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Thread started 12/15/16 2:47pm

mikemike13

Slept on Soul/Blowout Comb (Digable Planets)

A native of Seattle, Washington, Ishmael Butler was the son of revolutionary Black Panthers educators who filled his young world words and music that would become his lives work. After graduating from high school, he attended the University of Massachusetts on a basketball scholarship, but wound-up leaving. Moving to the Washington, D.C. area, Ish became friends with Craig Irving and Mary Ann Vierra (Mecca). The three co-founded the rap group Digable Planets in D.C. and Philly (where the boys were roommates for a minute) and set-off to New York City in hopes of bringing their vision to fruition.

With the introduction of the Native Tongues crew, A Tribe Called Quest, as well as projects produced by DJ Premier and Easy Mo Bee, jazz was becoming a more acceptable sonic source for samples as well as live instrumentation to be used on records, and Digable was determined to flip the style their way. “Jazz as an idea in hip-hop was a story of tradition and shared knowledge, of connecting a younger cohort to the radical art of their parents’ generation,” Pitchfork editor Mark Richardson wrote in 2013. “And in the tense era of the 80s and 90s, there was comfort to be found in that continuum, of positioning this new music in the context of an earlier sound that changed the world.”

Though some folks accused Digable’s musical style to be too much on Tribe’s tip, the radio listening/record buying public embraced them out the box. Released in the fall of ‘93, Digable’s debut single “Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat)” propelled the group into a pop stratosphere that they group neither expected nor fully accepted. Although watching them on television deliver their acceptance speech after winning the Grammy Award for Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group in 1993, Digable was appreciative, with Ish giving a barbed-wire (but gentle) speech about homelessness and “the universal Black family” recognizing the real enemy, but still looked uncomfortable under the bright stage lights, as though they couldn’t wait to bolt from Radio City Music Hall and return to the smoky darkness.

Unbeknownst to most, Digable was already started working on new material that was much more politically aware, poetically dense and production sharp.


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Reply #1 posted 12/15/16 4:36pm

MickyDolenz

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Here's a full concert from November 2016. It's professionally filmed, not camera phone.


You can take a black guy to Nashville from right out of the cotton fields with bib overalls, and they will call him R&B. You can take a white guy in a pin-stripe suit who’s never seen a cotton field, and they will call him country. ~ O. B. McClinton
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Reply #2 posted 12/19/16 12:51pm

namepeace

One of the greatest albums of the decade, and one of the best albums in hip-hop history.

#DogIt

Good night, sweet Prince | 7 June 1958 - 21 April 2016

Props will be withheld until the showing and proving has commenced. -- Aaron McGruder
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Forums > Music: Non-Prince > Slept on Soul/Blowout Comb (Digable Planets)