Aha!
to follow up on my post last week about High Fructose Corn Syrup and you,
there has been a new study that has garnered some controversy.
Check out this article from CNN.com
http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/03/25/corn.syrup.sugar/index.html?section=cnn_latest
All I’m sayin….Where’s Brandon at when you need his punk ass to comment on something worthwhile??
First Monica and Rocko wanna break up, then Fall Out Boy Break up,
and everyday I wake up….
See, a week and a half ago, I went to see the flick Our Family Wedding starring Forest Whitaker, Carlos Mencia, America Ferrara, My New Crush Regina King and my boy Lance Gross.
I went strictly in support of him and also because it doesn’t hurt to have that much star power in a Major film with an all minority cast. Dopeness.
Just when I was about to post up something in Praise of the homey and his starring role, he goes and pulls this shit! What do you mean you and Eva aren’t together anymore?! Public Statement?? Mutual?? A few Months before your wedding??
You and your fiance were suppose to be the bright new burning hope for Young Black love everywhere…a beacon that shone to exemplify that the invisible power struggle doesn’t have to exist, that there could be sex without scandal, that comittment still mattered, that 2 beautiful people (pause) can actually be a dope couple – you were our C-list Brad and Angelina!
Funny right? But this is what people are thinking. That’s waaaaay too much to put on one couple. But they were super symbolic and did inspire lots of Black love. I even felt stronger about my situations after reading articles on them. Anyone can tell you that whatever the circumstances surrounding it, a break-up is the craziest feeling and event that can take place in your emotional life, it’s got to be especially tough in front of the public eye. Iam glad that the general sentiment towards this news is one of sympathy and the media isn’t killing them with snide remarks or backhanded talk. Now I’m sure the parade of Eva hounds and Lance Groupies with googly eyes who have followed him since my school days with him at Howard are sure to resurface. I went to college with the kid when he was doing his track star thing and side modeling. Me and my fellow Bison started dying when we saw him pop-up in random videos like Tony Yayo’s “Curious“, and soon becoming the number one ‘it’ guy for getting dissed in Female R&B singers’ songs like Kelis‘ “Bossy” (where he gets slapped) and Mary J‘s “Take me as Iam” (where he gets wine splashed in his face).
Nevertheless, Gaining a starring role in a widely released Hollywood film is definitely a big deal, and for Lance, this has got to be the official stamp that he has made it. You can thank Tyler Perry for giving him his shot, or just hard work and charm. I guess that’s the balance of life at work huh? You gain something big, you lose something big…I hope this is not a sign that you cannot have both Love and success at the same time and be happy. That would just be the most depressing. As someone who has been dealing with the Break-up word alot recently, this puts things in some other kind of perspective for me, but nevermind all of that…
Since it’s Friday, I’m throwing in my 2 cents and suggesting that you when you go out to a movie this weekend, you consider Our Family Wedding. It’s brought to you by the same guy who did The Best Man and Brown Sugar (and we know how you love those 2!). And while it’s not all deep and thought provoking, it does touch on an interesting subject and is everything fluffy that you’ve come to expect and love from Hollywood.
Plus, support my boy!
I’m still proud of mr. Gross. And Iam SUPER proud of the hundreds of Howard kids I keep running into who I see doing their thing. There’s way too many to name, but I see you!! Good to see people working in their fields…
The first 4 years out, it seemed like everybody was teaching and working in restaurants, but now I see the Takeover. I see ya’ll in my Hood to – Harlem= Howard???
Word?!!
“HU, You Know!!!!!”
I leave you with a song…
Classic Sounds,
Like
Ok,
this was by request. The boy Mike Gordon asked me to Review Big L’s Classic debut for my next installment of this section. It was a no-brainer seeing as to how the Harlem pioneer is heavily responsible for the inception and inclusion of Punchlines in my writing style.
I’m sure Mike will have plenty to say after reading this review, since it’s an album near and dear to his heart.
The pulse of the Diggin’ In The Crates collective of the 90’s is One of my favorites from my area and one of my greatest influences in rap. I studied his style so much so that I kinda outgrew it once I broke down the mechanics of how it worked. His multi-syllable flow and patterns of stacked rhyming sentences with rapid-fire delivery is not easy to recreate without sounding like a biter. But it is one that’s also not as complex as it would seem. What was to be learned from it, however, was the importance of timing. In hip-hop, just like any form of entertainment, timing is everything. L was a master of this. Even early on before the hype around him that we’ve all come to know existed.
I missed this wave somehow. This album was a Columbia records release, when Sony still had some kind of foothold on hip-hop. The same house that gave the world Illmatic. A year after that and one before The Other Columbia records classic, The Score, Big L quietly slid in with his ‘wild style‘. This product of rap’s ever-so-fabled “Golden Era” marked a turn in several trends in hip-hop. It was kind of a crossroads…somewhere at the point when the dark, grimey, rah-rah rap was on his last leg and still popular, but at the launching of the flossy, overtly braggadocio conversational style New York hip-hop of the mid- to – late 90’s that was laced with witty one-liners. Big L’s debut stood right there. You’ll hear tones of both on Lifestylez…
Now, this album wasn’t neccessarily blaring out of speakers in the Harlem streets, unless I severely missed something. But I was right there, in front of the radio in the dawn of my Hip-hop -headness, and no Big L records on the radio to be found. I do recall hearing the beat from “Put it on” loosely around the city, but I’m sure a song like that and would-be hit “MVP” got overshadowed by the Biggie song that used the same sample during that year.
See, this was before blogs. Before there were comment walls or message boards to fill with praise and nerdy dissection of lyrics. This was when the now legendary freestyle with Jay-Z was just….a freestyle. Everything known of L was all word of mouth and hip-hopper buzz. Imagine how he would have flourished in the post internet-dependent world, where folks could have seriously appreciated his wordplay and hunger. The man was an unprecedented Beast! Yet and still, I didn’t catch on to This 94-95 incarnation of L. The Hype didn’t exist until right before he died unfortunately. Before it was second nature to throw up the L with your fingers at a hip-hop show, the buzz had just started brewing for L due to the rise of Mixtapes. His collabos were growing, and he had just released the notorious “Ebonics/Size ’em up” single. I guess it didn’t hurt that somebody put the battery in the back of D.I.T.C. and they started releasing plenty of singles in preparation for their long-awaited album as a group. The rumor of him getting signed to Roc-A-Fella records at the time didn’t hurt either.
But see, this was the Big L that caught my attention. In high school, the talk about him was non-stop. I remember vividly, the day I decided to take a cue from him…. I was in summer school at La Guardia (shout out to Reeenie!), but we were across the street from MLK high school. This was right after L had passed and a summer where everyone was so laid back and in the chill zone, but of course, delinquency brings out the rappers! I was drawn into a comparative cypher in front of King with 2 kids from Queens who seemed to have lines for days. It quickly turned to a battle where my witty street-poetry lines were just not holding up and seeming to grab as much attention from the crowd as the Q-boro kids. My fellow Harlemites on the side were looking at me with disgust, saying ‘damn son, how you let these kids from Queens eat you?!’, quoting their lines and all. I turned to my homegirl at the time and she told me that my punchline game was weak, and that was what people react to. It was at that moment that I looked down at my book of rhymes and saw the sticker that I had on the cover. It was an R.I.P. sticker of Big L. I decided to make sure I never lost the crowd or any kind of battle due to lack of lines.
In a way, I’m glad it all happened like that. I caught on to Big L at the perfect time. I was there. I even saw him on his block one day getting his hair braided and caught an ice-grill. “Ebonics” changed my life. I bought his posthumous album that Rawkus records tried their damnest to beef up, I bought the Lackluster Diggin In The Crates album that was super late and only interesting on L’s verses. But it was really this album, the debut, that made me think how underrated he was. I truly believe that he was on his way to that status. He would have at least touched that late 90’s Cam type of fame. My boy used to bring print-outs of verses from his first album to school and I used to trip off of the fact that these were punchlines from ’94 that were better than what was out then. Fab would’ve had to get his weight up! It’s really a shame that up until right before his death, he was mainly an Underground artist, with One classic underground album.
This album starts off with the aforementioned “Put it on” which is probably one of the livest track 1’s in hip-hop history and so synonymous with the times… and thumping bass heavy beat that stutters near the hook build-up, background posse cheers, shout outs, and a dj (Kid Capri in this instance) obnoxiously adlibing. Yet and still it contains some of the most memorable Big L lines ever. It’s followed by “MVP” and what I presume was slated to be the big single had the album showed any promise of selling, “No Endz, No Skinz“.
Yes kiddies, you can tell by the title what era this song is from, but then again, even retreating back to that mindframe and the sound of that era, I remember thinking that this song was perhaps 2 years out of place even for the time it was out. It employed that Jazzy horn based kind of hip-hop beat that was ushered in and overused in the early 90’s by the influx of nerdy rap groups and producers looking for something more. Not to mention, rappers who just wanted to pay respect to their pop’s favorite music. It also had a cheesy call and response hook that sounded so 1993 you would think the Fu-schnickens and Onyx were doing the background vocals. You might wanna blame that on producer Showbiz being in some kind of time warp, but I truly believe that this and the other Showbiz produced tracks on the album were just old recordings that were saved up and made the final cut. The song still contains some sense of content for L, which was not his strong suit. It also was laced with humor, which was his strong suit, as well as a penchant for super misogynistic lines that bordered on bragging about abusing Women.
L’s Domestic Violence rhymes littered this album periodically. For every clever line like “I’m lookin’ nothin like your poppa, I wouldn’t give a chic 10 cent to put cheese on a Whopper!“, there’s a “a chic asked me for a ring and I put one around her whole eye!” or “and if I get Aids, then I’mma start rapin’ bitches!” (“All Black“). Just real unneccesary shit here…
But this is the entire angle of L’s approach, shock value! He makes it a point to announce his hunger to a reckless degree of not caring how he expresses it. Blame it on the Harlem sentiment of the time, the previous era of rah-rah, say-the-craziest shit-you-can-say kind of rap, or just his eagerness to stand out and grab attention, but L went out of his way to say outlandish punchlines. He’s very much so from the school of thought brought out by his mentor, Lord Finesse, who handles a fair share of production on this project. But Finesse was one of the first guys along with Kane and Kool G Rap who began taking witticism seriously in hip-hop toward the turn of the 80’s decade and began focusing on compound rhyme schemes that landed on clever sentences aimed at belittling the competition. What we have today as the standard for most rappers who we consider “nice”, was revolutionary back then and what we witness with L’s lyrics, is the evolution of that. He was second generation…designed to surpass Finesse. And he did.
But in the anxiousness to exhibit this, L would push super hard, with super hard beats accompanying to show you how serious he was, even in the midst of deadpan humor. This was the ethic that had rappers mistaking “hard” for “real” or successful, so the beats on this album were predominantly dark and grimy. Blame it on Wu-Tang. The initial 3 songs that I discussed are misleading. Until we get to the second to last tracks, we don’t hear anything close to the upbeat or groovy vibe introduced at the beginning. Everything in between is one stark, menacing New York Stick Up-Kid soundtrack.
Sometimes it works, where it becomes apparent that L may be playing a role or creating a fictionally exaggerated version of himself, Like on the title track. The extreme scenarios depicted by l in this song clearly planted the seeds for stuff like Cam’s “Confessions“. Like I said, there was some kind of Harlem kid sentiment to be the best and outdo any other rapper that came before by pulling the crazy card. I guess the idea was to talk so insane that it trumped bragging itself.
Where Big L shined the most tho,
was in his storytelling and picture painting. Like a more hands on, and less poetic Nas, L weaved street stories from a narrative standpoint, usually in third person. They were relatable, tho Harlem-Centric (as were most of his rhymes – you already know! Harlem all day!), and easy to follow. From loose diatribes like “I can’t Understand it” and “Fed Up With The Bullshit“, to more solid tales like “Lifestylez...” and “Street Struck“, L was definitely an urban Griot in his own right.
What makes this album the most famous, is who was actually made famous or became so subsequently. The biggest tragedy, many believe, is that 2 of the most minor guests on this album went on to become 2 of the BIGGEST rappers to ever set foot in the game. Their fame even while L was still alive was like a slap in the face, because guess what? No Big L features on their projects! We never know what goes on behind the scenes for sure, but you can definitely see L’s sense of charity in full effect back then when he shares the mic with 7 other Harlem niggas destined to NEVER make it on the song “8 iz enuff“. In this mix is a young, unpolished Cam’ron who can get easily lost in the sauce if you’re not distinctly looking for him. This same generosity is extended on the Horrible track “The Graveyard“, where the names that you know on it are the only names worth knowing! Lord Finesse sets it off and Jay-Z (version 1.0) comes off as eager as L does, shoutin his verse and rapping with at least 4 different flows to make sure you know he’s got versatility. Safe to say, L was better than all of them at this point in their careers.
However, at some point in time, L got stuck. The dudes he was attempting to bring up had surpassed him in multiple aspects. He might’ve relied on his rhyme-for-rhyme style too heavily. Although he would often fore-go the couplets that his peers used and developed a unique pattern of stacking sentences and speeding up to slow back down, after a while it can get almost predictable. Or at least to me, what weighed that style down was the fact that in the frenzy to get to that oh-so special last line, he squeezed a bunch of random, awkwardly placed words and sentences in to make it connect. And if they all did interweave, then it was usually a series of wild sentences that would all lead to one outrageous conclusion, like on “The Graveyard” where L exclaims that he’s “lightin’ niggas like incense, gettin’ men lynched, and when tense, I’m killin infants for ten cents!” Really tho? This line resonated with me and my boy Brandon so much that we started referring to rhymes when rappers reach to make punchlines connect as that ol’ ‘infants for 10 cents’ shit.
Either way, Big L is one of the nicest ever, and I think he could’ve gave Big and Jay some comp had he got his content game up. L doesn’t welcome you into Harlem as a tour guide, he instead pulls a Training Day move on you; he puts you in the passenger seat and takes you as he makes his crazy runs and tells you to pay attention. This album is 139th street and Lenox avenue essentially. If you want to hear some of the greatest punchlines in hip-hop history, then peep this classic album. But if you’re looking for depth or some kind of Journey, this is not the record.
Overall, as a Classic Album, I give Big L’s Lifestylez Ov Da Poor N Dangerous 8 Candles out of a possible
4, 8, 12 or 16.
4(Classic Just because where it stands in Hip-Hop, whether it be the time of it’s release, it’s influence, or the popularity of it’s singles overall)
8(Classic because it was solid for it’s time, but may be a little dated or less than amazing by today’s standards)
12(Classic as a complete release and probably celebrated widely on the surface, but possibly lacking one key element – be it one song that doesn’t fit, a wack guest appearance, lyrics, lack of depth or beats)
16(Classic all around)
My Favorite joints are “Let em have it L“, “Street Struck“, “Lifestylez Ov Da Poor N Dangerous” and “MVP“
In the wake of the success of our Viral video, “Subway Bus or Walking”,
The boy Brandon Carter has taken things one step further and made it into a ringtone as well as turning the title into a T-shirt for all my Stylish Straphangers out there!
If you are a proud commuter who knows how to utilize that public transportation system in your city, save money and still somehow remain flyer than those driving in the Newest new, then Rock this whenever this season and let people know how you roll…
Here’s the link for the Tee
http://www.audiolife.com/store/BrandonCarter1/Merchandise.aspx
And for the ringtone
http://www.audiolife.com/store/BrandonCarter1/Ringtones.aspx
Like I told you before,
whenever you see this image above, you know that means that our esteemed author of
Sex & The Chocolate City missed her deadline.
This is the dunce banner for that.
So on behalf of the 16’s Candles family, please excuse the lateness or albeit absence of
Entry # 17,
TDJ‘s having a moment….
My Homey Komp’L just dropped his first video today in preparation for a mixtape by him and the other third of our Have-Knots trio, titled Channel Surfing.
The mixtape is due out this April, and this is just something to get you ready for what the boys have to offer.
Spring is in the air. Listen to the lines people!!
Shout out to Edel on the camera work and edit. This is the start of something…
Like I said before, It is Women’s History Month, and I will continue showing the love where I can here and there.
I stumbled across this clip from The Source.com and their coverage of the annual South By SouthWest festival that takes place in Texas e’rry year and attracts all of my contemporaries bubblin’ under the radar. In this particular clip, the boy WordSpit (you may know him from the McDonald’s dollar van commercial – or my shout out to him in the “Subway Bus Or Walking” joint), plays interviewer to fly Ladies Estelle and Ms. Nina B. We know they both hold it down for hip-hop culture hard!
Now I got this clip from a post Nina put up. Just wanted to show her love. She’s everywhere and always in the mix. She’s even on the intro to my website,
Act like you know!
How Dope is this???!!!
Yeah, Yeah, Healthcare Praise is all abuzz,
but how about immortality??!
We’ve all played with the idea of living forever. Recently, studies have developed that find a particular species of Jellyfish to be able to prolong it’s lifespan to an indefinite extent by regressing back to a primary stage of it’s life cycle.
The scientific term is transdifferentiation. It’s a form of regeneration that we see occur in lots of popular animals/organisms, it’s just that this Jellyfish does it to the extreme.
Now far be it for me to get all scientific on ya’ll, so peep the source where I came across this info for the details.
http://green.yahoo.com/blog/guest_bloggers/26/the-world-s-only-immortal-animal.html
Just something to think about. You can no doubt Guess that all kinds of probes will be done in the attempt to see how humans can learn anything from this to lead to some kind of fountain of youth breakthrough one day.
Would you if you could? Live forever that is….
“Forever, Ever?” (*cue Jay-Z song*)
Me and The Boy Brandon Carter back at it.
I have to give it up to Carter, he had an idea and a vision and he brought it to life. He hit me up with the idea to remake Lloyd Banks‘ ode to expensive whips (which is now New York and the internets “it” song of the month) into a humorous nod to the joys of being whip-less.
Something most of us can relate to. Unfortunately, If you’ve been following the blog, you know I lost my Pontiac, named, “Veen” at the end of January, so I too can now relate to the pedestrian pain. But had this been december, I’d pass on this song, like “ta!”. Oh how humbling it is to be on foot.
Anybody who knows Me and Brandon knows that nobody does it better than us when it comes to this kind of material. Back in Howard, we were the Satire kings and built quite the rep for injecting a much needed dose of laughter into the Blam Blam world of early 21st century Hip-Hop. Good to see the boys still got it and never missed a step. In fact, we’re better than ever!
I’ll tell you how so…
Brandon hit me up with the idea for this on Saturday. It was written Tuesday morning, recorded Tuesday afternoon filmed Tuesday evening, and edited on Wednesday and up for your enjoyment that night!
What you know about that?!
This is the perfect set-up for the upcoming release of Brandon’s Album,
Never Give A Fuck! (Yes, that’s the real title of the album – won’t find that in Wal-Mart)
I know, I know…But check him out at http://brandoncarter.ning.com/
And shout out to http://www.dajaz1.com for showing us Love yesterday!
http://www.dajaz1.com/2010/03/brandon-carter-feat-malik-16-subway-bus-or-walking-video/
You’ve heard the talking.
Apparently, so have the corn agriculturalists of America.
As the Country has progressed, or rather as people have followed one another into the stylized movement of making healthier choices, the main culprit who has taken the biggest fall and become a sort of face of what to stay away from is mr. HFCS. Or as my veggies like to call it, High Fructose Corn Syrup.
Now as someone who grew up reading labels on the backs of things I consumed, I’ve always seen this product in almost everything, and I knew that it had to be some kind of sweetener or sugar substitute. Despite my awareness of this, I never ventured far enough to actually discover what this ingredient was, where it came from (Besides the obvious, corn) and why it was so prevalent.
So now, in the common era of pseudo-health conscious people rebelling against the junk that’s been thrown in our faces and jammed down our throats, and opting for Whole Foods check-out lines, the inquiry was bound to surface. Only this inquiry is presented with frustration, a kind of Matrix-like unplugging that has left folks banging down the doors of manufacturers, Big brands, and the farming industry and FDA demanding answers to why we’ve been subjected to this product so heavily. The sentiment and downturn has become such a hot-button topic that recently it was the subject of a CBS news report.
In the coverage, a reporter even went so far as to state that
“High fructose corn syrup is just sugar with an image problem.”
Quite the statement. But why is High Fructose Corn Syrup in so many things?
Well,
the industry has proposed to answer this question and many others by setting up the site, SweetSurprise.com
By now, You may have seen the colorful tongue-in-cheek commercials aimed at making HFCS detractors feel dumb. If not, I encourage you to go check out the site if you’re interested and see the great efforts being made to dispel and dismiss the negative attention. Complete with multi-ethnic adorable babies, and cleverly placed family shots.
I strongly urge you to check out the myths section. Especially the Questions and Answers
http://www.sweetsurprise.com/myths-and-facts/hfcs-questions-answers
But to give you a balance of perspectives from both sides, please read this write-up from this site that I stumbled across that points out the darker side of things
http://www.helium.com/items/420475-the-dangers-of-high-fructose-corn-syrup
Where do you stand on this issue? All I know is that I stopped purchasing beverages with High Fructose Corn Syrup (Besides my occasional Vanilla Coke – it’s the best!) since 2007. I discourage my nephew from any juice that’s not 100% juice, and hate that I drink from the gun at the bar where I work at when I’m thirsty. Admittedly, I have not done the research my self, until I began writing this post, but when my veggie friends and nutritionists friends warn me against something enough times, I Listen and don’t hesitate!
I come from a section of life where unhealthy products are promoted, positioned and reinforced consistently through the local food providers, so this has been life for kids who grew up like me, opting for that quarter water or that $1.00 soda instead of that $1.00 water or $4.00 Naked brand juice with all natural ingredients that are easy to pronounce. As a matter of fact, our stores rarely have drinks like Naked. And if they do, you have to get past a whole front line of other enticing, colorful, witty-named drinks with sleek bottle designs and tempting flavors before you even notice them squeezed next to 50 Cent’s Vitamin Water Flavor.
We justify so much under the guise of ‘everything in moderation’, but how can you be moderate in the face of such over-abundance?
And with that, go check your Ocean Spray, Tropicana and Snapple!
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16's Candles 