Rawkus Records was one of the most important labels in hip hop history and gave us some of the greatest music ever made during their short run. Let me know down in the comments what is your favorite Rawkus album?
Street Light: The Documentary follows KRS-One across the Atlantic Ocean and into parts of England where in between some amazing live freestyles, KRS-One points our attention not only to Hip Hop on deeper, more philosophical levels, but also to words and their effects upon what we perceive as reality. The combination of these subjects “Hip Hop”, “words” and “reality”, inspires the viewer the think more deeply about one’s self and about one’s commitment to one’s future; to be more of a friend to one’s future self by taking better care of one’s present self.
I enjoyed this immensely but most know I’m a Boldy fan from way back…
The Story of the album that took a decade to create featuring Jazz, Hip-hop, Soul, Gospel, and Detroit. Boldy James and Sterling Toles masterpiece Manger on McNichols is told in these in-depth interviews. Producer Sterling Toles shares the story of meeting Boldy James and crafting an orchestra arrangement around the heartfelt story of what led him into street life. The Manger on McNichols album is already acknowledged as one of the most dynamic and creative works of 2020. Introduce yourself to the collaborative brotherhood that created this expression of Detroit Life. A documentary by Detroit is Different
An inside look at how Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos built one of the largest and most influential economic forces in the world — and the cost of Amazon’s convenience. Continue reading →
LTNFF Winner for Best Documentary Loyalty No Royalty, the untold story of the break up of the legendary R&B band from Oakland, CA. The trio, in fact began as a six member band in 1988 and successfully climbed the charts into the late 1990’s. Unfortunately greed fueled mistrust and eventually the demise of the original band. EXTRA CREDITS TO SOUL TRAIN AND SHOWTIME AT THE APOLLO. Soundtrack and 3TOB single is available on ambitiousrecords.net
Contact info for Elijah Baker email eb3lev@gmail.com / for booking 510-578-3766 /Instagram Elijah_Eb_baker / ambitiousrecords / Facebook Elijah EB Baker / Ambitious Records
Ill & Al Skratch had the summer of 93 in a choke hold with their infectious smash hit ” I’ll take her and where the homiez”.The Brooklyn Uptown connection after that dropped the Album Creep with me . Only to be bamboozled by their Production company and Label. Not Until now have their story been told. This is a story of persistence and determination. The Ups and Downs of the Business should never deter you if you destine to win.
Created, Written and Produced by James “Kraze” Billings
I used to like the one single I remember “We Don’t Play”
This is the story of two young perfectionists from distant cites who once won the World Rap and DJ contests in the same year and then joined forces. Re-live their rise to Hip Hop fame and see how they impacted the culture before suddenly disappearing from the music scene in the mid 90s. Continue reading →
Early internet users communicated with each other via Bulletin Board Systems, or BBS. Popular in the 1980s and early 1990s, these digital hubs allowed users to dial-up on a modem and chat on public message boards or through private chats, play text-based games, and even transfer files, from computer art to cracked software.
Pirated software, known as “warez,” was accompanied by ANSI art—a form of flashy hacker graffiti that credited the software crackers responsible for providing the illicit files. Eventually, ANSI art became its own subculture, with computer artists competing to develop new fonts and imagery in all its 8-bit glory.
A new documentary, The Art of Warez, directed by artist and filmmaker Oliver Payne in collaboration with one-time ANSI artist Kevin Bouton-Scott, dives into this world of warez and ANSI art. Payne told Motherboard that he met Bouton-Scott while teaching a course on video games at ArtCenter in Pasadena, California. The former ANSI artist schooled Payne on warez and ANSI subculture.
“Whilst graffiti exists illegally on private and public property, ANSI originally existed on (and to take credit for) illegally pirated software,” Payne said. “As they are criminal activities, both require anonymity and the use of a tag name to achieve notoriety within the scene. The best artists create fresh fonts using crazy color combinations and go hard to make as many dope ANSIs as they can. It’s totally hacker graffiti and the folk art movement of the proto cyber crime scene.”
Bouton-Scott said that ANSI art still feels mysterious to him after all these years. A graffiti artist as a kid, his transition into the ANSI scene felt completely natural to him.
“We were all completely obsessed with this stuff, going to enormous lengths to make the artwork and get the art packs together, trying to get good reviews in the electronic magazines that would write about all the latest work,” Bouton Scott said.
Payne thinks it’s remarkable that something so cool could remain virtually unknown. Bouton-Scott noted that many ANSI artists, who were also into coding and making VGA graphics and demos, later became graphic designers and likely influenced the look of the early web.
“As youth subcultures go, this might be the best one,” Payne said. “It combines so many wonderful things—hacking, video games, graffiti, freedom of information, fantasy art, mecha anime, anarchist literature, comic book monsters, [phone] phreaking.”
Bouton-Scott said the digital archivist Jason Scott, who works for the Internet Archive, teamed up with RaD MaN, founder of the ANSI group ACiD, to create a database of the art packs that still existed in the early 2000s. They are now available for download on Scott’s website, textfiles.com.
For Bouton-Scott, the ANSI scene has no contemporary parallel. But if there were one, he believes it would be comprised of teenagers, as social media for “creative adults” is dominated by entrepreneurialism, branding, and self-commodification.
“The ANSI scene was quite the opposite of this,” said Bouton-Scott. “It was a self-contained labor of love, pro-crime, anti-copyright, facilitating the very real need of free-software for young computer users.”
The Art of Warez, produced by safecrackers x somesuch, premieres online today (July 31) at SafeCrackers.
Started in a college dorm room by a group of North Carolina Central students in 2001, the Justus League collective and offshoot trio Little Brother defined the sound of Durham hip-hop for years to come, constructing a style altogether distinct from everything to the north and south. This level of innovation turned heads with some of hip-hop’s biggest names, and the members of Little Brother (9th Wonder, Big Pooh and Phonte) have gone on to work with superstars like Kanye West, Kendrick Lamar, Drake, Jay-Z, Dr. Dre and Questlove, who appears in the documentary. Continue reading →
The LR Zone 