The musings of a madman...

5: “Me Too!” and “Let’s Get Money Together”      No, this is not related to any basketball players’ attempts to rap or any rappers’ attempts to show how much “like Mike” he was in the gym.  It is more related to each side recognizing the other’s validity in the arena of entertainment.  There is a possibility that this could have been taken along with the “Acknowledgment” we previously discussed, but the level that this is taken to has a life of its own, beyond simple acknowledgment.  It almost becomes necessary to point to the fact that each experienced a bit of a burst in popularity right around the mid-80s, directly in line with the spikes in the popularities of – all at once – national media outlets (broadcast and cable TV, radio, etc.), the renewal of the Lakers/Celtics rivalry and perhaps most importantly, the previously mentioned marketing juggernaut named Michael Jeffrey Jordan.      A term born of this mutual respect and endearment from the hip hop community to that

            On my next birthday, I will be 34, so it stands to reason that my life has left me with plenty of access to hip hop music in my time.  One thing that artists USED to try and actually pull off well was concept albums.  No, I do not mean an album upon which the artist finds a reasonably central theme well and sticks close to that across the entirety of the album.  With that in mind,  Ready to Die, Only Built For Cuban Lynx  and the like are off of the table.  They were classically presented albums that stuck to their formulas well, but “Concept Albums” they were not.             On the other hand, Prince Paul’s TWO concept albums  A Prince Among Thieves  and  Politics of the Business , Kool Keith’s entire career and minor outlying and TERRIBLY slept-on Sporty Thievz  Street Cinema  should all personify what it is I am getting after.  It’s not to say that artists from the little-known on up to megastars haven’t TRIED, just that many fail to pull it off.  Let me lay it

4: Fashion Sensibilities      Two things can be guaranteed to be taken into consideration when it comes to regional applications and those are fashion and local team fanship.  When it boils down to it, through the presented history hip hop in popular culture, it was no huge deal – one could argue that it was expected – to see their favorite rappers donning the jersey of their favorite player or hat of their favorite team, or even both! One of the “standard” hip hop uniforms from the earliest days included the simple jeans and t-shirt with a pair of sneakers.  Sneakers would become one of the EARLIEST connected fashion items tying hip hop and basketball together.  As a child born in the late 70s and raised in the 80s, I distinctly recall seeing and desiring to own the player-specific Converse sneakers worn by Dr. J and Magic Johnson, badgering my parents for a new pair of the Chuck Taylors that seemingly every other player wore and To this day, I still go out of my way to o

3: “Just Like Us”      So now we’ve seen an understandable correlation born of the similar creations of basketball and hip hop.  We’ve discussed why the participants should want to involve themselves with one another, if only from more often than not coming up from similar backgrounds themselves.  Now it is time we discuss what good reason they may have to continue and cultivate the personal-cum-business relationship(s).      As with any connected entities, their mutual involvement will eventually espouse emulation.  One could argue that Biggie saw this coming (or had already witnessed) when, on his first album, he mentioned “either you slinging crack rock or you got a wicked jumpshot” with the at-the-time unspoken third option naturally being music.  It was ironic, because he was passively speaking out that third option by participating in it for his own out of those very same neighborhoods.  Either way, generations coming up behind the ones who made it out of the neigh

2: Acknowledgement and Acceptance      With a mind fully focused on the facts that basketball remains a sport that requires VERY little to get into as far as resources, and hip hop a musical medium that (at the time) required little in the way of classical musical training, it seems only natural that kids from lower-rent areas would be into either, or even both of the two simultaneously.  The connection between participants of the two is more than natural.      What could not be assumed was that either would be accepted as continuingly viable forms of entertainment or even recreational activities.  For what they were and the relative obscurity from whence they came, they would surely be a hard sell to say the least. With that in mind, it is (or was) only fair that both would initially cultivate and grow in areas with less-than-affluent populations and grow from there up, sometimes (or often) moving those less-than-affluent on to greener pastures for their troubles.  One c

1: Humble Beginnings      We all know the story of basketball’s beginnings. Dr. Naismith was commissioned with the creation of an indoor activity to keep kids in his YMCA busy on rainy days or in the harsh New England winters in Springfield, MA.  In a dearth of seed money or other outside resources, a peach basket was nailed to a wall ten feet in the air and the objective was to throw the ball (then a soccer ball – specifically-designed basketballs  wouldn't  come until later) into the basket within the constraints of a set of rules he had written out prior to nailing the baskets up. Compared to what “basket-ball” – as a then-skeptical Dr. Naismith called the game in his diaries – would become, it really doesn’t seem feasible that beginnings get more humble than that.  From his brainchild, the activity became sport played in YMCAs throughout the US, spreading through the rest of North America as well and eventually into high schools and colleges en route to taking hold

     Allow me a moment to explain what it is we’re about to embark on… Back in May, I had this idea that I would write a book that would detail the connected histories of Hip Hop and Professional Basketball.  In June I got married, then had the week leading up to my birthday off of work.  In that time, I got a lot of work done on it, but it was not shaping up to be voluminous to be worth attempting to pursue a whole book’s worth of writing on.  As of the date that I type this (10/15/2012), I was a hair over 10,000 words into the project and running out of steam enough to carry it any further.  I mean that to say that I was almost “done,” and would need an amount of input up to about four times the amount of words I had put into it.      Given the length of what I DID have, though, I would not be willing to let it go to waste, and that is what brings me here today.  Instead of a book, I will publish the presentation as a series of blogs to be posted every Tuesday until I h

I’ve been told I am a “hater,” and that I am incapable of conducting a discussion of hip hop music without falling off into some profanity-laced diatribe filled with nothing particularly constructive. Apart from genuinely not knowing what a “hater” actually is, as employed, I cannot disagree with this assessment of my own presented opinions of the current state of hip hop. What I am going to do today is offer all the positive reinforcement as it relates to the current state of hip hop, and I will not do so with the “aching pussy” approach of “underground ‘hip-hop’ vs. mainstream ‘rap’,” as that is a divisive tactic employed by a generally annoying minority fringe group of hip hop "fans" that I just refuse to employ. In discussions with some good friends this week, it was noted that until about 2003-2004ish – perhaps 05 at the latest, I could be counted on to buy 30-50 newly released CDs in a year, 80-85% of which of the hip hop genre. I was in a bit of a renaissance a

It seems to me that music -- popular or otherwise -- is the only medium in which people neglect to learn from those that came before them in making better product. That, or or they just refuse. Seriously, look at sports, even the ones you don't watch... Football players are bigger and faster and throwing the ball farther, baseballs are being pitched faster and hit further, basketball players are bigger, stronger and jumping higher, race cars are faster and safer in getting there, as well as same linear advancements in every other sport I did not care to mention. We COULD blame performance enhancing drugs, but that takes away too much credit from the athletes who are not cheats, which I truly do believe is the most of them. Anyway, we look at most professions in the world whose lives are made better by the knowledge imparted on them from the experiences of those who came before them and I am beginning to think that people making music these days are fucking stupid. Here we are, 4+ m

I'd originally STARTED to use this as a piggyback or even a series of rebuttals to a Curtis75Black guest post over on Tony Grand$' blog a minute ago, but I decided instead to make this one for my own instead of a series of responses in someone else's comments section, so here we are... The conversation, as presented, was one to fly in the face of the "hip hop is dead" movement from those who look at the current state of hip hop and music in general and look at it as being on a decline. My response, as a direct quote, was... "I won’t declare hip hop necessarily 'dead,' but there comes a time where one must look at quality over quantity. Just because artists who HAVE been “classic” in a past life are releasing albums does not mean we’re getting classic material on name alone. I own the last 3 on your 2008 list, and listen to Heltah Skeltah damn near every day still. Own or downloaded 11 of the 2009 list, but would not call all of them “great,” a

The Executive Producer is usually the least important individual on the actual production of an album, but the most important in the PRESENTATION of the album. As odd as that may sound, when one considers that the individual usually does have some hand in the production of the music contained on said album, but also has other non-musical duties as well. Such as... Minding the budget Legwork to secure promotion of the album Choosing which songs make the album and The order in which those chosen songs will be presented People who make the name "executive producer" one worth striving to achieve in spite of being a largely figurehead title to hold have always been DJ Premier (Gang Starr, others) , Large Professor (Main Source) , ?uestlove (D'Angelo, Common, The Roots) , MC Serch (3rd Bass, Nas) , and Prince Paul (3rd Bass, De La Soul, himself and many others) . Cheapening the title, though, have been the number of Diddy's albums "executive produced" by Biggie,

We know that record labels aren't actually RELEASING albums these days, not even from the big-draw artists unless said artists are the ones in charge of the release of their own shit. In combat of this, it seems that lesser known and surely less talented artists are going the way of the "mixtape/street album" to get their "art" to the masses. [ Phlip note - quotation marks on the former for definition, and for ridicule on the latter] I come from a different time, where a "Mix Tape" was exactly that - a 60 (or 90 if you could up a couple more bucks) minute cassette tape of songs you sat by the radio and recorded from the recorder set and left on pause for that moment... Extra points if you could catch the Friday and Saturday night mix shows, where they ONLY played the shit you waited all week to come on the radio... Then put in your walkman to impress people on the school bus until either... The tape broke. Some new shit came out and you recorded over