Showin your A$S and what happened??

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 11.98 VERY 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.

Peace…It’s not just a word.

I’m off to grab a Crooked I.

NWK

Party Flyer Designers…

What up kids?

Yeah that’s pretty demeaning, but whatever. I needed a new way to say “Hey” and since I didn’t post yesterday the “So how was your night?” doesn’t really work.

So since our blog is “Everything Urban” and clubs and parties are innately urban I thought I would give alittle love to some advertisements that we see so much we probably don’t even stop to think “Damn someone got paid for this crap?! Werd? ” Thats right I’m talking about Flyer designers.

I was going to start with a diatribe about using the same beach, big booty shots, fonts and ripped off logos but I decided to turn this post on its side and not just hate but elevate.

So class is in session, get ready for the anatomy of a flyer designer, ripped directly from the pages of Vice Magazine.

Half-way through this ohh-so informative post is the inspiration for the second part of my post today. The writer breaks every Futurist rule by telling the audience about What The Font. So in the spirit of full disclosure I would like to tell the rest of you about a few design webpages we’ve been hording for a while.

FlashKit – So ok the FlashKit interface isn’t ground breaking, and the actual site design itself looks more like something your sysadmin put together than a designer but this site is actually a treasure trove of Tutorials and Sound files for Developers and Designers. With a heavy Flash basis, Flashkit gives you the Tutorials and files to create endless animation and webapp possibilies.

Kuler – So I can see it now your reading this post going , “Damn I thought NWK was all about fresh shoes and hip hop [read Rah's post right under this for your fix] whats with this Flash developer stuff” well no fear this next site is applicable for everyone. Or at least those of us who want to match. Kuler is a community populated index of color pallets, sounds alittle wierd, well it is .But as a designer it’s useful. Ever have a client that gives you a color say Pantone 567, and tells you to match the green but don’t make it “look like a John Deer Ad,” thats where Kuler comes in. Kuler gives the user the ability to search from an ever growing database of pallets, or by using Kuler’s color matching tools allows the user to create a unique pallet of your own. You can even register and share your pallets with others, but we all know you don’t play well so that probably won’t happen.

Finally, this last sight is a GEM, and I know you’ve all probably used it once or twice but if you haven’t… Get on it.

Flickr – That’s right Flickr, the same site that houses every person you knows vacation pictures is one of the best possible tools a designer could ever use. Stock photo websites cost money, and usually after searching 3 you notice that they also have basically the same images. This is not the case with Flickr, with new images being uploaded every minute of every day, your possibilities are almost endless. Make sure to contact the person who took the picture if you plan on using it, but go nuts, look around, I bet you find at least 10x the number of beer bong or keg stand shots than on your average stock image site, and if your designing for people that aren’t on spring break, you will probably be able to find that here too.

Ok, well I hope that helps you kill some time and helps improve design. and without further adieu some EFX.

and to get u ready for Rah’s post some Bling! (well, not really, but shiny suits)

peace

-NWK