cold grey days = sigel desert eagle

Now I know...

ya'll will really be paying attention to my cover story on these boys when it drops next month : )

Oh, how we take our liberal arts degrees for granted.

I thought this was nicely done.

Back on the wagon.

Didn't I tell you?

Tooooo CUTE!

RBC luuuvvvsss the kids.

Just when you were at a loss for words...

One comes along that says it all. Can we steal this from the Britts for the New Era capped, gold chained, all-over-printed doosh bag?

The polls are in!

Don't forget to scroll to the end for the mixtape.

BEST NEW ARTISTS OF 2007
Black Kids
Blaqstarr

Bonjay

Cool Kids
Curtains
Kid Sister

Santogold

South Rakkas Crew

Wale


RUNNERS UP...
Kid Cuti
Kapps
The Pack
Tabi Bonney
Mickey Factz
Yo Majesty

DOWNLOAD THE RBC BEST NEW ARTISTS MIXTAPE

RACE WARS - When White America Strikes Back!!!!!!!!!

An interesting video I thought. Hillary is coming to the realization that while diamonds are forever, political dynasties aren't. Hillary at this point is shaking in her boots. Latest polls show Barack ahead with 33 percent to Hillary's 29 percent.

So now that she is behind and realizes the democratic nomination isn’t her birthright, her campaign strategy has shifted to trying to talk trash on Obama. But unlike normal trash talking they have taken it to a level of racial, ethnic, and even religious stereotyping and baiting that i havent seen since .. well wait, i have never seen a viable black man run for president so i guess i have nothing to compare this lastest conflict in Race Wars to. Moving on. The notables, being Barack doing cocaine as a shorty (which Barack has admitted to, and written about in his autobiography) and being accused of possibly being a drug dealer because he admitted to getting high when he was young. Bill Shaheen, the man who put out the question of if Barack was a drug dealer, and also New Hampshire co-chair of Hillary's campaign, resigned after he started getting flack for the comment. But then Hillary decided to contradict her own campaign and said Bill Sheenan was asked to step down. Whether he resigned or was forced to leave its not a good sign when your New Hampshire co chair steps down. But check out the first minute of the video it pretty much breaks down the gist of what im talking about.



But the bigger question is why Bill Clinton didn’t ever get accused of being a drug dealer because of his admitted drug use.

And though the Clinton Camp has gotten rid of Bill Sheenan, they seem to have done this so that they could keep referencing Barack cocaine use as exhibited by this video of Mark Penn, Campaign Consultant for Hillary's Campaign.


Then comes along Bob Kerry (Clinton Supporter) as if he was on the payroll of Fox News, referring to Barack as Barack Hussein Obama, insinuating that Barack is running from who he is and his "Muslim" roots because he won’t refer to himself as Barack Hussein Obama. Oh like Hillary "that’s right no one knows her middle name cuz no one cares" Clinton, or John "since when we did we start caring about politicians middle names" Edwards are held to the same standard. No of course not, so why is Barack being held to that standard. That’s right it’s called the R-word. Let’s stay it all together RACISM!!!!!!! Naw but on the real it obvious in this video that Bob Kerry is doing the trick of acting like you are giving a compliment to a opponent when in fact you are attacking him on things voters would perceive as going to far.



So being called a coke head, drug dealer and being lectured on how and why you should use your middle name - Hmmmm, just a day in the life of being young, black, gifted and running for president.

And the Crossover begins!!!!!!

SHIT TO DO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Wednesday, 12/19/07



Giveaways all night! FREE events!

cop ur limited release BROTHER HOOD tees. 50 @ each store. get it now or never!!!


AfterParty @ Lumen :: FREE :: OPEN TO THE PUBLIC!!!
DRINK SPECIALS AND GIVEAWAYS


THURSDAY, 12/20/07





SATURDAY, 12/22/07


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Wu Tang is For the Kids.

This is an oldie but goodie.

oh the irony

no country for anyone

so, i dont wanna get all serious and be a big downer or whatever, and i know everyone has already seen this movie, but i just had to write about it. i believe it to possibly be the most honest, profound and brutal piece of modern cinema to emerge in years. i found to be deeply compelling and (gulp) political, because of its underpinnings of subjective morality, and the dehumanization of ourselves as a society. it makes the clear point that in the end we have no one to blame but ourselves.

numerous movie critics have pointed out the coen brothers using this movie as a venue to make thinly veiled comments about our countries military involvement in iraq and the demoralization to our collective psyche that comes along with it, or just ask Alec Balwin at the HuffingtonPost or the Chicago Reader's own Jonathan Rosenbaum.

at any rate, if you dont know, now you know. go see it.

Not that I didn't have shit to do today...

But the cable guy came, and suddenly I have full access to The Wire, Season 4, at my fingertips. I know I'm kind of checking in with the late pass on this one but...

BEST

SEASON

EVER.

Shorties are growing up and coming into power. McNulty is tryna front like he's done with the game but we aaaaallll know that won't last! Slow ass Pryzbylewski is now prematurely ejaculating in the schools instead of on the streets. And good ole' Bubbles is still using! Ahhh the world feels right again.

So two things: Shout out to my main squeeze, man of my dreams, almost-husband Omar Little, who drops knowledge to live by. Omarism #401: "How you expect to run with the wolves at night if you spar with the puppies all day?"


And secondly, a haiku for hopeful endings in Season 4:
I hope this season
Pryzbylewski gets fucked up
Pussy bitch for real.

RBC Party Foul

It was pointed out that I forgot to create a tracklist for the Kala samples mixtape. My bad!

The Clash, "Straight To Hell" -- Sampled by M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes"
The Pixies, "Where is My Mind" -- Sampled by M.I.A.'s "$20"
New Order, "Blue Monday" -- Sampled by M.I.A.'s "$20"
Bappi Lahiri, "Jimmy Jimmy Jimmy Aaja" -- Sampled by M.I.A.'s "Jimmy Jimmy"
Jonathan Richman, "Roadrunner" -- Sampled by M.I.A.'s "Bamboo Banger"
Blaqstarr, "Thumbs Down" -- Sampled by M.I.A.'s "Down River"
Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band, "Sunshower" -- Sampled by M.I.A.'s "Sunshowers"

White Boy Rapper Appreciation Week...

In honor of Brian Wilson’s lost rap tap. Yes, Matt Dike (nh) did produce for Tone Loc, Young MC and the Beastie Boys, but I think we can file this one under "career indiscretions," like that time I saw Busta Rhymes pee on the NYC sidewalk one morning at 5 a.m. and tell some white bitches to go fuck themselves. Like white bitches don't buy Mountain Dew!!!! For shame Busta!

So for this, Mike Dike gets the "Dood Quit Playin'" award of the week. And we're posting some classic white boy moments in honor of white boy rap appreciation week.

For the record, I like this song.

"VANILLA! NOOOO!!" (P.S. Isn't this cast of hosts so "Reality Bites"???!)

"When it's time to party / We have a tea party!"

Hey, Jews are whites too!

Lord of the Flies Meets the Club.

Gwan Santogold, get yr Frida Khalo on.

B.O.O.T.A.Y. Video Premiere

Who Doesn't Love that Little Sri Lankan Firecracker?!

We've all had time to sit with a couple dozen drinks contemplating the genius of M.I.A.'s sophomore effort, Kala, and draw grand comparative musicological/political theories between her and our heroes in The Clash. So we thought it only appropriate to put together this lil’ mixtape of sample gems off the album, which we think is more comprehensive than any list anyone else has put together on the blogosphere so far. I also threw on the Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band “Sunshowers” cut for good measure as well, even though it’s off M.I.A.’s first LP. Ghostface sampled the same track for “Ghost Showers,” off his 2001 album, Bulletproof Wallets. (We think M.I.A. retooled it better.) And Ghost has borrowed from the Savannah Band before: On his 2000 classic Supreme Clientelle he assimilated Buzzard’s “Cherchez La Femme” into “Cherchez La Ghost.” Now ya can’t say RBC didn’t teach ya nothing.

z-share link.

Vice Makes Good?

This is the full edit of my piece that got hacked by a local publication we all know and love. I recommend you read this version rather than the one in print. It's sorta long but if you've found Vice both compelling and repulsive for years, as we at RBC have, you'll welcome the opportunity to hear co-founder Shane Smith speak on the evolution of the mag and his latest project, VBS.tv, which we think is pretty dope.

Seven years ago the idea of Vice Magazine making earnest news stories would have struck most people as absurd, and still others as offensive. It’s hard to forget that the company virtually pioneered an anti-PC movement, much less forgive it. “Being a mag in New York, you kind of get lost in this vortex of parties and drugs and all this stuff,” says co-founder and company president Shane Smith, 37. “When we started traveling around more we started seeing that there are a lot of things happening that are important. I guess when we started going to gun markets and realizing you can buy dirty bombs on the black market we were like, ‘Well, it’s over. That’s the end of history. That’s the end of culture.’ It seemed that writing about denim and rare sneakers just didn’t measure up anymore.”

When the magazine began its expansion into 22 countries in 1999 – including Australia, Japan and Russia – Smith realized there were more story possibilities than any of the magazine’s editions could handle in print. So he started VBS.tv, a Web site of documentary-style video stories about music and culture, but predominantly (and perhaps most surprisingly) global politics. Smith leads quite a few of the shorts himself, traveling to divided regions like Darfur, Iraq or North Korea. You might take or leave his American-guy-abroad approach to reporting – walking through the desert in Sudan the realization strikes him on camera, “In the states you get so used to booze and food and coke and super models, and you come here and it’s like, water” – but at the very least it’s unsettlingly honest and sincere. And the stories are sound: They’re reported straightforwardly, and the producers travel to places they’re not supposed to go so the film shows footage you don’t normally get to see.

We caught up with the founder of the veritable hipster media empire to get the scoop on his new project, and what fueled the turnaround of the most drippingly sarcastic publication around.

Can you begin by articulating the mission of VBS.tv?

It seems to me that modern media -- especially news media -- has sort of failed over the past five years, and admittedly so. We wanted to create something that could sort of be a bridge between creative people and the money to get what they want to say out. When we followed the only heavy metal band in Baghdad for three years you see as a backdrop what happened there because of the American presence. They can’t go outside. Their practice space is hit by a scud missile. Their friends were killed. But they’re guys that you can relate to. When kids turn on CNN -- if they even do which they don’t -- they sort of see, ‘Another hundred people killed in Baghdad,’ and they just turn it off again. Whereas when they watch something like heavy metal in Baghdad they say, ‘Oh, I’m in a band, I know someone in a band, I can relate to that. Oh, their practice space got blown up by us.’

Basically what we found is that there is a very limited counter cultural voice in America. Everyone talks about, ‘The liberal media, the liberal media’ -- there’s no such thing as liberal media here because there are four media companies that own everything and they’re all afraid of losing Budweiser as their advertiser. We wanted to make a countercultural voice that was bigger and you could have an alternative to Fox news.

Vice as an entity has gone from this kind of “I don’t give a fuck attitude” to tackling bigger issues quite a bit less sarcastically. Can you talk about that shift?

I think it came about with the expansion of the magazine into 22 other countries, because Europe’s [version of the magazine] was a bit more serious than us and I’d say, ‘Hey, this is a really great magazine that we’re doing here.’ Jesse Pearson and Eric Lavoi, who are both younger than (Vice co-founder) Suroosh Alvi and myself, they had different attitudes toward things and wanted to take it in a different direction. At the same time as Suroosh and I got older we got interested in different things. And the philosophy behind Vice magazine was always, ‘Well if we figure it’s interesting other people should figure it’s interesting.’ And in the 13 years we’ve been doing this we’ve never just said, ‘We’re this type of magazine and we’re gonna be like that.’ We’ve changed about 20 times. It just seemed that writing about denim and rare sneakers didn’t measure up anymore.

In one short you buy a dirty bomb with relative ease, and another takes audiences into a gun making market. It’s not like you just stumbled upon these really secret sorts of things. Can you talk about how you even get this information?

It came about from our expansion. We have 2,500 freelancers around the world in many countries, and we can only use so many articles for the mag. So a lot of content was just going by the wayside. Gun markets in Pakistan isn’t going to make it into the fashion issue but we should still go do something on it.

Because we’re a free mag distributed in local outlets, people feel that there’s a big interaction with us. So we get not only our freelancers but our audience says, “What about this? Have you heard about this thing?” So coming up with the stories isn’t the problem. Going out and shooting them is the problem.

You have an interesting personal reporting style. Can you talk a bit about the sort of travel guide approach you take in the pieces you lead?

I can’t really do it another way. To do so it would be fake. Young people have pretty sophisticated bullshit detectors. I’m not CNN, and I don’t really go crazy and research my pieces that much. I’m not there to solve the problems of the Middle East, but when some guy tells me they’re making 4 or 5 year old kids into transportation devices for dynamite I can say, “Look that’s an intrinsically bad thing. I don’t care who’s right or wrong that’s just an intrinsically bad thing.” I went into North Korea with these guys from Newsweek and Time and they’d already made up their minds. They were really sort of paradigmic, and they had all their questions made up before they went there. And I was like, “I don’t know anything about North Korea!” How am I supposed to know what questions to ask? I can base all my questions on things that I’ve read or researched from books by other people who have never been to North Korea. But it’s like – I’m gonna go there and it’s gonna affect me and how that affects me is the story. It’s the same thing with Sudan.

I always find that when you go to the places and talk to the people you’re going to get an interesting point of view on it rather than sort of just taking what the mainstream media is feeding you. I’m not trying to be Dan Rather. I’m just saying, hey I’m a regular guy just like you guys and I went there and this is what I saw. And you can take it or not take it, I don’t mind.