May 3rd, 2012 
CustomBread 
The Nike Air Safari‘s comeback this season has been well received by sneakerheads all around the world. Renowned for its simple yet eye-catching look, this pair is now set to hit Nike iD studios on May 22nd. No official announcement has surfaced regarding what aspects of the silhouette can or can’t be customized. However, stay tuned to Nice Kicks as we will disclose all pertinent details regarding the process.
*Note* The pair above is a retro from 2009, NOT an iD sample.
Source: KATC
May 3rd, 2012 CustomBread  |
Bay Area-bred rapper Bobby Brackins enjoyed success with his Ray J-assisted single “143″ back in 2010, but since then, he’s been grinding on the independent scene, dropping a few mixtapes … his latest being the recently released Stay On It. “As he motivates his followers whom he has successfully identified ‘Young Dannons’ to live good, he also encourages them to Stay On It meaning keep working hard, stay focused, continue to do what you do best in pursuit of a ‘Dannon’ lifestyle,” a rep for the rapper declares. The new mixtape is a sexual and mentally stimulating release, boasting features from the likes of Too Short, Bricksquad’s Joe Moses, Starting Six, Iamsu, Roach Gigz and Ty$, among others. So far, Bobby has unleashed the tape’s first music video, a hazy-looking party clip for “Young Booty” (see below). Download Stay On It now, over at HotNewHipHop.com. Below is the final tracklist: 1. “Oh Yea” – ft. Too Short |
May 3rd, 2012 CustomBread 
Entercom CEO David Field issued a statement stating that Entercom had no plans to change what he called “KBLX’s successful Urban Contemporary” format. Reassured that the KBLX ownership change would turn KBLX overnight turning into a country western or religious station, Shelly shut down the “Save KBLX” petition drive, convinced that “The Quiet Storm” would remain on Bay Area airways.
Tatum might want to revive that petition since Entercom this week announced the firing of popular longtime KBLX morning show host “Your Cousin” Kevin Brown, to be replaced starting next Monday May 7 with the syndicated Steve Harvey Show from New York City. True to the formula of most ownership changes, Entercom management is cleaning house and letting go other popular KBLX DJs
The move to fire Brown, who was the voice and face of KBLX reinforces fears by Tatum and many others that Entercom is not totally committed to keeping KBLX’s current format. The Bay Area has been the graveyard for attempts by other companies to air recorded syndicated African American morning shows on San Francisco radio stations.
Every major syndicated African American show is produced in the Eastern or Central time zone where programs like the Tom Joyner Morning Show, America’s most popular African American morning show air live. The handful of stations in the Pacific time zone that air African American morning shows record them because they would have to air live at 2 AM Pacific time, which is when these shows air live at 6 AM Eastern time.
The primary reason attempts to market syndicated Black morning shows have not worked in the Bay Area has been because of anger and frustrations by Bay Area listeners unable to interact with contests and phone calls during the morning shows. During Joyner’s brief tenure on Bay Area radio listeners tuned out in droves once they discovered the the show was on a 2-3 hour tape delay.
Most listeners of African American morning shows live East of Dallas and in the Southern part of the nation and the majority of subjects discussed on these shows focus on events happening in that part of the country. Interviews with African American morning shows are usually conducted with people living in or visiting the Eastern or Midwest time zone unless producers of these programs can persuade a celebrity or newsmaker on the West Coast to conduct a 3 or 4 AM Pacific time interview.
KBLX listeners, particularly African Americans, have expressed their dismay and anger about the firing of Brown and other KBLX on-air staff on the station’s official website and on the KBLX Facebook Page. While many of these listeners are tuned into KBLX whenever they listen to radio, are large number of listeners only tune into KBLX for the Kevin Brown Morning Show. These listeners say while they like Steve Harvey as a comedian, writer and film producer, they are not fans of his morning show format of tomfoolery and are looking for a new morning drive station.
Radio insiders are scratching their heads on why Entercom is bringing on Harvey into a market with a strong emphasis on local hosts and an insistence on live syndicated programming. If African American KBLX listeners abandon the station the way African American listeners in the past have rejected other African American tape delayed syndicated programming, the resulting ratings drop could justify Entercom eventually changing the station’s format without the negative fallout Cumulus is still facing over its decision to fire popular KGO’s talkshow hosts and to change KGO’s popular newstalk format with an all news format.
Who are the big winners in this move? The big winner will be Renel Brooks-Moon, hosts of Mornings with Renel on 98.1 KISS-FM. Renel and Brown competed head to head for the advertiser rich over 30 year-old Urban Market. Renel is immensely popular not only for her day job hosting her radio show, but her other job as the San Francisco Giants announcer at AT&T Park. Renel’s ratings will like boost as she inherits the Kevin Brown morning show audience looking to hear discussions about what’s going on here in the Bay Area, something that Steve Harvey won’t be able to do from New York City.
The big losers are music promoters like Shelly Tatum. Local and national PR agents and music promoters over the years have used Brown’s show to promote movies, books, plays and concerts targeted toward African Americans. For many artists Kevin Brown’s morning show was the only commercial station where they can be interview about their past history, current projects and upcoming Bay Area concert dates.
While Harvey might be able to promote the hottest artists doing national tours on his radio, Harvey would not spend much, if any time talking about events Brown hosted or supported like the Oakland Holiday Parade, the latest exhibits at the Museum of the African Diaspora.and countless other Bay Area community events and non-profit fundraisers Brown hosted.
Harvey is also unlikely going to interview up and coming Bay Area artists. Performers like Mark Curry, En Vogue and Ledesi were interviewed by Brown before they became international superstars.
Finally, the biggest loser will be the Bay Area radio community. With last year’s firing of KGO talkshow host Ray Taliaferro and this week’s firing of Brown, there are few African American males on commercial Bay Area radio. The few remaining Black males on Bay Area commercial radio include KCBS reporter Bob Butler, KGO weekend talkshow host Brian Copeland and KNBR’s Rod Brooks, one of the few African Americans in the country hosting a major market sportstalk program.
The promise of the 1996 Telecommunication Act was to bring about more on-air diversity in broadcasting and to increase the number of non-Whites and women owning radio and TV stations. There are less than 200 Black owned commercial radio stations in the United States out of a total of 12,000 commercial stations. The sale of KBLX to Entercom and the firing of Kevin Brown comes as the National Association of Broadcasters seeks further deregulation of the broadcast industry that will allow the major broadcast companies to own even more stations in major markets.
The question Kevin Brown fans, and radio listeners in general need to ask Congress and the FCC is has deregulation of the broadcast industry increased the number of African Americans on the air or the number of non-White and female station owners, and will further deregulation increase or decrease the number of people like Kevin Brown on the air or increase Black radio station ownership?
May 3rd, 2012 CustomBread 
John Forte speaks on why Fugees served an important function during the right moment in time.
After producer Jerry Wonda recently speculated that Fugees could reunite, John Forte is adding his opinion to the mix. During an interview with Sway in the Morning’s Sway Calloway on Shade 45, Forte, who wrote and produced for The Score, weighed in on the possibility of a reunion, stating that while it’s “above my pay grade” to speculate, the group served the right purpose during the proper time.
“I’m going to make an analogy, and I don’t know if most listeners are in tune with it, but last night, I was listening to Bob Dylan and I listened to one of his older songs from that era and I was listening to one of his new albums. There are certain periods – like you said, lightning in a bottle – where we hear Sam Cooke singing, ‘A Change is Gonna Come,’ when it comes out during the time that it was needed to come out. You can get the best R&B artist or vocalist today to cover that song, and while it might be a great cover, it might not have the same poignancy and relevance to whatever the current paradigm is. Who knows? I’m not saying that a reunion will or will not happen. That’s probably above my pay grade. But what happened during that time was supposed to happen for that time.”
Watch the full interview below.
May 3rd, 2012 CustomBread A Bay Area rap label, long linked by East Bay law enforcement to armed robberies, drug dealing and murk, has been implicated in a nationwide drug-trafficking distribution network after a four-year federal investigation, prosecutors said Tuesday.
Twenty-five individuals — including the CEO and numerous rappers[..]ociated with Thizz Entertainment, the label founded by slain Vallejo rapper Mac Dre — have been charged with distributing Ecstasy, cocaine, heroin, marijuana and codeine cough syrup across the East Bay and the country, according to a federal prosecutor.
The head of the organization, Michael Lott, 47, of Vallejo, who raps under the name Miami the Most, remains on the lam, along with nine others.
Thizz Entertainment’s business model was simple: sell drugs to finance the record label, said Vallejo police Lt. Ken Weaver.
For many in law enforcement, Thursday’s bust marks the end of a dangerous few decades in Vallejo involving the rap label, which started as a street gang committing robberies and selling drugs to finance fledgling rap careers before turning into a nationwide criminal enterprise, authorities said.
“The main players that belong with Thizz Entertainment now have warrants for their arrest for the drug-trafficking trade,” Weaver said. “The streets of Vallejo will be a little safer this summer because of this.”
Agents seized about 45,000 Ecstasy pills, 4 pounds of crack cocaine, a half-pound of heroin and $200,000 in suspected drug profits. Police linked two now-closed Vallejo marijuana dispensaries to the rap label, and seized about 230 acres of property valued at about $1 million after raiding a Yuba County grow operation supplying the operation.
The bust also highlighted the deadly history of Thizz Entertainment, including the slaying of Mac Dre, whose real name was Andre Hicks and who was shot to [rip] in 2004 after a performance in Kansas City, Mo., sparking a Vallejo-Kansas City rap war.
Romper Room Gang
In the 1980s and 1990s, a group of young men calling themselves the Romper Room Gang began knocking off pizza parlors. The gang, which formed in a small Vallejo neighborhood across Highway 37 from Six Flags Discovery Kingdom, moved on to hitting banks, slinging dope and committing k!llings, police and Drug Enforcement Administration officials said, to raise money to fund Romper Records.
“It was an explosion of rap music and rock cocaine,” Weaver said. “That was a huge deal to us because it was the first time we saw such organization by this culture, and it was new to us. We learned from them, and they learned from us.”
Many members were put behind bars, as police locked in on rap lyrics detailing and glorifying their robberies, including from Mac Dre, who in 1992 received a seven-year prison sentence.
Upon his release, Mac Dre formed Thizz Entertainment. The word “thizz” was derived from the feeling one gets while on MDMA, or Ecstasy. Many of the label’s lyrics, the DEA said, promote Ecstasy use.
The label’s popularity grew, and it put the Bay Area in the national rap spotlight.
“Thizz, when Mac Dre was on the label, were a major factor. They were coming out of a transformative time in the Bay Area,” said Davey D, a Bay Area journalist and hip-hop expert. “It was a resurgence of having national attention refocusing on the Bay.”
Rap war
As Mac Dre and his label’s popularity soared, he went on tour and played a show at a Kansas City club Nov. 1, 2004. As he left the club in a van, he was hit in a hail of gunfire and k!lled.
Police named Kansas City rapper Fat Tone as a person of interest in Mac Dre’s [rip], but by May 2005 Anthony “Fat Tone” Watkins and Jermaine “Cowboy” Akins were found shot to [rip] at a construction site near the Palms Casino. Bay Area rapper Andre “Mac Minister” Dow was convicted and sentenced to life in prison in 2008 for their murks, and authorities said his motive was to avenge Mac Dre’s murk. He is also accused of k!lling a prostitute who was a witness in Fairfield.
Lott, who was with Mac Dre when he died, took over Thizz Entertainment after his friend’s [rip] and produced albums for more than 60 artists, some who were arrested in the drug probe, including Gaylord Franklin, 32, who raps under the name “Geezy,” Bruce Thurmon, 41, aka “Little Bruce,” and Major Norton, aka “Dubee.”
In July 2008, Drug Enforcement Administration agents found a confidential informant who led them to Lott. An undercover agent made his first buy of 200 Ecstasy pills from Lott in a Vallejo gas station parking lot.
After numerous undercover drug buys and hours of surveillance and recorded phone calls, the DEA pulled the agent in December 2010. During the year and half that the undercover agent infiltrated the gang, members of Thizz Entertainment and its[..]ociates were k!lled, according to the DEA.
Gang members began to spread the enterprise to other states, making connections while on tour, Weaver said. Drug shipments were sent from the Vallejo area to Oklahoma City, New York, Atlanta and Milwaukee, the DEA said.
Using drug money to finance a rap label is a strategy not uncommon to many young men trying to leave tough urban neighborhoods, Davey D said.
“Do my dirt and invest it into something legitimate and graduate,” he said. “It’s a longtime formula that doesn’t hold the stigma because it’s looked at as bettering yourself and getting yourself out of danger. This is not an unusual story. I’ve heard that story lots and lots of times.”
The story ended Thursday, as agents cascaded into Vallejo and other East Bay cities to serve arrest warrants on 25 Thizz Entertainment[..]ociates.
A preliminary hearing has been scheduled for May 4 in Sacramento federal court.
May 3rd, 2012 CustomBread 
When M. Night Shyamalan’s fantasy film The Last Airbender — panned by both critics and fans of the wildly popular TV series on which it was based — flopped majestically at the box office, it looked like the end of a valuable franchise.
But now, with The Legend of Korra, which premieres Saturday on Nickelodeon, the creators of Avatar: The Last Airbender have been given a rare chance to rebuild a world that was taken away from them.
To be clear, this Avatar has nothing to do with blue people or James Cameron. Avatar: The Last Airbender was a highly rated animated kids’ show on Nickelodeon that ran from 2005 to 2008.
In the show’s world, four tribes are each associated with a base element: water, fire, earth, air. Some people, called benders, can control one of these elements using half magic, half martial arts.
But only one person can control all four elements. That’s the Avatar, who brings Taoist balance to the rest of the world.
Creators Bryan Konietzko and Michael DiMartino drew on Asian philosophies when they dreamt up the show. Nickelodeon had asked them to come up with something like Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter, but Konietzko says they found sword-and-sorcery-style magic unpersuasive.
“Where does it come from? What’s the limit?” Konietzko asks. “Why is one magician better than another, if they’re just saying a word?”
Or just pointing a wand. So Konietzko and DiMartino took what they liked about Lord of the Rings and blended it with the gentle humor of Japanese anime master Hayao Miyazaki.
“We wanted to make it natural,” Konietzko says. “It’s all physical, it comes from practice — it’s a skill you have to learn and earn.”
Clearly, there’s a little kung-fu-movie love in there too.
You can feel the pulse of the Last Airbender‘s heart through the 15,000 handmade drawings that animate every episode. Konietzko studied landscape painting at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he met DiMartino. The latter says he wanted to test the limits of a kids’ TV show.
“I always wanted it to be wider and bigger and deeper and have more depth, more cinematic scope,” DiMartino says.
But on the big screen — an adaptation DiMartino and Konietzko had no control over — the show’s hand-painted look was coarsened with cheesy CGI effects and live actors. Shyamalan’s film cost $150 million — and flopped epically. Fans complained that the casting added weird racial implications, and they lamented the ham-fisted script.
“Oh, the movie? Yeah, it wasn’t good at all,” says Brendan Kain, who started watching The Last Airbender on TV when he was 7 years old. Now he’s 15, and runs the new show’s Facebook fan page. He says he couldn’t be more pleased about its creators getting their world back.
For Konietzko, it’s the same: “It’s very nice to be back in the driver’s seat,” he says.
Konietzko says The Legend of Korra takes audiences back into the Last Airbender‘s shadowy snowscapes and pastoral tribal villages. But this show – meant for older kids — also includes a steampunk metropolis with coughing, old-fashioned cars and floating iron blimps.
“It’s kinda set in 1920s fictional Shanghai meets Manhattan,” Konietzko says.
In this show, Korra is the new Avatar. She travels to the city seeking training for her powers — and stumbles into fighting crime. Some episodes find Korra fighting in alleys and at night, and DiMartino calls the show moodier and more noir than its predecessor.
As for Korra herself, the show’s creators imagined their headstrong heroine as the kind of girl you might meet on a snowboard.
“She’s muscular, and we like that,” Konietzko says. “It’s definitely better than being a waif about to pass out. I know, I look like a waif — who am I to judge?”
Some Nickelodeon executives were worried, says Konietzko, about backing an animated action show with a female lead character. Conventional TV wisdom has it that girls will watch shows about boys, but boys won’t watch shows about girls.
During test screenings, though, boys said they didn’t care that Korra was a girl. They just said she was awesome.
Posted in Entertainment 
Tags: . Avatar: The Last Airbender, Nickelodeon, The Legend of Korra 
No Comments » May 3rd, 2012 CustomBread Now that he has his latest mixtape, Crown Me King, circulating around the internet, young Sactown emcee Chuuwee is ready to bless y’all with his official debut LP, Wild Style. “Wild Style is the album that’s going to eradicate weak rap off the face of the map. It is the return of real Hip-Hop. It’s pure and it’s not me trying to re-make it. It’s not me telling you it’s 90s Hip-Hop; it is 90s Hip-Hop” says Chuuwee. Keeping that in mind, what better way to promote the LP than with just a trailer of nothing but straight up bars – watch above. After the jump, check Chez puttin’ in work with Large Pro. Wild Style drops May 29th via Amalgam Digital.
May 3rd, 2012 CustomBread Official video for Kyle Rapps lead single of ON AIR mixtape. Featuring Talib Kweli. Directed by Lenny Bass. Track produced by Nate G by way of Air.
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