Yo what it is, what it do?! Welcome back to the World of Threat so yo…here’s a lil blast from the past…from an era of SUBSTANCE and smooth style…this song was used in a skateboarding video that changed my life…peep it…

Digable Planets – 9th Wonder

Word up…

Peace.

Melodic space-age boom-bap from the Digable Planets emcee’s 2011 album “Futuristic Sci-Fi”.

B/ THE COALITION of the white people against the colored people ™

C/ KATSUMI, while being pounded by Lex Steele

D/ FRED TESTOT, after he wuz gangbanged by Omar & his krew

E/ THE POPE, during his latest “urbi et orbi” mass

*****

I’m fucking proud, man. May I ?

Proud of what this blog is becoming.

Proud of what I & Oz Trish are doing with it.

Proud 2 finally present the FIRST PURE HIP HOP SEQUENCE !

It’s about time ! Enjoy !

“Europe’s biggest graffiti wall

along tram station De Wand, in Brussels”

http://www.brusselspictures.com/2010/07/16/europe%E2%80%99s-biggest-graffiti-wall-along-tram-station-de-wand/

Souhaiter pour tous les ados la meilleure éducation possible afin de les amener à devenir des citoyens responsables et conscients implique-t-il d’annihiler systématiquement leur potentiel créatif ?…

Généralisation n’est-elle mère de déraison ?

Ladybug Mecca
You may remember her soft-as-silk flow during her days with Digable Planets, when “Rebirth of Slick” (Cool Like Dat) was a favorite during Hip Hop’s zenith.

Ladybug Mecca has been in the process of developing her first solo album, “Trip the Light Fantastic” and has recently reunited with her former group members to drop a third Digable Planets album.

How does music from Ladybug differ from that of the Digable Planets era?

Well, first of all, Digable Planets was Digable Planets, which was three members. Ladybug is just Ladybug, I chose the music, I produced the music, I wrote all of the lyrics, so its just my interpretation, its my voice, versus a group. Also, versus having a label pick and choose and say yeah we want this record, no we don’t want this record, I don’t have that burden, I don’t have that annoyance. Gave me the freedom to do what I want to do. Also, in speaking about Ladybugs voice, back then I was a 17, 18, 19, 20 year old,. I was just a baby, I was just following the universe, following the wind, I don’t know how I got there. It was really just in the hands of the creator, now its different, I’m a woman, I handle my sh*t, I’ve experienced life, I’m a woman, a mother, an indigenous woman who knows what’s up, knows the bullsh*t, ,knows what’s real, that’s how I live my life.

Read more interview on Latin Rapper.Com

and p.s. I think it goes without saying that this mix is fairly explicit……

Right click and save as to download!

May 3rd 2012 – 90s Hip Hop Mix

1.    Rebirth of Slick – Digable Planets
2.    Electric Relaxation – A Tribe Called Quest
3.    Soul Food – Goodie Mob
4.    Can’t Knock The Hustle – Jay-Z / Mary J. Blige
5.    Everything Is Everything – Lauryn Hill
6.    Still Not A Player – Big Punisher
7.    Simon Says – Pharoahe Monch
8.    Wrong Side Of Da Tracks – Artifacts
9.    Dead Presidents II – Jay-Z
10.    Let Me Ride – Dr. Dre
11.    Regulate – Warren G
12.    Mind Playin’ Tricks On Me – Geto Boys
13.    Get At Me Dog – DMX
14.    How I Could Just Kill A Man – Cypress Hill
15.    Mama Said Knock You Out – LL Cool J
16.    Can’t Truss It – Public Enemy
17.    I Wish – Skee-Lo
18.    Gin & Juice – Snoop Doggy Dogg
19.    2 Of Amerikaz Most Wanted – Tupac
20.    Wu Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthing Ta F**k Wit – Wu-Tang Clan

Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favour of fair use

Enjoy and share. respect the artists, buy the music!

Going to Friday’s !!! and Shabazz Palaces at Tipitina’s in New Orleans was refreshing. First of all, it got me away from Houma, La., where I currently live, just for a little while. It’s easy to take having access to good music for granted, because I don’t anymore. Where I live, it seems like the residents JUST heard Limp Bizkit and consider it a musical revelation.

Overall, I was impressed with Shabazz Palaces, the alternative rap group who have been touring with !!! this year. Last year’s debut album Black Up, released on Sub Pop Records, is still growing on me, and live it was every bit of a listening experience, if not a visual one. The music is dense, and the beats created by Ishmael Butler (better known as Butterfly for anybody who likes Digable Planets) and multi-instrumentalist/percussionist/singer/etc. Tendai Maraire were creative.

With the exception of a few choreographed dance moves, the pair concentrated on making the sound good. With your eyes closed (just like listening to the album) it sounded fantastic. This is music more akin to free jazz than traditional hip-hop, with the beats changing at any given second.

The first 40 minutes of the set was incredible, and had me hooked. The group blasted through most of their album and then some. However, the set dragged on for more than hour, exposing some of the limitations of the pair’s music. While Black Up is one of the few hip-hop albums that benefit from listening on headphones, the show felt the same way. There just wasn’t much to look at, no matter how much Butler tried.

!!!, the New York-based dance-punk crew, were the complete opposite. The band, led by frontman/short shorts and ballet shoes donner Nic Offer, the band was tight, funky and high energy. During the 70-minute set, the energy never waned, as they went from disco to punk to post-punk to … umm … I can’t think of another genre they went into, but there probably was one.

The sparse crowd, which had been semi-interested in Shabazz Palaces, ate up everything !!! did. Once the hi-hat was hit, the crowd didn’t stop moving. Offer helped, jumping into the crowd several times to either scream in somebody’s face (including my own. Hey, it’s cool) or to show off his dance moves.

The band ended their set with an extended version of the song “Intensify,” interspersing The Beatles’ “Birthday” in there to wish their guitarist a good one. Multiple members were running around the stage, switching from tambourine to horns to keyboards just to keep the song going. The band had perfected everything that would be an electronic set, yet did it with live instruments.

Shabazz Palaces, take a few notes. You may not need to wear short shorts and ballet shoes, but a little showmanship can go a long way, and push that extra 20 minutes to be the best of the set.

It’s just like Subpop Records to scoop up everything good in the world. Well, if it had to be one label that can do THEESATISFACTION right it would be Sub Pop. So my guess is that this is what half the population of Seattle’s doing when it’s raining…making beautiful tracks like this. These girls are brining some freshness reminiscent of where Digable Planets was trying to go with their second album Blowout Comb. I guess had there been an indie movement back in the mid to late nineties DP would have been right at the front, but the world just wasn’t ready.I’m sure these sisters know about DP and credit them as influences…I hope. Maybe Butterfly can hit these girls up for a collaboration. I can wish can’t I? Loving this video by the way.

my name is ben jensen.

i am 20 years old.

i am an architecture student at the university of kansas in lawrence, kansas.

i want to share my favorite songs, pictures, thoughts, and ramblings of the moment.

this blog will be about any sporadic thoughts i am thinking about and want to share my feelings on, along with my favorite songs, pictures, and things at the moment.

feel free to linger.

-b.

by Ella Campbell

For my birthday weekend, I traveled to Detroit to see Ishmael Butler perform in his duo known as Shabazz Palaces. In this group he rolls under the alias Palaceer Lazaro, but he is still affectionately known to many as Butterfly from Digable Planets. We know, Ishmael, Dig Planets take the three of you, but you hold a place in our memories that we can’t ignore! Ishmael is joined by a multi talented Zimbabwean percussionist, Tendai “Baba” Maraire. I love Ishmael’s voice, [I definitely have a place in my heart baby-voiced emcee/producers like Ishmael and QTip.], I love his vibe, style, MUSIC, hair… smile… salt n pepper beard… Lord have mercy.

I was watching the men of Shabazz Palaces create a type of music I’d never seen mixed live before. Their sound was so robust and full that it rumbled, rattled and kicked within my core, and clattered my eardrums. The combination of Ishmael’s skeleton rattling bass and electric sampling, with Tendai’s congas, mbira, hi hat, and other auxiliary percussion was mean. Tendai laid back, hard. Ishmael’s voice floated above it all. The way he pronounced his lyrics was all very soft, soft consonants. The blend of the timbre of his voice and softness of his pronunciation, with the mix’s rumbling underbelly, was truly astounding.

While writing, I’ve been listening to Black Up, Shabazz Palace’s latest album. Then I decided to switch to Reachin’. My heart blossomed with petals of admiration for Ishmael as soon as his voice graced It’s Good To Be Here. I busted out. I know Shabazz Palaces is completely different than Digable Planets, but you can still hear the Butterfly in Palaceer Lazaro – he even references some Dig Planets songs in his rhymes on Black Up. It’s like Daniel Radcliff or the cast of Friends, it’s hard to separate their past endeavors from their new projects. It’s also not a bad thing, just like when you listen to an artist and you hear their influences through them: the Ahmad Jamal in Robert Glasper, the Roger Troutman in Casey Benjamin, the Ray Charles in Ben L’Oncle Soul, the Billie Holiday in Madeleine Peyroux, it aids your admiration. It gives you a piece of history to connect them to.

I’m sure that Ish would be shaking his head if he saw how much I was talking about Dig Planets so let’s cut to the chase. The show ended. It’s amazing how fast the crowd peace’d so it was very easy to get backstage to talk to Ishmael.

1. What music did you grow up with that has stuck with you? Motown. We told him that was a good answer for being in Detroit, and he said “Oh yeah! I forgot that’s where we are. I tried to go to the Motown Museum today but it was closed. At least I got to look at the outside of it.”

2. What was the first album you bought that you couldn’t stop listening to? Prince, 1999. [Ishmael answered this question quicker than anyone we have interviewed yet. He said it before we finished the question.]

3. What is your favorite thoughtful music? Grachan Moncour III, Air Raid. [Jazz girls. If you are not hip to the album Evolution, I highly suggest you get it. A lot of the cats are on this record.]

4. The first time I asked the previous question, I said artist, not musician, and he mentioned Mickelene Thomas. Ishmael said she has the ability to depict creation in a biblical sense. [I noticed he said “‘biblical’ sense” - while wearing a keffiyeh and performing under the name Shabazz. I don’t think it’s significant, but it’s certainly intriguing!]

5. What is your favorite basement album? Ariel Pink (whose music has been distributed by Animal Collective)

6. If you could see any musicians perform, alive or dead, who would they be?
James Brown
Miles Davis
Billie Holiday
Erykah Badu
Lil B

7. What music were you listening to today? “I had a Wiz Khalifa song stuck in my head. I use Shazaam a lot too.” He pulled out his iPod “The song it’s on right now is T Rex, Ride a White Swan.” Tendai said he’s been listening to Lee Morgan and Nite Jewel.

8. Who is a young musician we should be looking out for? OC Notes. That’s all I’m going to say.

9. A film crew from Wayne State University was also there, and they interviewed him before us. We got to stand in the background and watch. They asked what their music was to them and Ishmael said “it’s hip-hop to us.” However, when the camera left and it was just the four of us, I asked him, What do you call the music you perform? “Black music. Because it’s true.” I rebutted, “So what am I doing here?” And they looked at me like I was crazy – Tendai spoke up “That doesn’t mean you can’t be here. It doesn’t mean you can’t listen to it.”

10. We are female musicians. When we go on stage we get a different vibe from the musicians and the crowd. Females add a different energy and dynamic to the stage. Can you tell us what it was like working with Ladybug? What is it like to have a female dynamic in a group? At this, Ishmael bowed his head and started laughing. My fellow jazz girl and I gave each other “that look.” I turned back to Ishmael and said “No. No giggling. Tell me exactly the first thing that came to mind when I said that.”
He looked up – “the first thing? Fantastic. It’s an adventure. It’s an adventure travelling with a woman. She is a true original. And, I like women, I think they are fantastic. But even if you don’t, women have a cerebral sensual power that everyone relates to differently. Female energy is not something to ignore. There is something very visceral about it.”

“Better yet, they fell madly in love with Brooklyn — its jazz, its grit, its neighborhoods, its dark mystique — and the pop rappers began to represent. They made an album that sounded like their adopted borough: hi-hat steam hissing out of subway grates, synthesizers squealing like old tenement doors, snare drumbeats like a thief’s delicate footfalls on Franklin Avenue, and, everywhere, the hubbub of voices.”

[Tris McCall, nj.com]

Mellow DJ Alex J. / J-Bizness remix of this track from the Digable Planets member’s album “Futuristic Sci-Fi”.

The Seattle grown hip hop collective, Shabazz Palaces are set to kick off a stateside tour in support of last year’s critically acclaimed debut, Black Up.   Featuring former Digable Planets frontman, Ishmael ‘Butterfly’ Butler, The Palaces broke through by way of unconventional paths by being the first ever hip hop act signed to the Sub Pop label.  Although Swerve The Reaping of All that is Worthwhile (Noir Not Withstanding) is more less a straightforward hip hop beat, it concludes with one minute variation touching on traditional African melodic rhythms.  The general sound on Black Up is heavily influenced by jazz and is accompanied by numerous tribal instruments played by Tendai ‘Baba’ Maraier.

In a recent interview, Butler was asked to cite the inspiration behind some of their music.  He confessed, “you play a guitar part or come up with a melody or a cadence, yeah someone did it, but the ideas came from somewhere else. It could be deep inside them or it could be from outside of them. So to then sit down and start talking about ‘hey tell me about the evolution of this’ and then someone else starts talking ‘I was with this guy and he did this’, that’s not really how the song came about. That’s just what the person is deciding to say. Some are more talented than others at remembering those things and making a historical anecdote out of them. We’re not. We just feel like this is what happened to us. Here it is. There’s the song. Now, if you like music, if you’re a critic, if you’re a talented listener and you got some thoughts and feelings, run with it. That’s what we expect from people that are doing that. It’s just that asking us about it, we’re not that good at saying what it’s all about. Without sounding self-centred or self-oriented, we don’t wanna do that. It’s not about being mysterious or hiding behind anonymity, we just made the song. What else is there? I thought it was a music thing. I didn’t know it was a talking thing.”

Shabazz Palaces kicks off their US tour in Minneapolis on April 3rd at The Whole Music Club on the U of M campus.  Reasonably priced tickets at $6 are still available.

Tim Fischer Duluth, MN

Flipped Ghostface’s “Might Healthy” with the horns from Eddie Harris’s “Get Up and Dance,” which the Digable Planet’s sampled on “Dial 7: Axiom of Creamy Spies.”