Your author is not particularly versed in the minutiae of the American legal system, but if C-Murder, a rapper currently languishing in prison possibly wrongly convicted of 2nd degree murder after his violent lyrics were used as evidence against him, really wishes to push his appeal for a fair retrial, then perhaps recording insanely ig'nant verses in the prison studio with numerous references to guns and murder for A-Wax posse tracks might not be the smartest way to go about it?
A-Wax & Gonzoe ft. C-Murder - Natural Disasters
Similarly, it's touching that A-Wax wants to highlight the FREE C-MURDER campaign headed by Murder's brother Master P, but you imagine there might be slightly more sensible ways to go about it than recording a song which makes Trap Goin' Ham seem like Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now) in comparison.
Still, this video gets the thumbs up for featuring the first use of an umbrella seen in a rap video since that Dipset b-teamer video (was it Un Kasa or 40 Cal?) which included a scene where Jimmy held an umbrella aloft over Juelz as he got his Billy Joel on with a piano handily placed in the middle of a rain lashed Harlem street.
The Nore vs. Perez Hilton Twitter spat was an unexpected and often hilarious encounter, but here at The Martorialist we're eagerly awaiting a reprise of the A-Wax vs. Jacka Twitter beef. Never before has two men, their various hangers-on, a glut of fanboys from either side and various bemused trolls insulting each other on the internet been so entertaining.
Wednesday, 30 September 2009
Monday, 28 September 2009
Pressing matters...
You chaps really need to ease back with your wayward love for pre-Bad Boy Murda Ma$e, because the highlights of his Harlem World album stand as Mason's artistic pinnacle. His C.O.C era tracks were bogstandard chugging boom-bap (the only really great C.O.C tracks are I Remember When and A Star Is Born, where a young Cameron Giles shone) which aren't even playing the same sport as the grandiose posse cut 24 Hours To Live or the effervescent Feel So Good.
So, this looks like a standard UK press of Feel So Good, right? The crap thin paper photo sleeve and 45 RPM speed are in full effect but pop it on and it's actually a 33 RPM copy of Biggie's Hypnotize. What..the...fuck?
The Jam had an infamous pressing accident where 7" copies of Start actually contained Can't Stop The Music by The Village People and Chicago House label Trax Records were notorious for pressing faux-pas as their early releases by Vince Lawrence, Larry Heard etc were often mispressed with various other songs from the label's catalogue and pressed directly on top of old disco 12"s, but I'm unfamiliar with any instances of spectacular pressing fuck ups in rap, bar the ones in the early 90s when labels would purposefully press up bad quality wax which skipped in a rather shiesty bid to encourange vinyl-philes to convert to CD or tape instead (we won't even touch on wax which was pressed so quietly as to be inaudible to the human ear which is a whole other post in its own right), so I asked the homie and wax expert Greenpeace if he knew of any noted mispressings :
Not really sure of too many famous mispresses. There was a mispress of a nice n smooth return of the hip-hop freaks 12" which actually had a warren g track on there instead, or vice versa. My personal favourite mispress is on Tuff City by Priority one. The 12" was I can't go for that b/w showin my stuff. However on the b side instead of the 'showin my stuff' instrumental there was a dub version of a totally different priority one track which is really dope. Finding the original vocal version is my holy grail but unfortunately not even Tuff City could figure it out, they admit it was a mispress but don't know where the original master is.
If anything typifies just what a haphazard, badly organised genre rap is, it would be Tuff City Records themselves not knowing what or where the original song Dan mentions is. Beat that, other genres!
We end today back on the subject of one Mason Betha. Best use of the Hollywood Swingin' break by a rapper with a $ sign replacing the letter S in his rap moniker :
Too $hort - Money In The Ghetto
Ma$e - Feel So Good
So, this looks like a standard UK press of Feel So Good, right? The crap thin paper photo sleeve and 45 RPM speed are in full effect but pop it on and it's actually a 33 RPM copy of Biggie's Hypnotize. What..the...fuck?
The Jam had an infamous pressing accident where 7" copies of Start actually contained Can't Stop The Music by The Village People and Chicago House label Trax Records were notorious for pressing faux-pas as their early releases by Vince Lawrence, Larry Heard etc were often mispressed with various other songs from the label's catalogue and pressed directly on top of old disco 12"s, but I'm unfamiliar with any instances of spectacular pressing fuck ups in rap, bar the ones in the early 90s when labels would purposefully press up bad quality wax which skipped in a rather shiesty bid to encourange vinyl-philes to convert to CD or tape instead (we won't even touch on wax which was pressed so quietly as to be inaudible to the human ear which is a whole other post in its own right), so I asked the homie and wax expert Greenpeace if he knew of any noted mispressings :
Not really sure of too many famous mispresses. There was a mispress of a nice n smooth return of the hip-hop freaks 12" which actually had a warren g track on there instead, or vice versa. My personal favourite mispress is on Tuff City by Priority one. The 12" was I can't go for that b/w showin my stuff. However on the b side instead of the 'showin my stuff' instrumental there was a dub version of a totally different priority one track which is really dope. Finding the original vocal version is my holy grail but unfortunately not even Tuff City could figure it out, they admit it was a mispress but don't know where the original master is.
If anything typifies just what a haphazard, badly organised genre rap is, it would be Tuff City Records themselves not knowing what or where the original song Dan mentions is. Beat that, other genres!
We end today back on the subject of one Mason Betha. Best use of the Hollywood Swingin' break by a rapper with a $ sign replacing the letter S in his rap moniker :
Too $hort - Money In The Ghetto
Ma$e - Feel So Good
Thursday, 24 September 2009
Greatest movie scenes ever # 18
Being stuck on crowded, sweltering public transport with a strawberry from your fruit salad caught in your throat and no water to wash it down, next to the mongiest village idiot smackhead who insists on slurring into your face about "that queer porn on the internet" and trying to shake your hand every other minute is an experience so unpleasant even Ned Flanders would emerge wishing for redemption in the form of ending up like Zac Hobson from 1986 New Zealand sci-fi flick The Quiet Earth, who awakens one morning to find that the entire population of the planet has vanished.
You'd be bored to tears of pure salt after a couple of months, but having the freedom of an otherwise people-less planet for, say, one month would be an immensely pleasurable experience : money would be rendered null and void so those 4 weeks would be one long orgy of free shopping and travelling, with a side order of snooping on all sorts of top secret antics you aren't usually privvy to.
Still, it seems that The Quiet Earth sparks rose-tinted fantasy of a fantasy thoughts not worth igniting if the Life After People series on the History Channel Brooker recommended in his saturday Screen Burn is anything to go by. The concept of everyone else vanishing for a bit is all fine 'n' dandy, but some of those everyone elses are responsible for keeping electricity working (crucial for British winter time where darkness is interspersed with a grey clouds and rain between 8:30 AM and 3:45 PM), and who'd have thunk the combined corosive properties of bird shit and rain could be more of a problematic potent combination than the loneliness and bewilderment which drove Zac to run into a church wearing women's lingerie with a shotgun and start blasting the Jesus figurine as he begs for a sign from God in The Quiet Earth :
EvilTube2007 (2 months ago)
Okay, so we have a New Zealander walking around in a dress with a shotgun, desacrating a church. What's so odd about that?
Bonus movie thoughts for the evening :
* Have you seen the state of Carrie Fisher in Sorority Row? She's comfortably resided in my top ten sexiest movie chicks ever list since the bikini scenes in Return Of The Jedi, but she's now less Princess Leia and more Gamorrean Guard. Pour out a little liquor for a former fantasy hottie of every 70s baby now forever extinguished.
* More damning evidence for my case which suggests the entire current British film industry (bar Gemma Arteton, Michael Sheen, Timothy Spall and Tom whatshisface who played Bronson) should be sent out into the most densely shark populated area of the Atlantic ocean on Roman Abramovich's new luxury yacht and then torpedoed : Danny Dyer's next shit mockney gangster caper stars none other than that noted thespian Curtis "Fiddy" Jackson :
You'd be bored to tears of pure salt after a couple of months, but having the freedom of an otherwise people-less planet for, say, one month would be an immensely pleasurable experience : money would be rendered null and void so those 4 weeks would be one long orgy of free shopping and travelling, with a side order of snooping on all sorts of top secret antics you aren't usually privvy to.
Still, it seems that The Quiet Earth sparks rose-tinted fantasy of a fantasy thoughts not worth igniting if the Life After People series on the History Channel Brooker recommended in his saturday Screen Burn is anything to go by. The concept of everyone else vanishing for a bit is all fine 'n' dandy, but some of those everyone elses are responsible for keeping electricity working (crucial for British winter time where darkness is interspersed with a grey clouds and rain between 8:30 AM and 3:45 PM), and who'd have thunk the combined corosive properties of bird shit and rain could be more of a problematic potent combination than the loneliness and bewilderment which drove Zac to run into a church wearing women's lingerie with a shotgun and start blasting the Jesus figurine as he begs for a sign from God in The Quiet Earth :
EvilTube2007 (2 months ago)
Okay, so we have a New Zealander walking around in a dress with a shotgun, desacrating a church. What's so odd about that?
Bonus movie thoughts for the evening :
* Have you seen the state of Carrie Fisher in Sorority Row? She's comfortably resided in my top ten sexiest movie chicks ever list since the bikini scenes in Return Of The Jedi, but she's now less Princess Leia and more Gamorrean Guard. Pour out a little liquor for a former fantasy hottie of every 70s baby now forever extinguished.
* More damning evidence for my case which suggests the entire current British film industry (bar Gemma Arteton, Michael Sheen, Timothy Spall and Tom whatshisface who played Bronson) should be sent out into the most densely shark populated area of the Atlantic ocean on Roman Abramovich's new luxury yacht and then torpedoed : Danny Dyer's next shit mockney gangster caper stars none other than that noted thespian Curtis "Fiddy" Jackson :
Tuesday, 22 September 2009
Martorial elegance # 32
1. There are currently no pictures of Melvin Nerdly from Saved By The Bell to be found on Google image search.
2. The Uniqlo X Gilded Age blue zip-up is probably the most ill-fitting item of clothing I've ever tried on, and I'm someone who once bought an INFEST t-shirt from Richard of AWA Records which turned out to be a navel reaching belly shirt with a drawstring hem when it arrived through the post.
3. Chucks are baby-momma kicks status for everyone, bar esses and Cali' gang$ta-rappers. Great on Cube, Eazy, Snoop, Mac Dre, Turf Talk et al, not so great on everyone else. One thing i always wondered about Cali gangbangers is if Bloods can wear blue jeans? If not, it must really suck to have a wardrobe restristed to khakis and black jeans, huh?
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4. When Barratt sent me this pic, Sean P talkin' shit at the end of the first verse on Da Art Of Disrespekinazation by Heltah Skeltah immediately came to mind :
"Get the fuck outta here, man
Lookin' like Leroy from Fame and shit.."
5. If black teenagers are going to base their looks on characters from 80s movies, then Debbi from Repo Man would be an excellent aesthetic blueprint for the gurlz :
Saturday, 19 September 2009
She returns
Damn, son, baby is not only back but judging from last night's episode she got serious back too.
LFO - We Are Back
Thursday, 17 September 2009
The Above The Law 12" cover battle
The UK pressing :
Pros : possibly the better picture of the two with Go Mack's jheri-curl mullet in all its glory, a rare example of a UK pressing minus a crap CJ Mackintosh hip-house remix.
Cons : trademark UK pressing ultra thin paper sleeve.
The original US pressing :
Pros : full length outfit photo, the use of a cane.
Cons : the cumbersome Special 12" remixes by Dr Dre text.
Above The Law - Untouchable
"It's not what chu know, it's what cha can prove"
The original of Untouchable with the Light My Fire by Young Holt Unlimited sample was already perfect as it was, so I never had much love for the What Cha Can Prove remix itself, but as an instrumental the darn remix is some ol' Allied forces marching into Rome after forcing the Germans to retreat as the jubilant cheers from the people of Rome rang out in the air type shit :
Above The Law - What Cha Can Prove remix instrumental
Much in the same way that I proposed the Snoop freestyle from the start of the Afro Puffs should've been tweaked into a full length Death Row posse track a la Puffin' On Blunts And Drinkin' On Tanqueray with added freestyles from Tha Dogg Pound & Lady Of Rage, the What Cha Can Prove remix instrumental really should've been the bed for a DJ showcase track a la Behold The Detonator by Tuff Crew or Eric B Made My Day by Eric B. & Rakim (insert your own favorite golden-era DJ track here ~~~> _______ ) to let Above The Law's wax manipulator DJ Total K-Oss get loose and cut the livin' shit outta some records on it.
Them A&Rs over at Ruthless and Death Row were clearly bereft of my artistic vision.
Pros : possibly the better picture of the two with Go Mack's jheri-curl mullet in all its glory, a rare example of a UK pressing minus a crap CJ Mackintosh hip-house remix.
Cons : trademark UK pressing ultra thin paper sleeve.
The original US pressing :
Pros : full length outfit photo, the use of a cane.
Cons : the cumbersome Special 12" remixes by Dr Dre text.
Above The Law - Untouchable
"It's not what chu know, it's what cha can prove"
The original of Untouchable with the Light My Fire by Young Holt Unlimited sample was already perfect as it was, so I never had much love for the What Cha Can Prove remix itself, but as an instrumental the darn remix is some ol' Allied forces marching into Rome after forcing the Germans to retreat as the jubilant cheers from the people of Rome rang out in the air type shit :
Above The Law - What Cha Can Prove remix instrumental
Much in the same way that I proposed the Snoop freestyle from the start of the Afro Puffs should've been tweaked into a full length Death Row posse track a la Puffin' On Blunts And Drinkin' On Tanqueray with added freestyles from Tha Dogg Pound & Lady Of Rage, the What Cha Can Prove remix instrumental really should've been the bed for a DJ showcase track a la Behold The Detonator by Tuff Crew or Eric B Made My Day by Eric B. & Rakim (insert your own favorite golden-era DJ track here ~~~> _______ ) to let Above The Law's wax manipulator DJ Total K-Oss get loose and cut the livin' shit outta some records on it.
Them A&Rs over at Ruthless and Death Row were clearly bereft of my artistic vision.
Tuesday, 15 September 2009
Greatest movie scenes ever # 17
The Mostly Tha Voice edition.
If The Guardian can get away with exhorting that Michael Holding's dulcet Jamaican tones saying the words Ricky Ponting is one of the most joyous sounds on earth without accusations of patronising mild xenophbia being levelled at them, then I venture to suggest we can all quietly agree that Wikus from District 9 sounding like Mark Viduka is what bumps the movie into the domain of possible future classic. Every regular fuck became a more humourous fook and throwaway phrases such as "It's the sweetie man" and "I think I've crapped me pants" were elevated into guffaw inducing comedic knock-out blows. Even Woody back in the Annie Hall and Manhattan days couldn't have delivered 'em like that.
How very apt Peter Jackson was the producer behind District 9, since the distinctly amusing accents, offbeat location and protooding limbed aliens reminded me of Jackson's debut flick Bad Taste, which has long been a favourite here at The Martorialist. I would prefer to watch kittens being kicked before I'd watch any of the Lord Of The Rings franchise, and King Kong belongs in the same septic tank as Holy Smoke, Miami Vice and Transformers 2, but Jackson was THE man back when he was knocking out quirky Antipodean grossouts like Bad Taste, Brain Dead and Meet The Feebles.
In fact, Jackson was so good in those days that he could direct a particularly gruesome cliffside set-piece where he played both the victim, paramilitary team-member Derek, and the killer, homosapien munching 3rd-class alien flunky Robert :
Lose the goblins and role playing geeks, Jackson, and make another sordid horror-comedy with a 25 grand budget in New Zealand. Kthxbye.
Bonus beats :
Looka here, boy. Curren$y dropped a new video for my 2nd favourite song from This Ain't No Mixtape. So glad my compadre Sha Deezy became enamored with Curren$y this year, as we can now listen to something other than 95% Lloyd Banks tunes in the car.
Curren$y - Elevator Music
If The Guardian can get away with exhorting that Michael Holding's dulcet Jamaican tones saying the words Ricky Ponting is one of the most joyous sounds on earth without accusations of patronising mild xenophbia being levelled at them, then I venture to suggest we can all quietly agree that Wikus from District 9 sounding like Mark Viduka is what bumps the movie into the domain of possible future classic. Every regular fuck became a more humourous fook and throwaway phrases such as "It's the sweetie man" and "I think I've crapped me pants" were elevated into guffaw inducing comedic knock-out blows. Even Woody back in the Annie Hall and Manhattan days couldn't have delivered 'em like that.
How very apt Peter Jackson was the producer behind District 9, since the distinctly amusing accents, offbeat location and protooding limbed aliens reminded me of Jackson's debut flick Bad Taste, which has long been a favourite here at The Martorialist. I would prefer to watch kittens being kicked before I'd watch any of the Lord Of The Rings franchise, and King Kong belongs in the same septic tank as Holy Smoke, Miami Vice and Transformers 2, but Jackson was THE man back when he was knocking out quirky Antipodean grossouts like Bad Taste, Brain Dead and Meet The Feebles.
In fact, Jackson was so good in those days that he could direct a particularly gruesome cliffside set-piece where he played both the victim, paramilitary team-member Derek, and the killer, homosapien munching 3rd-class alien flunky Robert :
Lose the goblins and role playing geeks, Jackson, and make another sordid horror-comedy with a 25 grand budget in New Zealand. Kthxbye.
Bonus beats :
Looka here, boy. Curren$y dropped a new video for my 2nd favourite song from This Ain't No Mixtape. So glad my compadre Sha Deezy became enamored with Curren$y this year, as we can now listen to something other than 95% Lloyd Banks tunes in the car.
Curren$y - Elevator Music
Sunday, 13 September 2009
Martorial elegance # 31
Where are the middle aged blokes dressed like Alain Delon as Jef Costello in Le Samourai or the eccentric 30-something chicks going for that whole Cruella de Vil look? Nowhere we've been with a camera in the last week or two, so, all we can do is bide our time with another gander at denim shorts :
This guy pro'lly thinks he has steeze(sic), but, as always, denim shorts will never be able to escape the wrestler ghetto into semi-respectable territory. Just because one wears tailored jean short-shorts, as opposed to some 3/4 length DFS sofa sized ones, it doesn't make one any less immune to the wrestler effect; it just means that, rather than Raven or John Cena, one has achieved the Stevie Richards or Stone Cold Steve Austin look instead :
Our Martorial elegance subject's shirt? Refer to this post for our thoughts on the pressing matter of sleeveless denim, but we'll add Tom Cruise as Steve in The Outsiders to our brief list of acceptable sleeveless denim shirt/jacket sporters.
Lil' Boosie ft. Lil' Phat & Webbie - LEVIS
This guy pro'lly thinks he has steeze(sic), but, as always, denim shorts will never be able to escape the wrestler ghetto into semi-respectable territory. Just because one wears tailored jean short-shorts, as opposed to some 3/4 length DFS sofa sized ones, it doesn't make one any less immune to the wrestler effect; it just means that, rather than Raven or John Cena, one has achieved the Stevie Richards or Stone Cold Steve Austin look instead :
Our Martorial elegance subject's shirt? Refer to this post for our thoughts on the pressing matter of sleeveless denim, but we'll add Tom Cruise as Steve in The Outsiders to our brief list of acceptable sleeveless denim shirt/jacket sporters.
Lil' Boosie ft. Lil' Phat & Webbie - LEVIS
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