UPDATE before you MUCKRAKE!
Alright, so this blog has gone criminally unupdated for almost two months (1/6 of a year) and there's a very good reason for that: nothing has happened.
Oh sure, you might be seeing right through my hyperbole like so many protective sheets residing over a multitude of Kraft All-American singles, but allow me to extrapolate.
This blog (or clog, rather) was created to give a play-by-play of the recording, production of my super new album that was supposed to be released on August 14th, my forthcoming 21st birthday. Unforseen obstacles (I forgot that school is hard, rapping is hard, and that everyone I know is self-center, slow and pathetic and can't keep-up with my obligation to never ever do anything wrong, ever) as well as a series of personal setbacks and family emergencies have brought this progress to a screeching halt.
As a result, there has not been much to report. I had this idea to reveal a little more of the album each week, but it was not to be. Thus, this Clog is officially reborn as a place for my opinions to be read by everyone who has ever been on the intraweb evar.
Grab the kids, it's GAMETIME!
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Just a quick update, cupcake!
Well, here we are. I'd be a dick if I didn't update this at least once this month. Just to keep you clouded in mystery, my vocals for the album are all recorded, and since the last update I won the battle tournament at SinSin for a 4th time. I promise to go further into detail in the coming days.
Saturday, April 14, 2007
Three Tough Blog Entries...
So we meet again, bliggity blog...
It's almost the third Sunday in April. TS Elliot called this the cruelest month, but I found out this morning that I got accepted into the advanced poetry workshop and his ass didn't, so he can stick his "Wasteland" just south of his waistband!
It's been a trail-mix grab-bag of a week, but right now I'm leaning toward the positive end. I'm listening to Grover Washington Jr., eating a bag full of microwave popped corn, drinking a dark carbonated beverage and getting ready to hit the studio and then perform at a Zulu Nation event. The last week has seen me rock at Tah Phrum duh Bush's single release party, get some major shine at the front of the arts section of the Washington Square News, and perform at the GQ Talent Showcase. On the downside, NYU Housing is still wack (Attack the wack!) but let's focus on me and shit....
As I mentioned, I am about to hit the studio to crank out what will hopefully become the third fully realized track for the album. Two prime cuts, "Christian Rock" (produced by Neil Gong) and "Fire in the Eye" (produced by Slim King Koenig) are all polished and ready to be pirated over the internet, and this week MINDSpray's euphAmism is supposed to hit me with a disc full of beats that I selected to wreck shop on. Tonight, howevarz, the focus is on the album's (thus far and probably eventual) only serious song that features vocals from a VERY special guest who I've previously only been linked to via Wikipedia. Dreams come true, kids! Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
With the exception of the past two days*, I've been getting up much earlier than usual. I've been going for walks about eight or nine in the morning. I don't recall waking up before seven since moving to NY, and I realized what a different life this city has at different times of the day. Totally different vibe, but I like it. I feed off the energy of others around me, and feeling how vibrant the city is during the day, it's really inspired me to make the best music possible so I can live off it and thus sleep in and not have to see such ugly people as the sun rises**.
And on that note, I'm off to continue my classic!
paz,
chaz
*I was EXHAUSTED, OK?!
** JUST (half)KIDDING!
It's almost the third Sunday in April. TS Elliot called this the cruelest month, but I found out this morning that I got accepted into the advanced poetry workshop and his ass didn't, so he can stick his "Wasteland" just south of his waistband!
It's been a trail-mix grab-bag of a week, but right now I'm leaning toward the positive end. I'm listening to Grover Washington Jr., eating a bag full of microwave popped corn, drinking a dark carbonated beverage and getting ready to hit the studio and then perform at a Zulu Nation event. The last week has seen me rock at Tah Phrum duh Bush's single release party, get some major shine at the front of the arts section of the Washington Square News, and perform at the GQ Talent Showcase. On the downside, NYU Housing is still wack (Attack the wack!) but let's focus on me and shit....
As I mentioned, I am about to hit the studio to crank out what will hopefully become the third fully realized track for the album. Two prime cuts, "Christian Rock" (produced by Neil Gong) and "Fire in the Eye" (produced by Slim King Koenig) are all polished and ready to be pirated over the internet, and this week MINDSpray's euphAmism is supposed to hit me with a disc full of beats that I selected to wreck shop on. Tonight, howevarz, the focus is on the album's (thus far and probably eventual) only serious song that features vocals from a VERY special guest who I've previously only been linked to via Wikipedia. Dreams come true, kids! Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
With the exception of the past two days*, I've been getting up much earlier than usual. I've been going for walks about eight or nine in the morning. I don't recall waking up before seven since moving to NY, and I realized what a different life this city has at different times of the day. Totally different vibe, but I like it. I feed off the energy of others around me, and feeling how vibrant the city is during the day, it's really inspired me to make the best music possible so I can live off it and thus sleep in and not have to see such ugly people as the sun rises**.
And on that note, I'm off to continue my classic!
paz,
chaz
*I was EXHAUSTED, OK?!
** JUST (half)KIDDING!
Saturday, March 31, 2007
The Second Cut is the Deeperest...
Greetings!
Chaz here. It's the last day of March, just after four o'clock in the AM. After almost twenty days of not posting, I've decided to make this blog OFFICIAL and hit it with a follow-up post.
So what has happened in a span that translated to roughly a day a hundred years since Christ was born? Well, I've been on the grind/grizzly/hustle/clock hard. Haaaaaard. Spring break was spent writing the new record by means of playing Mortal Kombat with Patrick "Kid Icarus" Swanson and taking pictures of myself praying.
But that was only one week on the month. Perhaps March as a whole warrants a one-paragraph replay, so here we go. The month began winning my third SinSin Off-the-Head gameshow battle, mastered the footage from the final CBGB's show, then spring break, I returned to get interviewed for a profile in the Washington Square News, headline my first show ever at Knitting Factory, spent a day with the NYU Health Center in fear I had done serious damage to my vocal chords only to discover my warm up ritual for the past nine years is terrible for the muscles around my throat (10-12 glasses of cold water? BAD! Warm/room-temperature water? GOOD! Who knew?) which caused my voice to go through gravel-ridden portions on stage, won the inaugural Cafe Brama Hip Hop Ain't Dead NYU battle, rocked a Zulu Nation benefit in front of Large Professor, and got to do a serious in-class presentation on the score of a softcore grindhouse skinflick in my Chinese Martial Arts Cinema class. Busy me.
That's the Cliff's Notes version of my life. Allow me to now get to some specifics on this new record. Recording officially began last week with Neil Gong's production on a song female evangelical Christian rock fans. All that remains is for Bethany Basile to lay down her contribution, and it's knocked out the box. Neil is crazy talented, and I feel we both know how to bring the absolute best out of each other.
I would like to point out that this blog* is not going to be some sort of look-at-me namedrop fest. This project (the album, as once one's blog becomes a project they are either a respected and entertaining journalist or the type of person I would emigrate to avoid), as usual, is a snapshot of my life and where I am at the time. I want to not only utilize the skills of those I have access to, but make something special with those around me before we all scatter as my social radar tends to every year around this time. Also, I care enough about my friends to give them some serious Google love**, so we all can get famous together.
Without revealing too much about the final product, and the album is so far from completion now I wouldn't be able to anyway, but the tone so far is rather bleak***. "Lapland," my last and "happy" record was written and recorded reflecting my life and the world at the conclusion of my Freshman year of college. I don't think my circumstances since then have been particular unique considering what everyone goes through during that 18-21 span of their lives, but this album is going to reflect what's happened through that period up to now, as well as reflect the times we're in now.
Don't get it twisted, I'm not depressed and I far from hate my life. I'm not pulling a Morrisey. The writing is still through a grin, but the humor is darker and considering the bouts both I as a person and the music industry in general has gone through since May, 2005, we're operating on a MUCH different playing field.
For instance, Tower Records closed last December. Think about that for a second. The LAST straight-up music chain in the country CLOSED. As someone who lived and fell in love with music during the biggest industry boom period ('99-'00) when everyone went platinum and there was a MUSIC store on EVERY block, this disturbs me. Espicially the fact that Tower, the closest thing to a "moral chain store" fell. Our generation is really at a cut off point. I remember passing notes in junior high/high school and wondering if those have all been replaced by text messaging by now. When was the last time you memorized a phone number? I hate to come off potentially Amish, but it's just that this is happening SO fast, it's almost intimidating.
Did I mention I'm a practicioner of Hip-Hop? Seriously, this hits us. Hard. Last month, sandboxautomatic.com announced that they would be discontinuing selling vinyl, and last year saw the release of only ONE rap record that went platinum. (T.I. - "King")
Do you mean to tell me the genre that once held nine of the top ten selling albums of the year during the industry's peak now can't produce a single album to sell HALF as much as Dane Cook?
DANE FRICKIN' COOK?!
So that's where I'm coming from. I'm a twenty-year-old Catholic Minneapolitian living in the birthplace of what he truly loves in a time when the most successful of his peers can't outsell a comedian who, by all evidence, hasn't written an actual joke in his life. I live in a dorm, am a junior majoring in cinema studies, buys albums, and flourishes when surrounded by the energy of others. Pleased to meet you.
That's all for now. Thanks for reading. Next time, I'll order us a pizza. On me.
paz,
chaz
*There's that word again. I really detest writing it as I feel like both a pretentious twenty-something studio apartment between-jobs coffee fuels up-talking acting major AND a 13-year-old gIrL aT tHe sAmE tImE - and not in a good way.
**Consensual.
***NOT Bleek, but perhaps Amil?
Chaz here. It's the last day of March, just after four o'clock in the AM. After almost twenty days of not posting, I've decided to make this blog OFFICIAL and hit it with a follow-up post.
So what has happened in a span that translated to roughly a day a hundred years since Christ was born? Well, I've been on the grind/grizzly/hustle/clock hard. Haaaaaard. Spring break was spent writing the new record by means of playing Mortal Kombat with Patrick "Kid Icarus" Swanson and taking pictures of myself praying.
But that was only one week on the month. Perhaps March as a whole warrants a one-paragraph replay, so here we go. The month began winning my third SinSin Off-the-Head gameshow battle, mastered the footage from the final CBGB's show, then spring break, I returned to get interviewed for a profile in the Washington Square News, headline my first show ever at Knitting Factory, spent a day with the NYU Health Center in fear I had done serious damage to my vocal chords only to discover my warm up ritual for the past nine years is terrible for the muscles around my throat (10-12 glasses of cold water? BAD! Warm/room-temperature water? GOOD! Who knew?) which caused my voice to go through gravel-ridden portions on stage, won the inaugural Cafe Brama Hip Hop Ain't Dead NYU battle, rocked a Zulu Nation benefit in front of Large Professor, and got to do a serious in-class presentation on the score of a softcore grindhouse skinflick in my Chinese Martial Arts Cinema class. Busy me.
That's the Cliff's Notes version of my life. Allow me to now get to some specifics on this new record. Recording officially began last week with Neil Gong's production on a song female evangelical Christian rock fans. All that remains is for Bethany Basile to lay down her contribution, and it's knocked out the box. Neil is crazy talented, and I feel we both know how to bring the absolute best out of each other.
I would like to point out that this blog* is not going to be some sort of look-at-me namedrop fest. This project (the album, as once one's blog becomes a project they are either a respected and entertaining journalist or the type of person I would emigrate to avoid), as usual, is a snapshot of my life and where I am at the time. I want to not only utilize the skills of those I have access to, but make something special with those around me before we all scatter as my social radar tends to every year around this time. Also, I care enough about my friends to give them some serious Google love**, so we all can get famous together.
Without revealing too much about the final product, and the album is so far from completion now I wouldn't be able to anyway, but the tone so far is rather bleak***. "Lapland," my last and "happy" record was written and recorded reflecting my life and the world at the conclusion of my Freshman year of college. I don't think my circumstances since then have been particular unique considering what everyone goes through during that 18-21 span of their lives, but this album is going to reflect what's happened through that period up to now, as well as reflect the times we're in now.
Don't get it twisted, I'm not depressed and I far from hate my life. I'm not pulling a Morrisey. The writing is still through a grin, but the humor is darker and considering the bouts both I as a person and the music industry in general has gone through since May, 2005, we're operating on a MUCH different playing field.
For instance, Tower Records closed last December. Think about that for a second. The LAST straight-up music chain in the country CLOSED. As someone who lived and fell in love with music during the biggest industry boom period ('99-'00) when everyone went platinum and there was a MUSIC store on EVERY block, this disturbs me. Espicially the fact that Tower, the closest thing to a "moral chain store" fell. Our generation is really at a cut off point. I remember passing notes in junior high/high school and wondering if those have all been replaced by text messaging by now. When was the last time you memorized a phone number? I hate to come off potentially Amish, but it's just that this is happening SO fast, it's almost intimidating.
Did I mention I'm a practicioner of Hip-Hop? Seriously, this hits us. Hard. Last month, sandboxautomatic.com announced that they would be discontinuing selling vinyl, and last year saw the release of only ONE rap record that went platinum. (T.I. - "King")
Do you mean to tell me the genre that once held nine of the top ten selling albums of the year during the industry's peak now can't produce a single album to sell HALF as much as Dane Cook?
DANE FRICKIN' COOK?!
So that's where I'm coming from. I'm a twenty-year-old Catholic Minneapolitian living in the birthplace of what he truly loves in a time when the most successful of his peers can't outsell a comedian who, by all evidence, hasn't written an actual joke in his life. I live in a dorm, am a junior majoring in cinema studies, buys albums, and flourishes when surrounded by the energy of others. Pleased to meet you.
That's all for now. Thanks for reading. Next time, I'll order us a pizza. On me.
paz,
chaz
*There's that word again. I really detest writing it as I feel like both a pretentious twenty-something studio apartment between-jobs coffee fuels up-talking acting major AND a 13-year-old gIrL aT tHe sAmE tImE - and not in a good way.
**Consensual.
***NOT Bleek, but perhaps Amil?
Monday, March 12, 2007
The Beginning of the Beginning.
"You want a piece of my heart? You have to start from the start!"
- Loverboy 'Working For the Weekend'
Greetings from Spring Break, 2007.
- Loverboy 'Working For the Weekend'
Greetings from Spring Break, 2007.
If you're reading this right now, our public school systems have done their job. My name is Chaz Kangas. I'm an MC (rapper) originally from Minneapolis, MN who currently resides in New York City. I've been rapping for about nine years now, and have contributed countless live performances and have had my hands in over a half-dozen released projects. Chances are that, by finding this site at the first post, you know the basics, otherwise my other info (if you care to know more, and believe me you do) can be studied and interpreted at http://www.myspace.com/chazraps
About three years ago (2004, Year of our Lord) I released an album called "The Brown Bunny." It met with much local success, thanks in no small part to the chronically of the album's creation via an upstart blog known as Xanga. Not too many artists at the time (Except for Thom Yorke and Fred Durst, but what didn't they do together?) had embraced the blogosphere*, so whoever had one wound up inheriting an audience of readers curious as to how/why/what was being made. This allowed, not only consistant 24-hour-a-day promotion for a release that would be months away, BUT a truly unique venue for an artist to communicate directly with their audience.
I had similar success later that year in a joint venture with Patrick "Kid Icarus" Swanson. We promoted our collaborative effort "notes from the underground" through another blog that wound up getting more attention (presumably do to Patrick's often-better writing forcing me to step my game up) and lead to an even higher anticipated release date. Soon, every artist** had some sort of instant portal to their lives through such rising entities as MySpace, livejournal, and YouTube, the latter of which begat the era of the vLogosphere and helped contribute total strangers yelling "CUUUUUURTIS!" into my everyday life.
So here I am, rock you like a hurricane. I dropped my most recent release, 2006's "Lapland," over the summer with an internet presence only through MySpace and Facebook. Truthfully, I wanted to focus on the roots of what this Hip-Hop art is all about - the live performance.
I've never been an "internet MC." I've never entered a chatroom text rap battle. I've never posted a song online that I hadn't already performed before a room full of paying strangers. I'm not looking down on those who do, but I'm just making it abundantly clear that the focus of this online platform is not to bypass the open mic/battle/showcase/performance/interaction grind. It's not a matter of one-of-the-other. The fact is, this is 2007 and for one to make an impact and reach a market in this era where rap records are, to quote XXL, "selling like there's AIDS on them," you have to do both.
Not that I'm bemoaning it. There's nothing I love more than having a mic in my hand**** and rocking a crowd. If it wasn't my favorite thing in the whole worldwide world to do, I wouldn't do it. This lifestyle, both the art and the business, is hard stuff. I'd love to exchange the hours I've spent riding the subway from Open Mic to Open Mic and sitting through subpar opening act after subpar opening act for the equal amount of time playing Mortal Kombat II, but that's not how you pay your dues. I'm well aware how fortunate I am to have such complaints, but if it means that many more people helping me live off of what I wake up each morning to do, than I welcome it.
So that brings us to right now. As of last week, I've officially started work on my new album. The title is still up in the air, but the planets are in allignment and I am writing the best material I've ever written. I've either received or requested beats from the most talented producers I know (including Slim King Koenig, The Audible Doctor of The Grain, JLogic of Killworld, Kid Icarus of Tears of a Clownsilly, and Neil Gong of the Gong Family) and am currently on a writer's retreat in my snowy hometown of Minneapolis, Minnesota. By this time next week I will be in the salsa community abhorred village known as New York City to begin the long recording process, and continue the writing process that can only be inspired in the home of Hip-Hop.
So to everyone new to me, I'd like to give you the warmest of welcomes. To old friends, it's great to have you look at me again. This is the start of something truly heartfelt and deluded by grandeur, and with GOD AS MY WITNESS I WILL MAKE THE BEST RAP ALBUM I HAVE EVER MADE, EVER!
Thanks again for looking at things I make!
Paz,
Chaz
*Probably because it's such a horrible word.
**KidIckz and I take no credit for this.***
***OK, maybe a little.
****Held properly, might I add.
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