I’m AaronM, the newest addition to the ML team. To the left, you can see me in my blogging costume.

I’m very honoured to be asked to join Metal Lungies. I hope I can keep up the quality of the blog in my future posts. I’ve got some big plans for weekly features. I’m no new newbie to the blog game (see my personal blog here, for starters) and I also recently starting writing interviews for the public radio show The Sound of Young America’s blog.
So: leave some feedback, communicate. Here’s hoping for big things.

mp3 for the occasion: “Are You Ready?” by T.J. Swann, Peewee MEL & Barry B.

ML’s 6th Beat Drop installment, focusing on Just Blaze, will be up on the site this Friday. No special guests this time around, but plenty of special music.

Barring some Christmas miracle, this will likely be the last Beat Drop of the year, but look for Beat Drops in the near future on more of hip hop’s most famed beatmakers — among them J Dilla, RZA, Kanye West (on that note, R.I.P. to Dr. Donda West, who certainly seemed like a great person based on Kanye’s references to her), and the Neptunes. Also, we’ll be doing some Beat Drop posts focused not on current producers, but on artists from past generations — Isaac Hayes, Curtis Mayfield, Roger Troutman and Zapp, just to name a few — focusing on their classic music and the hip hop tracks that have sampled them. ML was like heaven in ‘07, and we’re going to be great in ‘08! [Pardon the cheesiness of that last sentence -- I was trying to channel my inner-Busta-Rhymes-on-"Scenario"-remix.]

So, why am I bigging up ML so much right now? To provide a perfect segway to this… Hey! Nielsen & Billboard.com have nominated us, along with several other blogs, for their Best Music Blog contest. To all our readers who will click the hell out of any zShare links we post but will only leave comments when we screw up — Just playing, y’all! It’s all love! — feel free to give us your vote at your earliest convenience. We’ll make sure that you’re properly compensated… with quality posts and great music. Hey, it’s almost as good as money!

For those of y’all that haven’t yet died of suspense (R.I.P. to those less fortunate), the Pete Rock Beat Drop will be up on Friday. Or next Monday in the case of some unforeseen circumstance that I can’t possibly know about right now because then it wouldn’t be unforeseen. But I’m really aiming for Friday. Keep your third eye open for that.

The main reason for the delay is that we’ve* lined up a couple of very special guests, both of whom are established hip hop producers. One is someone that has been around these parts before, and should be familiar to fans of our previous Beat Drops. The other guest, however, might catch y’all by surprise. I’d let the cat out the bag, but Pete’s telling me to keep it on the hush.

[* - And by "we've," I really just mean DJ01, who has done all the grunt work. Well played, good sir.]

Just a quick heads up, the name is now just ‘Dj01′. I’m going into internets witness protection. Contact page updated, please check that to continue to send your vital information spam.

Thats right! ML now has a radio show. If you miss it you can catch it on the podcast which will be posted after every show on this site each week. I’m currently negotiating to get two spots a week, but for now I just have Tuesday. Most of the shows will focus around a basic topic (think beat drops, only wider and on the radio). I don’t expect most people to catch the live show, but those podcasts are bound to be instant classics. If you do catch the live show, call in. I’ll read the number on the air.

P.S. the Time is EST.

This isn’t Metal Lungies, this is what happened to a hater of ours.

Hopefully, we’ll hit you up on Monday. Till then work on your 50/Kanye sales predictions.

“‘Shalom’ is ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ in Hebrew, right? Yeah, that pretty much sums up your career.” — Colin Quinn (not verbatim, but close enough), to someone at the Artie Lange Roast on The Howard Stern Show

… pretty much sums up my blogging career, as well.

On August 20th (Monday), I will start my first year of law school. So, needless to say, my presence at ML will be missing for a while. Will it be missed? Well, I guess that’s for y’all to decide. I’ll still drop by every now and again for the occasional Beat Drop (Hi-Tek’s is up for those that might not have seen it — Lethal’s been a one-man-blog-man lately), or whenever something gets me in a posting sort of mood. But, if I attempt to stay current with the daily goings-on of the hip hop world and balance that out with a time-consuming law school schedule, I’ll most certainly fail miserably in both areas — I’d be behind in class work, and you’d be reading my reviews of the Curtis and Graduation sometime in 2008 (assuming their release dates don’t change anymore).

So, in closing, I’ll see y’all when I see y’all. ML for life, ’til the casket dips and the death certificate reads, “Cause of Death: Iodine poisoning from eating so many shrimp.”

Easy,

Buhizzle

P.S. As one last goodbye-for-now, peep my guest post on Souled On (complete with MP3s if you’re not up for the long read).

Loungin’, son!

The last couple of posts I’ve made have been, what I essentially call, “throwaway posts”, because they require very little effort on my part — in fact, waiting for the zShare links to upload provides ample time for self-reflection. However, despite the lack of effort, I think that it offers something cool — 10 dope-in-my-humble-opinion songs — for our readers, and that’s what really counts, right? Hey, who said ‘No’? Show yourself, coward!

Anyways, another reason for my recent laziness is that next week is going to be big… Mo’nique big. (See, I was serious.) I’ll be attending a certain concert this weekend around the Southern Cali with a certain incredible line-up and I’ll be writing as detailed a recap of it as I’ll be able to (hopefully with some pictures, depending on how many elbows-to-other-people’s-faces I can get away with). Also, I have a guest post already written for another person’s blog which should be up next week, and the person who runs that blog complimented me for expressing myself (hopefully that doesn’t turn any of y’all away). And, hopefully, the next Beat Drop post for Hi-Tek some time in between.

And then, after all of that… well, I can’t say quite yet. But I can say that it might make some of y’all unhappy. Or it might make some of y’all happy. Or it might not affect you at all whatsoever. How’s that for a cliffhanger (no Stallone)?

We may be banned in China, but feel free to bring the kids around these parts:

Here at ML, to quote one Method Man, “We got love for those with love for us.” We don’t care about your culture or ethnicity — as long as y’all enjoy the site (and even if you don’t), we appreciate your visits.

All we ask for is the opportunity… which is why it hurts my heart (though, admittedly, also makes me feel kind of badass) that this website is BANNED in China. [Cocaine Blunts and The Basketball Jones, sites of which I am a fan, are also banned.] A website called Great Firewall of China allows you to enter a URL and see if that site can make it’s way through the nation’s many “watch dog” rules and regulations concerning censorship of… well, pretty much everything. I encourage any and all website operators out there to see if your site is also banned, and then we can all collectively laugh at how ridiculous the Chinese government is.

To any and all Chinese readers (either those who live elsewhere, or those of you who somehow can access this site from the homeland): Don’t be offended — it’s your nation’s government that we got issues with, not y’all.

And lastly, to shrimp fried rice:

Let nothing come between the bond we share.