Ice-T "The Art of Rap" Film - In AMC Theaters June 15!

[Amaranthine]

LOL I'm going to look so out of place in that theater. I kinda want to go in and play dumb blonde: "Oh, who's this guy? What's this? I thought this was Breaking Dawn!"

[Amaranthine]

LOL okay, okay, don't kill me. It was a joke. I don't even know when I'm going to be able to go see it. I'm broke as hell. Might have to wait until it's out on DVD before I have money.

[Amaranthine]

LOL okay, okay, don't kill me. It was a joke. I don't even know when I'm going to be able to go see it. I'm broke as hell. Might have to wait until it's out on DVD before I have money.

Come to Canada so I don't have to go alone. I could go with Menzo but I don't trust him in the dark.

Yeah, that's waaay cheaper than just going to the theater by my house.

[Amaranthine]

Yo, Genzo, you're off topic.
Stop ruining my beautiful thread.

[Amaranthine]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOs6GqH8 ... e=youtu.be

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4o4jdgPyOY

[Amaranthine]

Same man! Damn...

I'm more excited for this than the Slaughterhouse album lmao.

Me too. I need to find a way to scrape some money together first, though.

Common talks about his first rap verse:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... ewiPTjO9Xg

[Amaranthine]

Same man! Damn...

I'm more excited for this than the Slaughterhouse album lmao.

Me too. I need to find a way to scrape some money together first, though.

Isn't a movie ticket like..10 bucks?

Man...if SH drops on June 12th THEN this...fuck...June will be a nutbust worthy month.

Yes. I'm BROKE. Dead broke. I have $0.00 to my name.

Broke. No money. Nada. Zip. Zero. Zilch.

SUPER EXCLUSIVE: I am going to post the Official 'Art OF Rap' music video tonight!! Crazy!!! Stay tuned. #FLTG will see it FIRST.

Also, fun fact, Eminem has the most songs featured in the movie out of all the artists.

[Amaranthine]

^ That's dope news.

Hmm...you don't think you can ask a parent for 10 dollars? I can't imagine living with zero dollars to your name, granted I'm close lmao

Nope. They're like, "You're going to college, find your own money! Get a job!" No point in trying to get a job when I'll just have to quit in three months.

[Amaranthine]

^ That's dope news.

Hmm...you don't think you can ask a parent for 10 dollars? I can't imagine living with zero dollars to your name, granted I'm close lmao

Nope. They're like, "You're going to college, find your own money! Get a job!" No point in trying to get a job when I'll just have to quit in three months.

Ah yeah, mine don't give me money either. Find a way! There is no way you can hype this up so much and not see it yourself. I won't allow it, I will ban you.

I'm trying!!!

[Amaranthine]

Official Art of Rap music video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rykWQSWr ... e=youtu.be

[Amaranthine]

Snoop Dogg gets in the mood with a lot of marijuana, some old-school tunes on the stereo and “a couple of females around for inspiration”. Eminem treats it like a puzzle to be figured out. Grandmaster Caz – “widely regarded as one of the best that ever did this shit”, according to no less an authority than Ice-T – needs tranquillity, a notepad, a pen and an enormous cannabis cigar.

I refer, of course, to the act of writing. This delicate activity, for which writers over the ages have devised their own methods, from Truman Capote lying down with a glass of sherry and a pencil to Graham Greene’s daily insistence on stopping after writing precisely 500 words, is as crucial to rappers as it is to novelists or poets. No other form of pop music is as wordy as rap. It’s Grub Street with banging beats, blunts and Puffa jackets.

Yet, for all the outpouring of verses, Ice-T reckons the work that goes into rap hasn’t received due respect. “When people ask about your record, they never really ask how you do it, how you create it,” he says. “It’s kind of like it magically comes. They take time out to talk to songwriters about their process but for some reason rap is always alluded to as something that’s easy to do. Truth is, it’s not easy, it’s very difficult.”

The veteran LA rapper has set out to remedy this by making the feature documentary Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap. In it he persuades fellow emcees to reveal the secrets of their craft, from 1970s pioneers such as Grandmaster Caz and Afrika Bambaataa to modern-day superstars, including Eminem and Kanye West.

Eyebrows will be raised in some quarters by the film’s subtitle. Is rap really an art? The answer needn’t detain us. Of course it is. Yes, there have been loads of useless emcees (hello, MC Hammer) and terrible lyrics (Kanye West: “Don’t try to treat me like I ain’t famous/ Apologies, are you into astrology?/ ’Cos, um, I’m trying to make it to Uranus”). A great deal of it is profane, violent, misogynist or just plain stupid. But just as cinema’s parameters aren’t set by Police Academy V, nor should rap be defined solely by its lowest common denominator.

The best rapping is a unique combination of verbal dexterity, acting and musicianship. Not only does the rapper have to devise verses to fit within a certain metre, rigidly enforced by the producer’s beats, he also has to bring the words to life by voicing them. The result, at its finest, works at multiple levels. “They’re listening to your status, your personality, your flavour, your wordplay. Everything about you comes out in the rhyme,” says Ice-T.

In literature writers try to find their voice, a distinctive style of their own. Rappers also have to find their voice, though for them the challenge is twofold. Not only must their voice come across in the way they use words, as with writers, but they also have to employ their actual voice for the purpose of rapping.

It’s a balancing act between the way the words and music interact, the rapper’s so-called “flow”, and the persona he adopts to deliver it. “This is such a key point,” says Adam Bradley, professor of English at Colorado University and co-editor of The Anthology of Rap. “One of the greatest misconceptions about rap music is that there’s a one-for-one association between the artist and the character that they render in their lyrics. And the problem about that kind of conflation is that it takes the focus away from the artistic process.”

The misconception is partly of rap’s own making. Rap occupies the contradictory position of being at once highly stylised and obsessed with authenticity. In the classic Eric B and Rakim track “I Know You Got Soul”, Rakim delivers a silky masterclass in rap’s play between artifice and truth: “I start to think and then I sink/ Into the paper like I was ink/ When I’m writing I’m trapped between the lines/ I escape when I finish the rhyme.”

Ice-T became an emcee on returning to California after a stint in the army in the 1980s. The persona he projected, based on youthful experiences of petty crime and gang membership, was a forerunner of the gangsta rappers who dominated hip-hop in the 1990s. Lyrical adeptness and role play went together, as with his neat inversion of fertility and death in “Colors”, the title track of the 1988 movie: “Suckers, dive for your life when my shotgun scatters/ We gangs of LA will never die – just multiply.”

“That’s part of the fun of rap,” he says. “You can stretch reality and write from a lot of different perspectives. I might have never done drugs but I’ll rap from the perspective of the drug addict because I know enough information about it. When I wrote ‘Colors’ I wasn’t in a gang but I was able to rap from that perspective. I always called what I wrote ‘faction’: a factual situation to put into a fictional story.”

There is, however, a line between acceptable make-believe and risible inauthenticity. You can’t start rapping about dealing crack just because you’ve got a box set of The Wire. Rappers have to be seen to have a link to the lives they’re rapping about. Ice-T sounds a warning note. “Now if you attempt to play it off that it’s really you, that’s a little too much performance art for me. It’s, like, come on. That’s when you come with the fake gangsta rappers, something that’s frowned upon.”

Another example of fakery is the shadowy phenomenon of the ghost writer. “I know a lot of ghost writers who had to sign confidentiality agreements where you’ll never say you wrote this rhyme,” Ice-T says. “That’s another thing which is frowned on. You’re not like a pop singer that people make records for. You’re a rapper, so these are supposed to be your words.”

There’s a tension between making it up and keeping it real when the rapper writes. There’s also a tension between old-fashioned poetic values – try finding a rap that doesn’t rhyme – and the hyper-modern bricolage of samples and beats to which the words are set. “Put it this way,” says Bradley, “rap is new-school music but it’s old-school poetry.”

Rap’s love of rhyming goes against the grain of modern poetry, which treats rhyme as a quaint relic of a bygone age. As such, rappers are unlikely allies of tweedy literary traditionalists who think John Betjeman is better than John Ashbery. Yet whereas rhyme in poetry carries conservative connotations of order and correctness, in rap it means something different.

The most sophisticated raps are exercises in audacity, a blend of puns, street talk, internal rhymes and startling juxtapositions designed to show off the rapper’s command of language. “I sell ice in the winter, I sell fire in hell/ I’m a hustler baby, I’ll sell water to a well,” Jay-Z brags in “U Don’t Know”.

In the context of the black American history of dispossession, rap becomes a bold assertion of linguistic ownership. That’s what the rapper Nas is getting at when he poses a rhetorical question in Something from Nothing: “How are we making poetry out of this broken English?” Or as Ice-T himself rapped back in 1987: rhyme pays.

‘Something from Nothing’ opens in US cinemas on June 15 and is on general release in the UK in July.

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[Amaranthine]

Ice-T tells VH1 News his favorite moment in the documentary was Run recanting what it felt like to be on top during the time he was a member of the biggest rap group at the time. Rev Run’s response is laugh out loud funny. He tells the story of eating pancakes while sitting in his hotel bathtub. Syrup is running into the water, a groupie is at the hotel door waiting to get in and a magazine reporter is waiting for their scheduled interview. He describes being on top in three words: out of control. Ice-T says this is by far his favorite part of the film because it’s such an honest story. “All of a sudden you’re talking to Reverend Run and he’s talking about sitting in a bathtub and syrup is falling in,” Ice-T said. “Everybody wonders what’s it [like] at the top. Basically he said, it’s a point where if you’re not focused you can be out of control.”

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[Amaranthine]

Born from a desire to meticulously document the craft of emceeing while its legends are still living, Ice T’s Something From Nothing: The Art Of Rap (in theaters June 15) is a deep look into the minds of hip-hop’s greatest poets. The film (Ice T’s first as director) fascinatingly highlights each artist’s individual approach to song writing and how the music not only created careers for everyone but also more importantly, saved their lives.

“We created something from nothing; that’s what hip-hop is,” says Brand Nubian’s Lord Jamar in the movie’s opening scene, reminiscing over the difficulty of putting pen to paper for the first time. Ice T has a genuine friendship with each artist, some spanning decades. This affords him unparalleled access to the art form’s greats like Eminem, who emotionally maintains his success is because he “represented the other side of the tracks” while revealing there’s not a minute of the day his mind isn’t thinking about words and how to construct intricate rhyme patterns with them. Rakim for the first time reveals the science of his writing (“I try to start off with 16 dots on the paper. If it’s a 16-bar rhyme, I know what I’m dealing with”) as Immortal Technique details starving himself physically in order to deliver his best lyrics.

Nas touches on hip-hop being seen as threatening to this day while DJ Premier describes it as “a language—you have to know how to listen to it” and Marley Marl hypothesizes the genre’s in-fighting is why it’s yet to be viewed with the same respect as jazz and blues. Kanye West is evocative when speaking of his first time battle rapping and Dr. Dre is straight-faced when describing how he’s “never been out of the studio longer than two weeks in my entire career” (the past 27 years, if you’re counting).

While there are countless laugh-inducing moments (KRS-One’s story on how he became an MC is gold), Run from Run-DMC’s eye-opening stories of groupies, weed-smoking and paper chasing are perhaps the funniest, riotously clashing with his current status as a man of the cloth. Treach’s menacing diatribe into the camera against “wack” rappers is unintentionally hilarious: “Alotta MCs say they don’t write their rhymes—and it sounds like it. Write your shit down!”

In total 30 emcees are represented here, personally selected by Ice T to represent his vision for the film. At one point Ice reflects on Melle Mel’s quote “an art form can only be as great as its masters.” If Art Of Rap is anything to go by, hip-hop is indeed in safe hands.

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[Amaranthine]

There's been talk of this since the film premiered, but it's awesome to see it confirmed.

As he prepares for the June 15 theatrical opening of his documentary "Something From Nothing: The Art of Rap," Ice-T promises that the campaign "won't end with this film."

"We've got a DVD. We have a television show. We have a soundtrack album," the rapper told Billboard.com before a suburban Detroit screening of the film, which was attended by fellow MCs Chuck D of Public Enemy (who Ice-T had joined on stage the previous night at the Movement Electronic Music Festival), D-12's Denaun Porter and Trick Trick. "I've got 52 (MCs) in this movie, and I have at least an hour to an hour and a half of in-depth interviews. I've got, like, two hours with KRS-One. So the film will just be the first embodiment of 'The Art of Rap,' but I don't want to promote our secondary plans and take away from the film. I want people to see it on the big screen, hear it with the big speakers and take that ride."

Source: http://m.billboard.com/news/ice-t-the-a ... 4562.story

[Trimss]

Tha fuck, how am i gonna watch this.