So coming up I had alot of nicknames, and alot stemmed from hip-hop Johnny Blaze, John Blaze, John john the Phenomenon, San Diego John and sporadically in the late 90’s and early 00’s, John Forte was a standard too. Until that fateful afternoon in 2001 when the Refugee Allstar himself was just too “Hot” for even his own good. Forte was about to release his follow up to the 1997 debut album Poly Sci, but before the Forte could even get back to The Camp, in Orange, NJ he was stopped and detained at the Newark International Airport. Forte was set to serve fourteen years for possession with intent to distribute about thirty-one pounds of liquid cocaine, worth $1.5 million.
7 years later, and maybe just to prove Kanye wrong, Bush pardoned Forte and reduced his sentence from 14 to 7 years. Forte is set to drop back onto the street on December 22, 2008 just in time for Christmas with the fam. So to get you back up on John before he hits the street I’m back to hit you with a taste of Poly Sci.
But if you forget how Hot Forte was before he fell off, Neglectedsounds has a little post you may wanna check out too.
A’ight its back to the basement to kick it with Santa and Rah, I’m not gunna make ya’ll wait that long again though. So keep checkin’ back for a throwback and the new Freshness in ‘09.
Ok so in the last 24 hours I SHOULD have posted here like 12 times, bc there’s some stank comin’ from the basement, but instead I’ve been workin (for the man), grindin’ (for myself), and cookin’ up some new OSH -ish about to drop. (more on that in the weeks to come)
But first… Y must Dick’s show there tips in public? Or better yet why did happy hour cause some lumberjack wannabe, baboon to show his ass last night? Unless you OWN an place of business… you ALWAYS end up lookin’ like an ASS when you act like a caveman.
and dude I look like a caveman.
ok sorry about the PSA
But for real, and its a good segue to our next topic.
Rap Ads
What happened when they start drinkin sprite?.
I was listenin’ to a Mixtape from BlindIUseToBeForTheKids and mid way through the track list I noticed a St. Ides freestyle, this would normally not be a thing but I thought of of of my boys back in college and his unnatural love for “flavored Crooked I” so I skipped to check out the old Wu St. Ides commercial freestyle. It was short, and the sound quality sucked; but They loved that product and the verse had some fire to it. It was a refreshing break from overly produced sprite and Impala commercials of today.
So I started to do some research and talked to Rah for a bit… I found out that back in the day rappers used to rap about products that they actually used, and kick it with people in commercials they may actually be seen with. Now I don’t know if Biggie or Meth ever did a Dutchie commercial or if Slick Rick ever gave props to the dude where he got his chains. and I know for a FACT Flavor Flav never did a Timex commercial and though Run DMC did more for Adidas in one song than any ad agency could in the entire life of the brand, somehow they didn’t even cross paths in the commercial sense until 2007, after the death of Jam Master Jay when the company paid only for stock footage and the use of a song. So why aren’t rappers really reppin’ in ads what they rap about in songs.
Well come to find out the St. Ides ads caused a stir among the community and ended up making rappers look more gangster and more like “hooligans” and this did not bode well for a new genre on the rise. So according to another blog Str8 Dope heres a more in depth histor y of the commercials and the controversy .
Amazing! I then proceeded to dig around Google and I found a small blurb from 2002 from a record store:
V/A DJ Drank’s Greatest Malt Liquor Hits cd-r 11.98VERY LIMITED. And we think the blurb on the back of the cd says it best, so we’ll just quote it:Before the appropriately named Alkaholiks DJ/producer E-Swift hooked up with King Tee and DJ Pooh to work on a series of 60-second St. Ides TV and radio commercial spots that they had been commissioned to do: complete with a budget that allowed them to bring in some of the best emcees of the day. These rap commercials were really really good (they sound better than most commercial rap crap today!) and were so immensely popular at the time (early 90’s when commercial radio didn’t play nearly as much rap as today, esp. West Coast artists) that they resulted in listeners jamming radio station request lines at stations like Wild 107, San Francisco just to hear Cube or the Geto Boys rap about their favorite high-octane malt liquor. Not surprisingly with lyrics like Cube’s “Get your girl in the mood quicker, get your jimmy thicker, with St. Ides malt liquor,” it wasn’t long before controversy soon overshadowed the advertising campaign. Outraged protests followed particularly in African-American and Hispanic communities where malt-liquor billboards and posters were defaced. Additionally the St. Ides commercials were publicly criticized by the U.S. Surgeon General and the New York State Consumer Protection Commission and drew fines from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, as well as the New York State Attorney General’s Office. Additionally Korean grocers boycotted St. Ides, but for a different reason, for their use of Ice Cube as their spokesperson. Their protest was based on Cube’s derogatory lyrical comments about Koreans in his album “Death Certificate.” (Note: McKenzie River, the San Francisco-based maker of St. Ides, consequently temporarily discontinued using Ice Cube.) But the biggest criticism of the St. Ides commercials was that it used hip hop/rap music, a genre most popular with teenagers at the time, to sell malt liquor directly to underage drinkers. This was further enforced when St. Ides blatantly marketed a nonalcoholic drink for kids, boldly using the St. Ides name/logo (check out the lyrics to Ice Cube’s “Crooked I For All Ages” track #30). Overall the reaction to the St. Ides ads was so intense that G. Heileman Co., the national brewer that had created the St. Ides label, disavowed any connection with St. Ides. And eventually the commercials were banned altogether and never heard/seen again.
Instead leaving us with crap like this,
But rest assured I’ve done the leg work and now I’m about to reopen the St. Ides vault…
(the quality is all over the place and I just have them in Alphabetical order but enjoy.)
2Pac & Snoop
Cypress Hill
DJ. Pooh
Dr. Dre
Ice Cube
Ice Cube & Geto Boys
King Tee
Mc Eiht
Meth & Red
Notorious BIG
Rakim’s radio commercia
The Wu
and finally the 8 minute mixtape, I’m lookin for an mp3 for ya’ll but just open a new tab and put this on in the back.
Red and (talkin’ about the WU) Meth have a show in San Diego on Nov. 13th. just know that.
So though we try to rep everything Urban and Hip hop in the Lower Left Coast, I have a confession, both Rah and I completely slept on last weeks Rock The Bells show. Now I’m not sayin we didn’t talk about it, about goin up north for it, about getting to see Tribe, Meth, red, Jay Electronica, Nas, and the newly reunited Pharcyde, but we SLEPT on it [ok I slept on it it was MK's bithday so Rah had an excuse]. But it has been haunting me all week.
Now I’ve seen alot of shows, but this Hip Hop megafest from what I heard RIPPED it, like Kool Moe Dee on Death Blow. and one of the main reasons was the Pharcyde. Now its no small feat to get Tribe on the same stage again, especially after the disappointing departure of the band after the Love Movement, so to commemorate and educate I would liike to take some time today and show you just how influential a few of this years bands have really been.
I guess since I started with Tribe I should continue with them, Q-Tip, Phife, and Ali Shaheed Muhammad
[oh and sometimes Jarobe] have laid the foundation and beats down for some of Hip Hop’s Finest.
Let me bring up a Senarios where two groups, Tribe and LONS [Leaders Of the New School] teamed up to produce one of the biggest songs ever. If you look close you may even notice the “dungeon dragon.”
and even though Scenario is the jump off most recently you may have heard tribe beats here with Lil’ Wayne
The tribe aren’t the only band reuniting though that has laid foundation, the Pharcyde deserves some love . The West Coast version of the Tribe and another early Hip Hop group, the Pharcyde brought fun and teenage angst to a main stream, and if you don’t believe me, F Ya Mamma.
but if you don’t believe that they made an impact check this
Around lunch time the other day I stop by a local bookstore to see if I could find anything cool to read. To my surprise I found a book titled “Bling: The Hip-Hop Jewelry Book” by Reggie Ossé and Gabriel Tolliver.
OMG! This book was hot…it showed the evolution on bling, from Slick Rick to Ghost Face. The pictures are crazy…80s, 90s, 00s. This book is a must read. So today post is just a history show of Hip Hop Bling.
Slick Rick, hip-hop’s original “King of Bling.”
Dennis Coles, aka Ghostface Killah, taking a much needed snack break, shows off one of his most prized possessions, his “Wu Bird”.
Manny’s Rolls Royce, a classic late 1970’s – early 1980’s finger ring. This was a must-have amongst the period’s Harlemite drug dealers, hustlers, pimps and underground elite.
Diplomats. All those colors show us why these dudes are seriously ballin’. It’s also a visual metaphor for sampling. They took elements of the presidential seal, much like the Ramones did with their logo, and remixed it.
The Clown Prince of hip-hop, Biz Markie, rocking his custom made 18k gold four-finger ring
Ol’ Dirty Bastard, rocking his ill set of grills. I think this shot speaks to the last period when the grills were definitely part of a New York, Northeastern phenomenon. This is classic ODB in his state of genius/befuddlement. R.I.P. dude, you were one of the illest! Hope the man upstairs isn’t too tight about you rocking your shines in Heaven.
