Idolator

Greetings from "at large"! Like any good penitent, my self-imposed blogging exile has included certain dietary restrictions. Fer instance consuming as little music released in 2008 as possible. But spending the day slopping about in music-related nostalgia is still OK, because otherwise I would have to turn to Jack Van Impe reruns or honest work. That's why this weekend, while Maura was taking in the horror what Fat Mike and/or the Get Up kids wrought, I was at the Rock The Bells tour, a package deal involving hip-hop's geriatric giants that is not a "festival" but a "hip-hop platform," presumably because it's easy for socially conscious rappers to steal juice from political terminology in an election year. We (meaning me and photographer Frank Hamilton) scammed our way in with Idolator's press credentials (and strategic puppy dog eyes), so the usual guilt meant I wouldn't be able to enjoy myself if I didn't type something up after the fact. (Plus Maura made me.) What did we learn? Well, for one thing, we learned that if your blog ass tries to stand on concrete in a "golden age of hip-hop" gulag for 12 hours, it seriously fucks your back up. (According to Maura's account from emo-ville, this is a pan-genre festival problem.) Two, that if our nation's enemies (except for those Iranian fibbers) had targeted Columbia, Md., with their nuclear whatnot on Sunday, they'd have evaporated just about every rapper that made my high school years tolerable. To wit: More »

Rather than forcing the students involved to get jobs, "the Hip-Hop Congress, a non-profit organization, plans to release a new CD to raise money to reimburse the Thurston County Sheriff's office for damages caused during a riot at a recent dead prez show" at Olympia, Washington's Evergreen State College where a police cruiser was destroyed and rioting kids made off with laptops and radar guns. The CD will be coming soon to a store near you, but in the meantime, the Hip-Hop Congress has also produced this looooooong (but at least admirably thorough) video attempting to debunk local news coverage of the event and to pinpoint po-po accountability, though I mostly found it notable for reminding me of Evergreen's vaguely depressing, Soviet bloc architectural choices. [XXL]

Students at Olympia, Wash.'s hippie-tastic Evergreen State College—famed in song and zine lore as the crucible for Pacific Northwest indie-pop/rock—would usually rather hug out their differences than start lobbing bricks and breaking windows. But earlier today a scuffle took place at a Dead Prez show being held on campus, and when one concertgoer was arrested for misdemeanor assault, the audience decided to take it upon themselves to liberate him from the pigs' clutches. Thus finally answering the question "how many scrawny indie kids does it take to overturn a cop car?" More »