TTG - Who Are You Now, Old Man?

Hello everyone! Following is a song, for your enjoyment, that I wrote for my friend Eva Gnostiquette as part of our music group TTG.


 

Rap's Generation Gap

Westside and Doom - Gorilla Monsoon

I remember back in 2005, vaguely, DangerDoom being my favorite album. MF Doom is amazing - right next to Kool Keith and Eminem in his grasp of absurdity and irony. I never heard of Westside Gunn before but this is a classic Doom track.
 

Fr. Pontifex - Invasion of the Light

If You Are Enjoying Blood Is One, Please Also Check Out Radical Second Things

It seems as if, at least right now, Blood Is One is bringing in a bit more traffic than my blog Radical Second Things. I'm hoping that this is a positive relationship and I don't keep the two separate. I hope to advance the careers of artists like Often Spaced and Kenan Bell and, by effect, also expose the RST project to people who may never have heard about it.

For those who don't know, Radical Second Things is a religious project based on liberation theology, a radical Jesuit branch of Catholicism that took off in Central and South America in the 1970s and 1980s. I have so far put together two print editions of Radical Second Things and will soon put together the third. I'm also hoping to put together a print edition of Blood Is One if this revamp of it really does work out. Please check out the print editions - you can purchase them on Magcloud:

Re-Introducing Kenan Bell

In my last post, I said that it seemed like Kenan Bell had dropped off from the world. I had checked up on him on YouTube and sites like Spotify a few times over the last few years and only found stuff he produced back in 2011 and 2012 (he was really active then). However, it does look like he is still active. Check out this great experimental film that he starred in this year:



This is great stuff and really in tune with the ethereal stuff that Often Spaced is producing. Blood Is One Neo-Hip-Hop Collective - if you want to be part of it again, Kenan, just let me know, homie!!

Again, everyone, please donate so that I can make this all a reality.

Blood Is One Flashback

All the way back in 2011 (not that long ago, I know, but work with me here), right before my drug withdrawal episode, Blood Is One debuted as a website. We were serious about it - the above image is a promo shot a friend and I produced for Carl Roe. I had the support and association with two rap acts - Kenan Bell and Carl Roe. They put together one song to help with the website called "Killers," which I still honestly think is pretty dope:


My drug withdrawal was a bit brutal and I fell off of hip-hop world. Nothing was inspiring. I got Eminem's Marshall Mathers LP 2 and liked it plenty but besides that, I felt like an old man who had been there during Woodstock wondering what all this 1980s hair metal was about. Kenan's music never really took off and he seems to have dropped out of the world while I actually found myself unfriending Carl Roe - his music got weird and he seemed to be on the Trump train, which is a bit weird when you make hip-hop but whatever. I honestly stopped listening to hip-hop for the first time since I was a little kid for well on several years.

I got two albums, Yelawolf's Love Story and the Southpaw soundtrack, and it made me enthused again. I remember getting really excited about Yelawolf when I started this website. However, his major label debut Radioactive was bad even by his own estimates. Love Story was a genuine classic, however, and everything he has put out since has only built on it.

Hip-hop, like rock or jazz, isn't going to be exactly what it started out as. The crack epidemic, 1990s political environment and everything that produced hip-hop to begin with isn't just going to repeat itself. The genre isn't what it was and moves a whole lot slower than it once did but that doesn't mean the inspiration is gone. It's necessary that the art is different. I'm really glad to artists like Often Spaced or Ras Dude who are making this a productive project and one that is still here despite all sorts of forces against it.