Urban Honking

JShepherd: How are you feeling about electroclash? Ghettotech producer/DJ/Mr. De protege Disco D: “I call electroclash ‘AFE’: ass-free electro. That’s what I call it. It sounds like someone took the ass knob and turned it all the way down.”

Thing I learned from from MS-ELL’s Under Construction: Hiphop, get back to your roots–but only if you’re carrying platinum adidas. Things I learned from MS-ELL’s This is Not a Test: It’s okay to not have a cellular phone (“Wake Up”), but I better get a G-Unit like, three minutes ago (“Toyz”). If you are thick, […]

Yes, it is true: I grew up in Wyoming. It is a cultural island, that place, a vast, perfectly square island with secrets to be gleaned from beneath dust and tumbleweeds, where arrowheads and dinosaurs jut up from the earth like pirate booty, but little else. In Wyoming, Bell Biv Devoe provoked a great spiritual […]

Our Swiss correspondent, Ethan Swan, sent holiday wishes this morning: “The China-men built the railroad, the Indians saved the Pilgrim/And in return the Pilgrim killed em/ They call it it Thanksgiving, I call your holiday hell-day (from Stillmatic)” Ethan used to play in a superb Portland punk band called Emergency, which pre-dated last season’s “no-wave […]

PINK’s TRY THIS: Haven’t listened to it yet because was met with the unequivocal gasface from my boss, Steve Humphrey, who pretty much likes anything poppy (not that he has the soul of an auctioneer, but he can break bread with a good hook) BUT, Pink writes her thank yous in emoticons, says to embrace […]

RECENT OBSERVATIONS to be included in my forthcoming book on spirituality and rap/r&b liner notes: G-Unit’s BEG FOR MERCY: Young Buck thanks God, 50 Cent, and his mother, in that order. Three thank you’s later, he thanks his mother again, perhaps because he feels bad for ranking 50 Cent before her, assuming she isn’t one […]

According to a recent episode of Nova, the earth’s magnetic field is dissipating at such a rate that by the next millennium (approx. 20 generations from now), it will be all but gone, rendering us defenseless against fallout from the sun’s radiation storms, and essentially burning earth into a crisp. Like Mars. A more immediate […]

from raptivism records: RAPTIVISM TO DISTRIBUTE HEALTH DVD FEATURING ERYKAH BADU, COMMON, dead prez, etc. NEW YORK, NY. (November 18, 2003) Raptivism has announced plans to distribute “Wholistic Living For The Hip Hop Generation” for the first time on DVD format. The film, produced over several years by Brooklyn-based activist Supa Nova Slom, features candid […]

Though many will mock and many others already have, I have finally purchased the DVD of ex-Source writer Mike Elliot’s hiphop love story BROWN SUGAR, starring Taye Diggs, Sanaa Lathan, Queen Latifah and Mos Def, with many cameos including Method Man, Kool G Rap, Dana Dane, and that retired wrestler Chyna, who is a giant […]

I’m gonna take it down a notch and direct all two readers of this Movable Type Weblog to a brilliant and utterly sobering spread in the UK Guardian, which consists of letters written by Britons to George W. Bush, on occasion of his upcoming state visit to GB. The playwright Harold Pinter put it best: […]