Nobody in DC raps better than Fat Trel. Nobody in DC makes a cleaner hood video than 1st Impressions Studio.

Now that you’ve got both of those facts straight, I invite you to see Northeast DC’s most popular fool in his environment. Goodness. If this isn’t gutta gutta, I don’t know what is. I’ve been campaigning for this guy to take over the city for a while now (read my post about him here), and it looks like things are finally starting to look up! I smell a major label situation of some sort coming. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Many people already know this, but the U.S. lags behind most countries in global test scores. How are we supposed to be a world power, yet have the dumbest future leaders on the planet?

My man Nasser has been grinding in graduate school at Howard while simultaneously working as a middle school teacher. They interviewed him and asked him some awesome questions in regards to how the U.S. could change this. I’m about to go watch Waiting To Superman because I’d love to hear more of this discussion. It’s my duty to do that much as a citizen, right? I mean, according to the data, I’m part of the problem too just by being a U.S. citizen. Goodness. Anyway, watch!

Shout out to all my friends who are teachers and who are venturing into teaching. Oh, and I’m trying to speak that eloquently any time I’m speaking, on or off camera! And yeah, I just hit you with some educational based content, “based” being the key word. More to come.

This may be my new favorite Theo Martins joint. He samples “You Can’t Blame Me” by Johnson, Hawkins, Tatum & Durr, which hardcore hip-hop heads probably heard flipped before on Reks‘ “Big Dreamers” and the tree climbers who were on that earlier Wiz Khalifa music heard on “When U Find” (which is my favorite Wiz song to date).

“I speak the issues that we all are under / but I also spread the faith that we can all recover.”

There’s some heat in this! Sounds like a heartfelt rap, dude. I really rock with this joint. Speaking of which, me and Theo just had a crazy awesome night in Philly last Saturday with the AnmlHse heads, and while I don’t have the means to throw all the pictures up, I’d like to direct you to AnmlHse’s site to check out some of them (there’s SO MANY GOOD PICTURES), and Theo’s site for you to catch his re-cap.

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DOWNLOAD: Theo Martins – Lo-Fi Love [prod. by $port]

Really though. I want to know the first joint you scooped from your local Sam Goody, Tower Records, or whatever record spot you used to frequent that bloggers such as myself put out of business. i miss those days when albums used to matter.

Mine? DMX’s “It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot.” and then Mariah Carey’s “Butterfly.” Nevermind all of that. I did some hardcore brainstorming, and it was actually a very rare album that is no longer in production. It was Mickey Unrapped. I had forgotten about that one. Oh boy.

Don’t act like it didn’t have jams on it. I’m talking thumpers like the rabbit from Bambi. A couple trill guest appearances, too. And hella no name artists whose verses I was most likely reciting in the morning while I got dressed for elementary School. Damn. They got me. I still have it, and I’ve uploaded it for you. download it below. Before you do that though, I’m asking you to do two things.

First, jam a sample. Tag Team x Mickey x Minnie x Goofy x Donald x Daisy. It was like a 90′s “Swagger Like Us,” all the heavyweights were represented.

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As you listen to this, I also want you to think about what you were jamming way back in the day. Go check out the stacks of records, tapes, and/or CDs behind your bed or on your desk, in your parent’s ancient collection. You know it’s somewhere in there. Let me know what you’re working with. I wanna hear everything from your first purchases to some honorable mentions to “what was I thinking when I went to the checkout line with this album?” like my Mickey Unrapped.

DOWNLOAD: Mickey Unrapped [Album]

If you follow me on Twitter, you’ve already heard me sing this album’s praises. I bought ScHoolBoy Q‘s Setbacks off iTunes, and now he’s released a free version. The free version is shorter than the iTunes joint (couple different songs, and honestly, one of them is potentially a highlight on the tape…yikes…oh well!) Since he dropped the announcement on Twitter Nation, I figured I’d let those who don’t know of him or follow him to learn about him here.

Q’s got a charisma about him, man. His voice is unique, and he kills the majority of these tracks with his somewhat unorthodox rhyme scheme. Every song is pretty intense, too, as far as subject matter. When I play this album, I paint a vivid picture of this hazy, California hellhole. Lots of drug talk, but the stressful life that he seems to lead kind of explains it all. I love pretty much every beat on the album, and the only real problem I have with the project is that he didn’t put the one song that I blogged of his a while back on the joint. I understand the decision (it doesn’t really work with the entire “setbacks” concept), but that joint bumped.

All of the features are awesome. Top Dawg teammates Kendrick Lamar, Ab-Soul, and Jay Rock all have appearances (Kendrick actually has two, and the one on “LigHt Years AHead” is my favorite swag verse of his since I heard “Michael Jordan”) ***WOW! This song is NOT on the free version! Sorry, guys!*** BJ The Chicago Kid murders the hook on “I’m Good”, and in a great, great way.

I hate talking about music too much. Just listen to it. Thank me later. I rock with Q the long way. This album is the best thing to drop in January as far as hip-hop is concerned (that I’ve heard, anyway). Check out this video real quick, then grab the whole project via the link below. Oh, and shout out to @daveisfree.

DOWNLOAD: ScHoolBoy Q – Setbacks [ALBUM]

You know I’m probably Fam-Lay‘s biggest supporter. Ever. This is my favorite joint he’s put out recently, but Fam…where’s the album at!?

“I will put you up in something that you can’t get out of / got n****s makin’ money, shootin’ guns and sniffin’ powder.”

Goodness. So raw.

My man Tahir is in Sundance this year for his short film, Close. This is a big, big deal, folks, and it’s awesome that I know somebody that has achieved this kind of accolade. He’s the cousin of DC to BC’s Marcel, but strangely enough, I met him during my high school years, before I even met Marcel. He was sucking faces with a cute girl (who I know, but won’t put her name out there cuz there’s no need for that and this anecdote is for pure entertainment as opposed to putting people on front street) in the backseat of some car with really fogged up windows. Summer in DC, man. It’s awesome. My, how far we’ve come!

The film isn’t even eight minutes long, so don’t tell me you can’t take the time to watch this joint. Here it is!

Some nice text about the joint (that I didn’t write, but instead stole from the YouTube video description section. Got’em.)

Synopsis: One night after a casual ‘visit’, Angela is all but ready to leave Derek’s apartment. Derek, however, is determined no to let her go without a fight.

Programmer’s Note: Tahir Jetter makes his first visit to the Sundance Film Festival with his dramatic short film Close. With its truthful and intimate look at a turning point in a relationship, Jetter describes Close as “heavily autobiographical.” In fact, at the New York premiere of the short, one particular audience member found the film’s narrative more than coincidental, to which Jetter can only comment, “Nothing like making a movie about a person you’ve been romantically involved with and then having that person go and see it.” A graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Jetter is working on expanding Close into a feature film.

Oh, and if you made it all the way here, I’ll also tell you that Tahir has been featured on this blog before, and is an avid reader. I would go as far as to say a die-hard DC to BC supporter, but he’ll probably take that the wrong way, so let’s just leave it as I’ve stated. While you can find him in the older posts, talking crazy (yet rationally) in the comment section, he actually has an entire post dedicated to fitness called Tahir’s Daniel Craig in Casino Royale / Brad Pitt in Troy ÜberWorkout. Seriously. You can find that here.

Follow him: @tahirtweets.

My man Ben and I have known each other since he came to Sidwell in 3rd grade, and years later, we’re still cool. So cool, in fact, that he hollered at me to join him in a conversation about consent.

Yeah, you heard me. CONSENT. He’s started an AWESOME organization called The Consensual Project that teams up with schools and universities to talk to the young folks about consent in hookups, relationships, and I guess anywhere its present in their daily lives. It’s a pretty interesting concept, and once he told me about it, I was excited for him. Now, when he asked me to get on camera and talk about consent in hookup culture, I was a little reluctant. I didn’t wanna put myself out there like that, because…well, if you know about the infamous Roster post…no, but really, I just wasn’t really 100% ready to talk about it. After some persuading, we ended up talking on camera for about 45 minutes. Ben whittled all of that down to  this five minute clip you’re about to see. Check it out, and then scroll down to see what I have to say about things you didn’t catch due to editing.

Okay, so that was me being pretty damn honest about hookups and such. Now, a few things you didn’t see that I spoke about.

One of the big things we talked about was how black culture and white culture differ. For instance, partying and communication between the two, generally speaking, is lightyears apart in terms of similarity. I frequent all sorts of parties, but let’s talk about the black ones real quick. Since I’m from DC, I know how the party culture/climate is. When you hit a party around these parts, girls get grabbed up  and that’s just kinda how it goes, they know what it is. It’s not a real grab, it’s that light grab. You know, the joint that’s like our mating call. The girls know what’s up, the guys know what’s up. It’s not aggressive, it’s just what we do. Our culture kinda embraced that and that’s just how it’s done these days. Can we change it? Probably. But I proposed to Ben in our convo that maybe a combination of body language and consent is how change can be achieved.

I also quickly touched on how sometimes, the element of surprise is cooler than consent. Let’s just be real for a second: you don’t wanna know it all. Asking to kiss somebody is cool, but that rush of getting kissed or kissing somebody is almost unmatched! Ben and I have differing views here, but I think that in the end, like I said before, body language and consent combined can communicate pretty much everything that needs to be communicated in these scenarios.

I had a great time working with Ben, and I’m excited to see what The Consensual Project has up its sleeves in the near future. Schools, BOOK THE MAN! He’s literally getting gigs all over the country, and I’m proud of his progress. Check the site out here, it’s probably one of the smoothest, most easily navigable sites online. Whoever designed that should win some kind of award.

I started a Tumblr out of boredom, but I’ve found that it’s been one of the coolest random pastimes I’ve jumped into as of recent. It’s called Trill Flyers, and basically, all I do is find awesome flyers for events and post them. I’m not talking about promoting these events, because some of them have past. In fact, I recently put up a Harry Houdini (you know, that awesome magician guy who would get locked up in shackles underwater and still find a way out? The distant cousin of failed magician [and unfortunately, my distant relative], Modini?) poster from around 100 years ago.

Nobody I know made it to this joint. Grandpa wasn’t even an afterthought at this point.

But really, it’s a cool little side venture that has taught me how to utilize Tumblr in different ways, and how some flyers are better than the actual event they’re promoting. Check it out: http://trillflyers.tumblr.com. Follow it, reblog my posts, favorite them, “like” them, all that good stuff. Oh, and make sure you send me the coolest flyers you come across. I’ll do a better job of citing the creators of the flyers if I know them, but don’t just send me your $#!t and ask me to post it. It better be TRILL. Look at the previous postings to see what my definition is, and go to the site to find out how to send them my way.

Thanks!

Okay, so I ‘m not sure where I’m going and what I’m doing. But I found out today that all Coachella tickets have been sold. AKA, the joint is sold out. My team and I were in talks of renting a massive house out there for the weekend, but the tragic news on the ticket status ended that discussion abruptly.

I’m not giving up, but I think that it’s less likely. SXSW, anybody!?