The Audacity of Dope

Huge super duper hyphenated Euro shout out to my man Nils, who sent me this email recently:

Hey Hyphen,

I am writing from Germany, and I want to say “Thank you” for putting your sound session show online so that I can download it each week! I started listening to it in June 2006 starting with show #50-something. (I don’t know why) but I got to your myspace page somehow (googling, I guess) and started listening and cutting the shows to single mp3 tracks on my PC, having a good time every time I am listening to the mp3’s. The first mp3 track that I can cutting remember is “The storm” by the “Procussions”. Other remarkable artists are Grynch and Choclate.

I have been watching american TV shows since my youth (starting with Star Trek:Enterprise, ALF, A-Team, Simpsons, Baywatch among many others), so that I feel some kind of connection to the USA. This might seem strange on the first sight, but I just think that american culture is just some kind of different. I watch “Conan O’Brian” and “Jay Leno” since 10 years. I listen to your show since 2 years. : )

Well, I don’t know what you think of this email, but for me you are a kind of “anchor” to american hip hop culture and music. I don’t understand each sentence of the music, but many beats (connected with the vocals) are a very welcome earcandy.

I have learned English language for 9 years at school, but I still don’t get the lyrics. Maybe I just I don’t really want to understand, I just want to feel the beats and the flow of the rappers/singers. The sound of the music is just satisfying enough, and understanding 48 bars of foreign language is really hard work.

Without you, I wouldn’t have bought the “Kenna”-CD, downloaded the U-N-I mixtape and so on.

Last week I have started reading your audacity of dope website/blog. Thanks for that as well, you have a huge output. That is remarkable. I will read your blog in the future.

Greetings from Germany,
Nils

(Nils’ English is crushing my German)

I get emails like this every now and then (as I’m sure a lot of artists & DJ’s do), but it’s always wild and encouraging to see how I can affect what people listen to all over the world.  I started DJ’ing back in 2000 with the sole purpose of helping shine light on good music that people might not be hearing elsewhere.  Things have evolved a bit since then, but still, that’s the whole point of all this.  To put a dude from Germany up on Kenna, U-N-I, Choklate, and other dope artists is the illest thing to me.  I love living in a world where technology brings us closer together with every day that passes.

I really appreciate every single person who’s checked out anything I’ve done over the years, especially those as dedicated as Nils.  It’s all about the music though, and I’m just lucky enough to be the conduit sometimes.  Big shout to all music fans, artists, DJ’s, bloggers, industry heads, and friends who genuinely care about this artform.  Y’all inspire me daily.

*cue “Full House” aww moment*

Dreamhost was trippin’ and TAOD was down from for the entire afternoon/evening.  Third time this has happened in like a month and a half.  Hopefully we’re back up and running just fine, but I suppose the one positive of an outage is that I get to post a new fail pic each time.  Sorry bout that y’all.

M-Pain & T(ammi)-Pain – “Ain’t Nothin’ Like Auto-Tune”

Blasphemy, I know.  But hilarious.  Shout to the homey 6th for sending this over

J. Moore and I were just talking about this topic the other day, and Jay Smooth happened to repost an old video of his for Current TV recently. As always, dude is on point. I feel sorry for kids today, judging music off a cursory listen of an unmastered song squeaking through laptop speakers. [McCain] that’s not music we can believe in my friends [/McLame]

Be sure to peep Jay’s blog!

I still firmly believe that wasting money on a chain is topped only by the stupidity of plastering diamonds on your teeth, but anything Transformers related is tough for me to hate on. Keep on keepin on with that ignance Berg. I approve.

Swiped from RealTalkNY

I’m new to this whole website admin stuff, but just a week in and it’s already annoying.  This site was down for a few hours last night, which probably didn’t affect too many of you.  Since I’m damn near nocturnal, it was pretty frustrating for me, but I figured it was all good.  Then today, apparently some moron flipped a circuit breaker wherever the Dreamhost servers are located and TAOD was down for damn near the whole day.  It appears that we’re back up and running, so hopefully this was just an anomaly. 

Sorry for the downtime though y’all.

What up y’all?

I waded into the blogosphere a few years ago on my MySpace page, but now it’s time that I go ahead and cannonball myself into the deep end. So welcome to The Audacity of Dope, which will hopefully serve as a representation of all things I consider noteworthy going on in my life and the world at large. Here, you’ll be able to stay up to date on everything I’m doing in my DJ’ing career as “DJ Hyphen,” including my weekly radio shows on Seattle’s KUBE 93.3 FM, my interviews with some of the dopest musicians on the planet, and my Beats, Rhymes, and Life mixtape series. This site will begin as a blog, but it’ll soon double as an archive for everything I’ve worked on in the music industry. Bare with me though, this is my first site after all.

Also, while I’ve seen some other music related blogs receive criticism for occasionally veering off topic, I’m looking forward to using TAOD to speak my mind on whatever comes up. Part of the beauty of the internet (at least in this country) is that we’re all free to publish our ideas, and this is going to be my own little soapbox. So bookmark or subscribe to the page and get to know your friendly neighborhood Hyphen. Aight?

[Hov] Let’s get the proceedings proceeding this evening [/Hov]