I’ll upload real images once I get back to Amsterdam and can upload the photos and video from my camera

Capping off an incredible homecoming weekend, I was lucky enough to attend the second stop of the Watch the Throne tour at the Greensboro Coliseum in Greensboro, North Carolina. Even with the high ticket prices, pretty much everyone I talked to this past week was buzzing about the concert, by bringing together two of music’s living legends on one stage, “The Throne” had created a “be there” moment; either you were talking about what you hoped to see, or what you expected to miss out on.

I wasn’t overwhelmed by Watch the Throne the album, I think it will come to represent a significant change in how hip-hop music is produced, recorded and arranged in years to come, however at times I–like many others–was alienated by the number of luxury rap references and toasts to opulence. That said, I was excited to see how two of rap’s best performers, could bring their deep catalogues and enormous production budgets into a single show.

After an almost 2 and a half hour wait, almost an hour of which was spent in line at “Chick Fry Fry” who employed the time-honoured “keep-them-waiting-for drinks-long-enough-to-convince-them-they-could-actually-use-some-chicken-tenders” business model of concert concessions, the titans finally arrived to the album’s doddering leitmotif, before launching into “H.A.M.” whose blaring strings and powerful drums were in fact hard as a motherfucker.

The first few songs of the set were flawless, as the duo fired off a selection of Watch the Throne’s more energetic cuts, with “Who Gon Stop Me” being the definite highlight. Backed up by an impressive stage set-up that featured video montages of nature films, lasers and smoke machines, the concept looked like it would deliver on the album’s attempt to bring together “high” and “low” art in a way that felt vital despite the obvious calculation.

As the night wore on, Kanye and Jay began to take turns performing mini-sets of their hits, and that’s when the cracks started to appear. As an album, Watch the Throne felt like a Kanye West album laden with Jay-Z features, as a tour–at least in partisan Greensboro–Jay-Z felt like the headliner, with Kanye acting as a sometimes unwelcome guest to the festivities. The generational gap became apparent every time one exited the stage to let the other perform. When Jay took the time to reach deep into his bag of hits, the entire enraptured stadium dutifully raised their diamonds and followed every cue he sent in the audience’s direction. On the other hand, Kanye’s solo sets were hit and miss, and many of his attempts to draw the audience in failed to connect with the masses.

This was most evident when Kanye ascended an LED-lit pillar in the centre of the crowd to perform “Runaway” and “Heartless.” Bathed in red lights wearing a red motorcycle jacket, black leather jeans, black and pink Nike Yeezy 2’s and a grunge-style plaid shirt tied around his waist, an autotuned West crooned and ranted while advising concert goers to appreciate their loved ones in what in sincere displays of emotion that just didn’t resonate beyond his glowing totem pole.

In concert, Kanye seems to relive the moment that each song was conceived as he performs them, and in the right setting, that type of catharsis can be transcendent and powerful, but he is rendered impotent when the audience refuses to join him. Many in the crowd last night were clearly there to see Jay-Z and West’s more emotional moments at times felt like intermissions from Hova’s hit parade, which was a shame.

If the crowd came to party, Jay was more than happy to oblige them as he strung together, hit after hit, and never appeared to be having less than a ball. Hip-Hop’s first truly timeless figure delivered on every front, lyrical street tales (“Where I’m From,” “You Don’t Know”) radio hits (“Big Pimpin’,” “H to the Izzo,”) hits that shouldn’t be hits (“Public Service Announcement,”) and late career highlights (“On to the Next One,” and the surprisingly well-received “Empire State of Mind.”) The ageless God MC was pitch-perfect all night and by the time he returned to close the show with The Black Album’s “Encore,” the breathless crowd chanted his name even when he graciously tried to start a “Kanye” chant. Whether this trend continues as the tour moves forward remains to be seen, but at least on this night, the kilt-clad “Little Brother” deferred to “Big Brother.”

Family and Friends Summer 2011 from Onitsuka Tiger on Vimeo.

A recap of our goings on at Berlin Fashion week in July featuring footage of Donnis’ performance behind Nippon Sounds
#goodtimes

Introducing DE DE MOUSE from Onitsuka Tiger on Vimeo.

Check out a short interview with DJ/Producer/Performance Artist DE DE MOUSE, and then listen to one of his contributions to Nippon Sounds here.

DE DE MOUSE will be performing at our Family and Friends event. All the cool kids will be there, you should be there too.

Donnis – All I Need (Produced by DE DE MOUSE & Luke Walker) by Nippon Sounds

I’m extremely, extremely proud to present the first song from our upcoming Nippon Sounds project. From the first time the idea was put on the table, we were faced with a lot of challenges and considerable amount of controversy, the least of which was engineering a collaboration between two artists from opposite sides of the world who didn’t speak the same language. Internally, there was a considerable amount of fear that we were presenting an idea of Japan and Japanese creativity that was too far from common ideas about Japan. On the one hand, we had Donnis, a rapper from Atlanta who speaks and raps in heavy drawl and on the other we had DE DE MOUSE, a DJ who describes his style as breakcore, and uses fragments of samples and lightning fast drums to create sound beds that are somehow both jarring and soulful.

Beneath the surface, one thing–maybe the only thing–these two very different artists have in common is fact that their identities as artists are inseparably tied to Japan. Donnis got his start as an MC in Japan, recording on a US Army base while stationed outside Tokyo as an airman, and in his own words, “Tokyo, Japan is the reason why I’m making music. Tokyo was somewhere that opened my eyes and allowed me to fully find out who I was.”

DE DE MOUSE, a veteran of the Roppongi scene probably DJ’d at some of the parties that opened Donnis’ eyes in Japan. Mysterious and fairly eccentric, nothing about the man or his music could be called ‘accessible.’ That said, the singularity of his focus on his art, and the obvious, maybe anal, attention to detail on display in his manipulation of sounds shows a uniquely Japanese type of craftsmanship.

To me, putting these two together was kind of a no-brainer, Donnis brings exuberance and big choruses, where DE DE MOUSE brings edge and a sense of avant garde innovation. By letting the two artists reinterpret each other’s work, we got a clear window into how they work, how they think about music and how they see themselves as artists.

All I Need is Donnis’ take on DE DE MOUSE’s Baby’s Star Jam the airyness and eery sample remain, but Donnis turns the record into a triumphant of platform to reflect on his accomplishments and the material accouterments that accompany them.

In a week you’ll be able to see how DDM reinterpreted Donnis first hit Gone as well as hear new music from Donnis produced by Joe Iron and Taku Takhashi when Nippon Sounds drops on July 4th. A couple of days later, DE DE MOUSE and a special guest will be joining us at Family and Friends in Berlin for an event that will be filled with sneakers and surprises.

New music from the 2011 Rookie of the Year.

New Frank Ocean video, I fox with this

My song from our Midori game created by TEAMLAB. TEAMLAB is a group of Ultra Technologists that have been active in Tokyo since 2001. The group consists of a wide diversity of specialists including; Programmers, Network Engineers, Designers, Robot Engineers, Architects, CG Animators, Mathematicians and more. TEAMLAB carries out activities across a range of media, from developing web and robot technology, to installation art, video art and spatial design, making the border between Technology, Art, and Design more ambiguous.

We did a little interview with their leader Toshiyuki Inoko to explain the project, see below:

What is your approach towards “interactive design”?

People often say that men who are good at listening are popular with women but people actually enjoy talking more than just listening “if they could speak well”. To take it one step further, people enjoy expressing something more than just viewing a representation produced by someone else “if they could express it well”.

In the era of the mass media, the job of a designer was to attain a form of expression that was perfect in its quality. That was because the only point of contact with consumers was through mass media channels. However, the advent of the Internet and the networked society is changing the role of the designer. Since consumers enjoy expressing something if they could do so well, I believe that design should be about creating tools that enable people who are not professional creators to create things that make them want to “share it with friends”. It should be about tools that make the process of expression itself, something that they once struggled with, into a process that’s fun and enjoyable. It should be about constructing an environment that allows users to share their creations with friends. That is what I think interactive design is.

How did you work on the Midori concept?

Personally, I believe that in Japan, dichotomies such as nature and high-tech, or traditional and contemporary become mingled up, and it is exactly that which makes Japan interesting. For this project, I focused on creating a world with the Japanese “midori [green]”, that green which colours the ambiguous season when spring turns into early summer.
When I was a child, I felt that I could change the world in any way I wanted with my own hands using my imagination. I was always thrilled and excited. Just like when someone buys a new pairs of sneakers and goes out into the world running. It’s that excitement which I’d like players to be able to feel.

How do you and Team Lab regard Onitsuka Tiger’s values?

In a pre-Internet society, I think the priority was to let consumers know about a product or to induce yearning for it by utilizing the mass media and famous celebrities, or by placing products in big retailers. In a society where the Internet takes the centre stage, users consciously collect and evaluate information and share their experiences with the world. Team Lab believes that by focusing on the essential issues, and creating mind-blowing things that address them, users will support products and that will generate distribution. For us, mind-blowing things are an aggregate of details. That is why the values that Onitsuka Tiger upholds resonate with us, and we believe they are crucial for the coming society where users will begin to play a central role.

Please tell us about the Sketch Piston series (about its background)?

I talked about this for the approach to “interactive design” already, but we believe that users have more fun expressing something “if they could do so well”.

We wanted to create a tool that would make drawing and scribbling as fun as it used to be when we were children. When we were young, we let our rich imagination free and drew worlds which we enjoyed exploring. The reason I started the Sketch Piston series was my desire to create a drawing tool that would work to compensate for the lack of that bustling imagination, one that would make adults who are not good at drawing create works that they would want to share with others.

The Sketch Piston series includes a diverse array of works. Some focus on animation while others present comedy-show-like humour. For this project, our focus was on music and the concept was to create a musical instrument that could be drawn and played. I want people to enjoy creating music freely just like when we were children, when everything around us like plates and cutlery could instantly turn into musical instruments.

I want people to draw freely led by their creativity and mischievousness onto the green Midori world of Japan, and enjoy playing with different sounds.

I had the chance to see Odd Future at a free concert at Amsterdam’s famous Paradiso on Queen’s Day this Saturday. About 2 minutes into the set a single thought ran through my mind:
Holy.
Fucking.
Shit.
I would call the show a mixture between a Punk Rock gig and a Southern Baptist revival. The floor was filled with rabid fans whose energy never wavered, and the OFWGKTA members present gave them everything they could.
I’m not a huge fan of the music, but after watching these kids create an international grassroots movement with a wordpress blog, I’m incredibly impressed by the movement.

Some great photos here:

Don’t usually re-post Nahright stuff, but this pretty much made my day.
Phonte of Little Brother fame and Zo! of I-Have-Never-Heard-of-You fame come together to cover the classic by Mark Morrison.
So much hilarity ensues:
Phonte’s Lil B impersonation vs. his Mark Morrison impersonation
“More Ad-libs!”
“I’ll stop now!”
“Nigga Please!”

RIP