Graffiti legend Stay High 149 (Wayne Roberts) died on Monday at the age of 63.
Stay High was a pioneer in the world of graffiti, starting in the early 70s and returning in 2000 after a 25 year hiatus. His trademark was a pot smoking version of the stick figure icon from the British TV show The Saint. High’s name reflected his habit of smoking an ounce of marijuana a week and his brief gig as a messenger on Wall Street where he made extra scratch selling loose joints on his lunch break.
I was the first to take a logo and adapt it into something of my own. I remember doing it at the time, just because I thought it was cool. I made my stick figure with a joint in his hand because I stayed high, and I made mine crouching because he is getting ready to jump up and take off! After me I remember LSD3 added the “OM” symbol to his tag (example), and from there on I think other writers would try to add various symbols to their tags. But yeah as far as I can remember I don’t think anyone was doing any kind of symbol with their tags before me, at least not anyone that influenced me.” Stay High 149.
[...]Stay High 149 was the first to adopt an icon rather than a typographic tag as a nom de guerre; his “Smoker” was a subversive spin-off of the logo developed for the 1960s classic spy thriller television show “The Saint.” His “Voice of the Ghetto” tag began as an anonymous declaration of existence on behalf the city’s dispossessed and downtrodden.
Just as I was about to write ‘em off, Die Antwoord release this slab of fresh hell, “Baby’s On Fire.”
Directed by Ninja and Terence Neale, this video has over 600,000 views on YouTube (in less than two days), which reasserts the notion that Die Antwoord lives or dies by their videos. I’m personally waiting for them to finally do a feature-length film. Though, one wonders if they can sustain the madness over 90 minutes and whether or not viewers could endure it.
Beat Street won’t win any awards for authenticity. It’s Hollywood slick and full of unintentional laughs but it does have some of the flava of the era and features performances by Afrika Bambaataa, Grandmaster Melle Mel, the Treacherous Three, Doug E. Fresh and Jazzy Jay. Good holiday fun.
Breaking With the Mighty Poppalots is a totally hipnerdical instructional video from 1984. An all time favorite of mine, I picked up a VHS copy years ago at a store in New York City that sold close-out merchandise. I had no idea that two decades later it would be selling for $100 a pop (get it?) on Amazon, but over time it has developed a rep among aficionados of pop culture artifacts and B-Boy esoterica.
So grab some cardboard, push the sofa and cocktail table up against the wall, and let The Mighty Poppalots (Breakin Bett, Crazzy Leggs, Sly C, Red Rooster) guide you through the arcane arts of the electric boogie, popping, locking and moonwalking.
Here’s “four guys just having fun and bringing fun to everyone.”
I love the intro of the video with the Poppalots exiting a limo to throngs of screaming fans. It’s so Spinal Tappish.
There’s a new Nas single out. And guess what? It’s nothing special.
Indeed, it’s been so long since Nas was truly great that these days, it’s much more interesting to listen in to the slim period of his creative life when his finest hours were still to come. I’ll take pre-fame Nas over his current output any day.
On these 1991/1992 demos the teenage emcee oozes potential through his Kool G Rap chrysalis. In the first two tracks, Illmatic fans will recognize countless scraps of rhyme that would find themselves transplanted into more fully-realized verses within a couple of years, while the last track, “Nas Will Prevail”-–complete with great Wild Style-esque video-– is an obvious precursor of “It Ain’t Hard to Tell,” with everything from the backing track to the rhyme scheme as instantly recognisable as they are embryonic. Magical stuff. Rewarding, too.
The Gregory Brothers auto-tune Romney soundbites and the result is…well, another pretty amusing Gregory Brothers mash-up.
The video is only linkable via the NY Times right now. Looks like The Grey Lady is attempting to give herself a BuzzFeed dye job by jumping on the auto-tuning the news thing…too bad it’s two years too late. Still, it’s fun.
Ya snooze ya lose. This was sent to Dangerous Minds a few days ago and somehow I missed the submission! Now it’s a viral sensation. I’m a fool for not checking Facebook!
Anyway, if you haven’t seen it already, please enjoy this wonderful tribute to the late Adam Yauch made by James and Kjirsten Winters.
This past weekend in Austin, Texas, R. Kelly performed for 75 seconds to a packed-house of people who payed up to $950 each to see what can only be described as a massive rip-off.
My wife and I almost went to see this “show” - out of curiosity more than anything else. The buzz around town was generally skeptical as to whether the show was legit or not. The venue where it was scheduled to take place, The Mansion, flies under the radar of the local music press, so there was little advance hype. But a lot of people ended up going and were, in my opinion, treated like shit.
Considering R. Kelly’s past karma, this whole debacle doesn’t seem like a smart way to get right with the cosmic powers that be…or your fans.
Here’s a first-person report from Devon Tincknell as it appeared in the Austinist:
Last night, I went to see R. Kelly at the Mansion, a strip club in North Austin, and it was one of the biggest scams I’ve ever experienced. Sure, there were moments leading up to the show where I wondered, “R. Kelly is playing at a strip club I’ve never heard of and general admission tickets are only 30 bucks? That’s almost too good to be true,” but I never expected it to be as worthless as it turned out. Being led into an alley by a hand drawn cardboard sign that promised a “Free R. Kelly concert” and then being beaten with a brick and robbed would perhaps have been more satisfying; at least you could file a police report.
Like most modern frauds, this story begins online with an Eventbrite page selling tickets for “An Intimate Night w/ R. Kelly (Mothers Day Weekend).” Tickets ranged from $30 for general admission all the way up an escalating price scale caste system of VIP and celebrity room statuses to the ultimate baller package of $950 for a super-duper-ultra-pimp-VIP bottle service table accommodating eight people. It was a little odd that the R. Kelly of “Space Jam” soundtrack fame-and-acclaim would be playing a remote strip club rather than say, the Frank Erwin Center, but it seemed plausible. Maybe people had finally lost interest in the plot line of “Trapped in the Closet” and Kells couldn’t pack the house like he used to. I mean, if they’re selling $950 tickets it’s got to be a real R. Kelly concert, right?
My stomach dropped a little when we showed up at a swanky strip club near the junction of 183 and 290 and right past the entrance was a sign proclaiming “NO REFUNDS.” My fellow concert goers and I joked that they were just going to play us some R. Kelly music videos, but once we saw the room we were too excited by the idea of seeing R. Kelly perform up close and personal to really believe this could all just be a rip off. R. Kelly’s legend is so great that Aziz Ansari does a bit where he simply describes going to an R. Kelly concert. And here we were, about to watch the man perform on a stage five feet from us. A stage with stripper poles on it.
Doors opened at 9 p.m. and we arrived around 10. We camped out a few feet back from the lip of the stage and danced to a DJ playing the generic rap mix you’d hear at any inner city middle school prom. We were excited as fuck. Of course, as 10 became 10:30, then 11, then midnight, without R. Kelly live and in person wowing us with his R&B styles, that excitement diminished. From time to time, a hype man yelled at the crowd, “You people ready to party?! You don’t seem like you’re excited enough for R. Kelly to come out yet!”
Sometime after midnight, he starts yelling things along the lines of “R. Kelly is in the building!” We’ve been standing around for hours but we muster all the enthusiasm we can. The strip club staff begins to clear out the VIP room for R. Kelly. Wow, okay, now it’s looking like R. Kelly actually will show! Finally, at 12:43 in the morning, R. Kelly and his posse take the stage to a medley of his hits. Kells grins at the cheering crowd, everyone loses their shit and starts taking photos with their phones, while R. Kelly just stands there smoking a cigar. Then he walks over to the VIP area and touches more hands and stands there. He is not singing. This parade goes on for a worrisome amount of time.
Finally, he finds a mic and sings a very brief a capella ditty. This is followed by a lazy rendition of “Ignition (Remix)” sung over the album version with his vocals still on it. Then after he invites all the pretty ladies to the VIP section to party with him, he moves over there and sits down. It becomes very obvious that this is it; this is the R. Kelly “performance” we just waited hours for. A moment later, R. Kelly gets on the mic again and DEMANDS that pretty ladies come party with him in VIP or “he is going to be up out this bitch.” Up out this bitch? But you just got IN this bitch, Mr. Kelly!
With the VIP area packed to the gills by a flood of ladies - so much for those exclusive hundred dollar tickets, I guess - my friends and I decided this was total bullshit and left. We didn’t pay 30 fucking dollars to party in the same room as R. Kelly’s VIP section.
If you pay for an “intimate night” with R. Kelly and it takes place in a public venue, not in a hotel room with a tarp laid over the bed, do you have a right to expect a musical concert? I believe so. When I go to the zoo, I don’t expect the tigers and polar bears to sing “Bump-n-Grind” for me. Thus, when I go see R. Kelly, a man who is famous for performing music, I don’t expect him to stand there sleepily and have his photo taken. If you are a musician and the event does not specifically say “an appearance by” or “autograph signing” or “LIVE… and drunk and not performing, just sitting in VIP,” I believe the audience has a right to expect an actual concert.
In the end however, what really bothers me is that R. Kelly is a musician supported by fans who stood by him AFTER HE PEED ON AN UNDERAGED GIRL. People that like R. Kelly’s music know he peed on a girl and have forgiven him for it! And then how does he repay that loyalty? By tricking people into buying expensive tickets for a Mother’s Day “concert,” making them wait on their feet for over three hours, and then performing a sub-par karaoke at Beerland rendition of “Ignition (Remix)?” Happy Mother’s Day, R. Kelly. I feel like I just got pissed on.
Too drunk to funk? After reading another account of Kelly’s behavior at the club, I wonder if he was too drunk to perform even if he had wanted to.
From Austin360 :
Around 1:30 a clearly loopy R. Kelly came back out and said he wasn’t contractually obligated to sing - so what he had done was a favor, of sorts - and that he was there to get drunk and if the crowd would chill out and let him do so (from the looks of him by that point, no one had had much luck stopping him) he might come back out and do some more.
These photos of Kelly at The Mansion kind of tell the tale. His performance seems to consist of chomping on a big fat Cohiba while blessing the swooning multitudes.
In this video, the crowd starts booing as a surly DJ explains that R. Kelly don’t do shit for less than $250,000.
Update: Ticket sales website Eventbrite is offering refunds to the folks who bought tickets to R. Kelly’s Austin “show.” They acknowledge that the promoter misrepresented the event. Eventbrite should be given kudos for doing the right thing. What about the event promoters Exit Black? So far, they haven’t been heard from.
As a filmmaker who’s shot documentaries on both Lil’ Wayne and Lee “Scratch” Perry, Adam Bhala Lough thought it a good idea to cross wires a bit and let the eccentric 76-year-old dub master bestow a bit of mellow wisdom upon the drank-sippin’ 30-year-old rap supastar.
