For L.atasha A.lcindor also known as L.A., this is about respecting the art. Embarking on her rap journey in 2010 as just a spoken word poet with a passion for Hip Hop, the “nonchalant badass” decided to take the rap game into her hands in her first ever feature, “We Got Bars I” cypher, & has hit the ground running ever since. Put the thoughts of Lauryn Hill, the wildness of M.I.A. and the passion of Kanye West into a blender with sprinkles of Lil Kim and Nas, you would dish, L.A.. Born in Brooklyn as Latasha Alcindor, L.A. has always had a connection to the arts, from dance, writing, acting, and now rapping.
Ladies and Gentlemen give it up for ME! The Street Blogger! I have done it again; brought you the illest in underground, breath-taking, I know. Okay..enough of me and my bullsh*t let’s get to the music. It’s simple. Good Art comes from the people who dare to dig deep and just speak of what they are seeing along the way. Yo, She’s a Poet, singer, EMCEE, and a pretty awesome person if I say so myself! Enough of me….back to L.A. Read on, watch on, thank you for TUNING IN. We appreciate you for stopping by here on StreetPoetsNYC.com. Peace Family. Mother is watching.
- The Street Blogger
Since 2010, L.A. has performed in a multitude of major shows, including opening for Good Music’s Big Sean at NYU (2010), as well as Cali’s own Nipsey Hussle (2012). She also has rocked the Brooklyn Hip Hop Festival (2011), headlined for Toronto’s “Yes Yes Y’all” (2012) and surprised stages at SXSW and A3C. Featured on MTV2′s Sucker Freestyles, MTV Rapfix’s “Get in the Game”, Rocawear’s “That’s Rocawear” campaign, & Reebok’s all-female cypher, “The Freestyle”, L.A. has showing her hunger and drive in a two year span but devotes herself to being herself no matter what. With two projects out, “The Presentation” & “The L.A. Riots: Mental Fatality”, L.A. shows her exponential growth and is only getting better, as highlighted when she was named amongst AllHipHop.com’s Top 25 Underground Artists of 2011, featured in a Vibe Magazine (2011) and Ebony Magazine’ SonicBoom article where she was noted to be “lyrically superior to 95% of the people who have major label deals”(2012). But still hungry and humble, L.A. is diligently working on her next project, “LALytes”: Revelations of L.ife A.ddict which is joined with short film series due for release in 2013. L.A. has intrigued fans all over the globe with her captivating wordplay and energy-filled performances, but if you were to ask why she does this, her answer would only be, “the art got me.”
Man’E Ill is an emcee from Brooklyn, NY. He is best known for his witty wordplay, constant use of similes and metaphors, and a catchy chorus that ties them all together. Man’E also isn’t afraid to show vulnerability in his lyrics as a way of getting his listeners and supporters to gain a better sense of who he is as well as relate to him. He has put out a total of ten projects since 2007, the latest one being Progression Is A Blessing, his most popular one. Whether the topic is fear of subconsciously conforming to what the majority of hip-hop sounds like now, his struggle to maintain creating unique music, dealing with past relationships as well as new ones, or just feeling the need to exemplify his lyricism, Man’E Ill is one of the most consistent and versatile artists Brooklyn has to offer and is definitely worth the listen.
Arthur Z. Baton Jr. (Born January 13, 1992) Better known by his stage name A.R. Stylez, “Always Real Stylez” is an American Recording Hip-Hop Artist, Poet, Songwriter, & Model from Brooklyn, New York. He is respected & known for his conscious style of music. Always leaving a message for the listener to relate and grab hold to. Hence the term “Realism”. Some of his influences are, Tupac Shakur, Kanye West, J.Cole, Mickey Factz, Little Brother, Common and more. He attended George Westinghouse High School, also known for previously housing former students such as “The Notorious B.I.G”, “Jay-Z” & “Busta Rhymes”.
While growing up showing interest in Art, it seems as if his talent and passion for the beautiful self expression, evolved into music. At the age of 13, his first ever live performance took place at New York’s Historic “Knitting Factory”. With the anticipated release of his First mixtape “Realism”, which is scheduled to release November 22, 2012 (Thanksgiving Day). A.R. Stylez has spent countless hours in the studio working with Producers, and Artist from not only New York, but the UK, VA, Chicago and more. Hip-hop Artist, Mickey Factz (Member of Lupe Fiasco’s & Pharrell’s “All City Chess Club”, along with Diggy, Wale, B.O.B, J.Cole, Asher Roth, etc) is also featured on this project.
A.R. Stylez is known to perform at local Events, Colleges, & Lounges throughout New York City. Events & places such as Paint & Poetry, Everything Art, The Recoup Lounge, Plugs Media Lounge, Yippi’s Cafe, Nuyorican Poet Cafe, Inspired Word NYC, City Tech College of Technology, Queens College, and more.
“Success By Any Means”- A.R. Stylez
Quote from Producer: ” I believe this here is the ticket, this is going to be your golden ticket!, You have what it takes to get a Record Deal off this Mixtape!”- Syndrome
Quote from fan: “I live in England and stumbled across some of your music. I must congratulate you on your great support to Breast Cancer, and I believe that your music is truly amazing! I’m a fan!”- Mel Jones–
SoSoon is an emcee and songwriter dedicated to utilizing the medium of hip-hop to create an indelible cultural experience for his listeners. His stage name is an acronym that harkens to the conditions under which hip-hop music was created: the Sound Of Something Out Of Nothing.
SoSoon’s creative philosophy, “The Nieuw New Yorke,” seeks to fill the gap between the two extremes at which most emcees direct their focus: the realities and perils of living in a state of poverty, and a life of excessive wealth. The multifaceted artist conceptualized this new way of thinking after noticing a decline in not only the presence New York presents in the mainstream, but a lack of innovation amongst New York artists. Not only is SoSoon a product of hip-hop culture and its birthplace, having studied Africana and Latino Studies at CUNY Hunter College, he has a thorough understanding of both the art form, its origins, and the history of Africans in America.
Compelled by his college studies and a genuine desire to give back to the community that shaped him, SoSoon became a member of the Blackout Arts Collective, a cultural non-profit that utilized art as a vehicle for social justice. In 2003, he performed at Rikers Island as part of the Lyrics on Lockdown tour, which became a turning point in his artistry. As he became a known staple in the underground hip-hop scene and New York City’s spoken word circuit, he was eventually compelled to extend his reach beyond the stage to engage young people as a teaching artist. In 2011, SoSoon was hired as the coordinator for Find Your Passions, an arts based after-school program at Harlem Village Academies that provides middle school students the opportunity to explore their creativity through writing, dance, acting, and visual art. Since then, he has volunteered to facilitate writing and performance workshops with middle and high school students in after-school programs in Queens, Harlem and the Bronx.
In 2010, SoSoon released his first independent album, The Bandwagon: Director’s Cut. The 12 track journey through New York City is filled with a mixture of Soon’s personal stories and the often overlooked lives of working class New Yorkers. He was a finalist in the Battle of the Boroughs: Queens in 2011, and the show’s only solo hip-hop act. SoSoon was featured on the album On the Move: Sounds Inspired by Mumia Abu-Jamaal, alongside Public Enemy, Abiodun Oyewole of the Last Poets, Living Colour, Maya Azucena, Immortal Technique, and Hasan Salaam.
In 2011, SoSoon hosted a 12-week residency at Gizzi’s Café in Greenwich Village, providing an environment that explored his own offerings in nuanced detail, taking questions from the audience regarding artistic process, and curating an eclectic mix of featured performers. His guests included live bands, emcees, vocalists, musicians, and poets. During this same time period, he became the co-host of The Urban View, a weekly internet-based talk show that covers politics, entertainment gossip every Tuesday from 7-9pm onwww.urbanmediatv.com.
Throughout his twelve-year career, SoSoon has performed at some of New York City’s most popular venues, including SOB’s, Public Assembly, Southpaw, Santos Party House, the Nuyorican Poets Café, Bowery Poetry Club, the Rebel Diaz Arts Collective, Afrikan Poetry Theatre, and Sapphire Lounge. Aside from gracing multiple stages in the NYC Metro area, he has also performed in Vermont, Connecticut and the District of Columbia, and has opened for artists including M.O.P., Dead Prez, Saigon, Bazaar Royale and Game Rebellion. His witty lyricism, storytelling capabilities and stage presence has caught the attention of media outlets such as The Source, SOHH.com and Legends Radio.
Currently, SoSoon is teaching a self developed curriculum called #SampleSundays. Initially developed as a means of self education of the use of sampling in Hip-Hop music, SoSoon ultimately realized that he could use the knowledge to:
1. Help students understand how our interaction with and consumption of music has changed primarily because of advances in technology.
2. To gain a better understanding of the history of Hip-Hop music and its role in the overall culture.
3. To understand the role of sampling as a tool to create production.
4. To understand why the idea of sampling shows an unfathomable level of innovation and ingenuity, contrary to popular belief.
5. To be able to identify different types of samples.
6. To study other genres of music that have influenced Hip-Hop.
7. To bridge the generational gap and find common ground in the musical styles, thus ending the vicious cycle of older generations chastising younger generations for their music choices.
Through his art, SoSoon seeks to entertain, educate, and chart a course through the diversity of experiences that comprise urban life, peeling away the glamour of both the ghetto and celebrity life to uncover what it is really like to live in New York.
Brooklyn, New York – Looking for some new Music? Of course you are, so check this out. Black Dangerfield is a up and coming Hip Hop artist from New York City. He’s a regular is the Street Poets Den, and featured in our Powerful Is A Lifestyle Campaign! Check out his new video, it’s new, fresh, and only the beginning! This video was also directed and shot by a Street Poet! More on BLACK DANGERFIELD is coming soon, so let’s call this the appetizer ;-) -THE STREET BLOGGER
Sometimes a weighty tale is never more affecting than when it’s told lightly. “The Suit,” the wonderful touring production from the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, brims with a gentle effervescence and musicality that you associate with entertainments usually described, a bit dismissively, as charming.
Yet even as it draws you in like the gregarious host of an intimate party, this story of adultery in apartheid South Africa is quietly preparing to break your heart. By the time you leave the Harvey Theater of theBrooklyn Academy of Music, where“The Suit” runs through Feb. 2, you may feel you’ve experienced devastation by enchantment. The sadness will linger, but so will an elating sense of this show’s enfolding magic.
Such complicated sorcery is all the more potent for its seeming simplicity, a paradox long associated with the great director Peter Brook, who created “The Suit” with his longtime collaborator Marie-Hélène Estienne and the composer Frank Krawczyk. An ever-more-pared-down plainness has marked the path of Mr. Brook’s career, which stretches over more than six decades, embracing pinnacles like his acrobatic “Midsummer Night’s Dream” and his marathon “Mahabharata.”
Sometimes the results are austere to the point of starvation, as in his bare-bones 50-minute version of Dostoyevsky’s“Grand Inquisitor” several years ago. “The Suit” — which is based on a story by the South African writer Can Themba,and its stage adaptation by Mothobi Mutloatse and Barney Simon — is unlikely to leave anyone feeling hungry. It arranges similarly basic theatrical elements — a cast of four performers and three musicians, some chairs and some clothing racks — into a world that brims with juicy, appetizing life.
It’s our awareness of the possibilities for sweetness within that life that lends “The Suit” much of its sting. Its fablelike story unfolds in Sophiatown, a poor but vital suburb of Johannesburg that flourished in the 1940s and ’50s as a center of black culture (especially music) and has since acquired mythic status in South African memory. “The home of truth, our place,” is how the show’s narrator (Jared McNeill) describes it. Within that world live a couple who, when we first see them, wrapped in each other’s arms in bed one rainy morning, would appear to be the very image of marital contentment: Philomen (William Nadylam) and Matilda (Nonhlanhla Kheswa). Both husband and wife deliver separate encomiums, Matilda in soaring song, to the beauty within their existence, despite its privation.
Their Eden collapses that same day. Philomen, having been tipped off by a friend, rushes home from work to find his wife in the arms of a lover (Rikki Henry, in one of many roles), who escapes through the bedroom window in his underwear. His suit is left behind, to become the instrument of Philomen’s whimsical and cruel revenge upon his wife.
I won’t describe the forms that this revenge takes, except to say that the suit becomes an active participant in an unhappy ménage à trois. As Mr. Nadylam executes Philomen’s retribution, with a mix of sorrow and tight-lidded rage, you understand exactly why the narrator has told us earlier that this story could take place only in a land of repression. Like the apartheid-spawned violence and humiliation that the play’s characters trade frightened stories about, the suit casts an inescapable and blighting shadow on Philomen and Matilda’s private world.
This makes “The Suit” sound grim. It isn’t. This is partly a matter of the witty inventiveness of the production, lighted by Philippe Vialatte and designed by Oria Puppo, which creates an entire township from its small cast. (The fine, chameleon musicians — Arthur Astier, Raphael Chambouvet and David Dupuis — help fill out the roster of citizens.)
More important, time and again we feel the exultation that caged birds find in song. It is the great wish of Matilda (whom Ms. Kheswa presents as a ravishing blend of self-possession and perplexity) to become a singer. And when she performs at a women’s club, with the three male actors doing a jaunty backup, you may find tears in your eyes, because the sense of relief is so ecstatic. And because you know it can only be fleeting.
Conversely, when Mr. McNeill performs “Strange Fruit,” the song about lynching in the American South made famous by Billie Holiday, the purity of his voice and directness of his manner transform a ballad of destruction into an enduring victory for art. It’s a promise that though the music may end for Matilda and for Sophiatown — which would be razed soon after “The Suit” takes place — it never truly stops.
Everyone onstage is pretty close to perfect. Well, perhaps not the three additional cast members who are conscripted from the audience to join the show’s climactic party chez Philomen. I can say this because I was one on the night I saw “The Suit.” Normally such participation makes me cringe.
But it’s a testament to the seductive hold of this production that even onstage, amid performers I’d been watching from a comfortable distance, I could forget my embarrassment and focus on them. Up close the illusion remained so utterly intact that when I returned to my seat, I was grateful that I had managed, just barely, to keep myself from shedding tears in a spotlight.
The Suit
Based on “The Suit” by Can Themba, Mothobi Mutloatse and Barney Simon; directed, adapted and music by Peter Brook, Marie-Hélène Estienne and Franck Krawczyk; lighting by Philippe Vialatte; sets and costumes by Oria Puppo; assistant director, Rikki Henry; stage managers, R. Michael Blanco and Thomas Becelewski. A Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord production, presented by Brooklyn Academy of Music, Alan H. Fishman, chairman; Karen Brooks Hopkins, president. At the Harvey Theater, 651 Fulton Street, Fort Greene, Brooklyn; (718) 636-4100, bam.org. Through Feb. 2. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes.
WITH: Nonhlanhla Kheswa, Jared McNeill, William Nadylam and Rikki Henry.
THE STORY OF NEW YORK hip-hop’s 1990s championship years is in many ways the story of rapper-executive dream teams, pairings that shaped the sound of the city and, after that, the world. The Notorious B.I.G. and Puff Daddy, Jay-Z and Damon Dash, Ja Rule and Irv Gotti — all of these partnerships made the behind-the-scenes swami as crucial a hip-hop figure as the rappers they helped mold.
For ASAP Rocky, the Harlem rapper whose debut album, “Long.Live.ASAP” (Polo Grounds/RCA), just made its debut at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart, that partner is ASAP Yams, his longtime friend, collaborator and co-owner of the ASAP Worldwide label.
But you won’t find Yams behind the mixing boards in a studio, or in a corner office at a record label laboring over marketing plans, or huddled with designers creating a fashion line. Just 24 years old, he exerts his pull in extremely nebulous fashion. ”Rocky’s like Luke Skywalker, and I’m Yoda,” Yams said, cackling a bit, one recent afternoon in the South Bronx office that serves as a hangout space for the ASAP crew and where Yams lingers when not at the neat apartment he’s long shared with his mother in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. Rocky may be a natural star, one of the most charismatic figures in contemporary mainstream hip-hop and the one with the most expansive approach to his music. But his road to the top was paved with the help of Yams, who is a spirit guide, a muse, a curator of sonic ideas.
Much of what you hear in Rocky — a fully assimilated take on hip-hop styles from across the country and from across time periods — can be traced back to Yams, who spent his formative years studying the genre, then learning how to transmit his taste to others. Hip-hop has long been obsessed with fealty to a specific place and time, and Yams’s vision of the genre as an open house, not a fortress, qualifies as a radical one.
He’s happy, though, to exert pull in the shadows.
“He don’t want to be Puffy,” Rocky said, recalling Puff Daddy’s late-1990s turn from music executive to frontman. ”He’s the mastermind behind the scenes.”
OPEN TO AN OPEN HOUSE
Born to a Dominican mother and a Puerto Rican father, Yams, whose real name is Steven Rodriguez, grew up at the southern edge of Harlem, obsessed with hip-hop. By the time he was 11 he was spending all his free time either listening to the radio or searching for music online. “Even though I lived in the ‘hood, I was still on my Internety geek” stuff, he recalled, whether downloading obscure records off Napster or arguing in Yahoo chat rooms.
Other than that, little held his interest. After spending time in four different high schools, he dropped out but managed to secure an internship with Diplomats Records, home of Cam’ron and Juelz Santana, and he also, at the age of 16, managed a few producers, helping them sell their songs to rappers. To make extra money he’d sell mixtapes on the side or steal from the till of the downtown Starbucks where he worked. Sometimes, when his mother kicked him out of the house over one of his “shenanigans,” he’d sleep in Highbridge Park, in Washington Heights.
But Yams “always had a plan in his mind,” remembers Duke Da God, his Diplomats boss. At 17 he tattooed ASAP on his right arm; Yams had his eye on building a brand.
Yams met Rocky in 2008 through mutual friends, when Rocky was still getting his sea legs as a rapper. Yams saw him as possessing a blend of Kid Cudi’s melodic sense and Mase’s Harlem flash. Rocky also had long, straight hair, pulled into a ponytail. “The good ‘Player’s Ball’ swag, definitely ‘So Fresh, So Clean’ swag,” Yams snickered, referring to some early Outkast looks. Rocky was seeking “somebody who could actually kind of direct to get to where we need to go, and that’s what Yams was. He was like the director.”
Brooklyn, New York –Remember the last STREET POETS NYC New Years Eve house party? Yeah. A few people fell in love that day. It’s happening again. It’s $5 to get in and $2 drinks all night. Come out with us, we laugh, we share, we love, we kick it. It’s because we Love You. Word. Shout Outs to the Leo’s Check the details! See you there!
