no one on earth would want to party to. It's also the only playlist where the dTracks' middle-of-the-roadness actually worked for me. Outside of My Chemical Romance—who are geniuses—I prefer my emo as average as possible. I like knowing on first listen exactly where the song's breakdown will happen and what it'll sound like. Immediately after listening to every song on the playlist, I found myself absolutely unable to recall a single band name or scrap of melody, which was perfect. Thank you, faceless emo bands. You wasted a half hour of my life pretty good.

I was curious if the pizza/music connection was popping off industry-wide, but so far no other pizza company has stuck a music player on their Web site. Pizza Ria had a sort of sweetly annoying pop song on their splash page. I guess it was okay. The pizza I got from them was better.   

Fucking Kanye, man. He can piss me off again and again, talking crazy bullshit about how tough it is to be rich and famous or making an absolute fool of himself at European awards ceremonies, but every time he puts out a new record he wins me back all the way. The latest is Can't Tell Me Nothing, a new mix tape that dropped on the Internet over the weekend that's already shaping up to be the hot hip-hop joint of late May and early June. I can say without reservation that you have to download it right now and spend the rest of the day listening to it at full blast, on repeat, while hanging out the windows of a vehicle and screaming.

Kanye brought out all of his friends for the Can't Tell Me party, including Common (a couple of tracks from his upcoming Finding Forever), local track-killer GLC, Talib Kweli, Sa-Ra (who people really gotta start paying more attention to), and former Puff Daddy valet and current fashion plate Fonzworth Bentley ("I don't wear sneakers / I wear slippers"). The Lil Wayne verse on "C.O.L.O.U.R.S." is, like any Lil Wayne verse, reason enough to get the whole thing. The fact that he can make a line like, "When you're really rich / then asparagus is yummy" actually work goes a long way toward justifying his self-anointed Best Rapper in the World title.

As for Kanye's own contributions, he's still keeping up his role as hip-hop's premier smart-ass, flipping Rich Boy's "Throw Some D's" into an ode to breast implants and opening his take on T-Pain's "Buy You a Drank" by declaring that "this verse has not been Russell Simmons approved." But Kanye's been working on another part of his image for a minute now: the most up-on-it hipster in the rap game. Can't Tell Me has one song (a snippet of "Stronger," which is going to be Graduation's club-slayer) built off a Daft Punk sample, another ("Us Placers," in a supergroup with Lupe Fiasco and Pharrell) off a Thom Yorke solo track, and yet another where he shouts out being on the cover of Fader while riding the beat to Peter Bjorn and John's "Young Folks." He also makes a surprisingly big deal out of local scene star Kid Sister, whose fanbase is decidedly more Brooklyn Vegan than Murder Dog. Not to mention the cover art is by Takashi Murakami, who probably half the indie rock world would give a lung to score.

I'm all for Kanye's indie rock kick, but I'm afraid he's going to take it too far with an Arcade Fire collabo or something, and the resulting blog-gasm will basically melt the Internet. Please, Kanye, watch how far you take