raps & beats by Jonwayne, from the forth coming RAP ALBUM ONE - October 29, 2013. 
http://www.stonesthrow.com/store/album/jonwayne/rap-album-one

Rap Album One

Jonwayne - Reflection

Destiny's child, billsbillsbills, james blake,

Bills, Bills, Bills, (James Blake REMIX)

Our new track “Knees On The Ground” might benefit from an explanation. This is the most unguarded I ever intend to be when writing about Clipping.

What had happened was this: our very brief UK/Europe trip got called-off the day before we were supposed to get on a plane to London. Since we didn’t have any other plans, we met up in the studio with an idea to crank out a new track. On our list of songs to finish was one particular piece aimed directly at the club (or, at least, our twisted idea of what clubs should play). But none of us were in the mood for it. Each of us had spent the previous several days following the news of protests in Ferguson, MO. It was the only thing on our minds. We couldn’t bring ourselves to think about anything else, so we decided to direct our fear, our revulsion, our heartbreak into a new track.

The problem was that we’d defined our band — in interviews and to each other — as decidedly-not-an-activist-project. Diggs’s lyrics have been criticized for seeming apolitical, at least in comparison to what many listeners (perhaps rightly) expect to hear from an ‘experimental’ rap group. I have many times said (perhaps naïvely) that our politics lie in our structures, in our formal engagement with the rap genre. We love its conventions, its clichés, and we’re not above them. We see our participation in rap as something resembling an old punk flyer — an out-of-context collage of charged images with an fractured, contradictory, multiple point-of-view. I hope that our more dedicated listeners hear this and understand that we’re not interested in spoon-feeding them a position. At the same time, I’ve always assumed that they pretty much agree with us on most issues anyway. (We have yet to meet the misogynist, homophobic, white supremacist Clipping fan with an MBA and an NRA membership).

So what do we do when all we can think about, all we can feel, is a profound injustice — yet another young unarmed person of color is murdered by a police officer? How does a band, which overtly rejects affect and the emotions, address something that is, for its authors, a deeply felt, deeply affecting topic? Well, we don’t entirely know. But the fact is: there’s more truth in Diggs’s lyrics than we generally let on. “Inside Out” describes a drive-by shooting in Oakland, “Chain” is about three stick-ups. They are presented with a lot of detail and specificity (perhaps the result of personal experience). But at the same time, they represent archetypal scenarios within rap music. One trope we had yet to explore as Clipping was the anti-police rap — the lineage of Public Enemy, NWA and Paris, straight through The Coup, and all the way into the ‘stop snitching’ panic of the early 2000s. “Knees On The Ground” is a paradigmatic white-cop-kills-an-unarmed-black-kid-and-gets-away-with-it tale — a story that happens all the fucking time in the US. What we have learned — from our first hand experience in Oakland in 2009, and from the media coverage of Ferguson in 2014 — is that the second part of this story involves a police response better suited to a war zone than to an American city. Cops think they’re playing Call Of Duty when they’re supposed to be part of a community. If Ferguson were in Iraq, Obama would have sent in an airstrike already.

This is the least obtuse Diggs’s lyrics will ever get. We’re embarrassed by the timeliness of this track. We do not intend to capitalize on what is, undoubtedly, a terrible tragedy. But journalists make think-pieces and we make songs. Writers write what they know, and this is what we know right fucking now.

— William Hutson, Clipping.

Knees On The Ground

It’s a huge honor to have had Thom rework this track. After alt-J mentioned liking our music in an interview a few months back, we contacted them and they asked to trade remixes. You can hear our version of  “Hunger Of The Pine” on their SoundCloud page (soundcloud.com/alt-j/story-4-sleeplessly-embracing-a-remix-by-clipping). We dig the weird skittery rhythm of Thom’s “Inside Out”. He’s a really sophisticated percussionist and his remix has such an alien sense of time. 

Inside Out (Thom alt-J Remx)

Faith In Strangers’ was written and produced between January 2013 and June 2014, and was edited and sequenced in late July this year. Making use of on an array of instruments, field recordings, found sounds and vocal treatments, it’s a largely analogue variant of hi-tech production styles arcing from the dissonant to the sublime. The first two tracks recorded during these early sessions bookend the release, the opener ‘Time Away’ featuring Euphonium played by Kim Holly Thorpe and last track ‘Missing’ a contribution by Stott’s occasional vocal collaborator Alison Skidmore who also appeared on 2012’s ‘Luxury Problems’. Between these two points ‘Faith In Strangers’ heads off from the sparse and infected ‘Violence’ to the broken, downcast pop of ‘On Oath’ and the motorik, driving melancholy of ‘Science & Industry’ - three vocal tracks built around that angular production style that imbues proceedings with both a pioneering spirit and a resonating sense of familiarity. Things take a sharp turn with ‘No Surrender’- a sparkling analogue jam making way for a tough, smudged rhythmic assault, while ‘How It Was’ refracts sweaty Warehouse signatures and ‘Damage’ finds the sweet spot between RZA’s classic ‘Ghost Dog’ and Terror Danjah at his most brutal. ‘Faith in Strangers’ is next and offers perhaps the most beautiful and open track here, its vocal hook and chiming melody bound to the rest of the album via the almost inaudible hum of Stott’s mixing desk. It provides a haze of warmth and nostalgia that ties the nine loose joints that make up the LP into the most memorable and oddly cohesive of Stott’s career to date, built and rendered in the spirit of those rare albums that straddle innovation and tradition through darkness and light.

How It Was

From the album Yes Lawd! http://stonesthrow.com/nxworries

VINYL

Nxworries - Anderson Paak & Knxwledge - Suede

My single 'Bare' is out now including 'Slip' and remixes by @SteelanSound and @JaiTeeMusic.
Digital / Vinyl available at: store.visionrecordings.nl  
iTunes: geni.us/Bare
Spotify: http://spoti.fi/2db2atT
Beatport:  http://btprt.dj/1CkBGiM 

Official Music Video: youtu.be/7ypHL_9oAlI

Taken from my 'Uncanny Valley' EP, out now on digital and 12" vinyl.

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Bare

released 02 January 2012 

FRESH FROM THE HOOD 
Music by Gunjan “DJ Playuhhh” Patel 

(SMALL THINGS) TO A GIANT (FEAT. RAFAEL CASAL) Music by Chukwudi Hodge; Recorded @ Beautiful Bels Studio by Dion Decibels 

TRAPPERS 
Music by Chukwudi Hodge 

JES GREW 
Music by Gunjan “DJ Playuhhh” Patel 

NIGHT TIME 
Music by Romell “Wildman” Hoskins and Daveed Diggs 

DIRTY WORLD 
Music by Radproductionz and Daveed Diggs; Recorded at Stargate MG Studios by Romell “Wildman” Hoskins 

GO BOI (FEAT. RAFAEL CASAL) 
Music by Gunjan “DJ Playuhhh” Patel; Recorded @ Beautiful Bels Studio by Dion Decibels 

I WRITE RAP SONGS (FEAT. ROB BARON aka FACTOR) 
Music by Gunjan “DJ Playuhhh” Patel 

DON’T LET ME FALL (FEAT. MOE GREEN, LAUREN NAGEL) 
Music by Radproductionz 

ABOUT MY PAPER (FEAT. BIG SIZZ, UNCLE HUSS) 
Music by Romell “Wildman” Hoskins; Recorded @ Getback Studios by Romell “Wildman” Hoskins 

SMALL THINGS (TO A GIANT) (FEAT. CHINAKA HODGE) 
Music by Rafael Casal 

ALL TRACKS MIXED BY DJ DION DECIBELS (diondecibels@gmail.com) 
All Words by the people who said them (mostly) 
All Tracks Recorded by Daveed Diggs @ Getback Studios except where otherwise noted 

Additional Vocals by Romel “Wildman” Hoskins 

Album Art: Oakland skyscape by George X. Lin; Diggs Photo by Nathan Lee; Layout & Design by Rafael Casal 

For Booking contact info@thegetback.com 
Follow at twitter.com/daveeddiggs 
Keep checking daveeddiggs.com and thegetback.com for the latest news!

#1

lucas_brx