Blood Is One Mission Statement

By now, I've increased the BOI presence on Twitter, connected with alot of people and expressed the unorthodox views on hip hop of myself and Will Pierce. I've connected with several artists who I hope to work with to build both the visibility of this website and of themselves.

I adore hip-hop and legitimately think that it, as a genre, is the cry of a generation. Both Will and I seek through this project to help give the genre the respect it deserves. That's a big mission but we're going to try.

Future projects include an increase in interviews, increased promotion of artists and an eventual literary project. I have planned a book on hip-hop for a long time and this is the best place to launch something like that.

Peace
Michael

The Zen of Primary Hip-Hop

Does it get better than My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy? Of course it does. What has it done to thump the world so deep?

Maybe it's the epoch of striking crossovers began by Walk This Way. 'Ye in his own brand of mastercraft motherfuckery has invited both autotuned neo-folkist Bon Iver(the hell else would you describe him?) for the single and Elton John for an almost-too-long-enough piano solo, placed carefully in front-center row, middle of nowhere. Takes balls. Much less to pull it off.

Sure it's a personal work, and the kid's tastes run diverse. But on a more meta level, the album's endearing- a telling and honest moment in mad respect for hiphop's origins.

Uniquely as a genre, hiphop developed sort of tangentially out of raw pop culture- elements of bebop, spoken word, jazz, irrelevant to try to list here- it never had the sort of cellular branching other forms of music had. Classical as we know it began as string trios, music on rails, rigid one-zero-one structure; unwilling to explore the glory it represented; and within a few hundred years, boom Tchaikovsky. Rock and roll roots in blues- man and guitar front porch- the same structures took decades to flesh out, and never entirely.

Hip hop for such a prime cultural creative force never had the same upbringing. It is the mutt of pop culture. Could you reverse-engineer it? Could you make an origin story, start over, reduce hip-hop to binary?

If not just as a genre but as an imposing influence on all what is, hiphop needs a reflection, a meditation on itself. What is essential about it- headphones in, streetlight, beat, texture- and no one does efficient, instrumental hiphop like Japan's DJ Krush.

His 1998 instrumental classic Kakusei and 1997 monolith Milight fulfill a loose basis for hiphop as binary language; touches on texture && open air all art needs, like the front por...fuck naw, the zen sand garden with churning Technic tables in place of a rake. Krush's collabs with rappers the world round about individualism, mourning and beyond have spun some of the most spectacular flows time's gifted the cold earth(including maybe my top 1 list). Get back.

Yeah, yeah, outside of pseudointellectual bullshittery and suchlike posturing, it has a place in the public thump- Lil' Wayne has been a timely surprise curator of primary hiphop with A Milli(that link is your licensed excuse to listen to it again you're welcome) and the surprise Six Foot Seven Foot; take one basic template, one unbroken flow, swing that shit where it belongs. I guess we're always about to find out where that is.

Glass half full / I'll spill ya

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Oh, howdy. I'm Will. Elsewhere you can find me here. By the way you're going to want to bookmark Blood Is One or add us to your Google Reader and whatever. Things are happening.

Multiple Skin Tones, The Blood Is One

Welcome to the first post for The Blood Is One, a hip-hop enthusiast blog.

The genesis of the blog was when my friend Will Pierce sent me a comic book themed song that pitted the world of comic books against the most famous rappers in the game:

I listen to alot of hip-hop and have written professionally about rappers and rap groups for Seaspot magazine and Earthwalkers Magazine. I had never heard what he sent me before. I figured that he would be as damn good of a partner in something like this as anyone else.

Neither of us look like rap guys and if you visit either of our Twitter accounts (@mopowell and @greatistheworld, respectively), that vibe will likely not translate. Nevertheless, I think and hope that we will provide a service to our readers in exploring all facets of the genre and bringing to light untapped gems and new talents. We may cross into other genres because we're like that. I'll be starting this out on Blogger and may choose a new platform if things work out well. Likewise I will recruit more people to the blog if things work out.

I've created an e-mail account for this blog at bloodisone@gmail.com. If you want to contact us, you can leave a comment or send something there.