During my interview with production duo Sid Roams on Friday, Bravo dropped this little gem about how Prodigy has been using his time while he’s been incarcerated:
“Right now – behind bars, in prison – what he’s focusing on is crafting verses that are just gonna blow people’s mind. He’s really going in now. Because in retrospect, he feels like he didn’t give enough [on the last three albums]…he’s ready to attack. We have a song that we did with P over the phone and we’re just finishing it up right now. It’s an epic song, and it’s a conversation between him and Twin on phone time. The name of the song is called ‘Phone Tap’, and essentially it’s seven minutes of P just kinda recapping everything that’s happened behind bars and on the outside. It’s a pretty incredible song just unto itself, and you’ll hear some of what P is doing as far as writing. You should hear it within the next month. We’ve sent him beats while he’s been in there, and honestly, he wrote a song to every beat – and we sent him twenty-something beats – and we’re not the only ones. Al sent him joints and everybody’s been sending him stuff, so he’s definitely getting it done.”
More on Sid Roams next week. In the meantime, cop that Big Twins album and check back here to hear ‘Phone Tap’ when it drops…
You know how sometimes a loop gets switched up and then new version ends-up far inferior? This was one of those times…
Why did Puba and company decided to replace the perfectly understated and somber tone of the first version with the bouncy, upbeat Grover Washington loop which most of us associate with K-Solo‘s ‘Fugative’?
As requested by nation….Shyne‘s not out yet but it’s only right that we recall how correctly he was putting it down before he took a fall for King Cobra his old boss. (more…)
So I was listening to some AM radio in the car for some reason (i.e. my ipod battery ran out) and caught the last part of a conversation with Adam Bradley, an Associate Professor of Literature at the University of Colorado who wrote a book called Book of Rhymes about the connection between rap and poetry. Hardly the most exciting premise, but after enduring the usual bullshit about the difference between rap and hip-hop he was actually posed a decent question by the interviewer, which resulted in this jewel being dropped:
Who is the contemporary Shakespeare of the rap world?
Adam Bradley: It’s a heavy mantle for anyone to bare, but I think the one who could probably do it the best would be Jay-Z – and I say that both for the longevity of his career but also the range of his subject matter. As he’s evolved as an individual his music has evolved to reflect that. So while he was rhyming on his first album about street life, about dealing drugs, about all kinds of nefarious activities, on his latest album he’s rhyming about being married to Beyonce, he’s rhyming about life as a mogul, as an entrepreneur. As a visionary in business as well as music. So that kind of breadth, that kind of development, I think is a sign of an artist who is willing to grow. Willing to grow even past his own popularity, past the time when people expect a particular thing of him – and yet he finds new ways of appealing to a new public, and that’s precisely what Shakespeare did if you look across his body of work. He never stayed the same. Whether it’s tragedies or histories or comedies, he’s always shifting and expanding.
Sure, I may not be the president of the Hova Stan Club but I have to admit that the Prof. has a pretty strong case. Don’t forget, William Shakespeare wasn’t highbrow in his day – he was penning the stage equivalents of Summer blockbusters, knocking out those hits. But it wasn’t until years after his death that he was declared to be “the greatest writer in the English language…Shakespeare was never revered in his lifetime, but he received his share of praise”. S. Carter may never make a song as great as ‘Halftime’, but – like it or not – history may just prove him to be the G.O.A.T. after all.
Today hip-hop has lost one it’s true pioneers – Sir Juice, aka Mr. Magic, passed away after suffering a heart attack. Not only was Magic the first rap DJ to have an exclusive rap show on commercial radio on WBLS (The Rap Attack with DJ Marley Marl and Fly Ty) but his often brutal honesty (aka breaking their vinyl live on air!) would inspire BDP to record ‘South Bronx’ and ‘The Bridge Is Over’ – thus sparking the legendary ‘Bridge Wars’ – while he was equally vocal about his disapproval of an early Public Enemy track, with his “No more music by the suckers!” declaration being sampled for the Fear of A Black PlanetIt Takes A Nation of Millions… album. Not to mention that the ‘Roxanne’ answer record craze was sparked-off by UTFO turning down an appearance on Magic’s show, only to appear on KISS-FM. With a career as a radio personality spanning twenty years, he later hosted a show on Hot 97 with Mister Cee from 1992 to 2002. (more…)
Predictably, my comment the other day that LL ‘never lost a battle’ ruffled a few feathers among Canibus fans. LL vs. Kool Moe Dee was already covered a while back, but I guess there’s no other way to settle this than to dig out all the garbage songs recorded in this drawn-out and unsatisfying war of words. (more…)
