Mother Earth of samples: Blue Note records

Blue Note records, the jazz label, has given me - your average avid hiphop listener, many an instrumental melody that mentally smoke up all those gritty hiphop records I've come to love. My respects to hiphop producers who carefully handpick jazz samples for their beats, and give us listeners everlasting gems. Nearly every hiphop producer, from Dr. Dre to Kanye, would've at some point in time had his hands dusty sifting through the basement looking for old vinyl jazz records to look for that one last sample that would make their artwork complete.

I came about this link that has J Rocc (who I learn is an accomplished beat junkie) mixing Blue Notes' compilation of popular hiphop-sampled jazz samples with the hiphop tracks that samples them. I'm done guzzling the bandwidth for the day so I'ma return tomorrow and roll that stream out.

Talib Kweli and Mick Boogie: MCEO

One of the finest additions to my mixtape collection - incredibly good music gifted to the masses for free - mixtapes such as these truly carry the spirit of a musician: music is like philosophy, and an accomplished philosopher would address a crowd of thousands without asking for a penny in return; all he seeks is a deeper insight into his mindworks by listening to himself and to the response of his audience. There're only a few Mick Boogies in the hiphop community but hopefully we will see them get the better of corporate music giants whose shortsightedness is outclouding the yeateryear shine of this crossover genre that is hiphop. Check out his mixtapes including this one at his website or at datpiff.

Talib Kweli's music will certainly be with me on my Noah's arc - first heard him on kanye's College Dropout and then went on to buy his album Kwality -- another great album. So when I heard he's out with Mick Boogie blacksmithing new music, I wanted in!

Elephant in the sand

I would never buy a Fat Joe album, not even at INR100 (at INR50..? maybe..for beat-scavenging). but a FatJoe-diss album served free by the good brothers of G-Unit? Hizell yeah! as i write i'm banging Red light Green light from the mixtape "Elephant in the sand". A 68mb download - a good 30 odd minutes of high quality sound, music, rapping, and well, cursing. But i'm into this for the first three goodies, and for this, i give it a 5.0/5.0.

Alas, this is also going to be the last of DJ Whookid's mixtapes..self-admittedly he's fed up with everything that smells like beef (read rap game rivalries, that are often fuelled by what else, mixtapes) and is going to retire now at 30 (!!) and live far away in his hut in Thailand.

Man...retirement at 30...if i retired today, move with my family away from all this chaos...to a cosy hut somewhere along the beaches of nammooru South Canara...would i still be able to affizzord the internet chizzarges to download mixtapes?? i think i need to kill the lights on this post right now, talk to my better half on retiring and chizzew on it...

Bad thing about mixtapes

Well, there ain't a bad thing. none. Mixtapes are better than commercial produccs these days, serious! and they're free. and they're downloadable. and with broadband, streaming's aces. So i get my wavepad out and scrape up the whole mixtape stream from the system mixer and there you have it fresh off nero's oven into a 10 rupee, appendable, mp3 cd for every 1200km-a-month odometer bump clocced from home to electronics city and bacc.

Mixtape ROI
So far, my investment on mixtapes has been INR200 (thats 20 cds, one mixtape per cd...now i'm burning mp3s...hey save the loose change..serious!) plus INR1000 on download costs -- thats INR60 per fingerpicced, self-sorted mixxtape album, a sixth of what i pay for a regular double-plastic draped jewelcased rap cd in a forum, musicworld, temptations or a planet-m -- hehe, now here's where a dj like Clinton Sparks would drop his adlib "Ssayy Somethin'!!" - rhetorically. but if u're not into hiphop, i'm surprised you got all the way down to reading this anyway ;-)