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What’s going on Flex.  I hope you and yours are having a great Thanksgiving.  I dunno if it’s not Hip Hop to greet someone in the Holiday spirit, but why the hell not!?

I want to write you regarding the recent video that popped up on you about Tupac.  I’m sure you’ve been met with a lot of hate and anger about it from Pac fans especially, but I want to speak not as a Pac fan, but a Hip Hop fan.

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As we proceed with Women’s Week, I give you a duo that has truly inspired me.

The ladies of Nola Darling!

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Next up on the Women’s Week vibe is emoniFela.

If you come to the MIXER tonight, you’ll get to see her rock along with a bunch of other crazy dope artists.

How I connected to emoniFela is a quite random.  I put up my interview with Brook D’leau of J*Davey last year just on YouTube, and I saw Emoni had said something about it to him over Twitter.  I think she re-tweeted it.  I then clicked on her profile.  I clicked the link to her Myspace page.  I had felt like I heard of her before but wasn’t sure from where.  I heard the music and was like “Hey!  This is dope!”  I hit her up on Twitter and asked if she was down to do an interview, and bam.  We’ve been friends ever since.  This was my first time getting from behind the camera and having Eve do the camerawork too.

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I have so many old interviews in the stash that I only put on YouTube that I never officially put up…

It was sometimes around ’08 I think I came across Raven’s Myspace page.  I heard some of her tracks and thought they were pretty dope.  I saw that she also knew one of the local cats makin moves, the homie Val the Vandle.  Somehow or another I saw on her page that she was also booking for a monthly showcase Hip Hop show she did at a spot in Culver City.  I sent her my info.  She let me know how to get the pre-sale tickets.  If you peep the My Work section of the site, that’s the night I hit the stage at her show.  From then on we linked and stayed in touch.  we understood the roots of the Hip Hop and wanted to really take it back to the essence.

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I’ve said it before on Twitter but let me say it again:

JUST BECAUSE YOU HAVE A GREAT CAMERA DOESN’T MEAN YOU HAVE A GREAT VIDEO!

There are a lot of HD videos with nice lenses and nothing to show for it. No real interesting visuals besides the fact that everything looks clean and crisp. Standing on the corner rapping, or being in one single shot for 4 minutes while you do your songs doesn’t make it good. That’s boring. Green screens? You can tell who’s in front of them a lot now. Yes a lot of people are indie right now and budgets are slim, but what happened to creative story lines?

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