Back to the Nederland
Last night, Professor Meat and I trekked up the narrow, massive, dynamite blasted canyon to the First Street Pub in Nederland for hip-hop night.
I Know, "Hip hop night, where???" That's right, Nederland. Meat's boy Justin grabbed the mics and we drove into town around eleven, where we found Prakoshis rockin a tiny bar for about twenty people. He spit frees for about a half hour, and I gotta say I was impressed. The snow started around 11:30 which drove most everyone away, save about 10 people, all emcees and a camera girl. This means I was filmed rapping last night, which is probably not good.
I honestly couldn't believe it, a lot of kids up there had skills. Flow was questionable, but they were all mad concerned with lyrics, and when Meat and I grabbed the mics folks gave us love. After we played a mini-set, we started just spitting frees and then everyone in the bar got on stage and just passed the mics back and forth for about another hour. I don't know how to freestyle without insulting people, so i just started battling cats, Meat figured I was starting a fire so he kept rhyme-apologizing for my indiscretions, but it was all love. White cats in dashikis clutchin' they hearts like cardiac arrest and Justin producing his shit live; it was a lot of fun.
Kaybee and I just got back from a little trip to the motherland as well. We flew into Newark airport on Friday and got back yesterday. Whereas i didn't see a show while i was out there (overscheduling, underplanning) i did hear of a few. This is how it happens in New Brunswick:
That's my man GDP. One of the illest cats in Jersey, and the dude who knows how to have the most fun in the universe, is coming to Denver on the 28th at the Climax Lounge, be sure to check that out.
"Local Music" means shit to me now. It used to signify concrete floors and christmas lights, beer smell and smoking in a no smoking house.
I can't find a show that's not at a bar. We had a band at my house last week before i left for Jersey and the cops came in 10 minutes, told us what we were doing was illegal, and shut us down. It seems like this may be the start to something pretty cool, every wednesday, i'll keep yall posted.
State Politics meets THE FUTURE!!!
I started working at the State Capitol in the House of Representatives recently as a Legislative Aide. 
A pretty sweet office if i do say so myself. And it has recently come to my attention that the House of Representatives will be broadcasting all of the chamber meetings on streaming audio (weekdays from 9am - whenever they're done), television coverage (Comcast Channel 165) and online streaming video (link coming soon).
All of this has got me thinking: I personally watch a ton of C-SPAN, but that's because i'm a huge politics dork, and it's typically broadcasting national news, something the polity at large should be is probably interested in to a decent degree.
But will Coloradoans actually watch these proceedings? Those chumps in the Senate don't have camera crews, a television channel, or anything like that (though you can listen to their boring lame streaming audio of their unimportant and trite proceedings through the link above, if you're a square who's into those sort of things, that is).
But we're bringing TECHNOLOGY to the political process. Many of the Representatives don't even use computers, in fact, this is the first year that they're allowing Aides and interns to use the wireless network in the Capitol; so I ask you, are today's politics behind the curve of modern technology (yes!)
One of the other hats i wear has me tutoring students at Kaplan for various standardized tests, from the SAT, ACT, down to the ISEE. When we scan their tests through the machine, it is RARE AS HELL that we have any errors whatsoever, but the State of Colorado can't even get their voting machines certified!!!
This has led to a scandal here in the Rocky Mountain Empire where our Secretary of State Mike Coffman:
won't certify any voting machines in the state, unless they're manufactured by a company called Premier Electronic Solutions (who shares a PR firm with Coffman's former campaign...FISHY!)
Remember Diebold voting machines? Those screw-ups who were responsible for that whole Florida thing in the year 2000?
So the question remains: Are we sure that politics is ready for this newfangled technology, or can we (PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD AND ALL THAT IS HOLY AND GOOD) just stick to paper ballots where the voter knows exactly what he or she is choosing, and can have a paper trail to prove it if need be during any recounts?
I, for one, am excited about the live broadcasting of House meetings, but I'll be sitting there every day watching it happen, will any one out there be tuning in to watch us, or is this a giant waste of money?
WOWZA!!! LOCAL NEWS!!!
It has been brought to my attention that there is a ridiculous land grab case going on here in wonderful Boulder.
The doctrine of "adverse posession" basically states that a citizen may claim ownership of a property if it can be demonstrated that he or she used it exclusively for an extended period of time, here's the deal:
"In simple terms, this means that those attempting to claim the property are occupying it exclusively (keeping out others) and openly as if it were their own. Some jurisdictions permit accidental adverse possession as might occur with a surveying error. Generally, the openly hostile possession must be continuous (although not necessarily constant) without challenge or permission from the lawful owner, for a fixed statutory period in order to acquire title. Where the property is of a type ordinarily only occupied during certain times (such as a summer cottage), the adverse possessor may only need to have exclusive, open, and hostile possession during those successive useful periods, making the same use of the property as an owner would for the required number of years."
-wikipedia
SO as it turns out, some local yokel named Don Wrege has made some parody tracks about this situation:
Stealing Land from our Neighbor
This Land Belongs to Don and Susie
HILARIOUS!
Local Boulder Emcee: Professor Meat
Professor Meat started rhyming by text messaging his brother rhyming couplets, like:
When i'm in the club i be flirtin with dancers and i eat more pussy than some cervical cancer
The first rhyme he ever spit live was:
kids eat shit but they still pretend though, they 8-bit like old school nintendo.
Professor Meat began his career in 2003 in Champagne, Illinois. It's a funny story: he moved to champagne, not knowing anyone there, so he took to the streets to meet people. He heard some cats talking about hip-hop, and he had been freestyling himself, so on the campus of Champagne Urbana at the University of Illinois, he met a rapper by the name of Al iteration who invited Professor to a cipher that night. They were all warming up, getting ready to spit, and they put him on the spot with the words any novice emcee fears the most, "go first". Four cats stood in a circle spitting to industry instrumentals (like mixtapes), and Meat killed the cipher. After that summer, he moved back to Jersey and started a 9-5er at Best Buy, but his mind was never on the job, he was stuck in freestyle mode. Some Best Buy lines:
Most Eager Artist Today, hardest to slay, emcees like newports i smoke a carton a day
My pilots stay bombin' like shock and awe, i rock it raw, fuck with me and catch tetanus, i lock your jaw
At
this point, his little brother Dank was rhyming with some eastside
bloods, and Meat got down on ciphers constantly to develop his skills
further. During that period, he had his first secret freestyle session
with GDP out in the
Dunkin' Donuts parking lot in West Orange, NJ. They drove around in
his dad's truck spittin rhymes and elevating. This went through the
winter of '05, and in February '06 he moved to Portland, Oregon to
start his creative writing career, where he wrote a novella. He hit
the ground running with hip-hop there, his first day there he overheard
kids freestyling and he just jumped in and traded verses. They were
Graf writers, as is Meat, so they went bombing, still spittin, and he
caught the bug. He got hooked up with Randolf McTools from hip hop
anonymous, just a loose affiliation of emcees, producers, djs, just to
hook everyone up with rhymes and beats. Tools introduced Meat to Cheef
at BS Productions, where Meat laced his first tracks. Meat met this
homeless dude named Brooklyn, who supported himself by burning cds and
selling them on the street. They went around together spittin and
trying to sell Brook's CDs, and developed his skills more and more. He
recorded an untitled, unreleased demo with Cheef, which never saw the
light of day, but he kept the beats which are now on his EP
"Write
Truth on the Walls". Flash forward to October '06, Meat moved back to
Jersey and that's when he really decided to start running with it. He
had been seeing what GDP and his middleschool friend C-minus had been
up to on a Jersey label called Division East. Around the beginning of
December he was working in a secure fileroom on Wall Street, for a firm
called Bowne, he was the only one in there, and filing is bullshit, so
he spent most of the day writing rhymes (and catching tags during lunch
breaks). He had money to afford studio time, for a flat fee of $1,000
he got studio time and all the beats he needed from J-Stamps, 100dbs,
and C-Minus.
He recorded 9-10 rough cuts, did some edits, went back in the studio in January '07 and recorded the full-length EP "Write Truth on the Walls". He wanted to rock shows, GDP put him on a few Division East shows, he rocked with NoGoodsCrew, Tame One, Shape, GDP, Bully Mouth; and most of the North Jersey underground scene. He rocked open mics in New Brunswick (by Rutgers University, where this humble writer went to school) and was addicted to the shit. He tried to sell CDs at these shows, and it wasn't going well ("i think I sold one copy total, to a drunk girl"). He had a really shitty day in the fileroom one day and simultaneously applied to Wizard Magazine and Naropa University. He got the job at Wizard quickly, and brought C-Minus with him to work in the warehouse, during which he laced Viddy Dat, Blue Lie, Hip Hop Anonymous; basically a lot of tracks which are coming on the new full length (Working Title: The Bizarre Adventures of Professor Meat, slated for release by Spring '08)
This brings us up to speed, Meat quit Wizard and moved to Boulder to studying Writing & Poetics at Naropa. He found himself in the same situation as he was in Champagne, but this time he had a few copies of his EP with him, so he hit the streets to sell his burns. So he sold everything he had on him the first day, then burned some more the next day, and before he knew it he was selling 15 copies a day making around $75 a day on weekends, and during the week it varied. One night he was out rhyming and there were two other cats out there he's never seen before selling CDs too. Ya-B and Scope based out of Chicago stood across from the split rocks on Pearl Street and dropped everything they had on each other. They became quite close quite quickly, and ended up crashing with Meat for a week. Selling CDs on the street, Meat met producers, radio DJs, other emcees, and this humble writer. Scope, Ya-B and Meat freestyled on The Eclipse Show on KGNU, which stepped up Meat's game and gave him the impetus to apply himself fully to the rap game.
EmceEsher: Where do you get your rhymes from, what's your inspiration for writing lyrics?
Meat: I love language, i love hearing the way words interact, basically i just love clever lyricism; that's the whole Professor side of things.
EmceEsher: So what's with the name Professor Meat then?
Meat: I first got the nickname Meat when i first arrived in Illinois, the friend i drove out there with slipped on my real name and accidentally called me Meat, and that just stuck really well. I started studying the Supreme Alphabet, decoding the meaning in my own name. Mathematics Encode All Truths, Most Eager Artist Today, Making Emcees Ananlyze Themselves, Marijuana Elevates All Things, Mushroom Eating is Therapy, Meat Evil Always Triumph &c.
EmceEsher: So what's the next step for Professor Meat
Meat: The next step? Trying to integrate myself more in Boulder, rocking shows from the laundry room to Naropa, Headlining at the Roxy in Denver, and it's always been well recieved. There's a community of hip-hop artists here, but it's still a matter of paying dues, they don't know my pedigree out here yet, but there's plenty of room out here for cats to come up. I come home and rock for 300 people in NYC, and then come back to Boulder and play for 10 people, which is kind of frustrating.
EmceEsher: When do you hit the studio for the new album?
Meat:
The album is about 40% done, when I go home for Christmas break I'm
gonna get most of the album down, I hooked up with DOODZIEK (dutch for 'dead sick')
from Holland, and he gave me a bunch of the beats that'll be on the new
record. I'm also a novelist, I'm writing a voodoo-laced noir police
thriller meets stoner-zombie apocalypse with a sci-fi twist.
EmceEsher: From our conversations, I've learned you're heavily concerned with the government, conspiracy theories and philosophy.
Meat: Where to begin? I guess i first got concerned post 9/11 when the patriot act was passed, back in the day i used to hack computers, and personal liberty has always been a concern of mine. I was in Manhattan that day, and that stayed etched in my mind; they took this tragedy and then took our freedoms because of it. Conspiracy theories interested me in my hacking years, i had seen some Alex Jones docs, and i'm academically trained to be a social scientist, so i'm a skeptic in all dimensions. I was skeptically receptive to the ideas, but it started making sense to me on a fundamental level. When the Skull & Bones thing happened with Bush and Kerry, and Greg Palist's theories caught my attention. I was reading Chomsky at that time and things like that, but i was just generally trying to educate myself, and more than that, learning very quickly that i couldn't trust the official story, because there are always ulterior motives.
i met Meat on Pearl Street one night when my roomates and i were waiting for this kid Paul to show up so they could start a comedy group. Paul never ended up at the Sundown, but Meat came up to us rocking a New Jersey fitted hat and asked if we listened to hip-hop. i responded with an emphatic "YES" and we traded verses for about an hour, going through each of our catalogs until i completely ran out of rhymes. we went back to his apartment to watch conspiracy theory videos from the likes of Alex Jones who you might remember from the film "Waking Life" (he's the dude with the bullhorn car who drives around trying to "wake people up" to what's going on in their government) we had a good time and stayed up until 4am. These days, you can catch me and Meat on Pearl Street hocking CDs, the kid is a wizard, and he raps to eat, you can check out full tracks at www.myspace.com/profmeat
support local hip-hop fools.
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