I would offer a big long spiel about how dope Boycott Blues is, and how you should immediately cop last year’s epic Irony, but Van Stylez of UGHH.com does a commendable job in the description below. Looking forward to Boycott’s next project, but until then…

Arguably the most underrated rap album to drop in the past couple of years is the Brick Records release Irony, which features Boycott Blues rapping over all new production from the ever-elusive production genius Insight. In this 3-part interview conducted shortly after the release of this underground classic, Blues breaks down the socioeconomic conditions which formed his highly political, yet street-savvy worldview. These three videos also feature live performances of tracks off Irony, along with an interview with EDO.G’s former DJ, Nesquik, who recently reemerged to mix Blues’s R.I.P. City mixtape.

LOL

The lashings Canibus delivers to Marty in the comments section of his interview for the Boston Herald are incredible. Even though this is a year old.. I never knew about this. Now I must take the opportunity to exploit it.. the way I exploit everything. That’s the difference between real journalists and myself I guess.

“What self-respecting, righteous journalist wouldn’t want to take advantage of a rare opportunity to make a lasting, positive difference to a genre of music currently going through a creative and passion depression?

Some would say, “silly question. EVERY self-respecting journalist would love to make such a big impact on a struggling musical genre” and I would love to agree with them. However, Martin Caballero, from the Boston Herald, not only passed up the chance, but ended up putting out a generic, preplanned, negatively geared version of the true “Q & A” session conducted with Lyrical Supremo, one Canibus (Can-I-Bus), yesterday. (http://www.bostonherald.com/entertainment/music/general/view/2009_05_12_Canibus_says_it_s_time_to_%u2018K_O___hip-hop_rivalries/srvc=home&position=also)”

Oh god..

“You call this objective journalism? Ok. The truth? Canibus has respect for LL Cool J. Marty and his editor just want to see our black men beefing instead of peacing. Your a devil for twisting canibus words around.”

“Oh **** ! You loaded this question with a comment from an earlier email between us Marty. In that email, I accused you of harrassing hip hop and being a part of the anti hip hop establishment. Going by the tone of this entire interview, perhaps you would have more insight than I about what ruins hip hop. I don’t work at a publication that writes about poetry. I write the poetry. The critics of my work are like middlemen to me.”

JFC

“Really did your homework didn’t you Marty?”

ROFL

Man, did I want to hate Chiddy Bang and his producer/percussionist accomplice, Xaphoon Jones, with all my heartlessness. What with Chiddy’s cutesy nostalgic moniker, the skateboarding in their videos, and their major-label status, there seemed little reason not to lump them in with all the manufactured post-Wayne hype rappers. Except for one small thing: despite their popularity with stud-belted youngsters, Xaphoon and Chiddy, aged just 20 and 19, are nice beyond their years. It took me just a few listens to realize that if hip-hop is indeed supposed to evolve, then they’re the closest thing we have to contemporary archetypes.

READ THE WHOLE FEATURE/INTERVIEW HERE

Twenty summers ago, in the deep sweat of nowhere Iowa, a hired crew set out to film the lamest sort of low-budget sales video imaginable. But what could have been a mundane if not suicidal assignment spun into accidental comedy, as the star of the infomercial, ex-network news producer turned industrial thespian Jack Rebney, allowed his physical and occupational discomfort to get the best of him. In a blooper reel that first circulated on hand-dubbed VHS tapes before blowing up on YouTube, Rebney barks such vulgar trademark outbursts as “What does the goddamn line say, Tony?”, “I don’t even know what the fuck I’m saying,” and, perhaps most famously, “My mind is just a piece of shit this morning.” Chances are you know the clip as “Winnebago Man.”

In the most voyeuristic society ever to spy this earth, Rebney, cooking on the inside of a hot tin Itasca Sunflyer, is one of our favorite folks to ogle. The outtakes from his Winnebago debacle have been viewed by tens of millions, many of whom (myself included) return to the peephole sporadically, or even regularly, depending on depression levels. Some people watch Seinfeld reruns to cheer up; some abuse Dust-Off and other household gases. But for a growing legion of YouTube boobs and mouse potatoes, Winnebago Man is all the medication we need to laugh away overdue bills and genital infections. Indeed, Rebney is the meme of memes — the Holy Grail of accidental celebrities, as one interviewee puts it.

READ THE WHOLE REVIEW HERE

It’s a typically dope thing about hip-hop that one of its foremost architects — an old- and true-school icon who nurtured acts like De La Soul, cut the genre’s standard bearer for concept albums, and, for better or worse, produced boom-bap’s first comic interlude — will be manhandling the DJ booth at Good Life this Saturday at Fresh Produce’s fourth anniversary party. I’m pretty sure that Beatles mastermind George Martin didn’t spend much time spinning dusty 45s on London’s underground rock scene…

READ THE WHOLE FEATURE HERE

Visit The Fresh Produce Facebook Page

By his 20th birthday, two years ago, Fresno rhyme prodigy Fashawn didn’t just have evidence that he would dent the rap establishment. Even better: he was roommates in Los Angeles with Dilated Peoples stalwart Evidence, who — along with other exalted guides including producer Exile — helped the West Coast Golden Child navigate the industry. It’s not enough that Fashwan is nasty by nature — when nurturing hip-hop’s next legend, it takes a village of veterans.

“For me, moving in with Evidence was like how in X-Men they have the school for the special kids,” says Fashawn, who comes to the Western Front on Sunday. “And he would bring me around to spots like Alchemist’s house, which is like Xavier’s crib. Everyone you can imagine would just be there hanging out and chilling — one time, Raekwon was in the booth. I would just hop in the car with Evidence and go wherever he was going. Once I got there, I would do whatever to absorb the energy.”

READ IT ALL HERE…

For all their traditionalist gusto, Mobb Deep’s legacy is also tied to their captain’s role in propelling rapid-fire mixtape culture forward. By leaking a torrent of posse cuts and singles through publicity predators like DJ Clue, they helped catalyze a major shift in the rap marketplace. By the late ’90s, it was no longer enough to be the first cat queued to cop the latest 12-inch. Instead, we pilgrimaged to spots like Harlem Music Hut to hear joints before they even surfaced on college airwaves. Sorry if you thought that Lil Wayne pioneered contemporary buzz with his download-a-day diarrhea — the Mobb were dropping bombs by the bundle while Birdman was still changing that dude’s diapers.

READ IT ALL HERE

Havoc and Big Noyd at the Middle East this Saturday…

Sorry if you’ve known about this forever already, but I’ve been feeling this show so much that I would hate to think that anybody else is sleeping on it (as I was for a while). They crank tough didactic joints that get you thinking, and do some badass interviews as well. In fact, these are the first dudes to really grill Solar after the whole Guru thing. Probably my favorite hip-hop podcast right now…

Check This Week’s Show with Vinnie Paz and His Enemy Soil Labelmates HERE and HERE

Or Check The Whole Archives HERE

Don’t be fooled by its textbook appearance — How To Wreck a Nice Beach (Melville House/Stop Smiling) is hardly a dry anthropological study of “The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop,” as the subtitle suggests. In his decade-long exploration of voice compression, veteran music journo (and seismic wordsmith) Dave Tompkins came to understand the intimate relationship between larynx-tweaking robot tech and the musicians, world leaders, engineers, and civilians who have employed and marveled over this curious space-age gadgetry since the 1920s. I asked Tompkins about his discoveries — many of which were in the Greater Boston area — and about phone interviews with subjects who mask their pitch like kidnappers and warn of UFO abduction threats.

What sort of Vocoder experience set in motion your devotion to telling this peculiar history?
When I was writing for Vibe around 1999, my editor had me doing some crazy shit — shit that never should have been in Vibe. One time, they had Kenny G call me at this pharmaceutical company that I was working at to talk about his sitting in with Barry White’s band. Another time, Michael Jonzun [of Boston’s legendary Jonzun Crew] called me up while he was on a Vocoder and said, “Pack Jam — look out! Hello, Dave — this is Michael Jonzun. Space is the place.” Then he told me that the cosmos were coming to claim me. I guess that got me thinking about the compression of human speech.

READ IT ALL HERE

Dave Tompkins Book Signing on May 20 at Good Life in Boston

Props to Jake Paine from Hip-Hop DX for scoring (and transcribing) this remarkable interview with Solar’s baby mama, who worked extensively with 7 Grand. It’s a heart-breaking read, but holy shit is there a lot in here (excerpt below with link at the end)…

DX: Right. These guys weren’t just studio rats, so to speak. How close did it get, not in terms of it being a feud or anything, but you think there would have been contact with people that could get Guru’s mind right, old peers…
Tasha Denham: Honestly, pretty much, they kept themselves secluded from the Hip Hop world. They did not go out in New York City very often at all. It was a very rare occurrence, after Guru stopped drinking, that they would go out in New York. It wasn’t because of Guru’s drinking that they stopped going either.

When Guru stopped drinking, when he decided to stop drinking, he stopped drinking. Solar drinks Corona [beers] every single day. Solar would send Guru to the store to buy his Coronas for him. When Guru stopped drinking, he stopped drinking. Guru could have a bottle in his house, he wasn’t gonna drink it. He made that decision. When they toured, he was in nightclubs every night. He stopped drinking.

I truly believe that…Solar made it that “there’s so much hate out there for us. Being New York, Premier and them are out there, blah, blah, blah.” So they didn’t go. They didn’t even take shows in New York most of the time. There was always an excuse. Shows in Boston, there was always an excuse as to why they weren’t gonna do that show. All the tracks that had [featuring artists], they were all sent [to Guru and Solar]. They didn’t do those in the studio, personally, with any of those artists. I cannot speak of one single artist that was actually in the studio with them. Most of the time, it was all through management, so on and so forth. So there weren’t any opportunities for other artists to help bridge that gap because first of all, if Guru ever had the opportunity, Solar was standing right there.

Guru was never around anyone in the industry without Solar standing right next to him. He never did an interview unless Solar was right there. If somebody was to say, “Yo Guru, when’s there gonna be another Gang Starr album?” Guru would just knock it down right away, because if that got brought up and that became an issue, it would be become a [problematic issue] between him and Solar.

Guru and I spoke privately about who was that one person who could help give us that one hit for 7 Grand. He and Fat Joe were always really close, back in the day, and that was one of the people I know he thought about reaching out to. I can’t say that he ever did, out of fear that Solar wouldn’t agree with it, and Solar would find a reason not to, and it would become a problem again.

READ IT ALL HERE