http://grandcentrallife.com

Whether you are flipping burgers or doing corporate mergers, to survive in these turbulent times, you definitely have to be on your grind. Only by grinding will you be able to keep your lights on, put clothes on your back and food in your stomach. Unfortunately, the word grind has become like a fleeting slang term for some, but for Albert Martey aka Mr. Drastick and Christopher Mitchell aka Kinetik, collectively known as Grand Central, it is the philosophy that they live their lives by. Earlier this year, these two hustlers combined their individual energy and resources to create God Loves Grinders; the project that they both believe they were predestined to complete.

God Loves Grinders Vol. 1 is a healthy serving of intelligent wordplay, passionate delivery and straight laugh out loud humour, beautifully merged with innovative production, ultimately making this body of work one that demands your attention. Some of the highlights include the soulful ballad Baby You Know, produced by 8-Trak Productions, where Grand Central wax lyrical about love lost due to procrastination; the sexually invigorating Call Me Any Time You Like, which is sure to increase the pregnancy rate; and last but not least, Stay On Your Grind, which is a rallying call to grafters on every level to keep putting in that work. Even though this is a collaborative effort in every sense of the word, Drastick and Kinetik still showcase their individual personalities with a solo track each. Drastick flame grills all fair weather fans in the light of his impending success on the hilarious Chemo produced Kiss My Royal Ass. Kinetik then reports live from the streets alongside Scrooge and Micall Parknsun on the Jon Phonics produced political power bomb Run Dem.

The Grand Central vibe is fun, chilled out, warm and inviting but still firmly rooted in the realm of classic Hip Hop. God Loves Grinders Vol. 1 embodies this definition and is an undoubtedly riveting listen, mainly due to the rough with the smooth delivery they each demonstrate throughout the entire album. The project was written in Mr. Drastick’s living room and recorded at Kilimanjaro Studio in a two month surge of creativity. Not to mention that Drastick was intoxicated from Jack Daniels for the entire recording process whilst leaving Kinetik to stay sober and ensure everything remained somewhat professional in the midst of all the fun. You would be forgiven for thinking that Drastick and Kinetik have been recording together for years, but the truth is that this album is literally them doing what they feel. Spontaneity has never sounded so good.

The Go-Getters Union, LLC (GGU) presents “Shaolin Shadow-Boxing” and invites Atlanta to come out lounge or dance to international soul music while playing chess with one another. The night will be will take place at Mid-City Café located on 5th and West Peachtree St. in Mid-Town Atlanta. This event is Atlanta’s first and only chess night. The vibe is chic, and exciting - the entertainment is high quality, cutting-edge, fresh, and relevant. The Go-Getters Union promotes international urban art culture focused on the modern style that GGU has dubbed “Global and True School Soul”. “Shaolin Shadow-Boxing” will be held every Saturday starting Sept. 25th from 4pm-8:30pm. The Go-Getters Union feels that “Shaolin Shadow-Boxing” at Mid-City Café will become one of Atlanta’s premier meeting places, networking venues, and entertainment outlets; D.O. the Fabulous Drifter will be spinning a kaleidoscope of sounds from around the globe.

Mid City Café has an excellent dine-in menu with T.V.’s placed around for great views of the games, also, proceeds from drink specials that evening will go to the Atlanta based charity of choice by The Go-Getters Union So, with progressive cosmopolitan energy within an international underground-chic backdrop “Shaolin Shadow-Boxing” at Mid City Café is the perfect place to pre-game before bringing the red paint out into Atlanta’s high-energy Saturday nights.

The Go-Getters Union is a progressive international marketing brand for creative intellectuals in the arts, business and community.

Who: The Go-Getters Union
What: “Shaolin Shadow-Boxing”
Where: Mid-City Café
When: Every Saturday (starting September 25th)

Jaja Soze has teamed up with one of the U.K’s biggest artists Lowkey, along with his other PDC artists Tempman, Marcus Jordon and Buttafly. The new album features cross-Atlantic collaborations including D Block’s AP, and Mistah FAB, and some other familiar artists. The twelve-track album is shaping up to be a classic.

Jaja has also been working hard indirectly outside of Hip Hop, touring schools and giving speeches to children about the negativity of the gang culture. Alongside this, WHSmith confirmed that his book “Street Boy” is one of the best sellers since its release. Lastly, Jaja was recently involved with a nationwide talent search called F.A.M.E, and acted as a judge for hopefuls attempting to win a recording contract.

http://pdcent.com/

Video by Nerina Penzhorn

Lee-Ursus from africasacountry on Vimeo.

God Loves Grinders Vol. 1 is a healthy serving of intelligent wordplay, passionate delivery and straight laugh out loud humour, beautifully merged with innovative production, ultimately making this body of work one that demands your attention. Some of the highlights include the soulful ballad Baby You Know, produced by 8-Trak Productions, where Grand Central wax lyrical about love lost due to procrastination; the sexually invigorating Call Me Any Time You Like, which is sure to increase the pregnancy rate; and last but not least, Stay On Your Grind, which is a rallying call to grafters on every level to keep putting in that work. Even though this is a collaborative effort in every sense of the word, Drastick and Kinetik still showcase their individual personalities with a solo track each. Drastick flame grills all fair weather fans in the light of his impending success on the hilarious Chemo produced Kiss My Royal Ass. Kinetik then reports live from the streets alongside Scrooge and Micall Parknsun on the Jon Phonics produced political power bomb Run Dem.

The Grand Central vibe is fun, chilled out, warm and inviting but still firmly rooted in the realm of classic Hip Hop. God Loves Grinders Vol. 1 embodies this definition and is an undoubtedly riveting listen, mainly due to the rough with the smooth delivery they each demonstrate throughout the entire album. The project was written in Mr. Drastick’s living room and recorded at Kilimanjaro Studio in a two month surge of creativity. Not to mention that Drastick was intoxicated from Jack Daniels for the entire recording process whilst leaving Kinetik to stay sober and ensure everything remained somewhat professional in the midst of all the fun. You would be forgiven for thinking that Drastick and Kinetik have been recording together for years, but the truth is that this album is literally them doing what they feel. Spontaneity has never sounded so good.

God Loves Grinders Vol. 1 will be available for free download on Monday 16 August 2010 exclusively from GrandCentrallife.com

After several months of anticipation, two of Detroit’s most visionary hip-hop figures, Invincible and Waajeed, are finally releasing their single, “Detroit Summer” b/w “Emergence”. The passionate two-song project is not only being put out digitally and in limited edition 7” vinyl format but it’s also being launched with a powerful double music video as well.

This stunning visual representation of the songs was shot on-site during the historic Allied Media Conference and United States Social Forum this past June in Detroit. The video also documents the Detroit Summer Live Arts Media Project youth program, in which Invincible is heavily involved.

The “Detroit Summer”/”Emergence” music video debuts August 10th, simultaneously with the single release, showcasing the true passion both artists and EMERGENCE in-house video director El Iqaa put into the project.

This is far bigger than just Hip-Hop. “Detroit Summer” is not just a season, and its not just about a youth-focused organization in Detroit – the song is about a feeling and a movement. “Emergence” isn’t just the b-side, and it’s not about Invincible’s media company of the same name, but rather the dawning of a new era.

Invincible is already highly regarded as a lyricist, and Waajeed as a producer, but they are collectively ascending to new levels of on both songs. Together, the duo worked to show the resilience of their communities and refute the negative national image of Detroit. As Invincible’s lyrics proclaim, “You Call Motown a ghost-town, but the city’s vibrant!”

Detroit Summer/Emergence is a prequel to the full length album Invincible + Waajeed are dropping in 2011. For this single, they did a limited edition run of 1,000 7-inch records (all of which come with a digital download code) and once they’re gone, they’re gone.

More info on the organization Detroit Summer: DetroitSummer.org

Invincible + Waajeed - “Detroit Summer”/”Emergence” from EMERGENCE Media on Vimeo.

There are two methods for determining the start of Ramadan: astronomical calculations or visual sightings of the moon.

Either way, the holy month began Wednesday, with Muslims fasting, praying, and reflecting from before dawn until after sunset.

A new option to mark the start of Ramadan is with a hip-hop song by Virginia trio Native Deen, “Ramadan Is Here.”

The joyous melody is performed in a style unique to Muslim-Americans.

“Yo, they sighted the moon, it’s Ramadan!” the trio raps. “Check the condition of my heart like a sonogram.”

The lyrics recount the spiritual motivations and blessings of fasting and praying.
“But strive in your heart, for your Lord the one, and be blessed by Allah when the month is done.”

A video features the trio - who performed in Toledo in April - with a chorus of people smiling and looking heavenward, moving their arms as if following the sun’s track across the sky.

The video and a free song download are available on the band’s Web site, nativedeen.com.

FACEBOOK FAST: Facebook recently notched its 500 millionth member, and at least one Texas clergyman thinks the social networking phenomenon is taking a toll on personal relationships.

The Rev. Kerry Shook, pastor of the Woodlands Church in Houston, and his wife, Chris, are asking people to put down their mouse and meet with people in person on Aug. 25.

The Shooks have signed up 20,000 people in the Houston area and are hoping to enlist thousands more across the country for what they call the First National Facebook Fast.

Skip Facebook for 24 hours, they ask, and instead meet a friend over coffee, write a letter or card to someone, visit a person in the hospital, bring cookies to a neighbor, or plan a family dinner with no electronics allowed.

“Even though we are more technologically connected than ever,” Mr. Shook said, “deep and rewarding relationships seem further away from our grasp than ever, leaving most people lonely and disconnected from one of life’s greatest joys - indeed, one that God has clearly shown gives life its greatest meaning.”

You can always tweet about it tomorrow.

For more information see:
www.nativedeen.com
www.myspace.com/nativedeen

WHAT was the tipping point for Australian hip-hop music? Was it when Adelaide’s Hilltop Hoods enjoyed the first of their two No. 1 albums in 2006 with The Hard Road? Or was it in 2008, when Sydney trio Bliss N Eso sold out two nights at Melbourne’s 5000-capacity, history-laden venue Festival Hall?

Whenever the defining moment was, domestic hip-hop continues to accumulate accolades. At the start of this week, Bliss N Eso’s new disc, Running on Air, was No. 1 on the national charts; their previous album, 2008’s Flying Colours, rose no higher than No. 10. Australian hip-hop now has multiple champions achieving mainstream success, a busy alternative scene, infrastructure in the form of record labels and management companies, and supportive venues and festival bookers.

Most importantly, there are now generations of young listeners who discovered hip-hop via Australian acts, unlike early fans, who would begin with iconic American acts and eventually find a local variant.

”A lot of kids have Bliss N Eso as their very first hip-hop show,” enthuses MC Esoterik, aka Max MacKinnon. ”They don’t know about Wu-Tang Clan or Biggie Smalls, so it’s great to educate them.”

When MacKinnon and his fellow rapper, MC Bliss, aka Jonathan Notley, were in high school together on Sydney’s northern beaches in the late 1990s, they thought for a long time that they were the only two hip-hop fans in Australia. No one else at their school was interested and the wider public perception was that Australian hip-hop couldn’t possibly be anything more than a punchline.

When Notley changed schools, he finally met another devotee, Tarik Ejjamai, who eventually took to the turntables and was renamed DJ Izm. When they decided to form Bliss N Eso in the late ’90s, they played their first shows at Ejjamai’s family home, where they would perform to a brick wall. They couldn’t get a proper gig.

Nearly all musical acts have a sense of struggle as part of the narrative from which they derive their worth and sense of identity: lack of radio airplay, driving the Hume Highway overnight from Melbourne to Sydney for a show, no rent money. But Australian hip-hop groups also identify with their genre’s very struggle to exist. It’s decades since being in an Australian rock band brought universal derision but the early waves of Australian rappers and DJs were treated as either fools or slavish imitators of an American idiom.

”No one person in Australia is the cause of this,” Ejjamai says proudly of hip-hop’s growth in this country. ”We all made this story.”

Sitting in an inner-city Melbourne cafe, eating pizza after a photo session, Bliss N Eso augment each other’s answers, crack jokes and temper rash opinions. They’re a multicultural crew: Notley was born in the US and relocated here at the age of 13, while Ejjamai has Moroccan heritage, alongside the Anglo-Saxon MacKinnon.

Because hip-hop is an art form that revolves around lyrical description and self-examination - as Sigmund Freud described psychoanalysis, it’s ”the talking cure” - the genre’s artists talk about their career and outlooks with unusual sincerity. Rock’n'roll’s studied cool doesn’t get a look in.

”We’re the best of buddies,” the excitable MacKinnon says. ”These are my best mates in the world. It’s harder to go through it when something like money is involved but we’ve always said to each other that we’ll never let that affect us.”

Because the genre is still comparatively young in Australia, totems of success are treated as shared victories by musicians and fans. In 2000, when Bliss N Eso played their second show, supporting underground Los Angeles duo People Under the Stairs at Sydney’s 1200-capacity Metro Theatre, they came on five minutes after doors opened and played to 10 people at first. Afterwards, in their first dressing room, they wondered whether any Australian hip-hop artist could ever fill the room.

In 2008, needing a venue for a DVD concert shoot, Bliss N Eso quickly sold out the Metro. Before they came on, they played footage from the show held almost a decade earlier and the crowd cheered their progression.

As such, the trio take their shared responsibilities seriously. With Running on Air, their fourth long player, they were mindful of not repeating themselves and not trying to play to a newly expectant fan base.

”I remember saying to this guy [MacKinnon], ‘Let’s not worry about that and have fun again’. When you lose yourself in the music, that’s when the best stuff comes out,” Notley says. ”When you start thinking about external factors, that’s when you put a beat in the wrong place.”

The band recorded the album in various fortnight-long sessions, alternating them with solo writing sessions at home. At one stage, they found themselves at Mount Macedon, using a portable recording rig at the home of music impresario Michael Gudinski (”We didn’t mean to break the microwave,” MacKinnon quips), whose son Matt co-manages the trio and releases their records on the Illusive Sounds label.

”Sometimes me and Eso don’t even have a concept we’re trying to tie together to make an overall song,” Notley says. ”We each take it in our own directions … and it becomes like a piece of abstract artwork.”

The album builds on their songbook, moving from smoothly propulsive soul rhythms (Addicted) to atmospheric urban soundscapes (Art House Audio). Befitting a band that have risen through the ranks of Australia’s music festivals - Notley says you can trace their career by graphing their increasing point size each year on festival posters - the tracks are on the whole celebratory, although the group are mindful of their predominantly young audience. Freedom, on a Bliss N Eso record, is no longer celebrated by indulging in excess but rather by saying no when it suits.

One of the album’s key influences was a 2009 tour of the US’s west coast, supporting Canadian hip-hop group Swollen Members. The band went from headlining Festival Hall to 25-minute opening sets in small clubs. ”We had to start from scratch and win over the audience again,” MacKinnon remembers. The shows highlighted how commercial Australian hip-hop differs from the codified cultural behemoth that is its American counterpart.

”They are so ready for something new,” Ejjamai says. ”In the commercial scene, everyone is talking about the same shit over there: cars, women, money and drugs.”

Bliss N Eso cover the same topics but in a vastly different way. Cars, for them, are not status symbols but a sign of mobility that reflects social change. Young men, working in a strong economy with disposable incomes, can literally end up anywhere on the weekend, for better or worse. ”From the drugs to the girls and the beers I’m drinking,” runs a melancholic new track, Reflections, ”remember what’s at stake.”

”We would never say, ‘Don’t do that’,” Ejjamai says. ”But maybe that you don’t have to do it every night.”

MacKinnon adds: ”We don’t glamourise anything. We’d never rap about moving 10 keys [kilograms of cocaine] and doing this and doing that.”

In the music created by the likes of Bliss N Eso and Hilltop Hoods, the tone is egalitarian and boasting is purely for comic effect. It’s a distinctly Australian form of hip-hop, more Anzac than Eminem, that stresses the shared bond between group and listener and, ultimately, the group’s own members.

”As we get bigger - as they say - we keep each other together. People come up to us sometimes and start raving but we never let that go to our heads,” MacKinnon says.

”We might have a few drinks and joke about going to No. 1 but we’re more focused on making good music.

”Our downfall will be when we stop caring about the music, because the fans can tell.”

Bliss N Eso play the Palace Theatre tonight. Running on Air is out now through Illusive.

It was not surprising to see Tantra, at The Park, packed to capacity on a recent Friday.

And it had all the reasons to be so. After all, the hip-hop sensation, DJ Jam, who has performed the world over, and is also the official DJ for Snoop Dogg and Dr Dre on the Infamous Death Row Records, was there.

“His remixes and production work are diverse. In fact, he plays astounding tracks,” said a party reveller, who was waiting eagerly for the DJ to take the console. And DJ Jam was more than happy to churn out the latest in hip-hop, R&B and reggae for the crowd, who in turn, rocked the dancefloor!

“It seems Kolkata’s night life rocks and it should be so, with such an amazing crowd! I’m surprised the DJs here are well-aware of the latest numbers we play abroad! Three cheers!” DJ Jam signed off.

Rapper Charlie Blue wants to change the face of UK theatre. “It’s saturated by overpriced shows and musicals. There’s a gap in the market and we’re trying to fill it with hip hop,” says the 26-year-old head of urban collective Throwdown and workshop leader for Theatre is… a company “for, with and by young people” based in the East of England.

Blue epitomises the company ethos. Aged 19 he started as a flyer boy for Throwdown and within a few years was inspiring youngsters with hip hop workshops for Theatre is… “We wanted the participants to start running their own events afterwards,” says Blue. “We’ve had great success in this area.” His first workshop, which ran two and a half years ago in Norfolk, has spawned a beatboxer, a DJ, and the local club night Slam.

In his workshops, Blue defines hip hop broadly, breaking it into four elements – rap covers spoken word from scriptwriting to poetry; graffiti can be anything from painting to illustration; breakdance incorporates any dance and DJing encompasses all live music.

I join them at a workshop for Epiphany, a joint venture between Throwdown and Theatre is… . Creative director Stuart Mullins won arts council funding for the organisation in 2006. “I want to engage young people who have no opportunity to relate to theatre, which is a middle class dominated art form, and inspire them to become creative entrepreneurs,” he says. Blue designed the workshop with Mullins and event leaders Claudia Barwell and Darina Garland. It’s an adaptation of The Element, the bestselling book from revered education expert Sir Ken Robinson. Mullins saw Robinson’s 2006 talk on TED, the intellectual’s YouTube. ‘I had my moment of epiphany. This is what Theatre is… is all about – engaging, developing and empowering young people to follow their dreams and find their element, whether it’s becoming an accountant or a breakdancer. You can do the thing you love to do. That’s Ken’s mantra.”

For this two day workshop the group includes 15 young men aged 14-16 who are not in education. Blue describes the workshop as Hip hop “life-coaching for under 18s.”

“Hip hop is a way of behaving. It’s a magpie culture which steals samples from other genres and mixes them together. We’ve used these elements in the Epiphany workshop.” So rather than having modules on breakdancing, the intention of Epiphany is to find happiness and your ‘element’ – the thing you excel at. However Blue has provided a mic and soundsystem which are used today for an exercise where the boys rap national anthems they’ve written for their “desert island communities”.

One of the most popular projects is the intelligence test where the group are quizzed on different sorts of intelligence including creative, linguistic and logical. Prior to the test everyone when questioned thought they lacked intelligence but by the end of the workshop a significant number found they were brighter than they had assumed. For example 14-year-old Mustaq found he had emotional intelligence: “I’m good at reading people. It’s made me think about studying psychology”. Meanwhile 15-year-old Josh was pleased that he’d discovered a talent for music.

Blue wrote the first draft of the play Epiphany which premiered at The Junction in Cambridge in June. It’s the story of three hip hop artists who find their vocation in life. Footage from the workshop will be used in the production. And today’s group will be encouraged to shadow leaders at future workshops and follow in Blue’s footsteps. “If they’re good enough they’ll start getting paid,’ he says. ‘It’s really important to show them a career path.”