Showing posts with label hiphop. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hiphop. Show all posts
Thursday, August 12, 2021
Friday, November 15, 2019
Sunday, June 2, 2019
Thursday, March 28, 2019
Friday, March 15, 2019
Tuesday, February 12, 2019
Saturday, January 26, 2019
Thursday, October 4, 2018
Saturday, August 18, 2018
Wonder What A 1977 New York City Park Jam Sounded Like? Press Play… (Mix)
from Ambrosia For Heads:
Bringing the earliest days of Hip-Hop to the digital age is a challenge. While DJ Kool Herc, DJ Red Alert, and Grandmaster Melle Mel (among many others) are highly active in telling the story, and presenting the culture they helped create, other things are harder to find.
Pioneering DJs like Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa, The Disco Twins, Pete “DJ” Jones and others can tell you about their playlists. These icons can recall which 12″ singles (some of which had covered-up labels at the time) really opened up the party. These mixmasters can debate who played which breaks first, and who freaked these musical moments better. But how often can Heads in the 2010s really hear it as it was?
This weekend, cultural purveyor Hass718 shared a 40-minute segment from Elmhurst, Queens believed to be in the iconic 1977 year. The same calendar that brought the Blackout, Reggie Jackson’s “Mr. October” New York Yankees slug-fest, and the Son Of Sam’s arrest, delivered this party-in-audio. Recorded at P.S 127, Heads can hear the slang, catch the amazing rarities spun, and even get a taste of the Colt 45 beers for sale for 60¢ a pop—with some crazy on-the-mic advertising. This is just one party among many that era (and one that’s short on much info), but to the folks behind the wheels of steel, it rocks in ’15 just like it sounds like it did in ’77!
Thursday, June 7, 2018
Tuesday, June 5, 2018
The Spectacular Personal Mythology of Rammellzee
from The New Yorker:
Drawing from philology, astrophysics, and medieval history, Ramm channelled the chaos of seventies New York through his art and music.
By Hua Hsu
Drawing from philology, astrophysics, and medieval history, Ramm channelled the chaos of seventies New York through his art and music.
By Hua Hsu
In the late nineteen-seventies, the sociologist Nathan Glazer had grown weary of riding New York’s graffiti-covered subways. The names of young vandals, who identified themselves as “writers” rather than as artists, were everywhere—inside, outside, sometimes stretching across multiple train cars. Glazer didn’t know who these writers were, or whether their transgressive spirit ever manifested itself in violent crimes, but that didn’t matter. The daily confrontation with graffiti suggested a city under siege. “The signs of official failure are everywhere,” he wrote in an influential 1979 essay. Graffiti, with its casual anarchy and cryptic syntax, offered glimpses into a “world of uncontrollable predators.” In the nineties, Glazer’s essay would help inspire the concept of “broken windows” policing—a theory that preserving the appearance of calm, orderly neighborhoods can foster peace and civility.This article appears in the print edition of the May 28, 2018, issue, with the headline “Graffiti Prophet.”
Graffiti has always had this kind of metaphorical power. It is somehow more than art or destruction (even though it is both), and it prompts awe or dread, depending on your tolerance for disorder. For every Glazer, there were romantics like Norman Mailer, who had written the text for a book of photographs elevating graffiti to the status of “faith.” From his perspective, graffiti forced the upper crust to reckon with the names and the fugitive dreams of a forgotten underclass: “You hit your name and maybe something in the whole scheme of the system gives a death rattle.”
Few people understood and internalized this power as deeply as the artist, rapper, and theoretician Rammellzee (which he styled as The RAMM:ELL:ZEE). He believed that his time in the train yards and the tunnels of New York gave him a vision for how to destroy and rebuild our world. He was born in 1960 and grew up in Far Rockaway, Queens. His birth name is a closely guarded secret; he legally changed it to his artistic tag in 1979. (He also insisted that The RAMM:ELL:ZEE was an “equation,” not a name.) Little is known about his youth, aside from passing aspirations to study dentistry (he was good with his hands) and to be a model (in a 1980 catalogue, he is identified as Mcrammellzee).
Ramm—as he became known—believed that language enforced discipline, and that whoever controlled it could steer people’s thoughts and imaginations. His hope wasn’t to replace English; he wanted to annihilate it from the inside out. His generation grew up after urban flight had devastated New York’s finances and infrastructure. Ramm channelled the chaos into a spectacular personal mythology, drawn from philology, astrophysics, and medieval history. He was obsessed with a story of Gothic monks whose lettering grew so ornate that the bishops found it unreadable and banned the technique. The monks’ work wasn’t so different from the increasingly abstract styles of graffiti writing, which turned a name into something mysterious and unrecognizable. Ramm developed a philosophy, Gothic Futurism, and an artistic approach that he called Ikonoklast Panzerism: “Ikonoklast” because he was a “symbol destroyer,” abolishing age-old standards of language and meaning; “Panzer” because this symbolic warfare involved arming all the letters of the alphabet, so that they might liberate themselves. He lived these ideas through his art and his music, and by being part of the hip-hop scene during its infancy.
In 1983, Rammellzee and a rapper named K-Rob went to visit the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat. Though Ramm and Basquiat were friends, they were also rivals. Ramm would later say that Basquiat wasn’t a “dream artist”—he didn’t so much radiate visions outward as take things in like a “sponge,” learning about genius from books. He and Ramm once bet on who could most convincingly parody the other’s work. (Ramm claimed not only that he won but that Basquiat’s art dealer, who wasn’t in on their ruse, told Basquiat that “his” work was the best he had ever done.)
That night, Basquiat invited Ramm and K-Rob to record a song he’d written. Ramm, who had rapped in the movie “Wild Style,” was already known for his unique nasal sneer. (He called it his “gangster duck” style.) The two men looked at Basquiat’s elementary rhymes, laughed, and tossed them in the trash. Instead, they made up their own lyrics—a brilliant, surreal tale of a kid (the earnest, bemused K-Rob) who’s on his way home and a hectoring pimp (Ramm) who tries to tempt him toward the dark side. Basquiat called the song “Beat Bop,” and paid for it to be produced; he painted the vinyl single’s cover art himself. The song was murky and strange, like a spiky funk jam slowed to a sinister crawl. In the background, someone tunes a violin. There’s so much echo and reverb on the track that it sounds like an attempt at time travel.
In the eighties, graffiti gained acceptance in the art world. Despite Ramm’s charisma, the intensity of his work and his stubborn, erratic personality kept him on the movement’s fringes. Where Basquiat and Keith Haring seemed shy showmen, Ramm came across as a nutty professor. His early paintings took inspiration from the psychedelia of comic books and science fantasy, with mazy train tracks running across cosmic reliefs. His palette was attuned to the era’s anxieties about nuclear war and nuclear waste. The colors were bright and garish, suggesting a box of neon highlighters run amok.
In the mid-eighties, he began rendering these ideas in 3-D. He made sculptures that evoked the fossilized remains of twentieth-century life: newspaper clippings, key rings, chain links, and other junk, floating in an epoxy ooze. The most remarkable works were his “Garbage Gods,” full-body suits of armor, some of which weighed more than a hundred pounds. They look like junk-yard Transformers doing samurai cosplay. His most famous character, the Gasholeer, was outfitted with a small flamethrower.
Ramm’s art, thought, and music are the subject of the exhibition “RAMM∑LLZ∑∑: Racing for Thunder,” at Red Bull Arts New York. Befitting the popular drink’s own sense of iconoclasm, “Racing” bathes in Ramm’s frenzied, free-associative, and occasionally overwhelming energy. There are his early canvases and sculptures, along with flyers, business cards, manifestos, and patent applications. A small theatre screens previously unseen videos of Ramm rapping at night clubs. The most impressive part of the survey is a floor devoted to his “Garbage Gods” and “Letter Racers”—skateboards representing each letter of the alphabet, armed with makeshift rockets, screwdrivers, and blades.
Throughout the exhibition, you can hear moments from Ramm’s lectures on Gothic Futurism—a thrilling jumble of street-corner hustling and technical language, all “parsecs,” “integers,” “aerodynamics.” As I was examining a collection of hand-painted watches, I kept hearing Ramm pause as he reached the end of a long disquisition on ecological catastrophe and graffiti-as-warfare, and then bark, “Next slide!”
In early May, the Red Bull Music Festival staged a Ramm-inspired concert to mark the opening of the art show. Ramm had continued to make music after “Beat Bop,” never wavering from his philosophies, just declaring them against increasingly turbulent, industrial-sounding backdrops. The eclecticism of the bill spoke to his wandering ear, and ranged from the terse hardcore of Show Me the Body to the wise-ass raps of Wiki. K-Rob, wearing a T-shirt featuring a mushroom and the words “I’m a Fun Guy,” reprised his verse from “Beat Bop,” grinning the whole way through. Gio Escobar, the leader of the deft punk-jazz band Standing on the Corner, dedicated a song to a late friend. The departed are everywhere around us, he said, as a groove emerged from the band’s dubbed-out chaos. “And they’re waiting.”
As hip-hop and art changed, as graffiti vanished from New York’s trains and walls, Ramm delved further into his own private cosmos—namely, the enormous loft in Tribeca where he lived, which he called the Battle Station. His obscurity wasn’t a choice. In the early eighties, he offered to send the U.S. military some of the intelligence he had gathered for national defense. (It declined.) In 1985, he wrote an opera, “The Requiem of Gothic Futurism.” In the nineties, he tried to promote his ideas by producing a comic book and a board game. He thought that toy manufacturers might want to mass-produce his “Garbage Gods” models. He was the first artist to collaborate with the streetwear brand Supreme. There was a series of infomercial-like videos to seed interest in “Alpha’s Bet,” an epic movie that he hoped would finally resolve the narrative arc of his extended universe.
By the time Rammellzee died, in 2010, after a long illness, New York City had been completely remade by mayoral administrations that took broken-windows policing as gospel. The Battle Station became condos. The Internet has made it easy to take what the culture provides you and rearrange it in some novel, cheeky way. It’s much more difficult to build an entirely new world—to abide by an ethical vision with a ferocity that requires you to break all the rules. I was surprised by how moved I felt standing underneath Ramm’s “Letter Racers” and studying the textures of the “Garbage Gods.” To see their meticulous handiwork up close was to believe that Ramm’s far-flung theories, his mashup of quantum physics and “slanguage,” made sense as an outsider’s survival strategy. I noticed all the discarded fragments of city life—bulbs and screws, a billiard ball, a doll’s head, old fan blades and turn-signal signs, visors stacked to look like pill bugs. His commitment was total. These are works of devotion.
This is where Ramm wanted to live—at the edge of comprehensibility, but in a way that invited others to wonder. Cities are filled with strangers who possess an unnerving energy, who hail us with stories, songs, and poems. Ramm was one of these. In an interview filmed in the aughts, Ramm sheds light on his everyday life. Sometimes, he says, he’ll be walking down the street or sitting at a bar, and people will just look at him. And sometimes they’ll come up to him and ask, “Who are you?” He’s explaining all this while wearing one of his “Garbage God” masks. You notice his paunch, the warm crackle of his voice at rest. “I’m just an average Joe,” he says, and he sounds like he believes it. ♦
One of my all time favorite records:
Friday, April 20, 2018
"IT AIN'T ALL ABOUT YOU "
My latest interview
From Itchy Silk
Glen E Friedman is a social activist and the photographers’ photographer. His name resounds with clarity inside (and outside) photography and it pulsates with a verve even stronger than it was in 1976 when he started making images of those vibrant sub-cultures: cutting his teeth with Skateboarding and progressing into Punk and Hip-Hop as each began to surface to significance, no doubt in part, thanks to his “voice”.
Like so many who have become an integral part of the fabric of a given period, Glen E Friedman’s interest in photography started as a hobby. The documentation of these sub-cultures ‘quickly’ became a ‘passion’ as it appealed to his need/wish to give his ‘vision a loud voice’. The decibels of that ‘vision’ are set firmly on high.
Iconic, generation defining images of names and important moments from those sub-cultures ensued. But Glen E Friedman’s impact however goes far beyond documenting sub-cultures. It is fair to say that in many respects he helped shape youth culture in those periods where his photographic documentation was intense.
Now in 2018 while his name remains a constant in the photographic world his socially active voice seems even louder and clearer. Indeed, Glen E Friedman seems more intent to push ideas with an anti-establishment bias. Perhaps in these times where ‘we’ are bludgeoned to death by mass media’s agendas on everything from whether to bomb the fuck out of Syria or not and in times where the obfuscation from politicians is even more pronounced-we need an anarchic voice for us to collectively state; ‘fuck your truth we will find our own truth.’
Can you name a moment, image or person that created your initial spark for the creative disciplines and indeed what was it about that moment, image or person that helped light the fire?
No, I cannot, except to say, when I felt that something was going on around me that was happening nowhere else on earth that I have heard of, it inspired me. I was excited and stoked. I wanted others to feel it the way I did. It felt revolutionary because it was!
As a photographer what was it about your formative years that helped to lay the foundation for your interest in photography-in hindsight were you destined to pursue this career?
No, not at all-photography was a hobby, but it became a passion very quickly once I realized it gave my vision a loud voice. Once I noticed it articulated my visions to solid proof I got energized and confident, that what I was seeing and what I was doing with the tool (camera) was worthy and maybe even somehow important.
Do you ever wonder who or what Glen E Friedman would be if he were not in photography-what could you have been?
Not really. I don’t have the time to think about it in such personal abstract ways. When I ponder or wonder it’s about more worldly things like what if humans don’t fix the environment, what or why did we as a species even evolve as we have, what’s going to happen to us is my biggest curiosity?
The youth cultures/counter cultures you captured appeared to have some ethereal and concrete cause how did you capture that essence in your work and what images do you think best showed that?
I captured, or should I more accurately say I framed those moments in my own idealized way because they inspired me. I saw urgency and importance, and I saw and learned that to really inspire others they needed to be framed properly. It helps outsiders relate and helps practitioners to respect and cherish. It was and is about accuracy and beauty, not just mere show and tell-it’s about going beyond the standard ‘capture’ school of thought. Fuck that mediocrity you got to go beyond to be heard, to be seen, to change.
Your bio talks about your ‘science of defiance’ with figures like Ice T. How important was that period in terms of Hip-Hop and the socio-political climate at the time-what was the essence of what you were trying to capture?cont.
I was attempting to help others tell their stories, to share their culture with the outside world. It was about bringing; understanding, consideration, education, love, and integrity. “Keeping it Real” was the slogan. I became one of the biggest proponents of this idea. I believed, lived and enjoyed the art and action that I saw going on around me immensely. Sharing it with the quality of images the culture deserved it was my personal responsibility at that point. I had had success prior with the cultures of, Skateboarding and Punk Rock and exposing and inspiring others. It expanded even further, past my own first-hand experiences to those of my new friends and the new music that was teaching and inspiring me.
Click HERE: http://itchysilk.com/glen-e-friedman-it-aint-all-about-you/ for the rest of the interview
Thursday, March 29, 2018
Wednesday, December 20, 2017
Why Run-DMC didn’t want to make ‘Christmas in Hollis’
from the New York Post:
By Hardeep Phull
By Hardeep Phull
Shopping for the holidays is stressful enough to send anyone reaching for the eggnog, but for Darryl McDaniels, a k a DMC of Run-DMC, it’s especially taxing.
“At this time of year, I can’t walk five steps at the mall without someone shouting the lyrics to ‘Christmas in Hollis’ at me,” he tells The Post. “Just yesterday, I was at the grocery store, and a lady said, ‘Guess what’s on my playlist right now?’ I said, ‘Christmas in Hollis.’ She said, ‘How did you know?!’ It’s a beautiful thing, but I got to expect that for the rest of my life!”
That didn’t seem likely when the song was first released 30 years ago. In 1987, Run-DMC was invited to contribute a holiday song to “A Very Special Christmas,” a charity compilation benefiting the Special Olympics. Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, Whitney Houston and other artists recorded covers, but the New York rap trio went the extra mile and came up with the fun and funky “Christmas in Hollis.”
The song didn’t chart at the time, but over the years, it’s developed a cultural cachet as one of the few holiday songs that isn’t sappy. It’s also been featured in movies such as “Die Hard” (1988) and Seth Rogen’s 2015 comedy “The Night Before.” DMC’s just given it a 30th anniversary revamp to help promote the IFC network’s “Christmas in the ’80s” movie marathon over Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.
“We’re down with Christmas forever because of that record,” says the 53-year-old DMC, who recently released a four-track vinyl-only EP “Back From the Dead — The Legend Lives.”
“We’re part of the holidays, and I get paid a lot of money to do that song at parties this time of year.”
But the coolest Christmas song of all time almost didn’t happen. Kurtis Blow released the holiday track “Christmas Rappin’ ” in 1979, and the group worried about looking like copycats by releasing another. “In hip-hop culture, you can’t duplicate what’s already been done, so we weren’t sure about doing it,” says DMC.
But publicist Bill Adler convinced them otherwise. An avowed enthusiast and collector of lesser-heard Christmas music, Adler bought the group’s DJ Jam Master Jay (a k a Jason Mizell) a crate of festive records, hoping there would be something they could use to build a song. Eventually, Jay came across Clarence Carter’s 1968 R&B track “Back Door Santa,” and it immediately caught his ear.
“Run and DMC were in the next room and came in, as if they’d been drawn to the scent of a big Christmas pie or something,” Adler tells The Post. “They nodded at Jay, and everybody knew that was going to be the sample.”
Lyrically, the song followed Run-DMC’s established trope: writing about their native Queens. Joseph “Run” Simmons’ verse centers on spotting Santa Claus in Hollis, while DMC captures his own childhood Christmases, with his mom “cooking chicken and collard greens” at home.
“I ate that meal for 48 years before my mother passed away [in 2013], and I got tired of it,” says the rapper, who’s since left Queens for New Jersey.
“Now, I go out with my family on Christmas, because when you go to the city on Christmas, the whole city’s yours. You can get reservations in places you never would. The next Christmas song I do is gonna be about going out on Christmas to eat!”
Sunday, October 8, 2017
Wednesday, September 13, 2017
Saturday, July 1, 2017
Sunday, June 11, 2017
Wednesday, April 19, 2017
Wednesday, November 2, 2016
Skaters and musicians drawings from my personal collection
Over the last weekend I posted these three drawings on my Instagram including drawings by Wes Humpston, Chuck Dukowski and Chuck D. of Public Enemy, with some back stories... I thought you might like them.
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