Friday, May 21, 2004
Scratch magazine examined | Worse than BEP? | Zero 7 reviewed
It's been on stands at select spots throughout NYC for about a week now, but I just picked it up yesterday: the new Scratch magazine aimed at hip hop DJ's and producers. This idea, a fully-fledged magazine on hip hop DJ-ing and music production, is one that is long past due and which other magazines have only been partially focused on (like Remix) or have been too narrowly focused to cover (like beat diggers' quarterly Wax Poetics or battle DJ 'zine Tablist).
I haven't really gone through it in any real depth yet but my intial thoughts are that they may have blown their load (somewhat) by having Dr. Dre as the feature cover story in the premiere issue. Where do you got from there? It also seems like they need to get a bit more in depth in their discussion of productiuon techniques but I'm not surprised producers they interviewed might not have wanted to really give up their secrets even though knowing how something is done and actually doing it yourself can be a huge divide to cross, epsecially if you are lacking the magic "X" ingredient (aka "talent")
Related reading:
- An SOHH.com article on Scratch magazine.
The Zero 7 show last night was great. True to the joke photo tagline I used in the post just linked, the crowd was virtually all white mid-twenty to mid-thirtysomething hipster professional types swaying blissfully to the chilled out soultronica grooves as their X5 keys jingled in their pockets (maybe). If there was one complaint, it was that the sound mix occassionally drowned out singers Sophie Barker and Tina Dico. But it didn't seem to faze incredible vocalist Sia Furler who commanded the stage and the audience's attention every time she even stepped close to the mic, while sole (and soulful) male vocalist Mozez sounded fine too.
The show ended with a four song encore including an instrumental version of their remix of N*E*R*D's "Provider" and a cover of Donovan's beat digger fave "Get Thy Bearings" sung by Mozez. How great would it have been if Pharrell had come out and done the vocal version with them or if Mos Def had been around to do the, incredible but impossible-to-find on wax, remix verison of "Umi Says"? Maybe next time? (Yeah, right!) (mp3 link via hiphopsite.com)
I thought nothing could be worse than the Black Eyed Peas/Darkness collabo story I posted the other day (which seemed to generate some heated reaction from various bloggers). Then came this: Ice-T to produce Hasselhoff rap album. (Ananova via Patrick T | Broken Language)
Brooklyn Fight Club. (New York Daily News)
Extreme Ironing. (New York Times)
But to end, for those who haven't already seen this: The Shining in 30 seconds, re-enacted by bunnies. (via Angry Alien Productions)
