Strong Arming Five Minutes w/ Krondon

Strong Arm Steady’s latest album is titled In Search of Stoney Jackson. At RapReviews we were in search of an interview with someone from Strong Arm Steady. As much as we wanted to just jump in the official RapReviews ride (i.e. my ’98 Subaru Legacy), throw the album into the CD player, and ride around Cali until we could find them, we decided it would cost way too much in gas to cross the country and it probably wouldn’t have really helped the cause at all, although the change in weather would have been nice. After doing some digging I managed to get in touch with Krondon and get five minutes of the Strong Arm Steady member’s time. Krondon is not one to mince words, so we were able to get quite a few questions in as we asked him about In Search of Stoney Jackson and his thoughts on being considered underrated. He also revealed the one thing “even the most thuggest thug” has.

Read the full interview at RapReviews.com.

Artist Of The Week - My Brother’s Keeper

This feature is a momentous one. It’s the 200th Artist Of The Week here at Adam’s World. For such a milestone I wanted to get an artist who’s been down from the start. I actually managed to do one better than that - I found multiple artists who’ve been down from the start in My Brother’s Keeper. My Brother’s Keeper consists of (from L to R) Larry "Scholar" Aruwayo, Terrance "Thinker" Kelly, Dwayne "Tzo" Stewart and Levar "L-Star" McGibbon. I first met Thinker and Tzo back when I was co-hosting a radio show called In Da Mixx and they came to the studio with longtime B-Lister Conscious. That was at least five years ago, so with my Artist Of The Week feature reaching the milestone of #200, I could think of no one more appropriate to give the honor to than My Brother’s Keeper.

A hip-hop quartet with unparalleled skills on the mic and behind the boards, My Brother’s Keeper headlined as one of the main acts at Bondfire in January at the Bowery Poetry Club in NYC. Their maxi single for “Master Musical Minds” / “Power Up” is available for download, and according to Scholar the group is over three quarters of the way done with a full length album, targeting a mid-summer release for it. L-Star notes the hip-hop scene has been changing as of late, and changing in a way that’s good for My Brother’s Keeper, saying “real people who are themselves are taking over.” It gets no realer than My Brother’s Keeper and this week I caught up with them to find out more about the group, including how they came together, what some of their inspirations are, and the aspects of NYC’s hip-hop scene that they feel don’t get enough recognition.

Adam Bernard: Start everyone off with the basics; how did the My Brother’s Keeper project come together?
Thinker: This was a long time in the making. We have been recording music together since 2001 but this project in particular got jump started by a beat race that Tzo and myself started in late January until late February of ’09, with me being the victor of the race, along with the catalog that Scholar had been cooking up for over two years.
Tzo: Damn you Thinker!!!
Thinker: {laughs} Being the hip-hop fans that we are, with all of these beats compiled, and with us having mutual admiration for each other’s prior works, we were inspired to select a few of our favorites to hopefully make something for the ages.

Adam Bernard: What do you feel each member brings to the group?
Scholar: Thinker is the musical genius. He brings a wide range of musical talent from production, to songwriting, to singing vocals, as well as being an emcee. L-Star, who also is a producer, brings high caliber energetic lyricism with charisma and charm. Tzo brings passion, soul, and truth, with harsh doses of reality. He’s also the nucleus of the group, the general. As for me, I am the enforcer. I bring dark, gritty, staircase rhymes with 90's style boom bap production.

Adam Bernard: I know there’s some crossover in membership between My Brother’s Keeper and Black Horde, but do you treat them as totally separate entities?
L-Star: We are two different entities. Tzo and I are part of Black Horde.
Tzo: The co-founders of the Black Horde to be exact. My Brothers Keeper is a totally new affiliation.

Adam Benard: Musically, are there differences between what you do with Black Horde and what you do with My Brother’s Keeper? If so, how would you characterize those differences?
L-Star: Musically Black Horde has a more aggressive approach than My Brother’s Keeper.
Tzo: Yeah, Black Horde’s content is a bit grittier.

Adam Bernard: OK, so tell me a little more about the music of My Brother’s Keeper. What are some of the inspirations you’re harnessing for this?
Thinker: A need for good music.
Tzo: Yeah, I really believe people have been downloading singles these days because they can't find a good album they can listen to all the way through. I can't remember the last time I heard an album I could listen to all the way through.
Thinker: And some people are only releasing singles because they can't make a real album.
Scholar: The music that I hear I AM NOT HAPPY WITH, so I figured that I'd make my own.

Adam Bernard: So what are people in store for from you musically?
Scholar: I think people are in store for some good music straight from the soul.
Thinker: Music from the soul, for the soul.

Adam Bernard: Talk to me about the name of the group. Obviously, there’s the line from New Jack City, but I’m guessing since you’re all significantly deeper than Lil’ Wayne there’s something more to it.
Tzo: Well, really we are here to make music for the people and we think they need something of substance that they can appreciate.
L-Star: It's not like Lil Wayne doesn't have any lyrics for the people {laughs}, but we have a different agenda.
Scholar: We were brothers before the music and the music keeps us together.
Tzo: And has brought us closer together.
Thinker: My Brother’s Keeper is formula of building a community and keeping a community together.
Tzo: And that means our sisters, too.

Adam Bernard: You are all veterans of NYC’s hip-hop scene. How has being a part of that scene affected your views on hip-hop and artistry in general?
Scholar: There’s a lot more unity in New York City than it’s given credit for, at least as far as the independent scene is concerned.
Tzo: And there’s a lot more talent in the independent scene than it’s given credit for. It’s just that it's saturated and sometimes it’s hard to filter out the real talent from the mediocre.

Adam Bernard: Finally, in all your years in the scene, what’s the nicest thing you’ve seen one artist do for another?
Tzo: Conscious has booked me for numerous shows just because he saw the potential in me.
L-Star: And when he gave Tzo shows he involved the entire crew if he could.
Tzo: I thank him all the time, but I want to thank him again.

Related Links

Bandcamp: mybrotherskeeper.bandcamp.com
Twitter: twitter.com/mybrotherskeeper
Facebook: facebook.com/pages/My-Brothers-Keeper
Blog: mybrotherskeepr.blogspot.com

Vid Pick: Kats - Popular Demand

Sometimes simplicity can be a beautiful thing. Take Kats' video for "Popular Demand." It has one crazy effect that constantly splits him in two, but other than that there's no set, no rental cars, no rented models, no obsessively overhyped crew around him, it's just a man and his rhymes, and isn't that what good hip-hop is really all about?

For more on Kats check out his Artist Of The Week feature.

To download his work head on over to FreeIceCream.net.

Is Pete Wentz an Evil Genius?

Some of you may remember my feature on last year’s Warped Tour and the not so glowing review I gave of an act called Millionaires. I referred to them as “The Powerpuff Girls attempting to rap over pop-techno beats,” and compared them to 2 Girls 1 Cup. The group’s EP had the Decaydance imprint on it, and their video for “Alcohol” featured Decaydance label owner Pete Wentz in it. Many assumed this meant Millionaires was part of the Decaydance roster. Wentz went to some lengths to deny that, but in retrospect, was deciding to release Millionaires’ EP in the summer of 2009 the favor Wentz later claimed it to be, or the mark of a man who could foresee what was on the horizon in pop music?

Let me be clear about this, Millionaires are not music to my ears. They are clearly aimed at a younger crowd and I actually think they could be potentially damaging to that crowd because their audience may still be at the point of being influenced by everything they hear. I don’t consider myself conservative in the least, heck, I love Akinyele, but his work is aimed towards adults. Songs about getting “fucked up” and sleeping around aren’t something I’d want my 12 year old listening to (if I had a 12 year old). The door has been opened for Millionaires, though, thanks to a club going dirty blonde named Ke$ha.

The emergence of Ke$ha and her hit “TiK ToK,” which is all about the joys of drinking and clubbing with no respect to one’s wallet, has proved that as long as a song is crafted properly, ignorant white girl rap will not only be accepted by the masses, but embraced. Heck, I’m not immune to it, I know half the lyrics to “TiK ToK.” The first time I heard it, however, my jaw dropped because I though Millionaires were getting airplay on Z100 (I quickly figured out it was too clean to be a Millionaires song). Ke$ha’s follow up, the even more shallow “Blah Blah Blah,” is currently climbing the charts and the more I hear it the more I realize the scary fact that Millionaires might very well be next up to bat.

This brings me back to Pete Wentz. He may have denied signing Millionaires to his label in 2009, but he did press up their CD, even if he claimed, at the time it was simply due to the fact that they all happened to be in the same place at the same time. Does that reasoning sound a little fishy to anyone else? Perhaps he was just trying to distance himself from a group that was getting ripped by every critic from here to Timbuktu and that he didn’t have to have an affiliation with. Oh what a difference a year, and one trashy pop-singer hitting number one on the charts, makes.

Now Millionaires look like a potentially bankable act, and something tells me Wentz, despite his denial of signing them, knew about this all along. He now has an established relationship with them, he pressed up their first album, and he was even in one of their videos. With all that laid out it’s hard to imagine he didn’t have a feeling they would go somewhere. I think this is all the mark of an evil genius. OK, so maybe it’s not technically “evil,” but I think that prefix makes it sound a lot cooler. The point is, Pete Wentz clearly knows what he’s doing.

As an aside - I wonder how many of these pop-rapper chicks realize they all owe a large portion of their checks to Gillette? I know you didn’t forget about her!

Pop Shots - Faces In Unexpected Places

Welcome to your weekly dose of pop world musings. Covering all things pop culture, this week Pop Shots is hitting you with thoughts on everything from a quarterback’s ex making it to the Super Bowl, to someone associated with New Zealand’s biggest band working with the Muppets, to the Jersey Shore cast going far far away from the boardwalk, and since it's Pop Shots you know everything is seasoned with a little bit of attitude.

Check it out at 101Distribution.com.

Artist Interviews - Only The Hungry

As many of you may know, I’m entering my fifth year at RapReviews.com (tenth year in the game overall) and over those years I’ve tried my best to deliver you Q&As with some of the biggest names in the business as well as some of the hardest working emcees, producers and label owners in the independent and underground scenes. Lately, the scales have tipped noticeably in favor of the latter. Let me assure you, it’s not because I’m an indie rap snob. It actually has everything to do with artists and their work ethic.

Read the full story at RapReviews.com.

Artist Of The Week - Dessa

A lifelong Minnesota native, Doomtree emcee Dessa felt a musical influence very early on in life thanks to her Bronx born and raised mother. “My dad, as he tells it, says he found her clapping my hands along with the radio to make sure that I would be able to keep time.” Her mother also encouraged her to ad-lib to the popular songs on the radio. Late last month Dessa revealed the latest fruits of those influences, her official solo debut, A Badly Broken Code. With the sheer variety of music on the album Dessa notes it’s a fairly difficult project to categorize, saying “it’s a bitch of a record to try to put on a planogram.” Also a poet, and published author, Dessa’s artistic accomplishments extend beyond her rhymes and songs. This week I caught up with her to find out more about her work, the biggest musical hurdle she’s encountered as an emcee, and how a run in with a husky, balding, middle-aged man reminded her of the universality of art.

Adam Bernard: Start me off with the Dessa story. Which came first, the poetry or the hip-hop?
Dessa: They kind of came simultaneously, but writing preceded both of them. I did creative nonfiction and I took some classes in college that really prompted me to consider trying to pursue it as a career when I read some authors who were doing short, true, stories, which I didn’t know counted as lit. I really liked it, but I wasn’t exactly sure how to get that stuff published, so music ended up being a more immediate possibility because I could see people in Minneapolis booking shows, performing live, pressing their own CDs, and selling and distributing those CDs on small scales. I knew what it would look like to try to make progress and I didn’t know what that progress would look like in the literary world.

Adam Bernard: Yet, you still ended up writing a book, Spiral Bound.
Dessa: I did! I felt a lot better afterwards. I think I had been really dissatisfied, and just kind of fussy, because my career certainly wasn’t making a lot of money, which didn’t bother me very much, but it didn’t feel like I was honoring this kind of literary impulse and it was starting to serve as a thorn in my side, so after publishing that book, even though it’s an independent publication, I felt so much better and it really reinvigorated my drive as a rapper.

Adam Bernard: Are there certain things you feel you can say, or emote, through one form of writing that you can’t through another?
Dessa: If there’s a term or phrase that seems to have a really interesting cadence or sonnet quality to it, that might be hard to include in an essay because essays need more substantial structures. I also think that in songs you have the opportunity to explore stream of consciousness stuff in a more satisfying way. I know that that there are stream of consciousness literary writers, but I haven’t really been satisfied by reading that stuff. It seems like a great writing exercise, but my impulse is to cull that to something more cohesive. In music I feel like the emotional tenor is oftentimes provided by the beat, so you have some more leeway to be able to be flexible as a writer because you’re working in tandem with a beat, which is in itself a very powerful emotional driver. You don’t have to ask your words to do all the work because they’re complimenting the work that’s being done.

Adam Bernard: How has everything you’ve done lead up to A Badly Broken Code?
Dessa: I was cutting my teeth as an emcee on False Hopes, which was a kind of unofficial release under the Doomtree Records banner a couple of years ago. Most of the rappers in Doomtree have put out a disc called False Hopes, it ends up being our series of unofficial releases, kind of like the Headshots tapes by Atmosphere, that kind of vibe. In the intervening years, the past four or so, I’ve contributed to a lot of the Doomtree collective releases and I think I’ve gotten a little bit more comfortable working in a variety of styles in doing so because I’ve had the opportunity to be a guest vocalist on a melancholy song, on a shit talking song, on a political song, and on a love song, so I was able to get a little bit of experience in each of those things. Now for A Badly Broken Code I feel like I’m in a position where I’m really able to release a product that reflects the wider range of musical expressions that I like. There’s club music, there’s introspective hip-hop fare, and there’s also hymnals, almost, a capella arrangements that I did myself.

Adam Bernard: You are the lone female member of Doomtree. How is it being the only injection of estrogen in an otherwise all-male crew?
Dessa: It’s been so cool within Doomtree. The hardest part, artistically, was just that I’m working with an instrument that’s different from what most of my favorite rappers have. My voice is higher and that makes things sound differently. When I would listen to the emcees that I admired, even if I were to just rap along, it was almost as if I was transposing something, like you’re playing something on guitar that was meant for piano. Trying to figure out how to do rap music with a female voice, for me, took a little while.

Adam Bernard: Do you have all the male groupies because you’re the only female in the crew?
Dessa: {laughs} You know, on the occasion that someone hits on someone in Doomtree at the merch table, the girls are so much more ferocious than the dudes. Maybe that’s because it’s presumed that female advances are always welcome, or maybe that’s because I have what amounts to eight older brothers mean mugging somebody over my shoulder. Every once in a while I’ll see a guy lookin and leanin and then I’ll look behind me there’s just eight dudes with their arms crossed like “nah, son.”

Adam Bernard: That’s hilarious! Speaking of shows, you’re going to be hitting the road with P.O.S. for a big tour starting February 2nd. With that in mind, what’s your fondest memory from one of your live performances?
Dessa: Performing at a club here in Minneapolis called The Uptown. It was not particularly well attended, there were maybe 100 kids on the floor, and there was one guy in the back, middle aged, rotund, and balding, and I thought oh that poor guy came into his neighborhood bar to have a beer and has to sit through a rap show. Afterwards he said he’d come because he’d read something that I’d written and posted that day. It was a poem about mercy. Learning how to forgive people is a lesson that I relearn, if not on a weekly, at least on a monthly basis. Real, true, honest forgiving is hard stuff. He’d read that poem about what it meant to forgive someone and he said that he’d come because he’d read it and that he called someone that he had been trying forgive that day. I didn’t know this guy and I just wanted to like collapse on his lapel. It really meant a lot to me. It really reinforced those ideas of the universality of art and all that touchy-feely stuff. It was a very sweet moment for me.

Related Links

MySpace: myspace.com/dessadarling
Twitter: twitter.com/dessadarling
Doomtree: doomtree.net