Fat Beats, my favorite place in New York City that doesn’t involve food, will close its remaining locations in New York and Los Angeles next September, XXLmag.com reports.
I wrote about Fat Beats and the business of hip-hop vinyl last year. DJ Eclipse told me that hip-hop wasn’t part of the niche resurgence of vinyl, but it never occurred to me that Fat Beats might close. How could it? Like so many others, I looked at Fat Beats as the old friend I could see whenever I wanted. Fat Beats was a haven for people who live and breathe hip-hop. You walked in and MF Doom,Smif-n-Wessun, and Count Bass D watched you from their LPs on the walls.
Record collectors will mourn Fat Beats as the source of hard-to-find records. But I grew up on mp3s and immediate access to every song ever made. I will remember Fat Beats differently.
I’ll remember Fat Beats as the place where Tanya Morgan told me they follow my insignificant blog. Where I met underground artists like Homeboy Sandman, Magestik Legend, and Shawn Jackson who turned out to be amazing talents. Where People Under The Stairs performed for me and no more than a dozen others who had the will to trudge through the rain. Where artists waited on the sidewalk to force their CD into my hand in exchange for a few dollars. Where I got to tell Black Milk how crazy “Motown 25” is. Where I interviewed Blaq Poet while he swigged from a bottle.
Fat Beats was a place where you could surround yourself with music and people who love that music. No club or concert venue can ever take its place or duplicate its feeling.
It took me a minute, but I can now confidently call myself a Freddie Gibbs fan. You can only avoid the deafening consensus of the hip-hop blogs for so long. Gibbs & company sell a determinedly bleak, glamor-free brand of gangsta rap reminiscent of the survivalist mentality of 2Pac and the Outlawz. Equipped with an agile flow and an excellent ear for beats, Gibbs has no trouble delivering a tape that’s great from beginning to end.
Str8 Killa No Filla is the mixtape. Str8 Killa is the EP, which drops Tuesday.
Update: Here’s the untagged version of the mixtape minus the songs that appear on the EP. Yay for not having duplicates in iTunes! Grab it at The DJ Booth
Flying Lotus doesn’t produce hip-hop nearly as often as he should. St. Louis rapper Vandalyzm nabbed a beat for his new album Megatron Majorz Redux, which is out now.
October 09: Dre mentions that he’d like Jay-Z to appear on Detox as more than just a ghostwriter.
March 2010: Michael Yo from E! News lets slip that there’s a Dr. Dre and Jay-Z song coming out “this week.” It doesn’t.
April 2010: The song is called “Under Pressure” and Nah Right tells us it’s “an upbeat club record and Ester Dean wrote the hook.” It’s supposed to drop that coming Friday. It doesn’t. Dre says the song will drop “in the next two weeks or so.” It doesn’t.
May 2010: Dre says “Under Pressure” was delayed because Eminem wanted to drop. He says he wants to drop a single this summer.
June 2010: The song leaks and the world collectively vomits. Dre issues a statement saying it’s unfinished.
I thought it would take at worst case a couple of years. For example, actual work time on The Chronic was nine months and actual work time on my last album, 2001, was about 10 months. The actual work time on this album is about half of that, where I’m seriously focusing on it. There is always something coming up. Like signing talent, old and new.
Dr. Dre has probably amassed a second career’s worth of material since he’s started working on Detox. It’s just a matter of time until he feels like releasing it, at which point he’ll be better known for his headphones than any music he may have made.
Oh yeah, here’s a new track that’s really funky, but only two minutes long. I want to shake the leaker’s hand at times like this. Despite Dre’s best efforts, we get to listen to his music.
yooo i got a record in my inbox from my homie @boombe its maybe a yr or more old but fugg it… im finna upload this shitSun Aug 15 23:50:51 via webSpitta
CurrenSy_Spitta
Just what you would expect from Curren$y; blissfully breezy, but sprinkled with jewels.
Now that the obligatory defiant comeback single is out of the way and he’s assured fans that he’s done with Auto-Tune, Kanye has room to have more fun. As hip-hop’s most reliable hit-maker, Kanye can pull anyone he wants into the studio. On “See Me Now” Team Yeezy recruited Beyonce, Charlie Wilson, and producer of the moment, Lex Luger (“BMF,” “Hard In Da Paint”). Think of “See Me Now”as a more ballsy “Ego,” An upbeat ‘we made it’ song, perfect for graduations and bar mitzvahs. I can picture Levi Grossman and his friends celebrating right now.
Mark Ronson rekindles the amazing chemistry he had with Ghostface on his 2003 debut Here Comes the Fuzz’sstandout single Ooh Wee. I remember I had that track on loop for months, as well as the 2CD Here Comes the Fuzz mixtape that was a teaser to the album. This new track is off of Ronson’s 3rd album Record Collection. The track was shamelessly ripped from Ronson’s East Village Radio Show, Authentic Shit, which is a weekly must-listen.
Update: At long last, here’s the CDQ. We had that radio rip early! All those blogs murmuring about a radio rip floating around are talking about us.
After he left Aftermath, Bishop Lamont said in an interview that he would bless us with a tidal wave of unreleased music that he secured from Interscope:
We’re about to finally bless the world with a lot of music. It got to the point where it wasn’t fair to the fans or to myself to have to keep on waiting. I understand that labels have obligations, but it was difficult to have fans coming up to you and asking when I was going to get a release date. There’s a lot of crazy records I got to take with me. There’s a J Dilla record that I got with the blessing of DJ House Shoes. Tracks from DJ Khalil, Lord Finesse, 9th Wonder, Mr. Porter, Focus, basically a who’s who of underground hip-hop.
He also spoke of Dr. Dre records. But Bishop has been extremely quiet except for a few leaks like this one and his album The Reformation is nowhere in sight. Bishop announced today that a new project called The Shawshank Redemption/Angola 3 is due in September.
“Get ‘Em Girl” must be the record he got from House Shoes. Is there a Dilla expert in the house who can tell us if this beat is new? Talib Kweli says the song is “OLD as hell.”
True story: the kitchen scene was filmed in my apartment by Devin Chanda and the fine people at Scheme Engine. If you pause at 1:07 you can see my Tupperware container!
“Do Wrong” originally featured Pill and first appeared on DGK Stevie’s Vol. 1 mixtape and more recently Freddie’s Str8 Killa No Filla. “Part 2” is an iTunes bonus track for Freddie’s new EP. Produced by Atlanta brethren DJ Burn One.
I was indifferent toward Freddie until he oh-so-casually dropped this line:
I flirt with death; on the day that I fuck the bitch,
Bury me with my zipper down so my haters can suck my dick.
