crucial

Stupid fresh 1986 Hip-Hop documentary

HipHop video

Really great Dutch documentary about Hip-Hop shot in New York in 1986. Totally honest street level interviews with real people.

http://www.vpro.nl/programma/vrijegeluiden/afleveringen/17295970/

Its amazing how cute and innocent rap was back then (LL at 18 bragging about his girlfriend).

I always have these idle fantasies of getting a time machine and taking say Jay-Z, Ludacris, Ghostface Killer and Q-bert back to rock a party in 1980s. It would be scary. But poor Grandmaster Flash would be crushed so completely by Q-bert that he would fall into depression and would be unable to further his art. History would fail and I would be responsible for destroying it.

Alternatively I could smoke a lot of pot and pretend I'm from the future and make eerie records that make no sense to any of you, vibrating on planes of existence that you cannot yet perceive. Yeah that might not work either.



"We're not stupid like they say we are. Rock 'n' Roll went through the same thing and now its accepted, we're going through that now." - Doug E. Fresh

"When I started getting busy, they just stood there like I was teaching class or something.
I mean it took me like hours to figure out the best part of the record and I got a program of like 30 or 40 records, and everybody is just standing there." - Grandmaster Flash before he figured out he should add an MC to tell people what to do

"I tell my daughter everything, she knows I was in jail, that some of her uncles she grew up with she's never going to see again cause they got killed.... She wants to be a singer but I'm like telling her she should be a Music Lawyer. Its statistically impossible to be a music artist." - Ice T (Body Count era, before he figured out that you make more money sitting in your trailer on a movie set than you do from a whole tour with your band)



Here's a last poets docu :
http://www.vpro.nl/programma/vrijegeluiden/afleveringen/17295959/

"When y'all were nappin, we was rappin." - Last Poets


( via http://republish.org via http://spinemagazine.com )

Links and things

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I've been doing the Dance Music Business Resource since 1995, back when it was on hyperreal.org. Articles and info for artists and small labels. Recently I've been posting interesting industry news items and adding some new content about downloads etc.