Friday, May 8, 2009
Cam'ron Crime Pays (DIRTY version)
Tracklist
------------
01. Crime Pays (Intro) (Produced By Skitzo) 2:32
02. Cookin Up (Produced By I.N.F.O And Nova) 4:03
03. Where I Know You From (Produced By Skitzo) 4:03
04. Fuck Cam 1 (Skit) 1:24
05. Never Ever (Produced By Skitzo) 3:30
06. Curve (Produced By Araabmuzik Co-Produced By Skitzo) 3:44
07. Silky (No Homo) (Produced By Skitzo) 3:20
08. Get It In Ohio (Produced By Araabmuzik) 4:23
09. Who (Produced By Skitzo) 3:43
10. Grease (Skit) 2:10
11. You Know Whats Up Ft. C.O. And Sky-Lyn (Produced By Skitzo) 3:16
12. Spend The Night (Produced By Araabmuzik) 4:03
13. Fuck Cam 2 (Skit) 1:13
14. Woo Hoo Ft. Byrd Lady And 40 Cal (Produced By Skitzo) 3:50
15. Chalupa (Produced By Araabmuzik) 4:01
16. Cookies-N-Apple Juice Ft. Skitzo And Byrd Lady (Produced By Skitzo) 3:55
17. My Job (Produced By Skitzo) 3:47
18. Homicide (Produced By Skitzo) 3:43
19. Fuck Cam 3 (Skit) 0:50
20. Got It For Cheap Ft. Skitzo (Produced By YH) 4:11
21. Get It Get It (Produced By Skitzo) 3:14
22. Bottom Of The Pussy (Produced By Skitzo) 3:16
23. Fuck Cam 4 (Skit)
http://www.zshare.net/download/597072338bbdd59d/
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=E4DF9HTK
50 ways to make money online
The unattributed list below has been circulating in forums and reprinted on many “make money online” blogs since 2008. We’re reprinting it here to comment on each method individually. This particular reprinted list is from the reprint at iBanter — we’re reprinting the list here for “Fair Use” purposes of commentary and analysis.
1. Write and submit articles to the article directories.
How it works: The directories have Page Rank and they pass some of it to the links in the “About the Author” sections of the articles they publish.
Pro: Most article sites are free. Fairly straightforward and simple to do. Good for backlinks and direct traffic. For best results, pick only high value/high PR/highly categorized sites and submit manually.
Con: You run the risk of duplicate content penalties if you submit the same article to too many sites. Also, it helps tremendously if the article is categorized correctly and the article site’s permalink structure is search engine friendly. Using automated submitters produce less results than manual and ‘cherry picked’ submissions. If you’re not a writer, writing the articles might be a challenge. Fortunately, leased website copywriters are available for as low as $175 per month.
2. Leave comments on other people’s blogs with a backlink to your site.
How it works: The blog has Page Rank and it passes it through links in the body of commenters’ posts or in the hyperlinked names of the commenters.
Pro: Very effective way of getting backlinks from High Page rank sites.
Con: Wordpress comments are by default NO FOLLOW so link juice is not passed. Even if NO FOLLOW is deactivated (such as on this blog), the link builder cannot just use his/her keyword as a name. Many blogs require a real name only. Others require a name and allow for the keyword to follow. Example: “Jim - Funny Video Site”. For best results, the blog must be in the same category as the site you’re building links for. For Blogger/blogspot.com, comments are NO FOLLOW by default as well.
3. Answer people’s questions on www.answers.yahoo.com .
How it works: Yahoo Answers lists commonly asked questions regarding a particular topic. You answer a question in your site’s niche/category and stuff the useful and informative answer with keywords. You put your link as a ‘Source’. Yahoo’s own user database has tons of people that would click your source link so you get direct traffic.
Pro: Free. Great way to tap into Yahoo’s user base. Good for targeted direct traffic. Keyword-driven search results yield targeted traffic.
Con: The links don’t use text titles so SEO value is limited to begin with. Yahoo has since made the links NO FOLLOW which destroyed these links Google SEO value. Works best for frequent users not drive by “contributors”.
4. Post in forums and have a link to your site in your signature.
How it works: Whatever Page Rank the forum has is sometimes (depending on a few factors) shared with the links users place in the body of their posts or, to a lesser extent, their signature text links.
Pro: Free. Very easy way to get backlinks. You set your signature and you forget it. The more you post, the greater your links proliferate. Good addition to a daily linkbuilding routine if you visit and post on forums habitually. Some direct traffic.
Con: Link value is diluted by the tons of other links posted by other users. Signature-based links carry less weight than ‘in content’ (in post) links. The value of your backlink is greatly affected by how closely the forum you’re posting on meets the content category of the site you’re linkbuilding for. Also, many forums are now using NO FOLLOW tags for links, in post links, or both.
5. Write a press release and submit it to www.PRWeb.com .
How it works: PRWeb has a Pagerank of 7 and it passes on some of its page rank to links embedded in the categorized press releases published on its site.
Pro: Fast and relatively easy way to get a backlink from a trusted site. Not only do you get a backlink, your press release might be picked up sites that monitor PRWeb for category-specific releases.
Con: PRWeb is NOT free. The cheapest available package is $80. $80 for a backlink located on a site that has tons of other backlinks to other sites. To get full media distribution, you have to pay $360. You can get many more backlinks at cheaper rates from SEO linkbuilding services. However, periodic backlink building using PRWeb is probably a good idea to give new sites a good backlink start.
6. Advertise your website in the appropriate category on www.CraigsList.com .
How it works: Craigslist has a nice Page Rank. Posting your ad (with anchor text) in the right category lets Craigslist passes some of Craigslist’s link juice to your site.
Pro: Free. Backlinks from a nicely categorized high value site. Good for backlinks and direct traffic.
Con: Due to excessive spamming of Craigslist, posting has become more difficult since posters need a Phone Verified Account in order to post. This is quite a hassle specially if you’re not based in the US. Beware of scammers selling fake PVAs. Also, Craigslist employs some anti-spam measures.
7 . Give an unbiased testimonial on a product/service that you have used in exchange for a backlink to your site.
How it works: Highly popular or established product pages will have Page Rank. By posting your domain on their site they pass some of this PR to you.
Pro: Free.
Con: To get full SEO benefits, the product/service must be somewhat related to the niche/category of the site you are building links for. Finding relevant high page rank product/service sites can be time consuming. You are filtering for a) category b) Page Rank and c) do follow. Thankfully, there’s some tools that can make this task easier.
8. Start a blog and submit it to the 100’s of free blog directories.
How it works: Submission to any directory can result in some of those directory sites passing their PR on to your site.
Pro: Free. Third Party publishers that “leech” content off RSS feeds sometimes post your entries with your links intact.
Con: This opens you up to RSS hijackers which scrape your content and strip your links. You can protect yourself from this by setting up your blog to publish only summaries. This setting is in the “READING” section of WP setup. RSS feed hijacking can get so bad that the thieves sometimes rank higher than you for the keywords of your entry!
9. Manually submit your website to the major search engines.
How it works: Submitting your site to search engines reduces their effort in finding you. Once you’re in their database, they can index your pages, and rank them.
Pro: Saves the search engines time. Not like they care
Con: Based on personal experience and other webmasters experiences posted on forums, you get indexed faster if you submit to some key sites other than search engines. There’s even reports of submitted sites sitting for WEEKS without even one visit from Googlebot. Instead of submitting to the search engine, submit your site map using Google’s webmaster tools and submit to some major DO FOLLOW sites.
10. Optimize each page of your website for a particular keyword or search phrase.
How it works: Search engine spiders tend to be literal and, until recent developments, linear in their approach. You have to spoonfeed them as to where to go on your site and suggest what keywords to pick up. This makes for a more ‘directed’ system.
Pro: Free. Relatively straightforward.
Con: You need to expend some time and effort to find the right keywords for each section. Competitor analysis helps a lot but in order to beat your competition you have to find the right combination of keywords and subkeywords that have less competition from which you can build a backlink critical mass. This can lift your rankings for more competitive keywords.
Photo Credits: Nelson D.
Here are the remaining items on the list which will be analyzed in PARTS 2 through 5 of this 5 part series.
11. Add a link in your email signature to your website. It’s a free and easy way to get a little more traffic.
12. Make a custom 404 error page for your website redirecting people to your home page.
13. Use PPC search engine advertising.
14. Add a “bookmark this site” link to your webpages.
15. Have a tell-a-friend form on your site.
16. Send articles to ezine publishers that includes a link to your website.
17. Hold a crazy content and make it go viral.
18. Give away a freebie (ebook, report, e-course) to keep people coming back to your site.
19. Add an RSS feed to your blog.
20. Submit your site to any related niche directories on the net.
21. Participate in a banner or link exchange program.
22. Create a software program and give it away for free.
23. Purchase the misspellings or variations of your domain name, or those of your competitors.
24. Buy a domain name related to your niche that is already receiving traffic and forward it to your site.
25. Pass out business cards with your domain on them everywhere you go.
26. Start and affiliate program and let your affiliates send you visitors.
27. Start a page on social bookmarking sites such as www.wowzza.com .
28. Submit a viral video to www.YouTube.com
29. Conduct and publish surveys to your website.
30. Find joint venture partners that will send you traffic.
31. Start your own newsletter or ezine.
32. Use a autoresponder or email campaign to keep people coming back to your site.
33. Purchase ads on other sites.
34. Send a free copy of your product to other site owners in exchange for a product review.
35. Sell or place classified ads on www.eBay.com with a link to your site.
36. Post free classified ads on any of the sites that allow them with a link to your site.
37. Exchange reciprocal links with other related websites.
38. Network with other people at seminars or other live events.
39. Purchase advertising in popular newsletters or ezines.
40. Advertise on other product’s “thank you” pages.
41. Create a free ebook and list in on the “free ebook” sites.
42. Buy and use a memorable domain name.
43. Do something controversial.
44. Create an Amazon profile and submit reviews for books and other products that you have read.
45. Start a lens on www.Squidoo.com .
46. Use a traffic exchange (low quality traffic, but can sometimes be worthwhile).
47. Get referrals form similar but non-competing sites.
48. Create and sell a product with resell or giveaway rights and include a link to your site in it o others pass it around for you.
49. Email your list. If you don’t have one, get one.
50. Buy a pair of sandals; get your website engraved on the bottom and walk on the beach, stomp in the mud or play in the snow.
1. Write and submit articles to the article directories.
How it works: The directories have Page Rank and they pass some of it to the links in the “About the Author” sections of the articles they publish.
Pro: Most article sites are free. Fairly straightforward and simple to do. Good for backlinks and direct traffic. For best results, pick only high value/high PR/highly categorized sites and submit manually.
Con: You run the risk of duplicate content penalties if you submit the same article to too many sites. Also, it helps tremendously if the article is categorized correctly and the article site’s permalink structure is search engine friendly. Using automated submitters produce less results than manual and ‘cherry picked’ submissions. If you’re not a writer, writing the articles might be a challenge. Fortunately, leased website copywriters are available for as low as $175 per month.
2. Leave comments on other people’s blogs with a backlink to your site.
How it works: The blog has Page Rank and it passes it through links in the body of commenters’ posts or in the hyperlinked names of the commenters.
Pro: Very effective way of getting backlinks from High Page rank sites.
Con: Wordpress comments are by default NO FOLLOW so link juice is not passed. Even if NO FOLLOW is deactivated (such as on this blog), the link builder cannot just use his/her keyword as a name. Many blogs require a real name only. Others require a name and allow for the keyword to follow. Example: “Jim - Funny Video Site”. For best results, the blog must be in the same category as the site you’re building links for. For Blogger/blogspot.com, comments are NO FOLLOW by default as well.
3. Answer people’s questions on www.answers.yahoo.com .
How it works: Yahoo Answers lists commonly asked questions regarding a particular topic. You answer a question in your site’s niche/category and stuff the useful and informative answer with keywords. You put your link as a ‘Source’. Yahoo’s own user database has tons of people that would click your source link so you get direct traffic.
Pro: Free. Great way to tap into Yahoo’s user base. Good for targeted direct traffic. Keyword-driven search results yield targeted traffic.
Con: The links don’t use text titles so SEO value is limited to begin with. Yahoo has since made the links NO FOLLOW which destroyed these links Google SEO value. Works best for frequent users not drive by “contributors”.
4. Post in forums and have a link to your site in your signature.
How it works: Whatever Page Rank the forum has is sometimes (depending on a few factors) shared with the links users place in the body of their posts or, to a lesser extent, their signature text links.
Pro: Free. Very easy way to get backlinks. You set your signature and you forget it. The more you post, the greater your links proliferate. Good addition to a daily linkbuilding routine if you visit and post on forums habitually. Some direct traffic.
Con: Link value is diluted by the tons of other links posted by other users. Signature-based links carry less weight than ‘in content’ (in post) links. The value of your backlink is greatly affected by how closely the forum you’re posting on meets the content category of the site you’re linkbuilding for. Also, many forums are now using NO FOLLOW tags for links, in post links, or both.
5. Write a press release and submit it to www.PRWeb.com .
How it works: PRWeb has a Pagerank of 7 and it passes on some of its page rank to links embedded in the categorized press releases published on its site.
Pro: Fast and relatively easy way to get a backlink from a trusted site. Not only do you get a backlink, your press release might be picked up sites that monitor PRWeb for category-specific releases.
Con: PRWeb is NOT free. The cheapest available package is $80. $80 for a backlink located on a site that has tons of other backlinks to other sites. To get full media distribution, you have to pay $360. You can get many more backlinks at cheaper rates from SEO linkbuilding services. However, periodic backlink building using PRWeb is probably a good idea to give new sites a good backlink start.
6. Advertise your website in the appropriate category on www.CraigsList.com .
How it works: Craigslist has a nice Page Rank. Posting your ad (with anchor text) in the right category lets Craigslist passes some of Craigslist’s link juice to your site.
Pro: Free. Backlinks from a nicely categorized high value site. Good for backlinks and direct traffic.
Con: Due to excessive spamming of Craigslist, posting has become more difficult since posters need a Phone Verified Account in order to post. This is quite a hassle specially if you’re not based in the US. Beware of scammers selling fake PVAs. Also, Craigslist employs some anti-spam measures.
7 . Give an unbiased testimonial on a product/service that you have used in exchange for a backlink to your site.
How it works: Highly popular or established product pages will have Page Rank. By posting your domain on their site they pass some of this PR to you.
Pro: Free.
Con: To get full SEO benefits, the product/service must be somewhat related to the niche/category of the site you are building links for. Finding relevant high page rank product/service sites can be time consuming. You are filtering for a) category b) Page Rank and c) do follow. Thankfully, there’s some tools that can make this task easier.
8. Start a blog and submit it to the 100’s of free blog directories.
How it works: Submission to any directory can result in some of those directory sites passing their PR on to your site.
Pro: Free. Third Party publishers that “leech” content off RSS feeds sometimes post your entries with your links intact.
Con: This opens you up to RSS hijackers which scrape your content and strip your links. You can protect yourself from this by setting up your blog to publish only summaries. This setting is in the “READING” section of WP setup. RSS feed hijacking can get so bad that the thieves sometimes rank higher than you for the keywords of your entry!
9. Manually submit your website to the major search engines.
How it works: Submitting your site to search engines reduces their effort in finding you. Once you’re in their database, they can index your pages, and rank them.
Pro: Saves the search engines time. Not like they care
Con: Based on personal experience and other webmasters experiences posted on forums, you get indexed faster if you submit to some key sites other than search engines. There’s even reports of submitted sites sitting for WEEKS without even one visit from Googlebot. Instead of submitting to the search engine, submit your site map using Google’s webmaster tools and submit to some major DO FOLLOW sites.
10. Optimize each page of your website for a particular keyword or search phrase.
How it works: Search engine spiders tend to be literal and, until recent developments, linear in their approach. You have to spoonfeed them as to where to go on your site and suggest what keywords to pick up. This makes for a more ‘directed’ system.
Pro: Free. Relatively straightforward.
Con: You need to expend some time and effort to find the right keywords for each section. Competitor analysis helps a lot but in order to beat your competition you have to find the right combination of keywords and subkeywords that have less competition from which you can build a backlink critical mass. This can lift your rankings for more competitive keywords.
Photo Credits: Nelson D.
Here are the remaining items on the list which will be analyzed in PARTS 2 through 5 of this 5 part series.
11. Add a link in your email signature to your website. It’s a free and easy way to get a little more traffic.
12. Make a custom 404 error page for your website redirecting people to your home page.
13. Use PPC search engine advertising.
14. Add a “bookmark this site” link to your webpages.
15. Have a tell-a-friend form on your site.
16. Send articles to ezine publishers that includes a link to your website.
17. Hold a crazy content and make it go viral.
18. Give away a freebie (ebook, report, e-course) to keep people coming back to your site.
19. Add an RSS feed to your blog.
20. Submit your site to any related niche directories on the net.
21. Participate in a banner or link exchange program.
22. Create a software program and give it away for free.
23. Purchase the misspellings or variations of your domain name, or those of your competitors.
24. Buy a domain name related to your niche that is already receiving traffic and forward it to your site.
25. Pass out business cards with your domain on them everywhere you go.
26. Start and affiliate program and let your affiliates send you visitors.
27. Start a page on social bookmarking sites such as www.wowzza.com .
28. Submit a viral video to www.YouTube.com
29. Conduct and publish surveys to your website.
30. Find joint venture partners that will send you traffic.
31. Start your own newsletter or ezine.
32. Use a autoresponder or email campaign to keep people coming back to your site.
33. Purchase ads on other sites.
34. Send a free copy of your product to other site owners in exchange for a product review.
35. Sell or place classified ads on www.eBay.com with a link to your site.
36. Post free classified ads on any of the sites that allow them with a link to your site.
37. Exchange reciprocal links with other related websites.
38. Network with other people at seminars or other live events.
39. Purchase advertising in popular newsletters or ezines.
40. Advertise on other product’s “thank you” pages.
41. Create a free ebook and list in on the “free ebook” sites.
42. Buy and use a memorable domain name.
43. Do something controversial.
44. Create an Amazon profile and submit reviews for books and other products that you have read.
45. Start a lens on www.Squidoo.com .
46. Use a traffic exchange (low quality traffic, but can sometimes be worthwhile).
47. Get referrals form similar but non-competing sites.
48. Create and sell a product with resell or giveaway rights and include a link to your site in it o others pass it around for you.
49. Email your list. If you don’t have one, get one.
50. Buy a pair of sandals; get your website engraved on the bottom and walk on the beach, stomp in the mud or play in the snow.
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Toure interviews Black Thought of the Roots....full interview
Black Thought Interview With Toure
In a rare interview, Touré talks with Black Thought—front man for The Roots and the new house MC of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon—about what Chuck D. taught him about race, why rapping is like jumping rope, and the reasons behind his rhymes.
Black Thought is not just one of the best-named MCs in hip-hop history, he’s one of the best. As the front man of The Roots—Jimmy Fallon’s new house band for his late-night talk show—Black Thought is both a rapper’s rapper and an intellectual’s rapper, who doesn’t brag about the ghetto and never has to say how tough he is. He has a deliciously deep and steely voice, a tremendous rhythmic sensibility, and a pen that delivers furious flurries of rhymes about everything—politics, women, language, whatever. He’s got a personal style that’s as serious as a heart attack—he evinces that there’s-no-smiling-in-hip-hop thing, as if he’s not here to be loved by you, but instead here to slay you with his skill, take your respect, and leave.
Over the years, Black Thought, born Tariq Trotter, has done very few interviews—preferring, he says, to let his rhyming speak for him. But as The Roots will appear every night on Jimmy Fallon, he’s growing a little more amenable. I pulled him aside during a band rehearsal in a rehearsal space in Manhattan one day, found a tiny room, and talked to him about some of the science behind being an MC.
T: Who are the MCs you most closely studied and learned something from?
BT: Kool G Rap. Big Daddy Kane. Rakim. KRS-One.
T: What have you learned from them?
From G Rap, I learned not to be pigeon held as regards to my vocabulary. The young Kool G Rap, when he was the cool genius of rap, it was really about the genius part and the fact that his lexicon was crazy.
It doesn’t matter than he might be using words that we, the audience, don’t know.
Shit, I use words that I don’t know but, you know, they just sound dope. G Rap was not just using hip-hop slang and words that everyone knew and not just using big words just for the sake of using them—he would use them in their proper context. G Rap, if he was an instrument, he’d be like a drum, whereas Rakim was like brass, he was more melodic. I’d compare Rakim to a saxophone. But from Rakim I got the melodic influence and just repetition in my patterns. I got more of the subtleties, I saw someone perfectly marrying consciousness with musicality with street credibility and still gangster. And his tone was crazy. He had a very distinct delivery. Sometimes nasal meets guttural.
“I’ve become a functioning cog in the machine called The Roots, but in my youth I was comin’ from a more braggadocious, egotistical perspective.”
T: Who else did you study?
BT: Chuck D. From Chuck I got the black nationalism, the militancy. Chuck was a more avant-garde MC to me. And LL was a major influence. What I got from him was swagger. He was relatively young when he came in the game and he garnered the respect and admiration of these older MCs. He’s another guy from Queens who was saying, "I’m gonna use every word in the English lexicon and slap you in the face with it real hard." There’s something about MCs that came from that part of New York in the ‘80s.
T: Where do you rhyme from? Your nose, throat, chest, where?
BT: Diaphragm. I try to. Sometimes you forget. If you have to sing you may just slip back into rhyming from my mouth or my throat or rhyming where we naturally speak. You can always hear me breathing during my verses, but that breathing becomes part of the music. If you’re rappin’ in perfect rhythm with the track then you’re gonna be breathin’ in perfect rhythm, too. And that’s part of the percussion.
But sometimes those breaths miss the mark.
I mean, if I swallow incorrectly or if I breathe and some dust goes down the wrong pipe, words will be missed or a line might be left out. The audience may be none the wiser, but more importantly it’s a bump in the stride of us onstage. And there’s gonna be a bloop, a sonic taxing for it, and everyone’s gonna be brought out of their zone for just a split second to acknowledge the fact that this one person just fucked up or left out this line. So you want everything to be as effortless as possible. It happens all the time but that’s one of the things you micromanage.
Every rapper, when they first hear a beat and start relating to it they go uh, uh, yeah, uh, uh—what’s the about?
It’s like a map. You have to be synced.
T: So you’re getting into the rhythm?
BT: Yeah. When you hear a beat it usually takes a measure or one or two lines of the music before you become accustomed to the rhythm. It’s like jumping into a jump rope. You just start turning and then I jump in.
T: The double-dutch analogy is interesting, because you’re very much a part of The Roots in that you’re an instrument in this mix. Most rappers do it as an ego gesture—I’m the man, check me out. All eyes on me. That’s not where you’re coming from. It’s more of a musical gesture.
BT: I’ve become an instrument in this. I’ve become a functioning cog in the machine called The Roots, but in my youth I was comin’ from a more braggadocious, egotistical perspective. I started changing as an artist the day that Ahmir and I met. I feel like I became more musical and he became more street. That’s what we brought to one another. I was definitely knowledgeable in the world of hip-hop and Ahmir was knowledgeable about jazz and soul and all other music and we turned each other on.
T: You guys met in high school at the Philadelphia High School for Creative and Performing Arts. Did you take music classes together?
BT: I’ve never studied music. Music for me was a hobby, something to do other than the art I’ve always done. I’ve been in art school from the age of three. I was a visual-arts major so what I learned at the school was just about colors and warm colors and cool colors and the effect that different colors have on people when you see a certain colors or two colors together. Which is where I got my name from: black being all the colors of the palette. The thing that’s carried over from my visual-art education into what I do musically is my openness. I can deal with sonic colors, the sound palette, from the experience I have dealing with the actual palette.
T: Has another rapper ever told you something that made a difference, or made you better?
BT: Well, in KRS-One’s book The Science of Rap, he said come out with your jacket on. Begin your performance and your rapport with your audience by warmin’ yourself up, and that means start rappin’ with your coat on and at some point during the first three songs you take it off. This gives the impression that you’re getting even more personal, getting down to business. And that way you get an extra rush, an extra roar from the crowd and your performance elevates from that point.
T: How do you write a rhyme?
BT: Rhymes will come to me line by line. Maybe I heard these two people over here having a conversation and they reminded me of a phrase that was coined years ago that people don’t use anymore that I wanna bring back. When I’ve accumulated half a book of these I’ll sit down and flip through and start writing a rhyme. I don’t usually write a rhyme before it’s due. I usually write a song when people are waiting for me to turn it in. I don’t just have a pre-manufactured thing. I don’t have songs I haven’t used yet. When I write a song, it’s tailor-written to whatever sonic bed was pre-existing.
T: How did you improve when you were developing?
BT: I would always be rappin’. Always be rappin’. I’d just sit in this room and rap about everything in it. And you’d be sick. You’d be mad. Just stop rapping!
T: So young rappers trying should practice all the time.
BT: The same way Norah Jones and Alicia Keys had to practice at the piano and Wyclef with his guitar, and ?uestlove—I’d call him after school and be like "Lemme speak to Ahmir," and his Dad would be like, he’s practicing, and hang up. That’s what makes a great musician, and if you’re gonna be a vocalist, if your voice is gonna be your axe, then you need to refine your knowledge. You also gotta be abreast of what’s goin’ on in current affairs, news, the latest reality-TV shit, what’s goin’ on in the Internet—you boil all of that down into one line that was witty because you compared this thing with that thing. You have to be knowledgeable of all the pre-existing information in order to edit it into something that’s fly to say.
**Touré is the host of BET’s The Black Carpet and the host of Treasure HD’s I’ll Try Anything Once. He is the author of Never Drank the Kool-Aid, Soul City, and The Portable Promised Land. He was a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, was CNN’s first pop-culture correspondent, and was the host of MTV2's Spoke N Heard.
In a rare interview, Touré talks with Black Thought—front man for The Roots and the new house MC of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon—about what Chuck D. taught him about race, why rapping is like jumping rope, and the reasons behind his rhymes.
Black Thought is not just one of the best-named MCs in hip-hop history, he’s one of the best. As the front man of The Roots—Jimmy Fallon’s new house band for his late-night talk show—Black Thought is both a rapper’s rapper and an intellectual’s rapper, who doesn’t brag about the ghetto and never has to say how tough he is. He has a deliciously deep and steely voice, a tremendous rhythmic sensibility, and a pen that delivers furious flurries of rhymes about everything—politics, women, language, whatever. He’s got a personal style that’s as serious as a heart attack—he evinces that there’s-no-smiling-in-hip-hop thing, as if he’s not here to be loved by you, but instead here to slay you with his skill, take your respect, and leave.
Over the years, Black Thought, born Tariq Trotter, has done very few interviews—preferring, he says, to let his rhyming speak for him. But as The Roots will appear every night on Jimmy Fallon, he’s growing a little more amenable. I pulled him aside during a band rehearsal in a rehearsal space in Manhattan one day, found a tiny room, and talked to him about some of the science behind being an MC.
T: Who are the MCs you most closely studied and learned something from?
BT: Kool G Rap. Big Daddy Kane. Rakim. KRS-One.
T: What have you learned from them?
From G Rap, I learned not to be pigeon held as regards to my vocabulary. The young Kool G Rap, when he was the cool genius of rap, it was really about the genius part and the fact that his lexicon was crazy.
It doesn’t matter than he might be using words that we, the audience, don’t know.
Shit, I use words that I don’t know but, you know, they just sound dope. G Rap was not just using hip-hop slang and words that everyone knew and not just using big words just for the sake of using them—he would use them in their proper context. G Rap, if he was an instrument, he’d be like a drum, whereas Rakim was like brass, he was more melodic. I’d compare Rakim to a saxophone. But from Rakim I got the melodic influence and just repetition in my patterns. I got more of the subtleties, I saw someone perfectly marrying consciousness with musicality with street credibility and still gangster. And his tone was crazy. He had a very distinct delivery. Sometimes nasal meets guttural.
“I’ve become a functioning cog in the machine called The Roots, but in my youth I was comin’ from a more braggadocious, egotistical perspective.”
T: Who else did you study?
BT: Chuck D. From Chuck I got the black nationalism, the militancy. Chuck was a more avant-garde MC to me. And LL was a major influence. What I got from him was swagger. He was relatively young when he came in the game and he garnered the respect and admiration of these older MCs. He’s another guy from Queens who was saying, "I’m gonna use every word in the English lexicon and slap you in the face with it real hard." There’s something about MCs that came from that part of New York in the ‘80s.
T: Where do you rhyme from? Your nose, throat, chest, where?
BT: Diaphragm. I try to. Sometimes you forget. If you have to sing you may just slip back into rhyming from my mouth or my throat or rhyming where we naturally speak. You can always hear me breathing during my verses, but that breathing becomes part of the music. If you’re rappin’ in perfect rhythm with the track then you’re gonna be breathin’ in perfect rhythm, too. And that’s part of the percussion.
But sometimes those breaths miss the mark.
I mean, if I swallow incorrectly or if I breathe and some dust goes down the wrong pipe, words will be missed or a line might be left out. The audience may be none the wiser, but more importantly it’s a bump in the stride of us onstage. And there’s gonna be a bloop, a sonic taxing for it, and everyone’s gonna be brought out of their zone for just a split second to acknowledge the fact that this one person just fucked up or left out this line. So you want everything to be as effortless as possible. It happens all the time but that’s one of the things you micromanage.
Every rapper, when they first hear a beat and start relating to it they go uh, uh, yeah, uh, uh—what’s the about?
It’s like a map. You have to be synced.
T: So you’re getting into the rhythm?
BT: Yeah. When you hear a beat it usually takes a measure or one or two lines of the music before you become accustomed to the rhythm. It’s like jumping into a jump rope. You just start turning and then I jump in.
T: The double-dutch analogy is interesting, because you’re very much a part of The Roots in that you’re an instrument in this mix. Most rappers do it as an ego gesture—I’m the man, check me out. All eyes on me. That’s not where you’re coming from. It’s more of a musical gesture.
BT: I’ve become an instrument in this. I’ve become a functioning cog in the machine called The Roots, but in my youth I was comin’ from a more braggadocious, egotistical perspective. I started changing as an artist the day that Ahmir and I met. I feel like I became more musical and he became more street. That’s what we brought to one another. I was definitely knowledgeable in the world of hip-hop and Ahmir was knowledgeable about jazz and soul and all other music and we turned each other on.
T: You guys met in high school at the Philadelphia High School for Creative and Performing Arts. Did you take music classes together?
BT: I’ve never studied music. Music for me was a hobby, something to do other than the art I’ve always done. I’ve been in art school from the age of three. I was a visual-arts major so what I learned at the school was just about colors and warm colors and cool colors and the effect that different colors have on people when you see a certain colors or two colors together. Which is where I got my name from: black being all the colors of the palette. The thing that’s carried over from my visual-art education into what I do musically is my openness. I can deal with sonic colors, the sound palette, from the experience I have dealing with the actual palette.
T: Has another rapper ever told you something that made a difference, or made you better?
BT: Well, in KRS-One’s book The Science of Rap, he said come out with your jacket on. Begin your performance and your rapport with your audience by warmin’ yourself up, and that means start rappin’ with your coat on and at some point during the first three songs you take it off. This gives the impression that you’re getting even more personal, getting down to business. And that way you get an extra rush, an extra roar from the crowd and your performance elevates from that point.
T: How do you write a rhyme?
BT: Rhymes will come to me line by line. Maybe I heard these two people over here having a conversation and they reminded me of a phrase that was coined years ago that people don’t use anymore that I wanna bring back. When I’ve accumulated half a book of these I’ll sit down and flip through and start writing a rhyme. I don’t usually write a rhyme before it’s due. I usually write a song when people are waiting for me to turn it in. I don’t just have a pre-manufactured thing. I don’t have songs I haven’t used yet. When I write a song, it’s tailor-written to whatever sonic bed was pre-existing.
T: How did you improve when you were developing?
BT: I would always be rappin’. Always be rappin’. I’d just sit in this room and rap about everything in it. And you’d be sick. You’d be mad. Just stop rapping!
T: So young rappers trying should practice all the time.
BT: The same way Norah Jones and Alicia Keys had to practice at the piano and Wyclef with his guitar, and ?uestlove—I’d call him after school and be like "Lemme speak to Ahmir," and his Dad would be like, he’s practicing, and hang up. That’s what makes a great musician, and if you’re gonna be a vocalist, if your voice is gonna be your axe, then you need to refine your knowledge. You also gotta be abreast of what’s goin’ on in current affairs, news, the latest reality-TV shit, what’s goin’ on in the Internet—you boil all of that down into one line that was witty because you compared this thing with that thing. You have to be knowledgeable of all the pre-existing information in order to edit it into something that’s fly to say.
**Touré is the host of BET’s The Black Carpet and the host of Treasure HD’s I’ll Try Anything Once. He is the author of Never Drank the Kool-Aid, Soul City, and The Portable Promised Land. He was a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, was CNN’s first pop-culture correspondent, and was the host of MTV2's Spoke N Heard.
Cam'Ron - Crime Pays (clean version)...I'll have the Dirty in a few..
http://depositfiles.com/en/files/vvrar5wdu
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Complex magazine hollaz at Ye about the 'Air Yeezy's' (full article)
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE BIGGEST NAME IN POP CULTURE MEETS THE BIGGEST NAME IN SNEAKERS? SECRECY, RUMORS AND AN INEVETABLE DROP-DAY MASSACRE. IT’S FINALLY TIME TO MEET THE AIR YEEZY
Kanye West: MC, Producer, Hypebeast: I’ve always stressed my passion for design—and not just, “Oh, let me throw my name on this,” but to use my celebrity as an opportunity to jump into the design world—and in this case, to design my own shoe.
Mark Smith: Creative Dir. of Special Projects, Nike: I don’t really put my life in dates in a normal way. [Laughs.] So I couldn’t even say when everything went down, but one day I got a call asking me if I would work with Kanye on the project.
Kanye West: It was after the Air Force 1 “1 Night Only” event [in December 2006]. I sat there and drew countless forms of shoes, and a lot of them were inspired by Back to the Future, by the McFlys or whatever people call them—I just call them the Mags. All kinds of different ideas that stemmed from that and Robotech and all my other anime influences.
Mark Smith: What we wanted to do was really create something that was specific and unique to the two of us working together, so it wasn’t an entourage full of people on either side.
Kanye West: Nike is the No. 1 sneaker lifestyle brand, right? And I’m the No. 1 most influential cutural pop art brand: scarves, beards, plastic glasses, whatever. So you take those two things and you mesh that—it’s very exciting. I’m the Nike of culture.
Mark Smith: He showed me what he was into. I asked him about sneakers that he liked, what he was wearing and why he was wearing them; he’s very up to the minute on what he likes.
Kanye West: I grabbed all these Jordans from their archives, and I’m sitting in the office next to Tinker [Hatfield, Jordan designer] and Mark, just pulling out shit and putting it in front of him like, “I like this element.” We just vibed it out.
Mark Smith: He started just dumping stuff out, and I did the same thing. We did it in the Innovation Kitchen—Nike’s underground innovation center where tomorrow’s technologies are kind of getting bubbled up, so he actually was seeing a bunch of stuff that nobody else would see.
Kanye West: The types of shit Nike can do? I say, “Hey, use this sole,” and they have it? The possibilities are just endless.
Mark Smith: I always try to look at things through an athlete’s eyes—if you look at a basketball player, his or her performance is on-court in the middle of a game. The equivalent for Kanye would be to get onstage and rock it for a couple of hours. And he goes through a pretty athletic show, so we wanted to make sure these were super-comfortable performance shoes.
Kanye West: Every guy drew Nikes in fourth grade, so to really do it is a dream come true.
Kanye West: I’m aesthetics-first on anything. Even when I make music, I think about the aesthetics: Where will you be when you’re listening to this? Visuals first. I wanted to take the concept of the future pop colors and all this ’80s influence and make it wearable.
Mark Smith: I remember him saying originally that he wanted to create something that looked and felt like it had come from the past. I thought, That’s actually really cool, because back then it was very, very simple. There weren’t a lot of extras on the older stuff. So that kind of pushed that edge a little bit; instead of adding a whole bunch of today’s stuff onto it and super-technology or anything like that, it was more about keeping things simple. And if you look at it at a glance, it might look like it was a little retro.
Kanye West: We developed our own soles for the shoe also, which is the hardest thing and takes the longest—so long that there was a point in the design [process] where I just had to pick a sole that they already had. That was one of the days my heart got broken. [Laughs.]
Mark Smith: We never looked at one shoe and said, “You gotta take the toe from this and the heel from that and the bottom from this and slam it all together.” Kanye West: The original shoes were battery-operated, and they lit up. I have a version of the first shoe that has a push-button on the side, and it lights up and stays lit.
Mark Smith: We had a very futuristic-looking product for a long time. Then Kanye said, “Can we use something that’s recognizable?” So I think the elephant tooling, which was directly pulled from the Jordan 3, really rooted the shoe in that time period.
Kanye West: A lot of that patent stuff Mark came up with, like the strap—that’s when I was happy to be able to work with an O.G. designer like that.
Mark Smith: You have to make sure the lines, the materials, the direction are all intact—and then once you get those broad strokes in, then you really start applying the storytelling, the textures and the unique aspects that make it something for Kanye specifically.
Mark Smith: If we did our job right, we could take this shoe and put it in the line or a catalog from back in the day, and it would just feel like it was part of the lineup. But when you bring that shoe forward into today, it should also feel a little timeless; it’s yesterday and today slammed together
Kanye West: Conceptually, it was made for a person that was walking on another planet. So it’s like almost a shoe-like space boot.
Mark Smith: There was never a design brief or a color brief; it was very fluid. He had some really great ideas coming into it with neutral browns and tans and keeping it a very monotone color and then letting the interior have a little bit more pop to it.
Kanye West: I wanted to give the Yeezys their own colorway. You wouldn’t have a whole fuchsia wall in your house, but you might have a little Jeff Koons piece of art that’s fuchsia and small. So I do it small, on the inside of the tongue.
Mark Smith: Throughout the process we probably did a couple hundred color studies, and I think we only showed him a couple; it was more like he was giving us his insights into color and then we’d play with it. Like, “What if this black was a suede,” or “What if this black was patent leather?”
Kanye West: I got like 12 different colors at my house, just colorway samples we were trying. I’ve worn them at certain events—the all-black ones I wore at the Grammys.
Mark Smith: I think we really started hitting our stride when we had real samples to look at.
Kanye West: It expresses my sensibility of design: what I want to do with clothing, with hotels eventually. The type of colors that I live in.
Mark Smith: We agreed that any time we wanted to add something to the product, we had to take something else away so that it wasn’t just adding, adding, adding—it was just one of those things where it can get down to as little as possible but make it as functional and comfortable and cool as possible.
Kanye West: We had a lot of conversations like, “We wanna just put it on eBay,” and I’m like, “No! People need to be able to get this shoe!” At first they were only gonna do 3,000 pairs. Now they’re doing 9,000, which is still limited. It’s not like it’s 200,000.
Mark Smith: We’re real happy with the result.
Kanye West: Oh my god, they’re gonna be out of there! Toot! [Laughs.] They’re not even gonna hit the ground. The boxes from the truck will literally not hit the ground.
Raekwon x DJ Absolut - Blood on Chef's Apron
http://rs476gc2.rapidshare.com/files/229958656/Raekwon-Blood_on_Chefs_Apron-_Hosted_by_DJ_Absolute_-2009-CLX.rar
ILL Heels...
From The Designer:
“I’m interested in designing objects that ignore or challenge conventions in order to make the product-design world less generic,” says the London-based designer. “l rethink what an object can look like or how it can function. There can be more to clothes.”
Lost scenes from Kanye West's College Dropout video - Spaceship
'FakeShoreDrive.com'...Thanx Andrew!
Once upon a time, all the way back in 2004, there was a video created for one of the most memorable songs from Kanye West's The College Dropout, one that featured two of Kanye's GOOD Music starters, GLC & Consequence. The ode to finding a better way (no Lil Troy), the soulful and introspective "Spaceship".
The video was a big budget affair (you know how Kanye does videos, especially back in 2004 when the climate of the biz was much different) and an all out masterpiece (at least in my opinion), but for reasons only known to Kanye (apparently he didn't like the finished product), "Spaceship" never saw the light of day.
Well, never say never. Now thanks to Kanye's closet crony, GLC (and GLCityMusic ), we can finally get a sneak peak into the "lost" video for "Spaceship".
I know this is five years (yikes!) after the fact, but I really hope Kanye one day decides to release this video. It would have been the ultimate introduction for both GLC and the Cons, but they're here now, so it really doesn't matter.
Hit the jump for more shots from the indefinitely shelved, "Spaceship"
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
De La Soul x Nike - Are You In? mixtape
01. Mornin’ Rise ft. Raheem DeVaughn
02. Good Morning
03. Big Mouf
04. Attack of the Stet
05. Pick Up the Pace (Run)
06. Poetic Greed ft. Gina Loring
07. Greedy Man ft. Billy Ray
08. Victory Laps
09. We O.D.
10. Forever
http://rapidshare.com/files/229379629/De_La_Soul_-_Are_You_In_Nike___Original_Run__2009_-turbocity.rar
Monday, May 4, 2009
The Invisible Car
Sara Watson, an English art student, turned a car "invisible" with a lovely trompe l'oeil paintjob:
Sara Watson, who is studying drawing at the University of Central Lancashire (Uclan), took three weeks to transform the car's appearance.
She created the illusion in the car park outside her studio at Uclan's Hanover Building in Preston.
The car is now being used for advertising by the local recycling firm that donated the vehicle.
Sunday, May 3, 2009
Saturday, May 2, 2009
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1st look @ the Generation 3 Iphone/Ipod Touch...2010!
This bad boy comes standard with 500gig or 1TB of memory. It's made of Titanium and scratch/smear resistant touch screen display. It runs on OS-mmX/Mac-OS backwards capability, Bluetooth V4. WiFi Upload for iTunes through your designated IP Address on your harddrive(no matter where you are), WiFi Earbuds, Hi-Def screen resolution of 1280x720, works vertically or horizontally. USB4 connectors with auto-locking mechanism. Options: 4GSM iPhone, Two-way iSight, GPS for navigation, weather, emergency beacon, Embeded Game System, Voice Playback.
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