While most people are blaming recording artists for the wall-to-wall foulness in current mainstream Hip-Hop and R&B, people who listen to more than just profit-seeking pundits know what the real deal is. The record labels and media outlets have the most control. You’d think that’d be obvious, but pundits look cooler if they take it straight to the artists instead of attacking the real cause. Really, if any of those artists changed their message, their label would drop them like a bad habit after Viacom would refuse to air their videos. And if you don’t believe that, Bruce Banter from Playahata.com has a story for you about Keke Palmer:

Here’s a few clips from Atlantic records tries to turn Akeelah the Bee into Lil Kim:

Keke Palmer, is the 14 year old girl who played Akeelah, in the movie, Akeelah and the Bee.She and her mother Sharon have a huge problem with the upcoming record deal they signed with Atlantic Records in March of 2006. The problem is that the record label wants to market the 14 year old as a sexpot but she does not want that image.Keke admits “From the very beginning Atlantics A&R representative tried to get me to record inappropriate music, and my parents and I resisted.”

Who’s behind this nonsense? Well the Senior A&R rep, Mike Caren, was the main antagonist, he kept on saying , ” Keke is urban”, so as long as they refused to record the raunchy tracks that he sent them, he refused to pay for the good clean music they brought him.At one point he even stopped Keke from recording by not paying for studio time.

If that isn’t messed up enough for you…

She is only 14 years old, and when she signed the deal she was only 12 years old, “what did they think she would be singing about?” Anyway, they kept their word and did very little to promote her cd. They refused to provide marketing reports, even when Das management kept asking.Then on Sept 14th they received the report, 4 days before her cd release date of Sept 18th.

That’s just insane. You have the kid from Akelah at your record company and you don’t promote it because it jibes more with her image from a hit Hollywood movie than it does typical bass-ackwards urban radio? If the Congress wants to investigate something in the music industry, they may need to look into this. Of course, any execs that want a 14 year old girl to sex-up her image may need a different kind of investigation.

I apologize to the four people that still read this blog for taking over a week to post. Right now I can feel my sinuses headknocking me from the inside and it seems as if almost every other allergy-sufferer around here is catching hell. I have quite a few unfinished posts and unstarted post ideas that I’ll act upon once I feel better. For now, here’s some random stuff that’d I’d ramble about if I had the energy.

X-Men fans: Sigh… when are the X-Men going to be the center of the Marvel Universe again?
Marvel: Okay.
X-Men fans: Not like that. NOT LIKE THAT!

Davey-D postings:

Stop White on White Violence at Award Shows
Tommy Lee vs. Kid Rock. Like one of the commenters said there, I’m waiting for someone to mention how Kid Rock’s connection to Hip-Hop helped bring along the violence.

Johnny Rotten Judges Pop Stars and Politicians
I’m just posting a link to it since I’d just cosign the whole damn thing.

It’s nice to see 2-D games coming back into style even if it’s on systems that I don’t own. I’m even more glad to see that some classic titles are being revived as a result. For those who haven’t heard about Contra 4, it’s strictly 2-D and seems to ignore all 3-D Contra lore (and it’s boo-worthy plot twist). On top of that, the Legend of Kage is making a comeback on the DS that will hopefully make enough money for the hero to buy a shirt. Of course, the original was more of a good idea and bad-ass name than a good game. I hope Taito will fix that, though.

and while I’m linking to DS Fanboy is the best subject line/slightly related photo combo I’ve seen in a while. Shame on yuh you if you don’t agree.

In the early days of this blog was a Funky Friday, a day where I’d post links to music videos that’d either have a theme or not have a theme. Then I called it ‘Make the Music with your Blog” because I found someone else was using Funky Friday. But back in the first post ever was one of my favorite videos from one of my favorite groups: Whodini. Unfortunately, the video was deleted almost right after I linked to it. Hell, just about all of them were. That’s what killed the feature in the first place. After checking out the usual place, I found that someone uploaded it again. So I present it with what I said in the old post:

‘Funky Beat’ by Whodini
- When I was a kid, Whodini was my favorite group, period. I’ll eventually do an entire post on Whodini. For now, just dig the only music video on Earth to feature the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Dinosaurs, multiple chef hats (a true primal element of comedy), the ‘Funky Beat puppet’ and Theodore Huxtable.

Much respect to the uploader for allowing future generations to see the glory of the Funky Beat Puppet. “FUNKY BEAT! FUNKY BEAT!!!”

While rearranging my cluttered closet to get to my comics, I finally found the box with the 1990’s Black Lightning series by Tony Isabella (Jefferson’s creator) and Eddy Newell. It may have been brief, but damn was it sweet. Instead of going right to sleep, I reread issues one through three and it was like magic all over again. The fact that this run ended so early still irks me because a longer run would’ve cemented more of BL’s status quo here and the recent retcons would’ve been a lot less likely. I want to give this run a post of it’s own one day, but I’m posting because I just found out that Eddy Newell has a site again after thinking it had disappeared from the ‘net. That’s one huge upgrade! I’ll have to peep that out when I’m not working on something because I truly need time to browse. I’m joining that board, too!

Evorgleb from Highbrid Nation (which I just had to add to the Blogroll) inspired some rare envy in me by linking to a great interview he had with Mele Mel of the Furious Five. As always, Mele Mel had some important points about the current state of Hip-Hop. He also dropped a few jewels on crowd psychology and other seemingly-lost arts of Hip-Hop performances. That interview is further proof that the group deserves to be the first Hip-Hop group in the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame.

Gotta get back to the artwork. Later!

First of all, I need to hunt down whoever it is that’s been beating me in the head with a cinder block as I sleep. That’s just what it feels like right now. It’s as if someone said of me, “And you can’t beat that with a stickball bat!” and some jackass took them up on the challenge. So if the culprit is out there reading the blog, know you this:messin’ with me is a contest that many have entered and few have won. Okay, not really, but I just thought of that line and wanted to have it somewhere before I forgot it.

I was going to post a link to a Davey D story about Immortal Technique being blocked from performing at an anti-War demonstration by a maze of misdirection courtesy of the authorities, but there’s a ton of new stuff that I don’t have time to read yet. I’m dying to read the “Confessions of a BET programmer” stories that I didn’t notice last time. I love the fact that there are sites like Davey D’s and Playahata.com (which I keep forgetting ot add to my redone blog’s link list) out there exposing nonsense and bringing light to some of the positive stuff out there.

I’m working on the April 1st Nutroll preview and it’s pretty news-heavy. I have to keep looking at pictures of news desks and news anchors. The news anchors I’m drawing aren’t just plain characters in my head any more and have taken on a life of their own with frightening results. Some of the page layout may make it impossible to preserve a perfect TV screen shape, but there’ll still be lots of screen graphics cluttering things up just as in real life. More on that later.

I’m sleepy. For those that know me in real life, that’s nothing new because I usually look like I’m going to fall asleep. In this case, I’m sleepier than usual. I’m making more idjit-grade mistakes than usual. It’s like the weird thing that happened to my sleeping pattern got even worse just in time for an early DST shift this weekend. At this point, I’m wobbling around like an 8-year-old strung out on strong cough medicine who is just coherent enough not to knock over his toys. Sadly, that last part applies to both the 8-year old me and the adult me.

People keep asking me what’s up with Nutroll and when he’ll finally get some online comics. What’s up is that I have three story ideas and I’m unsure of which to start with. Besides a remake of the old Escapism story, I’ve had a story idea about a therapy session between ‘Roll and Dr. Sakimoto that’d establish her role. I still call it an idea because I could never decide on how to start it and worried that it’d be too boring of a way to introduce him. That was until I came up with a new intro story idea that’d blend all the early Nutroll basics into one story that wouldn’t bore you to tears. With any luck, I’ll have news (or the story itself) in April.

On Illmosis, I added a slightly updated version of the Mindsight redesign pic and updated the Artists link page. To help spread the word of these two places (not that anyone reads this blog or anything) , I’m also posting the links here:

Nyte Varisector - An artsite/online comic/every dang thing site that belongs to Dynamowolf, one really talented and creative cat. Like Rakim, his style is identical to none and this world is better for it. Plus, his list of favorite music artists is nearly identical to mine right down to including Whodini. Gotta spread the word of any

Titanium Knights - This artist is linking to me, so I’m linking right back at him. Like Dynamowolf, he’s another creative artist with his own comic book universe. Some has a cosmic/sci-fi feel to it, but he has stuff from a bit of everywhere. I really want to see him draw more spaceship designs like the one on this page. .

Check ‘em out and give them some love (and a DeviantArt add if you’re on there). Once I “get the lead out” and start producing more artwork at a higher rate, I need to draw some fan art for those two.

First of all, I’m going to hold off on “Everything is Everything” until I’m less busy. I’ve already started scanning comics and taking photos for it, so it’s definitely coming. Despite claiming not to be a daily blog, it’s been daily for over a week now while ScrollBoss has been neglected. As I work on that for tonight and tomorrow then switch back to drawn artwork for the Illmosis update. So, expect posts to be a bit more scaled back while I get productive here. Besides, it’s not like anybody’s reading this anyway.

When I heard about the Payola Settlement in the news, I knew that Davey D would have a post to break it down. , he has a blog post about the FCC giving big business another chance to keep radio in it’s brain-dead state. Apparently, part of the trick is that independant labels aren’t always small companies. Jive Records, which has Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, R. Kelly and Usher, is an independant label. So, really, they don’t have to change their playlists. Except some oldies channels and college stations, most radio stations are garbage anyway.

There’s an interesting topic on Newsarama.com called WonderCon ‘07: Gender and Genre about female characters in action-based genres. A lot of good, intelligent points were brought up in the story. Of course, the response thread about the story almost completely derails on page one for multiple reasons. If anything, I’m kind of shocked that the Women In Refrigerators issue (or as I used to call it, ‘Gwen Stacy’s Disease’) didn’t seem to turn up. Yeah, I know it’s an old topic now, but it still happens and there’s at least one more disappointing instance where it looks like it’s going to happen again.

So I planned to start this week off with an upbeat post and start a theme about how everything that I like is connected in my head in the same way it is in the minds of many other people out there. Then I saw this news story that I’m about to talk about and decided to do that instead. Why? You’ll see.

Last week, Davey-D drops an article called, ‘Is Hip-Hop really dead?’ that talks about how the mainstream version of Hip-Hop is finally starting to show signs of struggling after years of being creatively stagnant and mindbogglingly mindless. In an MySpace blog version of the article with another related article added, it mentions that says ‘Though music sales are down overall, rap sales slid a whopping 21 percent from 2005 to 2006, and for the first time in 12 years no rap album was among the top 10 sellers of the year.’ You can’t blame music downloading for that, because there are fewer easy methods to get it now than there were a few years before. Here’s what I think happened: the record companies built a marketbase that was easy to fool through means of over-saturation on TV and radio places that mainstream people consider to be cool. Once it’s accepted, the industry can pump out a high quantity of low-quality work with a common theme that’s easy to produce (here, thuggishness) and make lots of cash on a consistant basis. The main problem is that people start to realize that that they’re being fed garbage and move on to something else. Maybe not even another genre of music, but they may start buying more movies, games, books, etc. Why do I think that? Because we’ve seen this already.

One of the reasons that the video game industry crashed in 1983 was a flood of low-quality games. Both Atari and many 3rd party game makers tossed out games that weren’t ready and people began to get burned after buying so many flops. Things were kind of dead until the Nintendo Entertainment System hit with the Big N’s ability to have quality control on their games.

Comics gained a little attention from events like the Jim Lee/Chris Claremont X-Men #1, the controversial Death of Superman and those newsbits of somebody finding a really old comic book and selling it for $241 boozillion dollars. Suddenly, people who didn’t give a damn about comics were hitting comic shops to grab up anything with a shiny cover, a #1 on the cover, some character getting completely mangled in one way or another or various unholy combinations of all these concepts. They started creating more and more extra titles with all these things to get chumps to buy more books. Of course, this didn’t last forever and the speculators left after realizing that they couldn’t start their kids’ college fund with 500 copies of X-Force #1. Not only did the industry loose those marks sales, but they also lost a lot of loyal fans who got tired of being played for suckers. While the industry seems healthy again, you can still see those gimmicks in constant use but with less books and more talent.

For the most part, the same thing happened with various types of toys, collectible trading card and much more. When the business world sees an audience that they can turn into a consistant one, they’ll exploit it in a way that leaves the product lesser as a whole then move on to the next craze. I don’t know what’ll happen to Hip-Hop after this coming storm shakes out, but it really can’t get any worse than this.

I was going to do a completely different theme for this week’s music post, but I thought it’d be better if I waited until using that one for now. I have a week-long theme planned that’s related to the subject, so I figure I’d save it until then. Eh, I’m busy anyway. The apt. floor’s damp from the combo of rain melting the ton of snow we had here and the fact that these apts. have NO sub pumps. So they just got done working on that. Then I have to go to work earlier this evening, so I’m short on time. Plus, I have lots of stuff to work on. **strokes chin** Hold up… that it. This week’s theme may as well be work-related. So every video is going to roll like that whether or not working is in the song title. No genre limits this week, either. Dig? Solid.

Ghostface Killa ‘Apollo Kids’ (warning: uncensored version) - Besides being part of the playlist I was listening to today, I’m adding this one because that picture that you see up there comes from this video. No, you never get a clear, straight shot at it, so I took lots of screenshots, warped them, and cleaned them up to get as close as I could to making a normal version.

Big Daddy Kane ‘I Get The Job Done’ (Live on Arsenio) - From BDK’s album “It’s a Big Daddy Thing” comes another joint with more slick word play and references that most current rappers’ albums. It may not be the music video with sweaty women using construction equipment (because you know I looked), but hey, you get to see more of Kane, Scoob and Scrap goin’ off and Kane getting smoove with ladies in the crowd before starting the song.

Public Enemy ‘Brothas gonna work it out’ - Wish I could give you a better link, but I’m just working with what I’ve got. Besides being yet another good P.E. jam, the protest in the video is about the infamous Howard Beach incident. Yes, MTV used to show this back when it still had a spine.

Donna Summer ‘She works hard for the money’ - Allow me to get 80’s on you, even though you were probably expecting this one. Still, I’m trying to mix things up this week. Besides, Donna Summer has a damn good voice.

Daft Punk ‘Harder Better Faster Stronger’ - Remember when Toonami used to be cool and played a bunch of the animated Daft Punk videos in order? If you’re wondering what’s up with the animated video, peep this Wikipedia page about Interstella 5555.

Loverboy ‘Working for the Weekend’ Can you get more appropriate than this one? I doubt it. Did you ever think you’d see Ghostface and Loverboy in the same post? I doubt it. And here it is, defying all expectations, shattering barriers and breaking your brain like an MF.

Time to jet, party people. Be sure to keep an eye on Illmosis this weekend to see a beta color version of that Mindsight picture and maybe some other newness or old newness. Later!