Semi-Pro; A Hip-Hop Blog

Hip-hop and RnB that is flying just under the radar and is some of the best music around.

[tre916]

Wax... This is where my internet music journey started.

I found him at the recommendation of a video that I had only clicked on to test what YouTube looked like on my first smartphone.

This guy started (on YouTube) rapping over beats in his car and the first song in this playlist was the first thing I heard from him a submission and 2nd place in a Vibe magazine contest, and it was surprisingly great. Especially because my idea at the time was that anyone who was any good was already famous and most independent rap I had heard at the time was utter trash.

Wax and his identical twin brother Herbal T have put out a ton of videos some silly some serious but all of them have serious lyrical skills behind them, plus they both play multiple instruments. This playlist is a good cross-section but I encourage anyone who likes them to check out more of their channel at youtube.com/wax, Wax’s website at waxdotcom.com and to buy their stuff on iTunes(or my personal preference, anywhere BUT iTunes). He also puts out a mostly-weekly podcast, Wax’s Podcast, which is pretty funny and self deprecating and a good way to pass an hour.

Always support your favorite artists, ESPECIALLY independent ones.

[tre916]

The Jumpoff

After years of listening to Music nobody has heard of and being disconnected from everyone I used to put on everything I had found, I decided that I need something beyond my one YouTube playlist to document all the great music I have found.

Let this be the inaugural post to something that someone, somewhere finds and gets some enjoyment out of. What follows is just a background into where my tastes came from feel free to skip it.

I was born in 1984 son of a drummer and an aspiring singer. My parents were active in the local music scene when I was very young, and I have memories around the time I was 4 and 5 of going with my parents to local park shows that they helped put on as co-owners of a local nightclub (as in live music, this WAS the late 80s) I remember my dad getting a Sony 5 disc CD changer stereo system and receiver and giant speakers and listening to my fathers Primus and Nine Inch Nails and my favorite Rage Against the Machine around the time when MTV first got started. I also remember Peter Gabriel, Elvis Costello, Sting, The Police, REM, Frank Zappa, Red Hot Chili Peppers I was very much raised on Rock n’ Roll but I lost connection with most of that when my parents split and I went with my mother in the early 90s.

I remember one of my best friends listened to Rap but I had never heard it before, then someone did a Kris Kross song at the school’s talent show and loved it, so my friend let me borrow his tape, and I was hooked. My mom bought me that tape and I started memorizing lyrics and practicing to rap faster so that I could keep up with “miggity-miggity-miggity-miggity mack”.

I remember watching the Grammy’s that year and being pissed off that Kris Kross lost the best rap song to those old guys, Boyz II Men (yes, RnB and Rap were considered the same thing by the Grammy’s back then). But little me not understanding how music worked, asked my step dad if he could go to the record store and buy the new Kris Kross album for my birthday, because why wouldn’t there be another album already… He came back and told me that there was no new Kris Kross album but he did get the Boyz II Men album CooleyHighHarmony. I was disgusted at first, as they were the ones who robbed Kris Kross of their well deserved Grammy! But I decided to give it a listen to see what they were all about, and it BLEW MY MIND. The harmonies were so amazing and the vocal agility was something my 7 year old mind had never heard before. I found the local Hip Hop/RnB station on the radio and never looked back…