Thursday, June 26, 2008

Ooo-ooh that smell

I'm currently engrossed in a rousing game of "what's that smell" in my house, which has been thoroughly cleaned twice in the past two weeks due to company. So the pad is cleaner than usual, yet I can't trace this faint odor. Maybe I'm just losing my mind with the onset of old age.

Yes, I turn another decade older on Sunday. Just don't call me Timothy Busfield.

Jeff Weiss recently put up an article in LA Weekly about how Dilla's estate has been loosing gobs of dough fighting piracy and theft of Jay's final work. Now, normally I wouldn't take a stand on either side of a hip-hop argument, simply because its a typically a losing situation. Sure, I miss the fallen MCs, and I hate to see when my favorite-rapper-of-the-moment falls into some wacky legal misfortune not uncommon to the suddenly rich, thus delaying the drop of their next album; but, that's arguably the most cutthroat of music genres considering it's populated with the most murders. But Dilla's a different situation altogether, ascending levels of sampling and mixing that truly no deejay or producer had previously attained, and creating a wave of new breed deejays, combining crate digging with gigantor hard drives and sniper like sample cutting. You can read Weiss's generously detailed bio portion of the article, or you can pick up Dilla's opus "Donuts," which I listened to for about 2 months straight. But, back to the issue, what the hell hip-hop? Your really biting Dilla's final work, those last brushes of genius drawn literally on his deathbed? Do you have no soul? Was giving us Soulja Boy, Hurricane Chris, J-Kwon, etc not enough pain to inflict? You really have to dig and dig at this fallen star and keep adding to Ma Dukes' financial burden? Heartbreaking, hip-hop...heartbreaking...

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

They are quick to say that piracy is the issue without offering any evidence as to why this is the case. We've seen this argument many times before, haven't we?

I don't know about the smell in your house, but this story reeks of old people.

Doug Norris said...

i just feel bad cause it's dilla-dog...

old people? is that a strike, mr. i-share-a-birthday?

Anonymous said...

Nah, just saying that old people don't understand stuff like new ways of distributing music.

Doug Norris said...

i think it's more of an issue of people taking dilla's cuts and claiming them for their own, where as his estate handlers had planned on releasing that to help pay some billz...you know...because he had the skillz