Mint Condition is back!!!

You know you remember 1991’s Breakin’ My Heart (Pretty Brown Eyes); 93’s U Send Me Swingin’; 96’s What Kind of Man Would I Be?; and 1997’s You Don’t Have to Hurt No More.

If you don’t know, well, go ask somebody. Mint Condition is back.

NPR Music: News & Notes , May 6, 2008 - The R&B band Mint Condition has released their ninth album in 18 years — but this one was produced by wielding the power of the Web.

Farai Chideya sits down with band members Stokley Williams, Homer O’Dell and Jeffrey Allen, who weigh in on their longevity in the music business and the new album, E-Life.

Mandela concert line-up unveiled

Queen, Leona Lewis, Annie Lennox and the Soweto Gospel Choir are among the acts that will appear at a concert for Nelson Mandela’s 90th birthday in June.

The former South African president will travel to London for the 27 June event, which will also feature Dame Shirley Bassey, Simple Minds and Razorlight.

Tickets go on public sale on Friday and Hyde Park will host a crowd of 46,664 - Mr Mandela’s old prison number.

It is now the name of his Aids charity, which will get proceeds from the show.

Surprise stars

Organisers have promised further stars on the bill, with “several major artists keeping silent about their involvement in order to take both Mr Mandela and the audience by surprise”, a statement said.

Eminem, U2, Amy Winehouse and the Spice Girls are among the other acts who have been mentioned in the press.

Read the whole article by the BBC-UK here…

Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop

Hip-hop is one of the most important global arts movements of the past two decades, moving beyond rap music to transform theater, dance, performance, poetry, literature, fashion, design, photography, painting, and film. Through essays, interviews, roundtable discussions, and more, Total Chaos provides a deep, incisive look at the hip-hop arts movement in the voices of its pioneers, innovators, and mavericks.

Buzz
“Total Chaos is Jeff Chang at his best: fierce and unwavering in his commitment to document the hip-hop explosion. In beginning to define a hip-hop aesthetic, this gathering of artists, pioneers, and thinkers illuminates the special truth that hip-hop speaks to youth around the globe.”
—Bakari Kitwana, author of The Hip Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African American Culture and Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop: Wankstas, Wiggers, Wannabes, And the New Reality of Race in America

“Jeff Chang, whose Can’t Stop Won’t Stop is nothing less than the finest rap history extant, envisions a future in which the four hip-hop ‘elements’-MC’ing, DJ’ing, B-Boying, graffiti-generate a polycultural, transnational, sampled-and-bricolaged vanguard in theater, dance, poetry, fiction, painting, and design. Uncommonly inspired anthology…readable and provocative.”
-Robert Christgau, Rolling Stone

Read more here…

Book excerpt:

Hip-hop is one of the big ideas of this generation, a grand expression of our collective creative powers. But, when recognized at all, the hip-hop arts have often been divided into subcategorical themes—”spoken word poetry”, “street literature”, “post-multicultural theatre”, “post-black art”, “urban outsider art”—by critics trained to classify trees while lost in the forest. Perhaps this is simply because the hip-hop arts movement did not undertake to formally announce itself in such circles, as in Antonin Artaud’s 1938 manifesto The Theater And Its Double or the 1971 Black Arts Movement anthology, The Black Aesthetic. Perhaps this is simply because, despite all the interest in the talking, the hip-hop arts movement has been chiefly concerned with doing, which is just what it has done, organically, for over three decades now.

R. Kelly Trial: Witness Will ID Young Girl

A woman will testify at R. Kelly’s upcoming child-pornography trial that she had a three-way sexual encounter with Kelly and the allegedly underage girl shown in the videotape at the center of the case, the Chicago Sun-Times reported on Saturday (May 3). Jury selection for the long-delayed case is scheduled to begin Friday.

In the case, prosecutors claim to have identified the girl in the videotape, who is now in her 20s. Kelly’s lawyers are planning to argue — and the alleged victim will reportedly testify — that she is not the girl in the tape, according to the Sun-Times.

But the new witness could weaken that defense, since she will identify the girl — and claim the girl was underage — sources reportedly told the paper.

“She was involved in a threesome with [the girl] and R. Kelly,” one source reportedly said.
Read the article here at MTV.com

Mariah Carey and Nick Cannon: Married.

Huh? MTV reports: While there was no official word at press time whether Mariah Carey and Nick Cannon have actually gotten married, People magazine reported on Friday (May 2) that … Read more