boston progress radio

As an unapologetic hip hop nerd and dilligent troller of mp3 blogs, I have recently noticed that CHOPS has had a hand in a lot of noteworthy remixes – mostly unofficial – for artists like Jay-Z, 50 Cent, and Pharrell.

It’s all coming full circle. Using this online forum to write about CHOPS is vaguely reminiscent of my first meaningful interactions with online communication when I was in college. I am aware the Internet existed well before 1999, but no regular people knew how to use it until about then. Some younger heads may have trouble believing this, but when I was finishing up my freshman year in college in 1997, we were still figuring out how to use e-mail. In 1997, I did not own a CD or DVD player, and I certainly did not know that by 1999 you would be able to listen to CDs, watch DVDs, and surf the Internet all on the same machine. Up until that point, computers were just typewriters that didn’t require Wite-Out. (If you’re interested, you can ask me about the day I saw wireless Internet for the first time in 2002 – talk about an experience…)

But as a 20 year-old fan of hip hop, aspiring writer, and burgeoning API activist in 1999, I was exploring this newfangled Internet for some confluence of all three interests, and I somehow found the Mountain Brothers, a Chinese American trio of emcees representing Philly. Read more

Tags: Appreciation, Commentary, Video.

I thought I told you that we won’t stop. Check the below paragraphs for info about music recently added to the BPRLive streaming Internets radio station. I loves this Internets!

Chicago emcee Mestizo has jumped up on our playlist. He - and the rest of the Galapagos 4 heads - has always been supportive of our projects. His CD is available at our store in Cambridge too. Make sure to check out more info and definitely peep his live show if he comes through your town.

We have also added new music - and by new music, I mean old music - from the Visionaries. We’ve been playing a couple tracks off their newest release We Are The Ones (We’ve Been Waiting For) steadily for several weeks now, but recently got a couple tracks off their previous effort Pangaea up on the playlist. If you haven’t been knowing about the Visionaries, then definitely do your homework now. They are one of the most consistent underground acts in hip hop history, releasing calssic material every time out the gate. Keep watching this space, because as long as they keep dropping dope music, we will keep talking about it.

And speaking of new old music, we at Boston Progress Radio are showing our age by uploading tracks off Kozmonautz, put out by Key-Kool & Rhettmatic back in 1995. A lot of new jacks think API hip hop started with Jin. But if you ask Jin, I’ll bet he might trace it back to three artists: Mountain Brothers, the first Asian American hip hop group signed to a major label and who bounced on them when they were asked to exploit and disparage their ethnicty and race on stage; BOOYAH Tribe, who were some of the originators of the West Coast gangsta rap scene and were all Samoan; and Key-Kool & Rhettmatic, who released Kozmonautz independently in 1995 and have maintained steadily on the scene ever since. The album featured guest shots from the aforementioned Visionaries, as well as West Coast lyrical wizards Ras Kass and Saafir and a bunch of others. Hip hop fans: do not sleep.

More updates about the playlist as they happen. Have a pleasant day.

Tags: News, Online Radio.