RIP: Gil Scott-Heron

According to Alec Wilkinson of the New Yorker:

Gil Scott-Heron, who died late Friday at the age of sixty-two, was among the very first musicians to understand the power of declamatory singing, of holding forth above a line of percussion and blending words into the rhythmic peaks and recessive contours of beats. He did not discover this, he heard the Last Poets do it, but he used their form to his own purposes and produced singular and scornfully brilliant observations such as “Whitey on the Moon,” and “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” which sound as vital and scornfully brilliant now as they did when he recorded them nearly forty years ago. The more cerebral rap and hip-hop artists knew his work the way British blues aspirants such as Eric Clapton and Keith Richards and Mick Jagger knew the work of Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf.

Read the full article here

Watch the video for “Me and the Devil” from Heron’s 2010 album I’m New Here

Below we’ve embedded the first part of a Gil Scott-Heron documentary entitled The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. The film was directed by Don Letts in 1996 for BBC television and features commentaries from Chuck D, Mos Def, Richie Havens, Clive Davis and more. Links to the other three parts are below the video.

Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4

New Music Video: J Dilla “Geekdown”

Illustrator, animator, and and now video director Steve Smith recently put together a short animation for the Stones Throw video contest. Choosing  ”Geekdown” from J Dilla’s (RIP) now classic album Donuts, which never had a video before, already made Smith a winner to me.  The fact Smith’s lively animation work is reminiscent of Mike Judge, Bill Plympton and The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine means he has good chance of winning more than just my heart.

BTW for those interested the contest ends July 1. Semi-finalists will get a $200 credit to be used on stonesthrow.com and the winner will get a $1000 check and a chance to direct an upcoming video for the label. Deets

New Music Video: Beastie Boys “Make Some Noise”

The visual component of the first single off the trio’s eighth album Hot Sauce Committee Part Two is actually a five-minute snippet from their Sundance-screened short Fight For Your Right Revisited, starring everybody and their mothers. Fight For Your Right Revisited will have its television debut tonight at midnight on VH1, followed by an airing of the uncensored version on Comedy Central at 3AM (all times EST).

Read more at MTV

Spike Jonze Presents: Lil Buck and Yo-Yo Ma

Spike Jonze films LA dancer Lil Buck improvising to Yo-Yo Ma’s performance of Mikhail Fokine’s “The Dying Swan” at an event to bring the arts back into schools.

via Opening Ceremony

Website Shout Out: DatPiff

DatPiff is a website that calls itself “The Authority in Free Mixtapes” – and they’re not lying.  I first stumbled onto this little gem of a site looking for Yelawolf’s “Trunk Muzik” mixtape, and it’s become a frequent online music stop ever since.  They’ve got everything from that new hot mixtape folks are chatting about like Pusha T’s “Fear Of God” to my cousin Mike Schpitz’s “Mike Murder” release.

The site is easy to use, just register and you get five free mixtape downloads a day. If you don’t feel like registering, or if you want to give something a listen, you can stream the mixtapes instead of downloading. There are also “sponsored” releases, which basically means they can be downloaded by folks who have not registered, and don’t count toward your five album per day download limit. The designated “Official” mixtapes are releases straight from the artist and/or their record companies, but there are people out there remixing and mixing stuff up all over the place as well.  The site has a fairly handy search system that will get you the specific artist you want. And you can also search by words, for instance my search for “Club Bangers” brought up around 20 different albums, all of them free. Sure, there’s some crap on here, but they’ve got a pretty handy rating and comments system, so you don’t get bad stuff unless you want it – and admit it, sometimes you want it – Gucci Mane chopped and screwed anyone?!