I shouldn't have left you..without a dope beat to step to. So, we were in the lab last night and ren finds this sample, knowing that I'm a sucker for vocal samples and all that..so he looped it up, put some bass under it, etc and I went to work. its nothing too serious, just a green street flavor for ya wintertime blues...enjoy.
If you want this joint in mp3, just leave your email in the comments or send us an email - greenstreetrecords@yahoo.com
Whats goody y'all! Its been a while since I hit y'all with some new ish, so I'm gonna pack some classics in this post.
This first joint is the Intro song for my man Papa E's radio show "Bars 'N Hooks". I made a post about it a couple weeks ago, and we were finally able to record this joint for him, so make sure you check him out. Even though it is an intro song, Papa is a fool and stays playing it all throughout the show...dont get it wrong though, I aint mad at ya!
Next up..I'm gonna hit y'all with a freestyle from '07 when we were guests on "Can't Stop, Won't Stop", the hip-hop radio show at BU. We actually produced the beat that is used in the background as well, it just never got released a song...even though I feel like it might still see the light of day.
I got a couple more joints, but I'm gonna wait 'til the holidays, and hit y'all with some official stocking stuffers...holla.
So I'm still feeling the high from Tuesday night...shoutsout to everyone we met in PA and NYC that night...I told y'all we were gonna get it! Right now though, I gotta big up my man Eli, aka Papa E, aka the ya baby momma's favorite dude, aka WTBU's foremost hip-hop DJ. Even though it took like 9 years, he finally blogging from his spot so y'all need to hit it up and check out what hes doing: http://barsnhooks.wordpress.com/
Also, Eli hosts 'Bars 'n Hooks', BU's finest hip-hop radio show, every Weds. from 2-4. Go to wtburadio.org to check that out! You can hit him up with requests for songs, questions, concerns about Sarah Palin, whatever you want...[The Spinners] He'll be there for you.[/The Spinners].
Also, stay tuned from some exclusive Green Street ft. Papa E material...coming soon...
I'm out for now...y'all Obama haters need to get you some tylenol.
I'm not going to say too much on this one...I just got this app on my iPhone that lets me record stuff, so even though the quality is not the greatest, I leave y'all with the Obama Freestyle on the eve of the most important day of our lifetime.
PLEASE GET OUT AND VOTE TOMORROW.
Me and Ren will be out in Philadelphia, trying to help people get to the polls so they can get their vote in, so wish us luck. Peace and blessings, as always.
"...we want change, like returning empty soda cans..."
Aight, so I promised to hit y'all with more from the Flow event, so here it is. This vid is from our cipher in the parking lot before the show, and until you see it, you won't understand how serious this is right now! Straight VH1 Behind the Music status.
In order of spittin is - A-live, The Flipside, Kharakter, Low Rey, Paradise and MusicBox Ent. I know its around 10 mins and change, but TRUST me, this ish is worth it until the end. My favorite moment? Check from 4:01-4:20 and Low Rey's whole section. Yeah, this vid is parental advisory, but dont get ya feelings hurt, ya dig?
"...they said I could never be it, like 'nahh, I cant see it'..."
Aiiight, so as most of you know, this weekend was Flow 2008 in RI. Green Street was in the building, collaborating with On Trak Ent. and Mulatto for an absolutely crazy performance. We performed 'Remember my Name' and 'Cloud Nine' off Kharakter's sophomore album, The Composition of Karma. For y'all that have been sleeping, you can scroll back a couple posts to get the low down on 'Cloud Nine'. Anyway, I had a crazy time this weekend, and I'm gonna post all the details later, but for now, I just want to put the video from our performance up so y'all can get a feel for how crazy it was. A huge shoutout to everyone who made it happen - Kharakter, Flips, J. Dodds, Paradise, G-Skillz, Low Ray, and everyone who made the trek out to watch us perform, much love! I have some more footage that I will post up later, some VH1 Behind the Scenes ish, but y'all are gonna have to wait for that. Enjoy.
Aight, whats good people...here it is: next Friday, Sept. 19, Green Street and the Ontrak Entertainment family will be performing at the FLOW Event in Providence, RI. Here's the description of it that I jacked from Ontrak's facebook event:
"September 19th of 2008 will bring light to the darker corner of the East Coast. With the help of Davies Music Management Group and many local sponsors, 12 Hip-Hop contestants from all over the East Coast region, INCLUDING THE FLIPSIDE & KHARAKTER & A-LIVE, will perform for a grand prize of $2,000 and much more. These 12 talented hip-hop artists, along with 5 featured acts, will be exclusively selected from compiled submissions of Mp3's and notified to participate."
Basically, we going in, throwing down an ill set, and hopefully walking out with a cool 2 Gs. For everyone who is in the RI/NYC/BOSTON area, hit me up with details on how to get there and whatnot if you're interested in coming out. Either way, wish us luck and thank you for tuning in. Also, pics and vids will be put up here after the show. Peaaaace. Time and Date: Friday, September 19, 2008 Time: 7:00pm - 11:00pm Location: Columbus Theater Street: 270 Broadway Avenue City/Town: Providence, RI
This week's post is dedicated to that mid 90's East Coast sound we grew up listening to. We like pushing the envelope in our music, but we always try and keep that sound alive in our music.
Not much to say for this one. We recorded this in my apt in NY at around 1AM; hooked up the Protools in the room, placed the mic inside a closet and went to work. The mix and everything is real rough right now, but it gets the job done.
Ren made this beat sometime last year, and we never really got a chance to mess with it, but I heard it the other day in the studio and I thought that this verse would be perfect for it. Ren thinks I jacked Wale's swag for this verse, but...ehh, I think hes hating. Enjoy!
Sorry for the delay on this week's post. This week's all about the exotic-sounding music that opened us up to a whole world of inspiration. Many of these songs draw on music from a variety of different cultures. Hope you like 'em.
A big part of why we do this has always been our influences. We’ve been trying to put people onto the music we listen to since back in high school. We knew that a lot of people would dig the music we were into if they were exposed to it, and always took it into our own hands to make that happen. For those of you are looking for more of those jawns, or those who like our music and want to know where our sound came from, your prayers have been answered.
This blogspot gives us an easy way to compile some of those joints that helped make our Green Street sound possible. We’re gonna make posts like these every weekend, so instead of nagging us to put you on to some new fire, just come check back every week to get your fix.
We’re gonna start off with different themes each week for the first month, and then we’ll start mixing it up after that. We’ll start it off with the songs that originally gave us our direction with the music we wanted to create. Enjoy.
Aight, so tonight, for better or for worse, we present the first song that we made as a group. This was made back in October, 2005 and its crazy to think how much time has passed since then. Its hard to say what exactly sparked us get our stuff together and make a song, but it was probably a combination of the artists we were listening to and the need to break out of everything that was going on.
This song was built around a piano sample from Miles Davis and a vocal sample from Nancy Wilson's "Never Will I Marry". We created the drum track ourselves, and this was our first time really messing with programming our own drums instead of using break beats and what not. Unfortunately, its pretty easy to see how immature our style was, but looking it back, you can't knock the hustle...word to Jay-Z.
For the record, we made this song with a $20 Radio Shack microphone, Acid 5.0 software and a makeshift pop-filter...straight gutta.
Honestly, despite the complete lack of production on this song and the obvious flaws in the mixing (we didnt do anything), I have a lot of love for this song. This is what kicked everything off for us, so it will always mean something to us. I remember how it felt to hear the final version of this song outta the speakers in Ren's Dodge Dynasty...official! Anyway, enough talk, lets get to the music. Enjoy.
"...and I used to rock chains that was missing a link, now I see myself change when I look above the sink, inspections take place before the session, in school half my life, but I never learned a lesson..."
Here is an article that The Hippodrome did about us sometime late last year. The Hippodrome describes themselves as the "not your average media blog, sending the best unknown and unheard musicians right to your computer, free of charge." We sent in a sample of our music to the site, and they liked it enough to ask us to do an interview for them, which provided the pieces for this article.
My initial reaction to the article was mixed. I think they misinterpreted our statements about how literature and philosophy play into our music; my initial point of bringing up our outside influences was to highlight how our style runs deeper than just music, but they kind of made that seem like the central aspect of our music, making us seem on some crazy, existentialism-oriented-neutron popping-Holden Caufield Wanna-be nerd rap type music. It's all good though, y'all know the drill.
Thats it for now, we got some BIG things in the works right now, working with some outside artists and whatnot, so we will keep y'all posted. New music coming soon, stay in tuned!
Aiiight, so today I am real proud to announce the release of Kharakter's sophomore album, the Composition of Karma. When people talk about "Oh, thats my boy from way back in the day!", Kharakter is literally one of my closest friends from way back when. We used to kick freestyle raps in parking lots at family functions, trying to act like we were hot, putting on a show for a bunch of little kids who would care enough to listen. Regardless, we've come a long way since, and so for us to both get on this track was half destiny, and all necessary.
I got an IM from Kharakter about 2 weeks ago, talking about how he was pushing to finish the album and he wanted me to hop on a track with him if possible. I told it was nothing, and since I was in Boston at the time, I told him it was going down, word to Yung Joc. He sent me the beat, with a rough draft of his verse and so I started building off of that. Initially, the vibe from the beat was very different from most of the stuff that we, Green Street, work with. But, as you can tell, it was a banger, so I got to scribin'. I took his first line "I'm '94 fly, turn the dial, I'm on 94 five..." and ran with that to start my verse. Honestly, I had no idea that it was turn out like it finally did, with the hook and Flipside's 3rd verse, and so when I heard the final version, I was lovin' it.
So, enjoy it and do yourself a favor and check out Kharakter's whole album, as well as a lot of other material from his label, On Trak Entertainment at http://www.ontrakent.com/artist.html. Got it? Hit me up, hit him up, and let the world know. Until next time, I'm outtie, peaace.
"All I See", the second single off our forthcoming neo-soul/jazz-hip hop instrumental album, has been up on our Myspace for several months now, but we haven't properly introduced it to you. For the amount time we put into making that joint, it's worth telling the story behind it for sure. Like most of the joints off this new album, it started out with Ken laying some guitar licks over one of my rough drum patterns. We had no real direction for the song to begin with, but when we got Malcolm in to add some rhodes to the mix, we knew it was gonna be one of our singles.
We'd been in contact with Oddisee of the LowBudget crew for a couple years, and after doing a drop for the intro on our first album, we wanted to get a verse from him on this album. For all who have never heard of Oddisee before, trust me, you are missing out. Not only is he one of the most down to earth people we have met, he is one of the freshest artists coming up right now, and he has worked with artists such as Talib Kweli, Jazzy Jeff, Little Brother, Kenn Starr, and Kev Brown, to name a few.
He dug the instrumental we sent him, and he agreed to drop a verse on it after we rolled him his loot. A-Live hadn't written his verse yet, so he got to it. It took a real long time to get the verse right. He wrote the verse during the week down in New York at school, then came up to the Bean for the weekend to lay it down. We ended up pulling an all-nighter trying to get the rhythms tight, but it really paid off.
Next order of business was the chorus. We had a saxophonist Ken played with in high school, Toby Forman, come through to lay down some horns for the chorus, but it wasn't sounding right. We ended up filtering what he played for the chorus in putting in in the intro and in the bridge, and it sounded fresh. The final piece was figuring out the vocals for the hook.
We wanted some soulful vocals for the hook and contemplated getting in touch with Oliver Daysoul or Darien Brockington for it, but we decided to stick with Ken, our in-house vocalist, and dude came through. He put in work writing the hook, then really delivered with his performance. Props to Ken, he never gets enough credit for all the work he puts in with Green Street. He saves us a lot of times when ish hits the fan. Dude is crazy versatile. Besides being a filthy guitarist, he's an ill song writer and can more than hold his own on bass, keys, and vocals...
Once the track was layed out, there was no rest for the weary. With all the instruments and filters, this track took a crazy amount of time to produce. In all we probably spent over 500 hours on this song, so I hope ya'll like it! Peace.
What up world! It's been a long time coming, but we are back, officially revamping the Green Street Records movement. A lot of people have hit us up recently, asking us what we've been up to and why we haven't been putting out any new music so its time to let y'all know. Despite the fact that things have been crazy lately, (with me living out in NYC and Ren just getting back from Spain), we have recorded over 50 songs over the last year, and have plenty of more in the works, so despite popular opinion, we have been working!
This blog has been created in order to get back in touch with our fans, let people know what we are currently working on, what we have done since our last album, as well as post unreleased tracks that we have done that just never saw the light of day. However, in order for this to work, we need y'all to be supportive and hit us with feedback. From reactions to songs we post, questions about our future projects or how fresh my Nikes are, we NEED to hear from you. TRUST me when I say that we have big things in the mix, but it won't work without the love and support that y'all have given us since our LHS lunch block days.
So, thats all I got for now, stay tuned because over this week, we will be posting a bunch of new stuff. Shoutouts to everyone who has held us down over the last couple years and everyone who hits me up on some 'What has Green Street been up to!? Put something out!', I appreciate y'all to the fullest.
Also, shoutouts to the family- Ken, Malcs, Ralphis, Prosper, Wondermaxx, Kharakter, Stephen Jones & the whole Introspective fam, Papa E, Dennis, Deej, Arms, Ray, Dev, Derik, Kai, Gabbie (for helping us with the site!), and errebody else I forgot. I'm out until the next time, one love.
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