Poor Vida - Underground Hip Hop

The Spotlight: New Single: GOAT - Lead

Written by Colin Roy Wednesday, 15 May 2013 18:48

GOAT (Grades Of Absolute Truth) encapsulates the definition of diversity in music. You might see him perform an intimate acoustic set at a coffee house one night, only to light up a stage with multiple features and a supporting DJ at a packed house at Trees the following night. At the basic level, one can describe his sound as southern, hovering somewhere in middle of a clash of rock, blues, and hip hop. We asked GOAT for some insight into the production process and some underlying themes behind his newest single, "Lead".

&amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://musicbygoat.bandcamp.com/track/lead"&amp;amp;amp;gt;Lead by GOAT&amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;gt;

Can you describe the inspiration for writing this song?

Oddly enough, I wrote the chorus lyrics & melody a few years ago. I was living near Greenville Ave & Ross in Dallas. Since I'd been there, several break-ins, robberies, and even a sexual assault had been committed on my street. JackRabbit James was living with me, at the time, and we always used to joke about how stupid it would be for someone to break into our place since we both have guns under our pillows. So those jokes inspired the hook. The verses and bridge were written around it.

It sounds like there's a heavy helping of live instruments, who are the musicians behind the music and what was the production process like?

There are two musicians behind it - Justin "Double J" Jones & Mike Warren. I'm lucky to have these guys in my corner, both are amazing. Double J constructed everything except the guitars. My cousin Mike did the guitar cuts when we were close to finished with the track. The production process went quickly. I came to Double J with the chorus melody, then he began playing various chord progressions over it. Once we decided on that, I let Double J do his thing with it. What he composed was an absolute perfect fit for the message.

It's pretty obvious you are an advocate of the 2nd Amendment. How do you feel about our current gun control laws?

Oh yeah, I'm an advocate, but don't take me as some trigger-happy lunatic. At its core, this song's about protecting your family from harm - that's it. Guns have been a positive force in my life and no one can change my opinion about that. When I think about the banning of assault rifles or magazines, I don't see the point. Making something illegal doesn't stop access to it. If criminals obeyed laws, we wouldn't have criminals. With that being said, I don't think the rights of people that obey laws should be stripped.

As a teacher, do you feel that teachers should be allowed to carry guns in the classroom?

With the proper training & evaluation, I don't have a problem with it. Do I think every teacher should have a pistol on them? No. But I don't see much of a difference between your child being in a public place with strangers holding CHLs and your child being in a classroom with an armed teacher you've trusted to educate your kid.

Download "Lead" Now

iTunes | Bandcamp | Amazon | Google Play

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The Spotlight: New Mix: DJ Rob Viktum - Modern Day Throwbacks Vol 1

Written by Joel Salazar Thursday, 18 April 2013 09:51

Yesterday afternoon saw the release of a new mixtape by the DJ, producer and founder of Low Post Music, Rob Viktum. Rob has been holding down the decks and residencies as long as anyone can remember, so it was only fitting to hear a fresh new tape with fresh beats and lyrics. Be sure to stop by and visit his lables site, Low Post Music to find out about all the projects they have working and future releases. Sit back and enjoy the mix!

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The Spotlight: Jailhouse Roc: The FACTS About Hip Hop and Prison for Profit

Written by Joel Salazar Wednesday, 17 April 2013 20:52

Earlier this week we received an e-mail about possibly getting a story out that many consider to be taboo. It's one of those topics that many people turn their cheek to and look past what is right in front of us. Help us welcome Homeboy Sandman as to the site and if anything you read sparks some interest, please share. Below is a short bio on him to get you caught up, and the main story is from the man himself. Enjoy.

Homeboy Sandman is a musician. His genre is hip-hop. An emcee that prides himself on musical growth and evolution, he has adopted as his motto and creative mission statement, "Boy Sand like you've never seen him before. As usual." Raised in Queens NY. Academic stints in New Hampshire, Philadelphia, London and Long Island. One semester short on two different graduate degrees. A couple of years of NYC Public School teaching thrown in there in between. 9th and 10th grades. Some bartending too, at the legendary Lennox Lounge in Harlem. That's where Shaft used to drink. December 2006 he decides to cut all that miscellaneous nonsense and follow his passion. His first album came the following year.Before signing to Stones Throw he'd already been chosen as a coach on MTV's MADE, featured in preeminent print hip-hop rags XXL and The Source, and perpetually championed on foremost online hubs. And since the signing, his accolades have extended beyond the realm of the hip hop specific. Rolling Stone has noted his "skill for wordplay that keeps you hooked." NPR has highlighted his "artful, hysterical, disobedient hip-hop that you can dance to." Pitchfork has straightforwardly dubbed him "one of the best pure lyricists around."He writes regularly for The Huffington Post, some for Gawker. While most of his writing is music, it appears he'll write wherever a lot of people are looking. If he had an opportunity to give a speech at a huge rally he'd take that too, so more than anything else he just wants to spread the word. Maybe he just wants attention. Attention for being himself though.

Jailhouse Roc: The FACTS About Hip Hop and Prison for Profit

GoldenUndergroundTV recently released an interview I did with them late last year. I got a bit animated at the end. Only so many interviews in a row I could handle being asked about Chief Keef.

My tirade wasn't really about Chief Keef. It wasn't about Gucci Mane or Wocka Flocka or any of the acts spontaneously catapulted into stardom by synchronized mass media coverage despite seemingly universal indifference (at the very best) regarding their talent. Whose arrests, involvement in underaged pregnancies, concert shootouts, and facial tattoos, dominate conversation for weeks at a time, with their actual music a mere afterthought, if thought of at all.

My tirade was about marketing. It was about media powers seeking out the biggest pretend criminal kingpins they can find, (many of whom who shamelessly adopt the names of actual real life criminal kingpins like 50 Cent and Rick Ross), and exalting them as the poster children for a culture. It was about an art form reduced to product placement, the selling of a lifestyle, and ultimately, a huge ad for imprisonment.

This is not my opinion.

Last year Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the biggest name in the private prison industry, contacted 48 states offering to buy their prisons. One stipulation of eligibility for the deal was particularly bizarre: "an assurance by the agency partner that the agency has sufficient inmate population to maintain a minimum 90% occupancy rate over the term of the contract.

What kind of legitimate and ethical measures could possibly be taken to ensure the maintenance of a 90% prison occupancy rate?

Two months later an anonymous email was sent out to various members of the music and publishing industries giving an account of a meeting where it was determined that hip-hop music would be manipulated to drive up privatized prison profits. Its author, despite claiming to be a former industry insider, did not provide the names of anyone involved in the plot, nor did he specify by which company he himself was employed. As such, the letter was largely regarded as a fraud for lack of facts.

Here are facts:

Ninety percent of what Americans read, watch and listen to is controlled by only six media companies. PBS's Frontline has described the conglomerates that determine what information is disseminated to the public as a "web of business relationships that now defines America's media and culture." Business relationships. Last year a mere 232 media executives were responsible for the intake of 277 million Americans, controlling all the avenues necessary to manufacture any celebrity and incite any trend. Time Warner, as owner of Warner Bros Records (among many other record labels), can not only sign an artist to a recording contract but, as the owner ofEntertainment Weekly, can see to it that they get next week's cover. Also the owner of New Line Cinemas, HBO and TNT, they can have their artist cast in a leading role in a film that, when pulled from theaters, will be put into rotation first on premium, then on basic, cable. Without any consideration to the music whatsoever, the artist will already be a star, though such monopolies also extend into radio stations and networks that air music videos. For consumers, choice is often illusory. Both BET and MTV belong to Viacom. While Hot 97, NYC's top hip hop station, is owned by Emmis Communications, online streaming is controlled by Clear Channel, who also owns rival station Power 105.

None of this is exactly breaking news, but when ownership of these media conglomerates is cross checked with ownership of the biggest names in prison privatization, interesting new facts emerge.

According to public analysis from Bloomberg, the largest holder in Corrections Corporation of America is Vanguard Group Incorporated. Interestingly enough, Vanguard also holds considerable stake in the media giants determining this country's culture. In fact, Vanguard is the third largest holder in both Viacom and Time Warner. Vanguard is also the third largest holder in the GEO Group, whose correctional, detention and community reentry services boast 101 facilities, approximately 73,000 beds and 18,000 employees. Second nationally only to Corrections Corporation of America, GEO's facilities are located not only in the United States but in the United Kingdom, Australia and South Africa.

You may be thinking, "Well, Vanguard is only the third largest holder in those media conglomerates, which is no guarantee that they're calling any shots." Well, the number-one holder of both Viacom and Time Warner is a company called Blackrock. Blackrock is the second largest holder in Corrections Corporation of America, second only to Vanguard, and the sixth largest holder in the GEO Group.

There are many other startling overlaps in private-prison/mass-media ownership, but two underlying facts become clear very quickly: The people who own the media are the same people who own private prisons, the EXACT same people, and using one to promote the other is (or "would be," depending on your analysis) very lucrative.

Such a scheme would mean some very greedy, very racist people.

There are facts to back that up, too.

Prison industry lobbyists developing and encouraging criminal justice policies to advance financial interests has been well-documented. The most notorious example is the Washington-based American Legislative Council, a policy organization funded by CCA and GEO, which successfully championed the incarceration promoting "truth in sentencing" and "three-strikes" sentencing laws. If the motive of the private prison industry were the goodhearted desire to get hold of inmates as quickly as possible for the purpose of sooner successfully rehabilitating them, maintenance of a 90% occupancy rate would be considered a huge failure, not a functioning prerequisite.

Likewise, the largest rise in incarceration that this country has ever seen correlates precisely with early-80's prison privatization. This despite the fact that crime rates actually declined since this time. This decreasing crime rate was pointed out enthusiastically by skeptics eager to debunk last year's anonymous industry insider, who painted a picture of popularized hip-hop as a tool for imprisoning masses. What wasn't pointed out was that despite crime rates going down, incarceration rates have skyrocketed. While the size of the prison population changed dramatically, so did its complexion. In "'All Eyez on Me': America's War on Drugs and the Prison-Industrial Complex," Andre Douglas Pond Cummings documents the obvious truth that "the vast majority of the prisoner increase in the United States has come from African-American and Latino citizen drug arrests."

Add to this well-documented statistics proving that the so-called "war on drugs" has been waged almost entirely on low-income communities of color, where up until just two years ago, cocaine sold in crack form fetched sentences 100 times as lengthy as the exact same amount of cocaine sold in powdered form, which is much more common in cocaine arrests in affluent communities. (In July 2010 the oddly named Fair Sentencing Act was adopted, which, rather than reducing the crack/powder disparity from 100-to-1 to 1-to-1, reduced it to 18-to-1, which is still grossly unfair.) This is not to suggest that the crack/powder disparity represents the extent of the racism rampant within the incarceration industry. The U.S. Sentencing Commission reported in March 2010 that in the federal prison system, even where convicted for the exact same crimes, people of color received prison sentences 10% longer . Where convictions are identical, mandatory minimum sentences are also 21% more likely for people of color.

Finally, let us not forget the wealth of evidence to support the notion that crime-, drug- and prison-glorifying hip-hop only outsells other hip-hop because it receives so much more exposure and financial backing, and that when given equal exposure, talent is a much more reliable indicator of success than content.

Yasiin Bey (formerly Mos Def) put it best; "'hip-hop" is just shorthand for 'black people.'" Before our eyes and ears, a "web of business relationships that now defines America's media and culture" has one particular business raking in billions of dollars while another defines the culture of a specific demographic as criminal. Both business are owned by the same people. Mainstream media continue to endorse hip-hop that glorifies criminality (most notably drug trafficking and violence), and private prison interests, long since proven to value profits over human rights, usher in inmates of color to meet capacity quotas. The same people disproportionately incarcerated when exposed to the criminal justice system are at every turn inundated with media normalizing incarceration to the point that wherever there is mainstream hip-hop music, reference to imprisonment as an ordinary, even expected, component of life is sure to follow.

Conspiracy theorists get a lot of flak for daring entertain the notion that people will do evil things for money. Historical atrocities like slavery and the Holocaust are universally acknowledged, yet simultaneously adopted is the contradictory position that there can't possibly be any human beings around intelligent enough and immoral enough to perpetrate such things. Even in the midst of the Europe-wide beef that was actually horse-meat fiasco, and the release of real-life nightmare documenting films like "Sunshine and Oranges," there is an abundance of people content to believe that the only conspiracies that ever exist are those that have successfully been exposed.

The link between mass media and the prison industrial complex, however, is part of a very different type of conversation.

The information in this article was not difficult to find; it is all public.

This is not a conspiracy. This is a fact.

www.homeboysandman.com

(photo credit Raul Buitrago)

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The Spotlight: New Music: Raw Elementz "Late Night Dreaming" Produced by Glo Gaines

Written by Whytney Joy Monday, 15 April 2013 17:17

The old becomes new again as Raw Elementz’ revamps the retro for Late Night Dreamin’ – his “[dedication] to all the dreamers and believers.” Drawing inspiration from all time periods seems to be thematic for Raw’s sound, as evidenced as early on as his mixtape Music from the Sole, and Late Night Dreamin’ is no exception. Reminiscent of his song Life Changing produced by MF Doom, his latest with GloGaines plays on the juxtaposition of jazz with verse, and he allows the sample to play the livewire while he remains steady and in control, sharp and articulate. This one will be an underdog, but just as Raw aspired to do, it does well to bring to life the artistic process and a longing for more.