The Eccentric Soul Review killed last night. Shame on you if you weren’t there!

Thanks to The Numero Group for putting it up, for JC Brooks & The Uptown Sound for laying it down, and to Renaldo Domino, The Notations, and Syl Johnson for knocking it out of the park. Er, the music hall.

Tonight, if you’re in NYC and looking for something to get into, you can’t do much better than my mans an nem Chairman Mao and Matthew Africa (from Oakland, CA! Town Biz, yadadadig?) at club APT for Mao’s Grand Groove monthly.

Apropos of Mr. Africa’s visit, everyone interested in good music and writing about it should make a point of visiting and bookmarking Matthew’s great blog I Wish You Would.

In other news, we’re still retooling the website… ugh… new arrivals are hitting the store with frightening speed… and we’ve got some more big things up our sleeve for the spring, so stay tuned.

Be safe and have a wonderful weekend! Go Pacquiao!

Hey family,

Just a quick note to let you all know that we’re doing a bit of tinkering with the site, hence the light posting for a while. However, all of this is being done in the hopes of adding a sale page where individual records will be listed for purchase. This is a good thing! I’m excited to start offering some of our exclusive stock on this site, and can’t wait for everything to finish and go live. Stay tuned…

- Jonny

Somewhere between the political unrest in Iran (strong shout out to Mazzi and his family, hope you’re all safe) and my man Cosmo Baker’s rant on real DJ business, I had to sign up for Twitter. I already feel more connected. Or lame. Or both. Anyway, I’m thinking a lot about the protesters in Iran, and I encourage everyone to keep an eye on the developments out there – big things happening. On a lighter note, here’s my man Cosmo, giving these fake DJs the business:

i remember when it was biting if you sounded like
someone else & you weren’t part of their crew or at least from their
hood

I remember when biting was considered weak and people got called out
for it. What the F*ck happened?

I remember when DJs had their own particular unique style motherfuckers
weren’t so generic

I remember when particular records were attributed to DJs, back when
every damn fool didn’t have every damn record at their fingertips

I remember when DJs had to work HARD to unearth joints, or drop serious
cream.

I remember when DJs had to work hard when they perform, not look like
they’re checking their f*cking email

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About a week ago Phill Most The Soulman, the man behind World Of Beats and ThatRealSchitt, upped a new mix of breaks, psych, funk, and all sorts of other madness (head to the jump to download the mix itself). To a lot of us, it was a welcome return by one of the originators of the “break tape”, one of the first guys to write about digging culture online, one of the inspirations for us to do what we do.

Rather than simply linking to Phill’s site and offering a few choice compliments of the (deep, mindblowing) mix, I thought I’d hit the man up for a quick interview to chop it up on the history of the WOB column and website, his thoughts on the game, past present and future, and the life of a man many consider a legend. Thankfully, he was all too willing to oblige.

Jonny Paycheck: So basically, I want to throw it back to the World Of Beats, which this mix really brought me back to, even though it’s on, kind of, another level than what cats were checking for back then. So WOB stretched from I guess around 93-94 when you had the magazine column to 2001 or so on the WOB site. Is that about right? Can you describe the course of the column/site/blog briefly, and why you decided to end it?

Soulman: Actually the original World Of Beats column that was in Rap Sheet ran from 1994 to 1995, a little more than a year. And the internet version of the WOB started in 1999 and I kept that going for almost three years. The whole idea behind the column was just to show a side of the Hip Hop world that rarely got any coverage in the magazines or tv shows that specialized in Hip Hop, and it’s a very important part of the artform that deserved some attention. I don’t think the editors at Rap Sheet really understood what it was all about or the significance, but to their credit they let me go ahead with it anyway. Actually I first introduced the idea for an article I did on Pete Rock; after that they asked me to do a monthly column on crate digging. It quickly became the most popular regular column in the magazine; I know I got a lot of letters sent directly to my address and from what I understand Rap Sheet got a lot sent to their offices, too. One of the things I wanted to do was to interview not just famous Hip Hop producers, but also deejays, record dealers and also collectors who may not have been household names but knew their stuff when it comes to beats and old records. A lot of times the producers don’t really know as much about records as you might think they do…

Hit the jump to read the rest of the interview

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