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With all the hype going on about the new Biggie movie I went through my collection and found an unreleased Biggie track. From my understanding this track was one of them that helped Biggie get signed. It’s a real tight track. Nothing better than listening to BIG flowin over The Emotions - “Blind Alley.” Just thought I’d give all you fans something you may not heard before. Let me know what you think. Check the track below.
De La Soul — 3 Feet High and Rising
Common — BE
A Tribe Called Quest — Midnight Marauders
Outkast — Stankonia
Professor Ferenc Szasz argued that so-called rap battles, where two or more performers trade elaborate insults, derive from the ancient Caledonian art of “flyting”.
According to the theory, Scottish slave owners took the tradition with them to the United States, where it was adopted and developed by slaves, emerging many years later as rap.
Professor Szasz is convinced there is a clear link between this tradition for settling scores in Scotland and rap battles, which were famously portrayed in Eminem’s 2002 movie 8 Mile.
He said: “The Scots have a lengthy tradition of flyting - intense verbal jousting, often laced with vulgarity, that is similar to the dozens that one finds among contemporary inner-city African-American youth.
“Both cultures accord high marks to satire. The skilled use of satire takes this verbal jousting to its ultimate level - one step short of a fist fight.”
The academic, who specialises in American and Scottish culture at the University of New Mexico, made the link in a new study examining the historical context of Robert Burn’s work.
The most famous surviving example of flyting comes from a 16th-century piece in which two rival poets hurl increasingly obscene rhyming insults at one another before the Court of King James IV.
Titled the Flyting Of Dunbar And Kennedy, it has been described by academics as “just over 500 lines of filth”.
Professor Szasz cites an American civil war poem, printed in the New York Vanity Fair magazine on November 9, 1861, as the first recorded example of the battles being used in the United States.
Professor Willie Ruff, of Yale University, agreed that Scottish slave owners had a profound impact on the development of African American music traditions.
Comparing flyting and rap battles, he said: “Two people engage in ritual verbal duelling and the winner has the last word in the argument, with the loser falling conspicuously silent.”
Gardening
Traffic Light
Bricks
Signs
Zebra Crossing
Top Images are from the “Urban Furniture” Series.
Notes from the Artist’s bio:
SpY is an artist from Madrid. His first actions appeared in the middle eighties. Shortly after, already a national reference as a graffiti artist, he started to work with other forms of artistic communication in the street: large posters, modified billboards, interventions that were experimental in the first nineties.
His work consists in the playful reappropiation of urban elements, that he replicates or transforms and then installs in the street. All his production stems from the observation of the urban environment, a sense sharpened by years of experience as a graffiti artist. A careful attention for the context of each piece and a constructive and non-invasive attitude unmistakably characterize his actions.
From the “Interventions” series:
Cow
Paint
Public Art
At last, the music industry admits what we’ve known for years: That filing music-swapping lawsuits against teenagers, little old ladies, and corpses is a fool’s errand (not to mention an expensive headache for the defendants). But don’t worry—the RIAA has something new up its sleeves.The new strategy (as reported by the Wall Street Journal): If the music industry finds out that you’re swapping music files online, it’ll send an e-mail to your ISP (agreements have already hashed out agreements with “some” unnamed service providers, apparently), which will in turn forward the message to you—probably with a little “P.S.” asking you to stop. [Update: CNET has a copy of the RIAA's form letter to ISPs.]
If you don’t stop, well … your service provider probably won’t sue you, but it might slow down your broadband connection, or cut off your service altogether.
So, why has the RIAA changed the play? Well, maybe it’s been looking at reports like this one from the NPD Group, which shows that U.S. CD sales continue to slide, while the number of tunes shared via P2P sites continues to increase, despite all the litigation.
And then there’s the disastrous headlines, as the RIAA relentlessly tracked down and sued tens of thousands of alleged music pirates. Among them: Kids, octogenarians, and a few dead people.
Reaction to the news? Mixed. Engadget’s headline reads (in part): “RIAA finds its soul,” with the story noting that while the RIAA reserves the right to go after “heavy uploaders or repeat offenders … it appears that single mothers are in the clear.”
All Things Digital has a darker outlook, speculating that ISPs—which “care about the cost of moving lots of data around … [and] want to make money by selling, renting, or just offering up Hollywood’s movies and TV shows to subscribers”—might be more than content to “cut off file-sharers … [or] simply [charge] heavy file-sharers a lot of money.”
And here’s another possibility, courtesy of yours truly: Say your ISP catches you sharing tunes via P2P. No problem—download away! But when you get your next cable bill, you’ll find the itemized songs added to your monthly charge, kind of like an iTunes bill.
Call it the “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” strategy.
P.S. Make no mistake—just because the RIAA has stopped filing new music-swapping lawsuits doesn’t mean that it’s dropped the existing ones, according to the Journal. Quite the contrary.
Related:
Music Industry to Abandon Mass Suits [Wall Street Journal]
