Thump Sutras

Michael and I started Bloodisone around the idea of hiphop as more than a bottom up musical force, Americana; it's oft knocked down as jus' influential but not as the beautiful mutt of cultural tones it is- but east to west is so much more than coasts.

Meet Kansho Tagai. He took over deep Tokyo's Kyoouji temple 24 years ago and has started attracting 100+ more youngins a week to the spot since rapping *sutras.*

Think. An adoption of dialect universal to click an outlook to draw heads, eyes, to a predilection, an outlook. Fuck style! We got real live monks dropping cartridges on the wheels of steel, men in robes peepin' insight to spiritual root, catching the eye of Al-Jazeera to boots. Watch the piece, imagine that serene face "Imma do me!" Really, man makes you smile. That ain't fringe.

Hiphop as an art stands unique, growing stronger as it stretches out.

Fun to listen to the man talk about hiphop making feelins regardless of language- hell, that's Blood Is One as fuck- but that beautiful act of invitation through the thump makes us wonder, why rap influences from the East haven't echoed on our end earlier(they still haven't, and DJ Punjab didn't stick). Korean boy band H.O.T. got nominated, incidentally rapping, for a MTV video award; Japan's Boss the MC and Tha Blue Herb have popped up in our landscape from time to time(I lauded DJ Krush's meditative 1998 album Kakusei in early essay here before). Wu Tang notoriously renamed Staten Island their own Shaolin Temple, drawing each song sample and provenance from a prodigious and comprehensive love of 1970s Shaw Bros. Hong Kong cinema. Similarly, Brooklyn-based Monsta Island Czars forged modern legend MF Doom, a group founded on a premise of kaiju giant monster movies; later, MF Doom produced 2006's (Bloodisone must-listen perennial favorite) Take Me To Your Leader under the pseudonym King
Gheedorah.

Hiphop is a cultural indicator, canary in the cold mine of globalized life- Michael and I can row for hours(and often will) about coorelations between hiphop and ground-level artistic truth, old-school country, blues, outlaw, beebop, bluebeat, the working man's thump all-round... so here's a call. We need people worldwide to show us how hiphop collates their life. Maybe mainstream French hiphop versus underground from
Paris slums. Wherever you are, if the thump of your metronomic area aggregates the blues in your blood, Bloodisone gotta hear it. Guest bloggers, bloody rapper demos, we need to kick it off.

We got big shit planned and we ain't ready to steady it to one continent. The worlds bigger than that now. Respect's bigger than that now. Hiphop's bigger that. Blood is one, now. Keep that head knock live, whether it prayer beads or 808s.

-Will

Btdubs, thanks to Caitlin Ewing for the tip.