Fans Against Fake Bands » Rap & Hip Hop

Beastie Boys

videeoo — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 20:08:57 +0000

Rating 5 Stars Beastie Boys are one of the longest lived hip-hop acts worldwide and continue to enjoy commercial and critical success in 2009, more than 25 years after the release of their debut album. On September 27, 2007, the Beastie Boys were nominated for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In 2009, the Beastie Boys released digitally remastered deluxe editions of their albums Paul’s Boutique, Check Your Head’, Ill Communication and Hello Nasty. Beastie Boys is an American hip hop group from New York City. The Beastie Boys comprises Michael “Mike D” Diamond, Adam “MCA” Yauch, and Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz. Since around the time of the Hello Nasty album, the DJ for the group has been Michael “Mix Master Mike” Schwartz, who was first featured in the song “Three MCs and One DJ”. Beastie Boys began as a hardcore punk group in 1979, appeared on the compilation cassette New York Thrash with Riot Fight and Beastie, and released their debut EP in 1982. After achieving moderate local success with the 1983 release of experimental hip-hop 12″ Cooky Puss, the Beastie Boys switched to hip-hop in 1984 and a string of successful 12″ singles followed culminating with their debut album Licensed to Ill (1986) which enjoyed international critical acclaim and commercial success. The Beastie Boys are well-known for its eclecticism, jocular and flippant attitude toward interviews and interviewers, obscure cultural references and kitschy lyrics, and for performing in outlandish matching suits. Source and more information: Wikipedia

Eminem

videeoo — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 00:15:58 +0000

Solo Act – No rating Marshall Bruce Mathers III (born October 17, 1972), better known by his stage name Eminem, is an American rapper, record producer, songwriter and actor. Eminem quickly gained popularity in 1999 with his major-label debut album The Slim Shady LP, which won a Grammy Award for Best Rap Album. The following album, The Marshall Mathers LP, became the fastest-selling hip hop album in history. It brought Eminem increased popularity, including his own record label, Shady Records, and brought his group project D12 to mainstream recognition. Eminem has won a total of 9 Grammy Awards. The Marshall Mathers LP and his third album, The Eminem Show also won Grammy Awards, making Eminem the first artist to win Best Rap Album for three consecutive LP’s. In 2002, he won the Academy Award for Best Original Song for “Lose Yourself” from the film 8 Mile, in which he also played the lead. “Lose Yourself” would go on to become the longest running #1 hip-hop single. Eminem then went on hiatus after touring in 2005. He released his first album since 2004′s Encore, titled Relapse, on May 15, 2009. Eminem is the best-selling artist of the decade, and has sold more than 80 million albums worldwide to date, making him one of the best-selling music artists in the world. Eminem is also ranked as one of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time by Rolling Stone magazine. He was also named the Best Rapper Ever by Vibe Magazine. Including his work with D12, Eminem has achieved eight #1 albums on the Billboard Top 200 and 12 number one singles worldwide. In December, 2009 Eminem was named the Artist of the Decade by Billboard Magazine. Eminem is the best selling rapper of all time. According to Billboard, Eminem has two of his albums among the top 5 highest selling albums of the decade. Source and more information: Wikipedia

Public Enemy

videeoo — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 23:50:54 +0000

Rating 3.5 Stars Chuck D put out a tape to promote WBAU (the radio station where he was working at the time) and to fend off a local mc who wanted to battle him. He called the tape Public Enemy #1 because he felt like he was being persecuted by people in the local scene. This was the first reference to the notion of a public enemy in any of Chuck D’s songs. The single was created by Chuck D with a contribution by Flavor Flav, though this was before the group Public Enemy was officially assembled. According to Chuck, The S1W, which stands for Security of the First World, “represents that the black man can be just as intelligent as he is strong. It stands for the fact that we’re not third-world people, we’re first-world people; we’re the original people of the earth. On the track “Louder Than a Bomb” from It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Chuck D reveals that the D in his nickname stands for Dangerous. Developing his talents as an MC with Flavor Flav while delivering furniture for his father’s business, Chuck D (Carlton Douglas Ridenhour) and Spectrum City, as the group was called, released the record “Check out the Radio,” backed by “Lies,” a social commentary—both of which would influence RUSH Productions’ Run-D.M.C. and Beastie Boys. The group was signed to the still developing Def Jam Recordings record label after co-founder Rick Rubin heard Chuck D freestyling on a demo. Around 1986, Bill Stephney, the former Program Director at WBAU, was approached by Sam Mulderrig and offered a position with the label. Stephney accepted, and his first assignment was to help Rubin sign Chuck D, whose song “Public Enemy Number One” he had heard from Andre “Doctor Dré” Brown. According to the book The History of Rap Music by Cookie Lommel, “Stephney thought it was time to mesh the hard-hitting style of Run DMC with politics that addressed black youth. Chuck recruited Spectrum City, which included Hank Shocklee, his brother Keith Shocklee, and Eric “Vietnam” Sadler, collectively known as the Bomb Squad, to be his production team and added another Spectrum City partner, Professor Griff, to become the group’s Minister of Information. With the addition of Flavor Flav and another local mobile DJ named Terminator X, the group Public Enemy was born.” Public Enemy opened for The Beastie Boys on some of their East Coast concerts, including Philadelphia, Newark and Brooklyn. Their debut album, Yo! Bum Rush The Show, was released in 1987 to critical acclaim. The album was the group’s first step toward stardom. The group released the album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back in 1988, which performed better in the charts than their previous release, and included the hit single “Don’t Believe the Hype” in addition to “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos”. Nation of Millions… was voted Album of the Year by the The Village Voice Pazz and Jop Poll, the first hip-hop album to be ranked number one by predominantly rock critics in a major periodical. It is also ranked the 18th best album of all time by Acclaimedmusic.net. In 1990, the group released Fear of a Black Planet which continued their politically charged themes. The album was the most controversial album in the hip hop community. The song “Fear of a Black Planet” addressed the fear some white people have of black and white relationships. It was the most successful of any of their albums and, in 2005, was selected for preservation in the Library of Congress. It included the singles “Welcome To The Terrodome”, “911 (is a Joke)”, which criticized emergency response units for taking longer to arrive at emergencies in the black community than those in the white community, and “Fight the Power”. The song is regarded among the most popular and influential in hip-hop history and was the theme song of Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing. It was ranked the 80th best song of all time by Acclaimedmusic.net. The song attacked the standard American Icons Elvis Presley and John Wayne. The group’s next release, Apocalypse ’91…The Enemy Strikes Black, continued this trend, with songs like “Can’t Truss It”, which addressed the history of slavery and how the black community can fight back against oppression; “I Don’t Wanna be Called Yo Nigga “, a track addresses on how the the urban culture uses the word “Nigga” outside of its usual derogatory context. The album also included the controversial song and video “By the Time I Get to Arizona,” which chronicled the black community’s frustration that some States did not recognize Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday as a national holiday. The video featured members of Public Enemy taking out their frustrations on politicians in the States not recognizing the holiday. The groups last album to date is How You Sell Soul to a Soulless People Who Sold Their Soul. Public Enemy’s single from the album was “Harder Than You Think”. “Though the group has faded, the repercussions of Public Enemy are felt to this day. Public Enemy showed that rap was not, as Alan Light says, “just a silly novelty, a fleeting fad.” Public Enemy made hip hop, like punk and reggae before it, an outlet for frustration and a portal to understanding anger. Public Enemy gave hip hop a consciousness that trancends styles. It Takes A Nation Of Millions and Fear Of A Black Planet are as pertinent today as when they were released, in the way that Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” still reverberates. They were talking loud and saying something, to interpolate James Brown. And for five years in the uneasy ’80s and the early ’90s, they were, to quote The Clash, the only band that mattered.” Source and more information: Wikipedia

Run–D.M.C.

videeoo — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 21:29:50 +0000

No rating, This group is not touring The three members of Run–D.M.C. grew up in the neighborhood of Hollis in the Queens borough of New York City, USA. As a teen, Joey Simmons was recruited by his older brother, an up and coming hip-hop promoter named Russell Simmons, to be the onstage DJ for rapper Kurtis Blow—who was managed by Russell. Performing as “DJ Run, Son of Kurtis Blow,” the younger Simmons soon began trading rhymes with Kurtis Blow and beat-boxing for the audience. He would often come back to Hollis and play his taped performances for his friend Darryl McDaniels. Previously, McDaniels had been more focused on athletics than music, but soon began to DJ after purchasing a set of turntables. Simmons convinced McDaniels to start rapping, and though McDaniels wouldn’t perform in public, he soon began writing rhymes and calling himself “Easy D.” Simmons and McDaniels (who, over time, had overcome his early stage fright) started hanging around Two-Fifths Park in Hollis in late 1980, hoping to rap for the local DJs that performed and competed there. The most popular local DJ at the park was a youngster named Jason “Jazzy Jase” Mizell. Mizell was known for his flashy wardrobe and b-boy attitude; but had had troubles with the law as a teen. He had decided to pursue music full-time and began entertaining in the park soon after. Eventually, Simmons and McDaniels rapped in front of Mizell at the park, and the three became friends immediately. Following Russell’s success managing Kurtis Blow, he helped Run record his first single, a song called “Street Kid.” The song went unnoticed, but despite the single’s failure, Run’s enthusiasm for music was growing. He wanted to record again—this time with his cohort Easy D; but Russell refused, citing a dislike for D’s rhyming style. After they completed high school and started college in 1982, Simmons and McDaniels finally convinced Russell to let them record as a duo, and they recruited Mizell (who now called himself Jam-Master Jay) to be their official DJ. A year later, in 1983, Russell agreed to help them record a new single and land a record deal; but only after he changed D’s name to ‘DMC’ and christened the group ‘Run–D.M.C.’—a name, incidentally, that the group hated. DMC said later, “We wanted to be the Dynamic Two, the Treacherous Two — when we heard that crap, we was like, ‘We’re gonna be ruined!’” After signing with Profile Records, Run–D.M.C. released their first single “It’s Like That/Sucker MCs”, in late 1983. The sound was a revolution in hip hop: aggressive, cocky rhymes over spare, minimal, hard-hitting beats. Previously, rap music had been chiefly funk and disco-influenced, but Run–D.M.C.’s sound, like their name, was unlike anything that had been heard in rap before. The single was well received, peaking at #15 on the R&B charts. The trio performed the single on the New York Hot Tracks video show in 1983. Emboldened by their success, Run–D.M.C. recorded their eponymous debut and, released in 1984, Run–D.M.C. was an instant hit and, arguably, rap’s first classic album.Hit singles such as “Jam-Master Jay” and “Hard Times” proved that the group were more than a one-hit wonder, and the landmark single “Rock Box” was a groundbreaking fusion of raw hip-hop and hard rock that would become a cornerstone of the group’s sound and paved the way for the rap rock movement of the late 1990s. Run–D.M.C.’s swift ascension to the forefront of rap with a new sound and style meant that old school hip hop artists had become outdated—in more ways than one. Along with pushing rap into a new direction musically, Run–D.M.C. changed the entire aesthetic of hip hop music and culture. Old school rappers like Afrika Bambaataa and Melle Mel of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five tended to dress in the flashy attire that was commonly attributed to rock and disco acts of the era: tight leather, chest-baring shirts, gloves and hats with rhinestones and spikes, leather boots, etc. Run–D.M.C. discarded the more glam aspects of early hip hop’s look (as later readopted by MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice) and incorporated a more ‘street’ sense of style. Their look had been influenced by the way Jay dressed. When Russell Simmons saw Jay’s flashy-yet-street b-boy style, he insisted the entire group follow suit. Run said later: “ There were guys that wore hats like those and sneakers with no shoestrings. It was a very street thing to wear, extremely rough. They couldn’t wear shoelaces in jail and we took it as a fashion statement. The reason they couldn’t have shoelaces in jail was because they might hang themselves. That’s why DMC says ‘My Adidas only bring good news and they are not used as felon shoes. That embrace of the look and style of the street would define the next 25 years of hip hop fashion. Source and more information: Wikipedia