To commemorate the 25th anniversary of 2Pac’s debut album 2Pacalypse Now, I wrote something for L.A. Weekly about how that record influenced me as a kid. Pac’s career only lasted for a five-year blink-of-an-eye span. He was twenty-five when he passed. This year he was nominated for the Rock N’ Roll Hall of Fame. He wasn’t a saint or an infallible icon. He was a man that made a lot of mistakes like most people, except his faults were publicized and broadcasted for the whole …
Category: article
I just wrote an article for LA Weekly. It’s about L.A. mobile DJ crew, Uncle Jamm’s Army (UJA), founded by Rodger Clayton aka Ace of Dreams aka Mr. Prinze. From the late 70’s to the mid 80’s, The Army was king. Nobody was doing it like them, nobody. After working on this piece, I started to speculate that West Coast DJ’s were way ahead of East Coast DJ’s, from how they set up their turntables, scratching, blending, to how they approached the use …
For TMG readers that don’t know, this artist is my boy. I’ve written about him here. After years of fits and false starts, DJ, producer and emcee DJ Zesto has at last released his debut album The New Laughing Gas. In January of last year he dropped the single, “The Pleasure Principle” and then he dipped back into obscurity. With the occasional tweet or Instagram post, homie is an elusive figure. He’s an 80’s baby who’s old enough to have experienced the before and …
Last night I woke up at five in the morning to get some water. I gulped it down and opened my eyes to my wife holding my head up. “Are you ok? You collapsed”, she said. I was laying near the dinning table with a chair on top of me. I don’t remember anything, except waking up to the sound of my moaning. Nothing like that has ever happened to me before. The stress of living here has managed to manifest …
In Japan you can’t walk into a cafe without either hearing Bossa Nova or Jazz. It’s like a permanent auditory fixture in just about any shopping center or restaurant. Professor E. Taylor Atkins talks about how Jazz came to Japan. By Patrick Jarenwattananon [NPR] “Over the years a racialized component emerges in such language—basically a kind of model minority discourse that presumes that Asians have no soul and have no business trying to be artists, especially in proximity to Blackness, which is, …
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