Design a logo. Please

This blog has been going for just over six months now and it’s not about to go away anytime soon. In that time I've completed my diploma, spent more time in London than I'd have liked and expanded by burgeoning trainer museum ten-fold. But there remains one problem. The top banner is still as uninspiring as it was on day one.

So, seeing as my skills with the coloured pencils are comparable to those of Morph himself rather than Tony Hart, I put this plea to you - please design me a logo.

No doubt all three of you visitors to this page will be falling over yourselves to help me out. But just in case I’m not inundated with entries could you put the word out as well, or else I might have to pick up the paints myself and that might risk getting paint on my nice new trainers.

Doc Brown Interview

It has been a good few minutes since Doc Brown was last on the UK Hip Hop scene. In that time he has been ripping up clubs not with his rhymes but with his wit.

I caught up with him to see why he left us all out on the cold and what happened to his elusive album but in the corse of our conversation he hada few things to say about the music industry and the state of Hip Hop to.

"The internet has changed the music industry. Every type of music and every type of musician is suffering to a different extent. You know, a couple of years ago a Robbie Williams album came out, I think it was called Rude Box, on EMI and they sold so few that they actually had to destroy a load of pre-orders. I think it was one million pre-orders had to be destroyed before they were even delivered. They were made in Beijing and they stayed in Beijing and they crushed them and used them to form the basis of roads in the provinces of Beijing.

When I read that story in the newspaper I did start thinking, ‘Jesus if Robbie Williams can’t sell records then how the hell are we going to do it?’ I realised that the internet had really changed the way people were experiencing and enjoying music. A lot of artists get really angry about it, and sometimes it makes me angry but at the same time I can understand. You know no-one’s got a lot of money, so why would you risk forking out some money on a rapper [where] you don’t really know if the album's all going to be good. You might just pick your favourite song and roll it from there, if you don’t want pay 79p on iTunes for it then you can probably find a way to copy it from somebody else. It doesn’t seem like a crime that would affect anyone but we are the victims, obviously. Rappers are the victims.

It’s so natural now that people don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. Even now I get people emailing me, emailing my website, asking how they can download my stuff for free. Even on my videos on YouTube all the comments are talking about how to get my songs on LimeWire or how to rip them off youtube, as if I wouldn’t notice or mind. But the fact is that it’s happening to everybody and I think it’s increasingly hard for people to sell records.

To me the music industry has shifted to its original way of reaching the public when popular music came out in the fifties, which is the live circuit. So live music is massive again now because music as it was has become faceless. What I mean by that is everything is a downloadable MP3 or is copied from someone else on a blank CD there’s no liner notes there’s no artwork. People are enjoying our music for free but they’re not getting to know the artist anymore, so ultimately they can enjoy their pirated music for a while but if they really enjoy it at some stage they want to connect with that artist on a deeper level.

If you look at the upper echelon or artists like at contemporary stuff, not the Bruce Springsteins of this world, but the Lily Allens. They are making a living now not through selling records but through the live circuit. It’s real and actual. You have to gig like 300 days of each year to really make your money back. It’s gigs and merchandise now which is massive.

In the UK rap game, which kicked off from vinyl and then moved on to CD and briefly had a resurgence of income through legal downloads, now it’s tough because rap gigs have never really been a big deal. Rap gigs are coming back in the States now but even like ten years ago in the States rap gigs weren’t that big because promoters didn’t want to risk it. They felt there would always be some sort of street element attached to a rap gig and we’ve always had that problem here and so rappers can’t even get paid gigs."

Read the rest of the interview and find out why the Doc left Hip Hop.

Social scientists waste time and money on Hip Hop

For a totally different purpose I was leafing through some electronic journals when I came across an entry from the January 2009 edition of the Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, which is an American publication. The study in question was called Controversial rap themes, gender portrayals and skin tone distortion: A content analysis of rap music videos, an informative if less than catchy title. I thought it might make for interesting reading but then the abstract went like this:

"A content analysis of rap music videos aired on BET, MTV, and VH1 examined the occurrence of controversial themes, gender differences, and skin tone distortion. The results of this study found that current rap music videos have placed an emphasis on themes of materialism and misogyny. Additionally, men and women in the videos differ in their portrayal of these themes. Specifically, female characters are significantly more likely to appear as objects of sexuality. Men and women also differ in their appearance with more African American females appearing to have Eurocentric features. Implications and suggestions for future research are discussed."

If any over-payed American professors want to pay me for sitting on my ass watching MTV and eating Cheetos in exchange for a few insightful notes, get in touch.

Image courtesy of ricardo.martins