Quasimoto: "Rappcats Pt. 3" Video
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For many, this is a dream collaboration between two of the most cherished artists in hip-hop, pitting the dusty, wig-twisting originality of Madlib's smoked out sounds capes against DOOM's nostalgic, visual rhyme style. Brothers from another mother, DOOM and Madlib have long admired each others work, first meeting face-to-face in Southern California in summer 2002, and since then they've shared a whole bunch of Cali-green, run through countless bottles of Grey Goose vodka and Heineken (well, that would be DOOM) and assembled over twenty tracks into a superb psychedelic romp of the highest caliber. The closest one can come to describing this beautiful chaos is a sublime companion piece to Madlib's previous evil adventure, Quasimoto's "The Unseen." But, as DOOM himself would ask anyone asking for a description: "He's the villain, so what about it?" In recent years the metal-faced maniac has released albums under the aliases of Viktor Vaughn, King Gheedora and Monster Island Czars. But rewind to 1993: DOOM (then Zev Love X) made his debut with the groundbreaking album 'Mr. Hood' as part of the group KMD, which has since achieved critical acclaim and cited as a key record in hip-hop's "Golden Age." Zev Love X, Subroc, and Onyx had just finished work on the follow up, "Bl_ck B_st_rds", a politicized commentary on the portrayal of race by the media, when their label Elektra decide to shelve the album over the controversial cover art which depicts a 'blackface sambo' character hanging from a gallows. Shortly after KMD were dropped and Zev Love X's brother Subroc was killed in a car crash. Like true-life story from the pages of a comic book, Zev Love X disappeared completely from public view, going back to the lab and fashioning new beats and lyrics, only to reemerge as the masked MF DOOM with the now classic "Operation Doomsday" in 1999. "Zev Luv X still exists, DOOM is a character, neither one of them is really me, they're a fa?ade I use to voice a certain view," Explains the MC behind the mask, Daniel Dumile. "Zev was like you're average nerd cat, might drop a jewel here and there, might tell you something you don't now, humble and modest. Whereas the DOOM character is more aggressive, on some real take over shit, but still trying to play likes he's a good guy. It's not so much I changed; I just took on another character." A string of creatively inspired singles on the influential Fondle 'Em label in the late 90's heralded DOOM's return. "Being from the underground, there's not so much bureaucracy, you can come out how you wanna come out. It's music straight up and down, if you're good you're good." DOOM sees himself as a conduit for his music. "I try not to tamper with it too much, I'm like the narrator or the spokesman. My music is raw, yet at the same time it can be easy listening." The spontaneity in DOOM's working process whether writing lyrics or building beats, calls to mind the spontaneous prose of Kerouac or the 'cut up' techniques of William Burroughs, in its praise of the purity of the original thought. Nostalgia is a central theme for DOOM: "I love cartoons, I still watch them to this day. I have an 8 year old son, he comes home and we just watch them together," smiles DOOM. "Dexter Laboratory, and of course all the Japanese shit, Dragonball Z, all them ill." DOOM's music harnesses the instinctive, inherent power of childlike thought; "There's no in-between with kids, they're so pure they can feel something if it's fat. As you get older you lose that innocence and purity of the original thought, so called 'growing up'," DOOM ponders. "I mean - you gotta keep that, that's the essence right there." Using his music to test the limits of his mind, DOOM finds creative inspiration in everything he does: "Any artistic genre feeds what I do as a musician, I do paintings, but music inspires my painting, and paintings or art inspires my music. Creativity and imagination is the key to what everybody's trying to figure out on Earth, it's the one thing that bridges everything together. It can solve a lot of problems with all this war and retarded shit that's going on." From the mellow keys of 'Accordion' with Madlib's deft tinkling to the bumping bass groove of 'America's Most Blunted' and the soulful beats of 'Fancy Clown' under his Viktor Vaughan guise, Madvillain sees Madlib on top form providing the freshest, most blunted foils for DOOM's ill flows. "Music is a universal language and I'm trying to show that all of us laugh at the same things, I'm trying to bring us all to more of an understanding. We need to bring this whole thing together," explains DOOM. With their Madvillain double-team, MF DOOM and Madlib have made a sure-fire classic sure to take the world by storm - will anyone dare step try and stop them?
The iHome iP1 may not sound great with all types of music, but this striking iPod/iPhone speaker system will appeal to listeners who gravitate toward pop, hip-hop, rock, and electronica.
Diddy feat. Christina Aguilera: "Tell Me"
Good hip-hop producers create hot beats, beats you can dance to, rhyme over, remember.Great hip-hop producers, however, create a sound. They have a point of view. If you didn't know that before, you will definitely know that now, once you catch any of the fourteen tracks that make up Press Play, Diddy's dazzling new Bad Boy/Atlantic Records release. As Diddy and guest stars Ciara and Big Boi intone on Wanna Move, it's a CD that will get you high on music while you enjoy the vibe.
The names Quasimoto and Madlib have been linked for years, yet they've never been seen in the same room together. In fact, Quasimoto's never been seen in the same room with anyone ? he's The Unseen. But you can hear him - and there's no mistaking what he sounds like. Peanut Butter Wolf first heard him off a dusty old cassette, one of Madlib?s infamous beat tapes ? the kind he?d make to listen to himself, maybe pass around to crew. Madlib and Quas had been up in Lost Gates, somewhere near Oxnard, CA, making music for years fueled by Top Ramen and shrooms without the slightest intention of releasing it to the masses. Wolf got it out though ? after some begging and pleading, and after signing a contract with Quas vowing not to reveal his name. The Unseen came out in 2000 and caught praise by fans and critics alike. SPIN went off on Quasimoto's "recipe for resin-caked jazz and crusty comedy samples as a new flavor for the bland world of mainstream rap" and stuck him smack between Madonna and Outkast in their best of the year list. URB too named the album one of the best of the year. Jon Caramanica (Rolling Stone/Village Voice) wrote an essay called "Blind Faith-Quasimoto's Backdoor Truth? choosing to describe the album as a revelation or ?strange dream? rather than a hip hop LP. In the tradition of artistic "role playing" in black music, Quas was compared favorably to RZA, Kool Keith, and even Prince (City Pages, St. Paul/Minneapolis). Another dude wrote that rap music "hasn?t been this far out since 3 Feet High and Rising" (Sleazenation). And a few commented on the voice. What a voice. Was it a tree-blazin? ghetto chipmunk? A cartoon Martian? Naw, it?s neither - but close. Lord Quas, personally, is more bizarre than Michael Jackson in a playpen, and he likewise demands a high level of privacy. Madlib and the heads at Stones Throw have been dodging questions about Lord Quas for years. Who is he? Why won?t he perform live? When?s the next album? Mostly that last question. The answer is now. Quasimoto is back with 27 tracks and 68 minutes of straight boom music. The Further Adventures find Lord Quas still digging for records, rolling blunts, and smackin? dudes with bricks. Madlib, for his part, appears to have been saving some of his best beats for Quas, and some that others were maybe afraid to touch. Consider the book on Hip Hop thrown out the window. Quas probably smoked it. They?ve got MF DOOM along for a reprise of the Madvillain-Quas collab on "Closer." (Madvillain ? that's where we last heard from Madlib & Lord Quas, on the album named as one of the best of 2004 by GQ, Rolling Stone, Spin, XLR8R, Village Voice, and a long list of others.) They've got M.E.D. from the Lootpack family up on "The Exclusive." Melvin Van Peebles (legendary filmmaker, the "Baadasssss" himself) shows up again on several tracks, as he did on The Unseen, channeled through the officially sanctioned use of a sampler. Madlib also takes the mic for several tracks ? among them "Rappcats," the ultimate ode to 80s hip hop; "Raw Addict Part 2," the ultimate ode to crate digging and sampling; "Another Demo Tape," the track that might result in his never again being given a CD demo from a stranger. Quasimoto's at no loss for words though. With some wild tales of crime sprees, kidnappings, and a fetish for some booty, we can assume he?ll still be known as "the Bad Character." Watch for a video for the lead track "Bullyshit" in May, followed by a short tour, for which Quasimoto may or may not show up.
SILK'S "ALWAYS AND FOREVER" CD TAKES "BABY-MAKING MUSIC" TO THE NEXT LEVEL "Always And Forever" is not a phrase usually associated with a fickle music business, especially in recent times when one-hit wonders and manufactured artists have been especially prevalent. But for Silk, one of the few vocal groups to breakthrough in the hip-hop era, the phrase applies not only to their own longevity--seventeen years and counting with the current line-up featuring the four original members who have been together throughout--but also to the quality of their music which features finely crafted harmony singing and lyrics that deal with timeless issues of love, romance and sex. With the release of their seventh album "Always And Forever", their debut release on Shanachie Entertainment on October 17th, Silk brings their vocal artistry to a hand-picked selection of songs that have inspired them as simultaneous homage to artists who they respect and musical statement of the ultimate quality of Silk's music. "It all comes full circle on this album," relates Gary Glenn. "A lot of these songs were ones we were already familiar with so it was easy for us to step in and emulate people we have a lot of respect for. It's a chance to show off our own artistry. If someone has the audacity to do a Michael Jackson number or a Prince tune and do it well, or to really do justice to"The Secret Garden" , then they walk away with respect from the audience. That's what we want." The album, which features Silk's interpretations of major hits by Blue Magic, Switch, Shalamar, Prince, Michael Jackson, Quincy Jones, Heatwave and others, simply builds on something Silk had already been doing. ""We've done a re-make on almost every album anyway so it was like time to do this--a full serving of what we've been doing throughout. Like (Blue Magic's classic) "Sideshow", we've been doing that in our shows and people love it. We were doing (Switch's) "There'll Never Be" at shows and people start to "step" when we do it...and it's a beautiful thing. It even happened in Aurora, Colorado, which is the last place I thought people would be steppin'!" The young men who formed Silk grew up in Atlanta. Three of them met each other in the late Eighties in the course of working at a particular McDonald's. Soon --Gary "Big G" Glenn, Jonathan "John John" Rasboro, Tim "Timzo" Cameron and Jimmy Gates (Tim and Jimmy were cousins)--got together around their mutual love of singing. They sang whenever and wherever they could ("I don't think there's a church in Atlanta we DIDN'T sing at," laughs Gary) at talent shows, clubs, churches and in the streets. Louise Ferguson, who is their manager today, was determined to get them a shot with Keith Sweat who didn't particularly want to audition the unknown wanna-be's. So when Keith came to a barbeque at Louise's house, she invited Silk to come over and they discreetly went down in the basement and started singing for the kids there. Keith heard them and liked what he heard enough to make Silk the first group signed to his Keia label in 1992 and they were featured on "two of Keith's tracks on his "Keep It Coming" album. Silk's first single, "Happy Days" was garnering radio play but then "Freak Me", another cut from their first album, starting generating radio play spontaneously and when released a single became a Number 1 R&B hit and Number 1 pop hit. It was quickly followed by two Top Ten R&B hits--"Lose Control" and "Girl U For Me, which grew into a string of hits throughout the Nineties including "Hooked On You", "I Can Go Deep", "If You ("Lovin' Me")and "Meeting In My Bedroom". Their signature sound was dubbed "baby-making music." "At the time we came up," Gary Glenn notes, "producers were putting groups together but when Keith met us we were already Silk. That may be part of the reason why we have been able to stand the test of time. We didn't just get together to get a deal; we got together to sing. We had to find our own niche. You had Boyz II Men with their harmonies and Jodeci with their "from the gut" sound, so we were kind of in the middle. We went from high school stages to arenas very quickly--that was due to Keith." Silk's audience has grown up along with them and some of the children who were the result of "baby-making music" are now teenagers. "People are always telling us," John adds, "I made my first child to your music." That's just a blessing! That someone created a child with our music. We know what people are looking for from our music so as long as we honor and respect that we can keep going in that vein, like The Isley Brothers and Keith Sweat." It's a difficult challenge for even a solo artist to survive in the cut-throat music industry and even more so for a group to stay together. Fourteen years together since the release of their first single, what's Silk's secret? "I think a lot of prayer, patience and understanding," says Gary Glenn. "We don't always realize how important our commitment to each other has been. It's like being in a marriage that you REFUSE to leave. It's like "I got this ring and I ain't going NOWHERE!" But we all bow down to what's important to Silk. And in the end, we just love singing together."
Today in Tech History: April 17, 2008
Find out what tech milestones happened on this date throughout the years! Today, we pay homage to Ben Franklin.
The Buzz Report: Thanks for all the laughs
This week, the Buzz Report pays homage to the tech stories and the gadgets that kept Molly (and hopefully you) rolling in the aisles this year.
At the 2009 Frankfurt auto show, Mercedes pays homage to its most loved car, the 300 SL, with the new SLS AMG.
Super 8: "For Your Listening Pleasure"
The debut video from the London-based hip-hop act
An homage to the infamous tree scene in "Evil Dead", with an innocent gardener finding herself molested by amorous killer plants and shrubs (encouraged by sex-crazed ladybirds). Music by Dissolved.
