JumpinJack AJ
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LL COOL J’s ‘THE FORCE’ Debuts in Top 10 on Top Rap Albums Chart
The rapper's first album in 11 years arrives, as current single "Proclivities," featuring Saweetie, climbs on radio.
By Trevor Anderson
09/18/2024
LL Cool J attends the 2024 MTV Video Music Awards at UBS Arena on Sept. 11, 2024 in Elmont, New York.Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for MTVDespite more than a decade since LL COOL J last released an album, the rapper picks up right where he left off. His new project, THE FORCE, debuts at No. 9 on the Top Rap Albums chart, giving the hip-hop legend his fifth consecutive top 10 result on the list, which began in 2004.
THE FORCE, released through LL COOL J’s self-titled imprint and the Def Jam Recordings record label, earned 16,000 equivalent album units in the tracking week of Sept. 6 – 12, according to Luminate. Of that sum, traditional album sales contributed 11,500 units, making THE FORCE the top-selling rap title of the week. 4,000 units derive from streaming activity, with the remaining 500 coming through track-equivalent album units. (One unit equals the following levels of consumption: one album sale, 10 individual tracks sold from an album, or 3,750 ad-supported or 1,250 paid/subscription on-demand official audio and video streams for a song on the album.)
Robust sales likely trace to LL COOL J’s flurry of promotional performances during the tracking week, including an interview on CBS Mornings and a performance to celebrate the Def Jam label’s 40th anniversary during the 2024 MTV Video Music Awards, where the MC delivered a medley of his hits such as “Headsprung,” “Goin’ Back to Cali” and “Bring the Noise.”
Released Sept. 6, THE FORCE marked the first project since 2013 for LL COOL J, the hip-hop pioneer who became one of the genre’s earliest crossover stars and, in 2017, became the first rapper to receive the Kennedy Center Honors. The album, largely produced by another rap icon, Q-Tip, of A Tribe Called Quest, boasts a strong supporting lineup, with Snoop Dogg, Rick Ross and Nas among the guest stars. Saweetie features on the set’s current single, “Proclivities,” which climbs 36-31 in its second week on the Mainstream R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay chart, while an Eminem feature on the album’s “Murdergram Deux” powers it to become the week’s top-selling (2,500 downloads) and most-streamed (2.3 million official U.S. streams) song on THE FORCE.As noted, THE FORCE is the fifth consecutive top-10 effort for LL COOL J on Top Rap Albums. The streak began with The DEFinition, which reigned for one week in 2004, and followed with Todd Smith (No. 2, 2006), Exit 13 (No. 2, 2008) and Authentic (No. 4, 2013).
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Tim shared this with me the other day. It's a good way to start off 2025.
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LL COOL J on reaction to his desire to record new album: “They looked at me like I was a hydra”
"People looked at me like I had nine heads"
14th September 2024
LL Cool J at the MTV Video Music Awards 2024. CREDIT: Jeff Kravitz/Getty Images for MTV
LL COOL J has spoken about the reaction he got when he revealed his intention to record a new album.
- Read More: LL COOL J on his first album in 11 years, ‘THE FORCE’: “I want to do the Blackest **** in the world”
In an interview with Variety published yesterday (September 13), the veteran rapper – real name James Todd Smith – talked about how people reacted to his desire to work on ‘The FORCE’, which was eventually released on September 6. It marks his first studio album in eleven years.
“When I told people, ‘Yo, I wanna do a culturally relevant album’ in the midst of all these [younger artists], people looked at me like I had nine heads,” Smith told the publication.
“They looked at me like I was a hydra – a hydra! – looking at me crazy like that, not because of any ill will, but just ‘How can you do that?’”
The rapper, who turned 56 this year, followed through with the project, which was mainly produced by A Tribe Called Quest‘s Q-Tip. Smith felt his ability to record such an album at his age would challenge ageism in hip-hop.
“It’s like breaking the four-minute mile,” he says. “Nobody thought it could be broken until Roger Bannister did it, and then a lot of people started breaking it. Now you’ll see, when [‘The FORCE’] has success, you’re [seeing] people believing that they can make it happen, and it’s gonna extend the life of hip-hop in general.”
He adds that “if somebody doesn’t do it” to show how “a guy who’s been out for a long time can make a new record and be relevant”, then “it never happens”.
LL COOL J. CREDIT: Chris Parsons/Press
Last month, Smith previewed ‘The FORCE’ track ‘Murdergram Deux’, which sees his first-ever collaboration with Eminem. Q-Tip shared with Variety that it was a surreal moment to be in the studio with a rapper he and Eminem idolised as kids. “This is like a ****ing dream, isn’t it, Tip?” he recalls Eminem telling him.
NME spoke with Smith about ‘The FORCE’, an album that he felt “artistic pressure” from himself to undertake. “[I] want to create something that I love, something that I can really embrace, something that I thought was amazing, something that I felt like, like was meaningful to me, something that I could love as a fan,” he said.
He also bristled at the common sentiment that “hip-hop is a young man’s game”, saying: “The genre just turned 50-years-old. So, what are we going to call it in 100 years? How is that mindset even sustainable?
“You haven’t had an opportunity to see artists continue to grow. Ultimately, the music determines that. We can talk all we want, but how’s that music sounding, b?” -
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Oh man, I hope he does more of these. When he did the book tour, he booked a D.C. event, but it got canceled before tickets went on sale.
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I feel like the song has gotten lost in the shuffle a bit, so I'm glad to hear he's still talking about it. Especially on a platform like that.
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On 9/2/2024 at 3:57 PM, MooseKnuckles said:
i can’t believe this forum is still going!
i heard some of will’s new music, and it saddens me greatly to hear all the god bull**** he’s leaning into. that’s really a bummer. thanks for the memories will, but i’m out ✌️
This is kind of a weird thing to make you tap out on an artist you've like for a long time. Did you have the same problems with "The Rain"? Let an artist express themselves. You don't have to rock with every facet of their art.
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The album hasn't come out yet, so I'm updating the title of the post. Her website still says "new music coming soon".
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New single!
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CHIP-FU - Like Us
Invisible Footprints 2024 (Coming in October)
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I think Men In Black could go on forever. Of course, that should only happen if the stories make it necessary. A main factor of the appeal of the first movie was that it was completely original. After that, the stories can be original, but you can't re-capture the newness and overall original-ness of it, being introduced into that world. Since they wrapped things up nicely in the third movie and since the fourth one involved other characters and was pretty average, they should just leave the original universe alone.
I think it could be a good idea to reboot it in the future, slightly change the tone to make it its own, and have the release of the films be more consistent. A big picture of multiple films should be in mind up front so that they don't vary in quality. I'm interested in seeing what might happen.
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https://coveredgeekly.com/sony-men-in-black-5-seemingly-revealed/
Men in Black 5 seemingly revealed to begin filming next year
By Alex DuthieJuly 11th, 2024
According to a recent production listing, an untitled Men in Black sequel will seemingly begin filming as soon as January 2025.
Although Sony has yet to officially announce “Men in Black 5”, franchise star Will Smith’s MIB performance at Coachella only fueled fan speculation.
The news comes from ProductionList.com, a popular website typically known for keeping tabs on major movie and TV show productions.
As per the listing, the Men in Black sequel will begin filming next January in London.
Hollywood veteran Tommy Lee Jones originally starred in the first three movies alongside Smith, who both played the franchise’s fan-favourite MIB agents.
However, due to the studio pivoting in which direction they initially had planned for a fourth movie, Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson ended up taking the lead roles.
The two Thor: Ragnarok stars replaced both Jones and Smith in Sony’s Men in Black: International, which didn’t quite perform as highly as the studio hoped.
It’s been around half a decade since International released in theatres.
Sadly for everyone involved, the latest instalment in the franchise ended up disappointing too many fans, which left any sequels starring Hemsworth and Thompson as the leads up in the air.
Since Smith’s Coachella cryptic MIB cameo, theories and speculation that the studio has plans to bring back the original cast have been at an all-time high.
The 1997 original is still said to be the best in the movie series, with its second instalment being one of the biggest letdowns prior to International being released.
Despite any harsh reviews, each movie has still managed to make a decent buck at the box office.
Men in Black 5 has yet to be announced but will reportedly begin filming in January 2025.
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As for a time table, he only said he'd probably start promoting the album about a month after Bad Boys: Ride or Die came out. He didn't hint as to when it would come out, but my guess is that it would be before the end of the year (there's always a spike in albums being bought during the holiday season). Big Willie Style and Willennium were both released in November.
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As I look at it, there are some simple minded mouth breathers who will always bring up the slap. As for people with some sort of platform or celebrity, they will bring this up just to get clicks/attention. Will has moved on. Most people have moved on. I haven't clicked on this kind of stuff in a long time.
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On 8/4/2024 at 9:11 AM, ORIGINAL DJ FINESSE said:
#1 Many of you dont even know these guys. #2 I was there when the careers of these guys launched. #3 I grew up with Ready and Will. Ready lived across the driveway from me literally 30ft away. We both Djed together in that driveway and house parties. Will lived around the corner from us. My mentor DJ CAPTAIN GROOVE (R.I.P.) who lived the next block down from me, was Wills second DJ. Marques Forrest was his first DJ.! Groove, Will,Marques and a guy named Jamie Fresh formed a group called DJ Groove and The Hipnotic 3 MCs. They were phenomenal and ran the tri-state area. Later Groove and Will worked on songs together. Behind Groove's back Will was taking the music to Jeff. Next thing ya know, here comes "Girls Aint Nothin But Trouble" which originally was written for 3 MCs (HYPNOTIC 3MCs). Groove made the beat and came up with the "I Dream Of Jeanie" hook. In other words WILL STOLE THE RECORD! Then here comes Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince performing in public. Then here comes the Lp "Rockin the House". DJ Groove was outraged! Will bought Groove a MPC 60 drum machine in the hopes of him producing more music for him while he was building his career with Jeff. How do I know? I WAS THERE! GROOVE WAS MY MENTOR! I was at Groove's house and Will was there. Will was in the basement practicing rhymes and Groove was upstairs when I got there. Next thing ya know BOOM! I heard a crash in the basement and the music cut off. Will came up to the floor I was on (living room) crying n I mean literally crying. He said wasup and left Groove's house. Groove came down and asked me what was that noise. I said I dont know but Will just left crying. We went in the basement and the MPC WAS SMASHED INTO A MILLION PIECES! Groove told me Will wanted him to do the music for their album and he told him NO! LETS BE CLEAR! This is before Ready Roc! Later that next summer I found out Ready joined the Duo, Jeff and Will, when I had a party to DJ, and his sister told me Ready was down with Will and Jeff. Later down the line I went to Ready's house and him and Will were writing "Parents Just Dont Understand" in Ready's kitchen. They let me hear what THEY wrote and it was exactly what was on the song verbatim. Ready toured with Will n Jeff then returned for a break. When it was time to go back on tour, Ready was lied to about what time the plane was leaving. Arriving to the airport, Ready was told his plane left hours ago. The rest is history! Ready felt it was more Jeff than Will because when it was Ready's spotlight the crowd would go BANANAS! as opposed to Jeff's time to shine. Yup thats the story I got from Clarence Holmes my childhood and still good friend. So now yall call fall back with the lies yall HEARD! THESE ARE THE FACTS! THE ORIGINAL DJ FINESSE #PHILLY
It's cool to hear this side of things. So much of matches up with what Ready Rock C has shared in the past.
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I definitely prefer Dance In Your Darkest Moments over Rave In The Wasteland, but whatever.
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CDs sales are growing. How I wish I hadn’t given my beloved collection away
Compact discs provided the soundtrack to his life. Then came streaming and he couldn’t get rid of them fast enough. As CDs enjoy a mini-renaissance, our writer looks back at what he lost and, below, musicians share their memories
Sun 28 Jul 2024 05.00 EDTGrease: The Original Soundtrack from the Motion Picture. The Beatles’ Red Album. A flimsy single, Boom! Shake the Room, by DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, and a chunky double-decker compilation record, Now That’s What I Call Music! 24. I thought about these treasured objects – my first CDs, bought or gifted to me in the mid-1990s – when I read the other day that CD sales were enjoying an unexpected bounce in the mid-2020s. I felt pleased at the news of a resurgence, if distantly so, as you might on hearing something nice about an old friend you long ago lost touch with. So fans of Taylor Swift are gobbling up special-edition copies of her albums on CD? Overall sales of the format are higher than they’ve been in decades? Great! Good for good old CDs.
It made me think of being 10 years old, newly in possession of a plasticky portable stereo that had (I still remember the glamour of the phrase) a disc reader under its press-open lid. With CDs in a CD player, you could boom and shake your room on infinite repeat without stopping to rewind. You could digitally programme the Red Album to skip And I Love Her, that buzz kill, and reorder the soundtrack of Grease to prioritise Beauty School Dropout, as heaven surely intended. You could randomise the order of a Now compilation, putting yourself through a daring Russian roulette: Ugly Kid Joe (the sonic equivalent of an empty pistol chamber), then PM Dawn (another empty chamber), then Bryan Ferry (bullet through the head).
I was a child. I wouldn’t have known or cared about the bigger-picture changes happening in the music industry in terms of clarity of sound, manufacturing or distribution processes, what the shift towards a digitised, copyable archive of sound would mean in terms of piracy. Back in the 90s, I saw only the enormous new potential for control. I could take a carefully orchestrated album of 11 or 12 tracks and turn it from a multi-course meal, one dish progressing to the next, into a messy, free-for-all buffet. To this day, I can picture the horror on my friends’ faces when I played them a custom rearrangement of Oasis’s second album: She’s Electric, She’s Electric, She’s Electric, Wonderwall, Champagne Supernova, Roll With It, Don’t Look Back in Anger, Cast No Shadow, She’s Electric, Some Might Say, She’s Electric.
View image in fullscreen Taylor Swift, whose special-edition copies of her albums on CD have contributed to a resurgence of the format. Photograph: Claudio Furlan/AP
To my generation, born at the same time as the CD in the early 1980s, teenagers by the time this was a globally dominant product, we felt like we had our format, a rejection of the massive, licquorice-y vinyl owned by our parents, a clear advance on the cassette tapes cherished by older siblings and cousins. For some reason, I never saw CDs as precious, fragile or collectible objects, even though plenty of my friends did. As far as I could tell, there were four types of CD collection in the 1990s: the Pile, the Rack, the Cabinet and the Archive.
Mine was a Pile, a collection kept in no sort of order, with glossy inserts and booklets that were always scuffed and had their staples coming loose. Those who Piled like me knew all too well the dreaded butterfly effect when you failed to put a disc back in its rightful case. One day you’d decide to play Portishead by Portishead, removing from the stereo the double A-side of I Believe/Up on the Roof by Robson & Jerome that had been in there before. Who could say where the case for that double A-side had got to? Easiest to sling the disc in the open, inviting Portishead case.Quick GuideNot dead yet: CD stats
After a few rounds of this you’d be opening The Score by the Fugees to find the soundtrack from a Levi’s ad. You’d want to dance to Setting Sun by the Chemical Brothers and have to settle instead for I Am, I Feel by Alisha’s Attic. As someone with a Pile, you were likely to start mislaying cover slips and lyric booklets pretty quickly. One advantage of this was that the front panes of the CD cases became little windows. Wrongly housed discs were slightly easier to find.
Compared with the Pile, the Rack was a halfway house towards respectability, a realistic attempt at order. Made of dark, matt-finished black plastic or a clearer acrylic, the CD racks and carousels of my youth allowed collectors to sweep a glance over a load of case spines at once, scanning for (say) the strip of white and bright orange that signified the Trainspotting soundtrack or the warmer, orangey-white that meant Blur by Blur. Related to the Rack was the Cabinet, usually towering and made of wood, with the tell-tale shelves that were just too small for paperback books. The Cabinet was ascended-to by collectors when the number of discs they owned became too much to be contained by factory-moulded plastic. When the novelist Colm Tóibín said recently that “home is where the CDs are”, he can only have been thinking of a Cabinet-sized collection, beloved, built up over time, a massive bloody pain to transport.
It was probably because I was a Piler, never a Racker or an Archivist, that I found it so easy to leave CDs behind
The last type of collection was the Archive, a shrine-like version of the Cabinet that was kept pristine, in A-to-Z order, perhaps with additional separation of albums and singles by genre, rarity, region of release. My best friend had the beginnings of an Archive, stuffed with immaculate copies of Suede, Beck, every CD the Britpop band Mansun had ever released. I remember the day he added an obscure import copy of Ash’s 1995 single Kung Fu. This CD had come all the way to England from Japan. When we held it we did so in awe, by the farthest corners of the case, like teenaged auctioneers.
Recently, I messaged him to ask what became of that treasured Ash disc. Oh (he said) he got rid of almost all of his singles years ago. They took up too much room. His import copy of Kung Fu was gone, maybe to someone else’s collection by now, maybe to someone’s bin.
“I feel weirdly sad to think of you without a copy of Mansun’s Taxloss to hand,” I wrote.
“I did keep my Mansun singles,” he wrote back.
“Thank God.”
The great shedding of CDs began, at least for me, around the turn of the millennium, when the world went online. I remember first seeing the music-sharing software Napster in action in early 2000. Using a dial-up connection, it took someone an hour to download Soul Bossa Nova (Original Mix) from the Austin Powers soundtrack. A year later, I visited a friend at a US college where the students had access to broadband. Using Napster, or one of the many equivalent pieces of file-sharing software that were proliferating at the time, tracks were downloadable in minutes. Whole albums by Gorillaz, Gabrielle, Ginuwine fell off the internet over the course of a day, like apples.
Around 2004 I started consolidating my albums and my singles on a desktop computer, ripping the CDs I already owned to my hard drive and sending the contents from there to an MP3 player. It was probably because I was a Piler, never a Racker or a Shelfer, let alone an Archivist, that I found it so easy to leave CDs behind. The first four albums by Belle and Sebastian had been in heavy rotation for me for years, always in and out of the stereo. Once I’d digitised these albums (in the 2000s, the work of minutes), I hardly touched them again. In 2005 I bought a lozenge-like iPod Shuffle that was about the size and weight of a packet of chewing gum and had room for 20-odd albums. At home, the computer replaced the stereo as a music player. I had dozens of albums, secure on a hard drive, playable with a double-click.
View image in fullscreen Adrian Utley and Beth Gibbons of Portishead. Photograph: Des Willie/Redferns
Where did you end up, my Belle and Sebastian CDs? My Blur by Blur? My Grease and my Nows? Some of these CDs were so overhandled by the time of their abandonment, the printed lettering on top of the discs had rubbed away, the grooved inside of cases had chipped or gone, and the plastic faceplates were grazed and foggy. Did I give the Belle and Sebastians away? Did they end up in landfill, with my friend’s abandoned Ash and Suede singles? I know the Belle and Sebastians didn’t make it as far as my last bin bag, a gathering-together of CDs belonging to me and to my wife that we gave away when we moved flats in 2012.
I miss the fussy, fusty process of deciding to put one on, a rummaging hand, a scour for the correct disc...
By this point we were both listening to music through a subscription streaming service – Spotify at first, then Apple’s equivalent. Even the invisible MP3s on my computer’s hard drive had started to feel fiddly and archaic, an unnecessary burden: so, of course, the last of the CDs had to go. I made the argument to my wife that we should do a clean sweep. I took all the discs we had to an Oxfam on Kentish Town Road. I remember handing the bag over dubiously, with no faith in the resale value of the contents. What a cool thing, I told myself, as I walked away unencumbered, to own no albums… yet somehow to own every album. What freedom! What choice!
I don’t know how long it took for the regret to sink in. Three years? Five? I know that I miss my pile of CDs now. I miss the fussy, fusty process of deciding to put one on, a rummaging hand, a scour for the correct disc, the colours and the fonts and feel of the plastic circles, lightweight yet at the same time heavy with associative feeling. I miss having signposted reminders of songs or records I loved during specific eras in my life. Streaming’s better, on the whole. I’ve paid out so much money in monthly subscriptions by now I have to believe it’s better. My access to new or unheard music has expanded. My diet is more varied. But something lovely has gone. Pointless denying that.
Grease: The Original Soundtrack from the Motion Picture is available to listen to on Apple Music, I see. So is a 2016 album of Grease tributes, including Boyz II Men singing Beauty School Dropout. My current subscription gives me access to about a dozen volumes of Now covering 2021 to 2024. The Beatles’ Red Album is on there, with an animated tweak to the cover that renders John, Paul, George and Ringo vanishing away into nothing. As I look at this graphic on my iPhone, propped on the desk beside me, it looks as if the band are repeatedly fading into the depths of the device, there to join the pixels, the compressed data, the algorithms, the nudging search results – innovations that enrich as well as complicate today’s curation and consumption of music.
View image in fullscreen Photograph: Gordon Scammell/Alamy
If it meant swapping what we have today for what we had then, I wouldn’t go back. I’m too greedy for the new stuff and too impatient to be fed with music when I want to be fed. That cover of Beauty School Dropout by Boyz II Men is decent, it turns out, and I never would have listened to it were it not for this opening up of a digitised music landscape, where one discovery leads to another then another, seamlessly, more or less infinitely. Piercing through the convenience of this, though, comes the regret about my old CDs.
When my primary school-age children want to put on music in our home they have to find a phone, mine or their mother’s. They have to scroll or type on a screen, press play, then wait for the mysterious rearrangement of ones and zeros that will bring Taylor or Oasis or the first track of In the Heights out of a wireless speaker. It’s an impressive process. I still find myself wanting to whistle, amazed by how far music tech has come. But there’s an absence now, some loss of connection with the initial creators of these pieces of art, some loss of awareness, too, about the spots they occupy in time and space.
For my children, attentive listeners though they are, Taylor might as well be a direct contemporary of Liam and Noel. All three of them might have grown up together in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Manhattan, or Stormzy’s Croydon, or in a Kings Road boozer of the 1960s. Now that music is invisible, everywhere and nowhere, served up track by track in capsule form, there aren’t the same indicators about provenance, influence, chronology, originality.
We don’t have a CD player in our home any more. There is one, never used, in our car. Perhaps I’ll stop in a charity shop the next time I pass one: buy a few CDs. Perhaps I’ll go down to the Oxfam on Kentish Town Road and see if I can buy back one or two of my CDs. If any of them are still there, I reckon I’d know them at once. The half-torn HMV label on Expecting to Fly by the Bluetones. A curved moon of acrylic missing from the corner of my Trainspotting case. I’d recognise them all, right away – old mates.
Tom Lamont’s debut novel, Going Home, is out now. To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
Three musicians on their love of CDs
View image in fullscreen Photograph: Dennis Morris
Bashy: ‘Vinyl is great but it’s very much a luxury’
British actor and rapper
There’s something about the tangible nature of CDs that really appeals to me. I released an album recently, and even though it was online and people were listening to it and talking about it, it only properly landed with me when I had the CD in my hand. That physical feeling gave me a sense of completion. There’s a video of me on my Instagram opening up the CD and taking in the artwork for the first time. It’s something I really care about.I was born in 1985 and grew up at the intersection of vinyl, cassettes and CDs. The first album I bought on CD was Kiss the Game Goodbye by Jadakiss and I ended up collecting hundreds and hundreds, which I stacked up in my room like a work of art. You could see someone’s musical taste through their CDs – mine included 50 Cent’s Get Rich or Die Trying, Jay-Z’s The Blueprint and The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill – whereas now it’s hidden away in your phone out of view.
Vinyl is great but it was expensive then and it’s very much a luxury now. For young kids from working-class backgrounds, the CD was a way for us to spread our music in a cost-effective manner. So it was essential in the London grime and hip-hop scenes before social media. In 2008 I put out The Chupa-Chups Mixtape, which I pressed up on CD myself, attaching a Chupa-Chups lollipop to the front of each cover with Sellotape. I put it in barber shops and local clothes shops for people to buy and the lollipop helped it stand out visually. Then it started to take on a life of its own. People would tell their friends about it, or they’d burn up a copy to share around. Thanks to that mixtape, I ended up making the theme song for the film Adulthood. It helped me lay my foundations as an artist.
Streaming has its advantages, but a lot of people are missing that physicality a CD gives you. The artwork and the liner notes and printed lyrics become an extension of the music. You can get a feeling of what the album is about, or who the artist is, before you’ve even pressed play. So I don’t think the CD format is dead or has ever died, it’s just been overlooked for a while because of the digital music revolution. I’m really glad to see it resurfacing. Interview by Killian Fox
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Bashy’s new album, Being Poor Is Expensive, is out now. The Chupa-Chups Mixtape can be streamed here. 1Xtra’s Album Launch Party with Bashy is on BBC iPlayer
Kitty Liv: ‘CDs give you an insight into the journey of an album’
Singer-songwriter, member of Kitty, Daisy & Lewis)
View image in fullscreen Photograph: Dean Chalkley
I was born in the early 90s and CDs were the biggest thing when I was growing up. I used to get them for Christmas presents, and sometimes I’d go to Woolworths and choose one. I’d burn them a lot and make my own compilations. It was such a straightforward thing to do as a kid on the family computer. It would be a huge mix of anything I was listening to at the time, from Elvis’s greatest hits to Daniel Bedingfield, T Rex and then random stuff by Eminem, a combination of whatever was popular at the time with music I really loved. I remember going to my local cafe, Mario’s in Kentish Town, and if I made him a CD, he’d give me a free breakfast. I was probably about 10.
Streaming platforms are good for discovering new music, but in terms of the listening experience, I think CDs are a great thing. Music has become quite disposable now, and with streaming, there is not that sense of urgency to listen to new music. If there’s a new song out, I might give it a listen later, whereas with CDs, it was like: “I’ll get the CD and I’ll put it on in the car and listen to the whole album.” Having the attention span to listen has been lost, certainly with the younger generation. I hope that will come back because when you make music, it’s great when someone else gets an insight into the journey that you’ve had making that record. Interview by Tess Reidy
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Kitty Liv’s debut solo album, Easy Tiger, is out now on Sunday Best Recordings, on digital, vinyl and – of course – CD
Joe Mount: ‘Hidden tracks are just not hidden any more’
Lead singer/ guitarist, Metronomy
View image in fullscreen Metronomy on stage at the 2009 Reading festival. Photograph: Simone Joyner/Getty Images
We were a tape household and we weren’t in the first wave of people to buy a CD player, but eventually, one Christmas, my sister ended up getting a ghettoblaster with a disc player. I just remember then having to try to build a collection and feeling a bit begrudging that I already had loads of stuff on tape. The quickest route to getting a CD collection was buying magazines that had cover-mount CDs on them, and so a lot of my earliest ones were from Q magazine or Select. One, which I still have, was called Be There Now. It had Radiohead, Wire, Bentley Rhythm Ace, Talking Heads and Talk Talk. That was ’97.
In the Britpop days, there were always inventive ways of making you buy more music. I remember having a Pulp CD and it had three slots for discs, but you had to go and buy individual singles to build up this collection. I never really splurged a load of money on them and I soon veered more into vinyl.
A lot of the CDs I owned I still have and they’re at my parents’ house. There’s the Aaliyah record, the one with a picture of her and the red cover. I’ve also got the Queens of the Stone Age’s Songs for the Deaf and In Search of... by NERD.
I think music streaming is not too bad, but I do slightly lament the fact that hidden tracks are just not hidden any more. It was a glory age of actually concealing things on discs. The first time I remember hearing a hidden track was on the Lemonheads’ Come On Feel the Lemonheads, which has a hidden reprise at the very end. The other thing I miss about the format is the printed artwork. I think that’s a really nice thing and people got quite creative with the different types of CD cases that they made.
In terms of durability, however, CDs have never been good. When my wife and I left the first flat we shared together, she had an enormous CD collection, and I was trying to organise it all and every case I opened there was no CD in it. They were in a DJ folder, completely scratched. I very passive aggressively put all the empty CD cases in a box and she wouldn’t let me throw them away, so I had to label it “empty CD cases”. We’ve still got that!
These days, you can go into charity shops and find decent albums on CD for 50p. I like doing that ahead of car journeys and enjoying the fact that you don’t need to care about them too much. You know they’ve already had their first usage and it’s like an act of recycling, like having the last crack of the scratched CD. TR
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Rakim just released his new album, G.O.Ds Network: Reb7rth. A collaboration remix with them, with Jeff on production, would be perfect. Jeff and Rakim have done a handful of shows in recent years. This only makes sense and would boost interest in both of their albums. Plus, if Will's album is leaning toward modern rap, a classic Hip-Hop remix would hit the spot for those of us wanting that.
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Will Smith resurges rap career with new single 'Work of Art'
Naledi Ushe
USA TODAYThe Fresh Prince is officially back in the rap game.Will Smith released the debut single "Work of Art" off of his upcoming album Friday along with its music video. The track features Smith's son Jaden and singer Russ on the vocals with the Grammy-winning rapper reflecting on the different aspects of his personality.
"I am Musa, I am Jesus / I am Judas, I am the judge / I am the victim, and I'm the shooter / I'm in the Torah, and the Koran, and in the Bible / I am a shepherd / I am a leader, and a disciple," Smith, 55, smoothly raps.
He also alludes to his struggle in the public eye after he slapped comedian Chris Rock at the 2022 Academy Awards.
"They tried to censor me / But then they sent for me," he raps in one section, adding in the chorus, "I am a saint, but if you touch, I am a savage."
Will Smith returns to musicwith uplifting BET Awards 2024 performance of 'You Can Make It'
Throughout the music video, Smith reveals to Russ that he recorded over 20 songs for his upcoming project. "'Work of Art' was the song where I found my voice. It was like 'Ah! That’s what I want to talk about,'" he says as the two become part of a museum display.
Smith has been teasing his return to music in the past few months with an appearance during J. Balvin's Coachella set in April, followed by the first live performance of his song "You Can Make It" at the BET Awards in June and a surprise appearance at La Velada Del Año 4 earlier this month.
Teasing his fifth album, the "Bad Boys: Ride or Die" star wrote on Instagram on July 12, "The Theme of the music I’ve been working on is 'Dance in your Darkest Moments.' Over the past couple of years I’ve had to learn a different way to be with adversity — a different way to face hard times."
The actor's most recent studio album was “Lost and Found,” released in 2005. The album sold a half-million copies and peaked at No. 6 on the Billboard 200 albums chart.
Contributing: Edward Segarra, KiMi Robinson
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I'd expect there'd be a CD release. Most albums still get a physical release. Artists that come from an era where it was essential to release CD, cassette, vinyl, etc, typically make a point to release physical media. Since SLANG is a new label, we don't really have anything to go by. I just tried to look them up on Discogs and they haven't been entered yet.
Queen Latifah Biopic In Works As Part Of Hip Hop Pics Slate From Flavor Unit, Westbrook Studios & Jesse Collins Entertainment
in Jazzy Jeff & Fresh Prince
Posted
I saw this news. I like it, but I also think it's too soon.