Tonight begins a summer of sleeping through Thursday evening, waking up around 11pm, making some, uh, preparations, then heading up to WTUL to commandeer the hip-hop show from midnight to 3am. I guess we'll go home and sleep a few hours after that, but Friday afternoons at work won't be pretty.A funny turn of events, really, cause I've been pretty ambivalent about hip-hop for about a year, not really buying much of anything and content to take what I get from commercial radio down here, which is basically a rotation of 5 or 6 songs from the Dirty South's increasingly uniform offerings. Back at East Village Radio, I had the team from NHB to feed me the new shit and in-studio freestyles to keep me thinking. This staved off what seems to be a general malaise about the music's present and future, about the wasted opportunities and over-stylization, the phoney beefs, and pandering to the suburban mall audience.
As far as the new show's content, we're gonna see what we can find in the TUL vaults, and bring with us selections from our own collection, with a few focal points:
-the early-mid 1990's
-the current underground
-old school New Orleans
And if anyone out there wants to send tapes, CD's, or come in for an interview, get at us.
As far as tastes, I'll let the show speak for itself, and hopefully we'll be able to post setlists and mp3 archives here. For a discussion of taste, check out the list put together at Straight Bangin' and the conversation that resulted from it. I'm a little wary of all the reflection, as it's often the sign of a dying, decadent artform, but argument must be a sign of life. People still care about hip-hop, people still identify with it, people still live it. For a few months, at least, we'll give it our best shot. If you're in the city, we're at 91.5FM midnight-3am.
And a few final words from the god....
