The many faces of Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Browsing Dallas Penn's site, I came across a Billy Sunday re-post of Joell Ortiz's discontent with the organisers of the annual Brooklyn Hip Hop Festival. It's a detailed read and definitely worth your time.

Gotta Let Your Soul Be Free

Brooklyn via Harlem's Jah C's tune "Soul Banger" (off the EP pictured above),sounds like it was crafted on another planet. It's a great tune. Listen to the lyrics, nod your head to the beat, sail away to that sax...

Labels can be suffocating, but we'll just call this intergalactic, heavyweight soul, for now.

Brooklyn Hip Hop Festival 2008

Check out this fresh look at a couple of the festivals highlights, look out for KRS-One performing "MC's Act Like They Don't Know" as the sun sets.

Shout to Hip Hop Official. Shout to Wes Jackson.

Sha Stimuli - Left Lane (video)

Directed by Dallas Alexis

Related Links:
Sha Stimuli on My Space

East Flatbush Project - A Day In A Life (Audio)

BK's the East Flatbush Project are best known for the real rap classic "Tried By 12". The EFB concept is the brainchild of producer Spencer For Hire. A Day In A Life is the third, in a series of singles and this dose of firewater over a menacing, bleak, powerful soundscape features New Jersey's Stress (pictured above).

Artist spotlight: Y-Love

Dynamic, hungry Brooklyn based Black Orthodox Jewish MC Yitz Jordan's (Y-Love) new album is entitled "This Is Babylon". He's been featured in publications as diverse as URB, XXL, through to Italy's La Repubblica. Truly revolutionary in what he's delivering to the listener through his lyrics, Jordan rhymes are a mixture of English, Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Latin. He is also the first MC to collaborate with the two top Israeli and Palestinian rappers Shaanan Street Hadag Nachash and Sameh “Saz” Zakout, making Y-Love the first Hasidic man in history to bring the Israel-Palestinian conflict to a musical collaboration on compact disc.

Take a listen to the following feature on Y-Love on Public Radio International's "The World" program.

"This Is Babylon" is a diverse, tempo-varying, rewarding, challenging listen. It's an album which needs to be listened to in whole to comprehend it's significance, importance and depth...

This is what one of the scribes at URB magazine had to say about "This Is Babylon":

“...a conscious intermixing of several languages...laced over uplifting beats that combine quite impeccably to serve as a soundtrack to social progression...Y-Love comes across as a proud individual with deep-rooted beliefs who is not only self aware, but socially aware as well.”



Here's a couple of tracks from "This Is Babylon":

Bring it on Down

State of the Nation

New Disease

Album stream: Full album stream

Related Links:

Y-Love on My Space

Modular Moods records

Dante Ross' "OG Status": Episode 1, Boogie

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