From the category archives:
Five years ago hip hop lost one of the most unique artists in the history of the game. Russell Jones aka Ol’ Dirty Bastard is truly a legend. He became one of the most recognizable figures in the Wu-Tang Clan and went on to great solo success as well. For this weekend, we’ll be honoring ODB and showing that although he’s gone, he’ll never be forgotten. Rest in Peace ODB…Wu-Tang is Forever!
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Yes, I’ve begun to be a part of the craze. I’ve finally given in and succumbed to the evils of updating my status every so often, letting people know about my life—aspects they’d definitely find uninteresting— and budding in on the lives of others, as well. I just started, and I’m gradually trying to get more followers because it is becoming harder and harder to let x amount of people know about my different pieces of work on different outlets. Moreover, I just want to intrude people’s lives and make them give a damn about KevinNottingham.com if they don’t already. Help promote the cause. Of course, this benefits everyone who is already a part of the community. If we get more readers, we get more reason to keep going and going and going, and we get more support and more attention and more everything. So, if you are on Twitter and feel like spreading the word, some particular articles, or just want to get our names out there, check the jump for the KN staff Twitter lists. Follow us; some of us will probably follow you too. It’s a reciprocal thing.
And feel free to leave your Twitter in the comments….
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In the mist of Jay-Z week we sprinkled in a lot of Raekwon. Probably wasn’t enough for many, but we we dropped some good ish: Who Spit It Better, instrumentals, and OB4CL video’s. Plus, Fred came through with two excellent reviews for OB4CL and OB4CLII and who can forget about the dope interview Addi conducted with The Chef? It wasn’t Rae week, but we represented the Wu-Tang Solider lovely.
Hit the cut for all Rae related material over the last three weeks. Enjoy!
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It has been a rough and bumpy week here at KevinNottingham.com. Why does it seem that I’ve made a post like this on more than one occassion in the past few months? Well, after a long dispute with our newest web host, we have successfully transferred the site to a new host. After all the problems with the last 3 hosts, I reached out to my fellow bloggers to ask who everyone else was using. The winner, after careful consideration, turned out to be Dreamhost.
The transfer was a bumpy one and if you were reading my Twitter last night, you know about my frustration. My old host was trying to extort me for $75 in extra bandwidth charges while holding the site’s images hostage. Luckily, I was able to backdoor into their servers and recover most of them. So you may see a few broken images on the site, until I replace the missing ones. While moving the site, I was also able to upgrade some components and fix/adjust some scripts behind the scenes.
As far as the current state of the web site, Dreamhost currently has us on a shared server until our dedicated server is ready. So right now, the site may seem a little slow and could time out on occasion until we get moved over to a dedicated server. Dreamhost estimates this to be about 2-3 days.
I want to thank everyone for the support and kind words expressed to me, either through Twitter, email, or over the phone. Thanks to all the readers who continue to show their appreciation and the ones who gave technical advice.. Thanks to the few who actually donated money to help with some of the new costs. A special thanks to DJ Vlad and Gooch, who both gave pep talks when I was down and wondered if all this was worth it to continue.
We will immediately get some new content on the site, as my email is backed up with posting requests. To those who sent stuff to post, please understand that I will not be able to get everything online as new stuff comes in all the time. Look out for our Michael Jackson Beat It Tribute Tape to drop this weekend, an exclusive mixtape from M. Will that we are hosting, and prepare yourself for our very special 11 Days of Jay starting September 1, as we count down the days to the release of The Blueprint 3.
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We are definitely 100% back again (queue in Dilated Peoples)… I wanna thank everyone for being so patient as we worked out our server issues. Apparently we were too popular… too many visitors was overloading the servers. I guess that ain’t a bad thing, huh?
We have successfully moved over to a fully dedicated server (all ours). The good news is that we should not see any more problems with the site being slow or unresponsive. We should be up 24/7 from here on out. The bad news is that this new server is taking a huge chunk of change out of my wallet. I plan to keep the site going for as long as I can afford it, but if you dig the site and would like to see it continue, I’ve placed a “donate” button below. In this case I don’t feel bad for asking for donations because the costs to run this site have increased dramatically. So if you feel the need to donate a dollar or two to help out, it is very much appreciated.
With that said, let’s get some new material posted!
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For those that did not know, the site has been offline all day. Still not sure what exactly happened, but a backup of our database was finally found and we have been restored to midnight last night. Thankfully, no content was lost… only comments that occurred after midnight were not salvaged.
Redirecting the site to my Twitter account proved to be highly effective! Not only did I get around 80 new followers, but it allowed me to keep you all updated with the latest status of the site and I even tried blogging from Twitter. All in all, it was a success. We’ll get our posts and everything back to normal soon. For those wondering about the Blueprint remix contest, I will extend tomorrow’s deadline 6 hours (until 9pm eastern time).
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Yup, one of my favorite television shows comes back on the air tonight for season 6… Entourage! Tonight @ 10:30 on HBO. Hug it out, bitch…
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One of the great things about running this site is that it gives me the opportunity to reach out to people when help is needed… I scratch your back, you scratch mine sort of thing. Anyway, we are in the process of prepping the second single for Nobody Famous‘ Order Up! Vol 3: Chicken & Waffles. A slight problem just arose and we lost our video editor. We have minimal time to find someone new, so I thought this might work better than Craigslist.
Looking for someone to edit the new video. We have a ton of footage, just need it put together and put to the music. If you got skills, leave a comment here with a link to some examples of your work. We need to start fast as I want the video done within 3-4 weeks. Thanks in advance!
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After the extremely well written review done by eA, I noticed some comments attacking the website for choosing to cover a particular album. The album was the Black Eyed Peas most recent release, The E.N.D. [read here]. I couldn’t be more shocked and appalled by the fact that a handful of commenters (and other silent readers) were gasping at the fact that KevinNottingham.com, the home of real hip hop, original samples, and quality content, was reviewing a Black Eyed Peas album (ewwwwwww!). I know, right? Isn’t that crazy? What kind of website covers music of all types? That’s pretty disgusting isn’t it? It’s remarkably horrible that we cover even the worst of un-established artists (not naming names) and yet, we turn to cover a highly established and developed hip-pop music sensation, also a group that once put out quality hip hop for a long time. I mean, what kind of website wants to channel and analyze the shift a particular group has made and possibly monitor it and write it out for everyone to see? It’s horrible. The nerve of us for picking this album to review and the nerve of eA to actually give it a 71!?!?
This score entails that it is better than this years Busta Rhymes album (Back on my…), Big Pooh’s Delightful Bars, and B Real’s Smoke n’ Mirrors. What?! Black Eyed Peas having higher scores (and conclusively being better) than other hip hop albums? What a joke KevinNottingham.com is.
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Ah, who here remembers the graphic above? If you do, then you’ve been with us most of the 2 years that we’ve been in existance. Today marks the 2 year anniversary of KevinNottingham.com. The site has grown tremendously in the short 2 years that we’ve been in existence. In 2 years we’ve reached close to 3.5 million hits on the site and have gone from around 50 average viewers a day to 15,000 viewers a day! Let me fill you in on the site’s history as we take a walk down memory lane…
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I rarely get on here to rant or voice my opinion, so when I do you know that there really is something on my mind. I want to use this post as the official notice to the end of our Inbox series. The work involved with putting that post together (often 3-4 hours every Saturday) is just not enough for us to keep it going. So since I hadn’t done an inbox post in two weeks, my email currently looks like the pic above.
I still believe the Inbox series was a great idea and it allowed me to try to please everyone by posting everything that I receive on a weekly basis. You’d think it would be enough. To some people it wasn’t. A lot of the emails I received after I started the series ended with, “please don’t put me in the inbox.” People still wanted their own seperate posts.
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Check out the dope new track Enter the Dragon from Spec Boogie and produced by Von Pea of Tanya Morgan. If you like this I would advise you to check out the other videos in the Summer Movie set on youtube. This is absolutely one of most unique blends I have ever seen/heard.
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I’d like to take a brief moment and welcome Ben and Justin to KevinNottingham.com as our summer interns. The other day I put up a help wanted ad and received a ton of response from people willing to help out. It was a tough choice, but I ultimately decided to take on two helpers. Please don’t take it personal if i did not chose you; there may be more opportunities down the road and I will keep those that applied in mind. Ben and Justin are gonna be helping out with the day to day postings on the site so that I can concentrate on other things. But make no mistake, this will not change the structure of the site in anyway. I still have full authority over what gets posted to the site. I now just have some help posting it. Hopefully this will free up my time to give you all more in depth articles and concentrate on things such as sample sets, interviews and planning artist weeks.
To Justin and Ben, I thank you for coming on board and giving us a hand… and don’t ask what the above image is all about. I just did a search for “something cool” and this is what popped up… haha. As the KevinNottingham.com family grows, only good things are bound to come out of this!
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Pharrell drops some serious knowledge about the industry and how to make some serious moves. Check the audio above.
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So I figure to help alleviate some of the load I have right now, asking for help seems like a pretty good idea. I have more than enough content for the site, but no time to post it. So consider this a “Help Wanted” ad. I’ve gotten a few offers from people willing to help, but I need someone with some experience. So if you’re interested in becoming part of an award winning team, hit the jump to see what qualifications I’m looking for and apply within…
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