UnKut drops a pictorial on some of the best beards in the rap game.
Be forewarned: There are no pics of Amber Rose or BeYonce.
Archive for the ‘The Guest Room’ Category
Hip-Hop’s Best Beards…
Monday, May 10th, 2010Laser Beam Rap FTW…
Friday, May 7th, 2010
Editor’s note: We are lucky to have readers who are proactive in their love for art. A reader hit me up and asked why I didn’t have a drop on this or that. I told the reader that it wasn’t because I didn’t fux with this or that, but because I didn’t have time to fux with this or that, but if he would take a minute to draft a drop I would certainly put it on the table for discussion. This is T-412 giving us a drop on Lupe Fiasco (I’ve been holding this image for a couple of years). Enjoy…
They say my future was dark…
So they say, but I say Lupe Fiasco just made one of my favorite new jams. A week ago he dropped his new single I’m Beaming. This record is representing Lupe’s third album Lasers. This is one of those jams that can get instant replay value for a few reasons. The one most important thing is the single was made for everyone to enjoy. Lupe shows he can spit three verses with nice content. The Neptunes come in with a monster beat and definitely raise the bar to higher standards. Not to mention, this is my wake n bake ishh right here ladies (start your mornings right people.). Watch the video, it was made by Illusive Media. It features help from a bunch of little kids running around all crazy/acting. Besides that, Shouts to DP for letting me share this with you, Lupe’s making hit records and someone had to show love.
Do you remember me the guy from verse one?
This video is pushing positive out energy and it reflects. Try playing it and not start dancing or start singing along to the hook. To say the least its refreshing to have lyrical content match the production, and to be released as a single? This what most artists cant do yet strive to with great pressure from recording companies, rushing your favorite artists with deadlines, dates, forced R n’ B collabos and the results ending not up to par(no names). 1st and 15th is an independent label and you can taste the organic roots.
Yeah its me again the guy from verse two.
Doesn’t it feel great to have refreshing music? With actual content with lyrical wordplay to boot. I had to pull a few lines out. Back to the lyrics, you gotta really listen to the content within, shit is real. One of the many examples of Lupe going in on I’m Beaming.
“Now those the type of eyes, I not cry from
You see the tears of fire run out my cryin’ songs.”
Example of Lupe going in from the heart. ^ These two quotes, (above and below) they reminded me of similar songs by two great artists can you guess who??
“And baby girl, what does it matter where your purse from?
Your hurr done, your nails did, your ass fat, but you’re dumb.”
Does going against the grain work on this one?? What about that Gucci, Louie, Fendi?? Addressing the ladies in an uplifting attempt to see past material items… Nice!
I hope I’m not getting to deep into this, but at times its hard not to just let the imagination run wild. This is what separates the good from great. See with the help from The Neptunes, Lupe was able to paint those vivid pictures that we all hope to get from inspiring artists. Not only pictures but real pictures with emotion/feeling behind it. You can tell Lupe uses his music as way to vent somewhat therapeutically. AKA Getting some things off his chest. Ill let your imagination take you to where you want to go. So take it at face value or dig deep its still sweet.
See me now, I’m beaming…
Still, with all that being said. Lupe hasn’t released an album since ‘The Cool’ in 2007. There is no question Lupe’s wordplay continues to get better with every release. In time I believe he will still be doing his craft with great passion and will no doubt be a huge part of Hip-Hop’s future. This will show greatly in the next few years. Shit, he’s even your favorite rappers’, favorite rapper. Check the first LP. There are all green lights in Lupe’s lane. With our attention now, three years later and timing might be everything.
Sean P In The ‘A’…
Monday, May 3rd, 2010
The Gritty Committee presents…
MarQ Spekt catches up with Sean Price and Sha Stimuli over the weekend for exclusive show footage and street dialog.
The Gritty Committe presents Sean Price Live from Lex Boogie on Vimeo.
Happy New Year Mingus…
Thursday, April 22nd, 2010
Editor’s note: I always tell people Happy New Year on their birthdays because that is what it really is to them. Since being birthed again would be problematic for our mother’s wombs. Here’s a drop from a good friend of ours shouting out the great Charles Mingus…
“You haven’t been told before that you’re phonies,” said bassist, composer, and activist CHARLES MINGUS (1922-1979) from the stage one night. “You’re dilettantes of style. A blind man can go to an exhibition of Picasso and Kline, and not even see their works, and comment behind dark glasses, ‘Wow! They’re the swingingest paintings ever, crazy!’ Well, so can you. You’ve got your dark glasses and clogged-up ears.” Mingus, a large, voluble, candid, sensitive, contradictory and impulsive man, made these provocations out of love, particularly for Duke Ellington (from whose band he’d been fired after chasing trombonist Juan Tizol with a fire axe) and Charlie Parker, whom Mingus honored with the greatest of his many uniquely evocative song titles: “Gunslinging Bird, or If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There’d Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats.” A Los Angeles native who grew up in sight of Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers, Mingus was himself inimitable: a virtuosic musician of vast emotional nuance and a man who’d press hard for his sense of justice, whether critical, economic, or racial. Sometimes Mingus’ ambitious reach exceeded his grasp — his short-lived record label, Debut (co-owned with Max Roach); his decades-in-the-making semi-autobiography, Beneath The Underdog (1972) — but the work he did still astonishes. Not everybody appreciated such truculence. While he lived, Mingus won but a single Grammy, and that for liner notes: “Let my children have music! Let them hear live music. Not noise. My children! You do what you want with your own!”
via HiLoBrow.com
SNEAKER FIENDS UNITE!
Thursday, April 8th, 2010
In Search of… The HOLY GRAIL.
Editor’s note: It’s been a minute since we featured a drop on someone’s holy grails. SFU Beijing/New Haven program director GrandMaster comes thru with this joint.
Internets!
Internets!
Not gon’ front – for a minute there I was hipstering out on y’all. Life got pretty real out there until a month ago I caught myself in Chuck Taylors, skinny pants, cardigan and a scarf walking down the Grand Concourse near 141st. Fortunately, I am a 5’6″ Asian cat so you know heads respected the kid. But it was close.
Anyhoo, it is Springtime now and all tru SFU northeast heads know the post-Easter period is the season for officially stunting on fools in these parts. The dope fiend lean Timbs are in the closet and now we are linking up with the first love again: more hot kicks than kung fu flicks.
The Good Book tells us to rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn. Well today I am going to be bringing the joy up in the internets, if the blogs and twitters will give me a little minute to testify. It’s not every day that a brother finally links up to his Holy Grail.
For those who have been keeping track, you’ll already know that I am all about the Nike SB line, Beaverton’s in-house line of skateboarding-friendly shoes. While I am less than amateur when it comes to four wheels, best believe Grand Master knows how to (kick) flip a couple pairs of uber-padded, super-stable, classically-colored Dunks.
But Real Talk is that I am a young head in the game. Nike SB has been around as a corporate entity since 2002, but I only really started getting fresh like that around 2005-6. In other words, I got into the Nike SB game just as the glorious Pink/Purple SB box era was drawing to a close. I’m talking all the OG classics – Tiffanies, Michael Lau, Heineken dunks. The year right after the (in?)famous Pigeon Dunk riots in NYC.
That summer I was living/studying in Beijing and getting down with my rap/streetwear family in Beijing, the Bustout crew, and because of their affiliations stayed around serious some serious heat for the feet (no athlete’s foot). I’m talking Air Max 1 Kiss of Deaths, Visvim FBT’s, Adidas Consortium x Neighborhood Superstars, etc. I came up on 3 or 4 serious pairs (the story of carting a summer’s worth of gear back to the States is for another time), but there was one pair of kicks I had seen floating around that I slept on: the Nike SB Dunk Highs designed by Todd Bratrud, a skate art OG. The community nicknamed this aqua/black pair the “Send Help” highs due to the graphic on the insole.
One of my first real sharp sneaker memories is walking along the street in China behind some Korean cat rocking the life out of a pair of Send Helps. This was the first pair of high-tops that I ever really appreciated. The color blocking is iconic, the material – a fine suede – so fresh that it can only be rocked on the sunniest and clearest of days. At the time, I considered this a negative point. I was young.
What I learned in the years since is that kicks like the Send Helps are not something to be rocked on the regulack like that. My Dunk Low CL’s are the daily drivers – these are a corvette or high-level pro tuned import. They require certain surroundings to be used to the fullest – but when time & space come together in the right combination of all things, they out-perform those daily drivers by miles.
I fronted on the Send Helps in the summer, and by the time I came around in late 06, they had been out of stores for months already, secondhand mark-ups climbing as high as $300+. Those who know the SFU code know that this is unconscionable.
In early 08, Nike released a pair of mid-cut Dunk SB’s that supposedly echoed the high-top Send Help colorway – I looked forward to them eagerly and copped early, but the substitution of “aqua fuel” for “blue reef” in the colorway, not to mention the distinctly un-premium materials and disappointing dunk mid construction (ankle strap? really?) left me unfulfilled. The mids would tide me over, but I was still fiending – and hard.
With prices still in the mid-to-high $200 range, I had to still lean back on grabbing a pair of the true send helps. And with fewer and fewer pairs appearing on the market, as stock settled out from resale hands, I essentially resigned myself to taking an L. The months passed into years, and I realized that the Send Helps had taken on official Grail status in my playbook. For other SB collectors, the Dunk grail is a scarcer, more prestigious pair – UNKLEs, Parises, What The Dunks, etc. But fiddddduck a hype beast, the wearable-but-flashy Send Help highs were my dream team.
Anyways, as I mentioned previously, I had been chilling on the sneaker market recently, content to make moves in my more extended sartorial repertoire. But as late March arrived – and with it both Spring weather as well as my 24th born day – I felt that ol SFU itch kicking in fierce again. The “F” in SFU stands for fiend for a reason.
And so as a birthday present from me to me I hit up the eBay trail. Searching for “Nike Dunk SB” in my sizes (8 + 8.5) I came across two pair of reasonably legitimate-seeming send helps, both in the low $100 range. I won one auction for a little over $110, but didn’t hit the seller’s fugazi reserve price (ol two-positive-feedback shady lookin cat) so I kept it moving, especially since they were a half-size too large.
Truth is, I was almost going to pass up the second seller because of some suspect dealings on the stitching and fine details (fake dunk detection is a well documented art). However, doing my due diligence (googling “Send Help SB legit”) turned up some other internet kid’s “Legit Check” on n-sb.org where an expert gave the thumbs up to this pair. Having performed sufficient recon on the competition like that, I knew it was time to move in strong.
Having copped and received shipping confirmation (but no tracking number) I was a kid waiting for the postman every day for a week before the joints finally popped in to my apartment one Friday afternoon. I immediately ditched the pair of kicks I had been planning to rock that day, and dug into my new pair of Send Helps. The purple SB box was pristine, straight from the store, and apart from a slight toebox crease in the left shoe, the dunks were as fresh as any boxed pair I’ve ever seen. I pulled them out and strapped up, and for the rest of the day (and week) walked around town with my eyes glued to my feet.
Sneaker Fiends! It can happen. Dreams do come true. Grails do get copped. Fire does get rocked. It’s what we do.
SFUnite!