New week people! Let’s get it!

Yes. I had a pretty busy weekend – Saturday I was at Shizzio‘s video shoot. I was getting my Slash on “playing” guitar. Shizzio does it big! The shoot was on some super-pro shit. I had a good time, ate some ‘nanas, drank a little Henny, smoked a little weed, copped some sunshine, choped up my hand. Shout out Fire Camp and Maestro, and everyone else that was safe who’s names I forgotted.

Sunday was a day of Cleaning. That shit wiped me out, I have no idea why.

Today I am working ona song that is epic to the extreme. And listening to the G Unit album. it’s hot so far.

OK. That One Time TV continues apace. Today’s Big Jack Nimble‘s turn. Check out dude’s podcast while you’re at it, about an hour of dope rap stuff. I enjoyed it a lot on Friday afternoon.

— Monday, June 30th, 2008

Kinda. Watch dude rock up at Glasto in a paraka with a guitar strapped on bawling over Wonderwall. Hov smashes it! What a class move! Miserably this has bought ought all the Youtube Ignoramuses, but whatcha gonna do? After that there’s footage of 99 Problems and Encore. Encore kills it.

Jay on Jonathan Ross after the jump…

— Sunday, June 29th, 2008

Following the hysteria surrounding Bizzle’s bottling at Download, I’ve written an article for The Quietus on the subject of top-down racism in the British music industry.

Headline:

“Is The BBC The Enemy Of Hip Hop?”

Strapline:

Last week amongst the detritus thrown at UK rapper Lethal Bizzle by the audience at Download was a banana skin. Forget about this though – a bigger problem facing UK hip hop stars, argues rapper/writer Adam Narkiewicz is the media itself.

I love Editorial Intros. Just in case people don’t actually read stuff mind, this is not me dissing the whole of the BBC. Some good people work there, and they know who they are. Anyway, go check out the article here.

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— Thursday, June 26th, 2008

Clever folks will remeber last year I did a remix of The Crimea‘s brillaint Loop A Loop, and myself and The Women played a show with them at Bush Hall. It was accoustic and it was grayte. ANYWAY! We’re doing it again, only this time it won’t be accoustic.

This will also likely be Mary Turner‘s last gig with The Women for a while, as she’s joined a girl group and is going to be a mega pop star! So I hope you can all come down and make it a great last night for her. And us.

The gig will be at the at Bush Hall in London on July 9th.

Anyway, that up there is a video of Davey Crimea Man playing a very lush and beautiful song called The Only Living Boy And Girl at London’s 12 Bar in March. There’s something of the Tom Waits about this song. It is fragile and gorgeous and makes my skin rush. It’s possibly going to be on their next album – a demo can be heard on their MySpace.

And if you haven’t got their current album, Secrets Of The Wishing Hour yet, you are foolish! It’s ace! And it’s free! No shit! You can get it right now here. As if you’ve got anything better to listen to this afternoon!

— Thursday, June 26th, 2008

Believe it or not, I wasn’t always this massive. I couldn’t rap either. I learnt to rap in 2000. Myself and my friends were sat in a pub on Upper Street on the first day of the new millenium, musing on the revelries of the night before, drinking pints and smoking fags, which you could do simultaneously in those days.

Anyway, For various reasons, we decided we wanted to rap. So we started doing just that, in the basement bedroom of the Camden flat I shared with Som from My Vitriol and Little Sarah (who recently found fame reciting a racist ditty with Amy Winehouse on Youtube). We’d just freestyle for hours and hours, and we did that for years. Initially it was me and Druze – I was called Kid Shifty and he was called Kool Kid Fresh, and soon enough Pete, AKA P$ joined in the fun. We would book rehearsal rooms in North London and just run around in circles rapping off the top of our heads over Dre and Wu-Tang instrumentals, and later our own beats.

I hardly ever freestyle any more, which is a shame. I rap a lot – and communally – but rarely in that unthinking, Mallets Mallet style of old. I was reminded of all that by this video, in which The Game, Busta Rhymes and Reek Da Villain engage in some impromptu spittage on Rap City over Wayne’s A Milli beat. It is so dope, they’re obviously having so much fun.

The Game, Busta Rhymes, Reek Da Villain on Rap City from 2dopeboyz.com on Vimeo.

I think I’m gonna have to dust off the ole freestyle chops again. Maybe start doing some cypher sessions. That shit is what made me love rapping, and while I’ve gotten mad pro at recording now, I feel it might be time to get back to the essence.

— Wednesday, June 25th, 2008

“One day during the trial, I hear a story about Larry Parnes, Britain’s first pop mogul. He discovered Tommy Steele and Marty Wilde. Like many of the great British impresarios back then, he based his business judgements on his sexual tastes. “

If I am attracted to Tommy Steele,” he would tell his associates, “teenage girls will be, too.”

Parnes’s West End flat was often full of teenage boys hoping to be chosen as his next stars. If he liked the look of them, he’d give them a clean white T-shirt. Once he’d had sex with them, he’d make them take off the white T-shirt and put on a black one.”
Jon Ronson, The Fall Of A Pop Impresario

Here’s one that slipped under the radar – Lou Pearlman, the man who created *NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys, launching the careers of Justin Timberlake and Nick Carter, has been alleged to be a pedophile who preyed on the young men he mentored.

“I would absolutely say the guy was a sexual predator. All the talent knew what Lou’s game was,” Steve Mooney, an aspiring singer who was Pearlman’s assistant, told Vanity Fair magazine. “Some guys joked about it. I remember [one singer] asking me, ‘Have you let Lou [fellate] you yet?’ ”

Mooney said he once asked Pearlman, who was known as “Big Poppa,” what it would take for him to get into a band. “I’ll never forget this as long as I live. He leaned back in his chair, in his white terry cloth robe and white underwear, and spread his legs,” Mooney told Burrough. “And then he said, and these were his exact words, ‘You’re a smart boy. Figure it out.’ ” Mooney added that a singer groped by Pearlman told him, “Look, if a guy wants to massage me, and I’m getting a million dollars for it, you just go along with it. It’s the price you got to pay.”

Phoenix Stone, an early member of the Backstreet Boys, told Vanity Fair that Pearlman was “definitely inappropriate” with Nick Carter. Nick’s mom, Jane Carter, wouldn’t get into specifics, but said, “Certain things happened and it almost destroyed our family. I tried to warn everyone. I tried to warn all the mothers . . . I tried to expose him for what he was years ago.”

Tim Christofore, a member of Take 5, recalls that during a sleepover at Pearlman’s house, the music czar swan-dived onto his and another boy’s bed and wrestled with them wearing only in a towel, which came off. “We were like, ‘Ooh, Lou, that’s gross.’ What did I know? I was 13,” Christofore told Vanity Fair.

Rich Cronin, lead singer of LFO, recalled Pearlman told him of an “ancient massage technique that if I massage you and we bond in a certain way, it will strengthen your aura.”

Pearlman, 53, is in a Florida jail awaiting trial on bank fraud charges. Prosecutors say he scammed more than 1,000 investors out of $315 million. He’d been a fugitive until June when he was busted in Indonesia, living under a fake name.

As someone on the RI messageboard pointed out, what’s disturbing about this is the moral: Lou Pearlman isn’t in trouble because he was sexually abusing kids – Lou Pearlman is in trouble because he no longer had sufficient money and power to get away with sexually abusing kids.

— Tuesday, June 24th, 2008