Like A Ginsu

Gza can give a fuck about rims or ice. That's what he told his students--and that's what we were--at his gig a few nights ago in DC. Here's how it went down in my review.

The sharpest sword in the Wu is no frills. He just stood in place most of the time and spit his heart out. Folks predictably went bananas.

Quick Gza quotes from the stage:

"I make sure to craft it real, original"

"The first time I did a demo was with Ol' Dirty Bastard. That was in '84!"

"[My son Justice] has been rhyming since he was in pampers."

Gza also said that he doesn't write often, typically only one rhyme a month. He also said he just recorded a 12 song album with DJ Muggs in L.A.

After the hour plus gig, he signed autographs and posed for pics with everyone who wanted one. "I'll stay here all night," he said. "I got nowhere to be."

Plan B

DJ Z-Trip's been through the ringer for his major label debut. I talked to him about the drama for the Balitmore City Paper and here's how it turned out.

Among the quotes that had to be snipped out of the feature:

When asked about playing at SARS Stock in Toronto:
"When you get up there and there's [400,000] people, there's also a point where, you mentally sort of shut down and block it out. It's just too hard to fucking fathom. It's too hard to comprehend that many people. In a weird way, I revert back to me Djing in my bedroom."

On the Mash Up vs. The Blend:
"There still is an art and a craft to mixing two songs together. I personally feel that when someone's doing it on a computer in their house, at four in the morning in their boxers, in front of their cat and they go, 'Oops, I screwed up. Oh, lemme just click my mouse and fix that. Oh, there we go. Now it sounds better.'"

On Uneasy Listening's unexpected success:
"It's sort of a drag, because something that we did sort of off the cuff in a very fun way has become a complete, studied, picked apart thing."

Z-Trip's also got a track on the upcoming Mowtown Remixeddisc. Listen to how he flips the Jackson 5 here.

Coincidentally, DJ P just posted the song credits (who mixed what) for "Uneasy Listening" at his website's message board. You might be suprised...

Bootylicious Bar Mitzvah

Destiny's Child is available for weddings and Bar Mitzvahs. Seems a British retail magnate is set to have the trio gyrate for a host of 13 year olds in the South of France for his kid's Bar Mitzvah.

Also on the bill, Justin Timberlake. Hilariously enough, he just had throat surgery and might lip sync his tunes for a million dollar payday. (OK...this is from a website that refers to him as Trousersnake.)

The guy who is wacky enough to pay for all this is British billionare Philip Green.

In a related story, Destiny's Child didn't play my wedding last summer. But DJ Neil Armstrong of the 5th Platoon did.


Thanks again Neil!

Saul Sans Band

Attention MCs:

Can you rock a crowd with just your voice?

For more than five minutes?

Thought so.

Saul Williams can. Here's how it went down.

Prophet of Rage

After seeing Adam Mansbach talk about his novel "Angry Black White Boy" last week in DC, I wanted to post this brief interview with him. It was used for a feature in the Washington Post Express, but since that paper must be downloaded in its entirety as a PDF, I'll give the Q & A in full.

Why do you think someone like Macon went to such extremes in the novel? Why wouldn't he consider other options to change the system?

Macon is the kind of kid who is fed up with inaction and fundamentally distrustful of institutions, and his self-image is very tied to insurgency. To him, the central problem is white people’s refusal to be self-critical, their ability to back away from the question of race when it becomes unpleasant, and so his agenda is to force the issue as radically as he can. It’s an agenda he backs into, however – he doesn’t set out to lead a movement. Events thrust him suddenly into a leadership position, and he makes his tactics up on the fly as things spiral out of control around him. And that’s the other thing: Macon is young, and very conflicted, and his politics are twisted up with his personal issues in a way that makes him both charismatic and volatile. Which is what gets him into this mess to begin with.

You and Macon are similar in many ways (school,hip-hop, geographical upbringing). Where do you think you stop and that character begins?

Definitely before the moment Macon decides to start pulling guns on people just because they’re white. We do share a lot; we’re both products of a mostly-white school system integrated by a program that brought inner-city black kids out to the white ‘burbs –- a unidirectional form of integration, you might say. And we both discovered hip hop and politics at a young age, at a time when hip hop was a gripping site of social critique – the first place I found real validation for my suspicion my community was hypocritical and complacent, and that institutional and economic racism were powerful, unseen forces that allowed it to be so. At that time, there weren’t many white kids on the scene. You had to seek hip hop out where it existed, which meant venturing into other neighborhoods, insinuating yourself into other communities. Being in the minority yourself, for a few hours. This lead to an interesting duality, for both Macon and me -- being vigilantly aware of your own whiteness, and simultaneously trying to escape it. In a lot of ways, though, Macon is an anti-autobiographical figure. He’s the zealot I might have been, but didn’t want to be, or lack the courage to be, or am too old now to be, or see too much grey to be. He’s caught up in a need for validation that I thankfully extricated myself from some time ago. I found other music, I went on the road with Elvin Jones and started dealing with jazz. Macon just has hip hop. It’s the only time signature he knows how to play in.

What's the status on the film? I see there is a director? Is there a studio or rough schedule?

Not yet. The director, Adam Bhala Lough, has written a great script, and in a few weeks the process of showing it to actors and studios will begin. We’ve held off because Adam’s first film, Bomb the System, hits theaters in two weeks, and also so that the book could get out there and generate its own buzz.

Who would you like to see Macon be portrayed by on the big screen & why?

I lean toward casting a really talented unknown – somebody for whom this will be a breakout role – and surrounding him with top-notch actors. I’d love to see Mos Def or Geoffrey Wright as Nique, Chloe Sevingne as Logan, Warren Beatty or Robert Duvall or Harvey Kietel as Conway Donner. I could also see Hayden Christensen as Macon. Some people aren’t into him, but I think he displays a real intensity in a couple of the scenes from the last Star Wars joint. Whether he’s hip hop enough to play Macon, I don’t know. But when I watch the scene where he comes back and tells Natalie Portman about how he’s just killed all the Tuskan Raiders, I’m like “Yeah! That’s Macon!”

Will you be doing any rapping at the book reading at Politics & Prose?

If I can get my drummer, The Apple Juice Kid, to drive in from Chapel Hill, then definitely. My new album, Stand for Nothing, Fall for Anything, just dropped on Upshot Records, so I’ll probably perform something off of that. It’s a hip hop and spoken word album with a six-piece jazz band – and because all the musicians are so well-versed in both jazz and hip hop, it’s a much more organic fusion of the musics than a lot of what’s come out thus far. Besides, I like to flip the script on what people expect in a bookstore. Keeps it interesting.