One of my favorite artists, Tonedeff, created a remix of Kanye West’s Love Lockdown. Tonedeff states, “It’s not so much a remix is as it is a re imagining of the concept – added a bunch of instrumentation, new lyrics & hook, etc.” Well, whatever he wants to call it, it’s a great song. Make sure you give it a listen and then head on over to QN5.com to find out more about this talented artist or download the track, plus a house remix from the blog post. He is a great rapper, singer, producer, and lyricist. This is what good hip hop is about.

tupacAfter waking up and seeing this article on the front page of Digg, I was instantly in a Tupac mood. The article does a good job of narrowing down his music to 22 of his best tracks (I’d disagree with some of them there) and it made me start thinking about his true place in history as an artist.

A lot of people dismiss Tupac as a typical thug. In fact, one of the comments on the Digg page stated:

People should forget about this thug and spend more time remembering real men like Dr. King, the Tuskegee airmen and Bernie Mac. Question, how long do you think it would take Dr. King to listen to a Tupac album before he hung his head in shame and walked away? Do you think Dr. King would be proud of the whole thug gangsta mentality? I doubt it. I want to see any man become more like Dr. King, not more like Tupac.

I can see his point to an extent, however, this commenter is limited by what the media saw of Tupac most of the time. They never saw the good things he did, they rarely played the deeper songs on the radio, only the party and gangster tracks, they never showcased his poetry. At least his acting ability garnered positive praise (though, he usually portrayed a thug in the movies, but that’s an issue with Hollywood and typecasting of African Americans and not of Tupac himself). Read more

I read an article on Wired yesterday about SanDisk pushing to replace CDs with “SlotMusic,” basically an album, complete with artwork, on a MicroSD card. Five to 10 years ago, this might have caught on for a while. Let’s face it, CDs are crap. They are easy to scratch, and if you do, the whole thing is ruined. If this had come out in a cost-efficient way 10 years ago, we’d see slots built into most devices and maybe the success of iTunes would have been a bit different. We can’t really say for sure. The one thing I can say is this is a big mistake for another industry, the movie industry.

After a fight between Blu-ray and HDDVD we are seeing that neither are really winners. HDDVD is dead and Blu-ray sales are extremely low with no bright future in sight. What the SlotMusic’s failure is going to do, and it will fail because a physical medium for music is dead in a culture of iTunes and MP3s, is prevent other people from taking the chance to change other mediums. This SlotMusic card idea is perfect for movies. Movies don’t come with album art, so you’re not missing anything there. DVDs scratch just as easily as cds, so there’s another reason not to continue the disc medium, and with the increasing capacity of the cards, you’ll be able to put higher quality movies and extras on a single card. This is where DVDs should be heading. Unfortunately, I think the inevitable failure of SlotMusic will prevent that. Without widespread adoption, prices on cards will still be too high and you won’t see gadget manufacturers adding readers to TVs, DVD players (because you still need something to play your craptastic DVD collection), and other devices.

When I was growing up there seemed to be magic specials on TV all the time. I would say every couple months there would be some sort of magic show on television. Sometimes it was a solo performer, such as David Copperfield, and sometimes it was a group effort, such as Worlds Greatest Magic. I wonder whatever happened to magic shows. Every few years David Blane comes out with a special, but he seems to be the only one. Chris Angel has the show Mind Freak, but that’s not the traditional magic that grasped my attention as a kid. You didn’t need tricks with a lot of blood and gore when I was growing up. It can’t be that there isn’t a market for magic specials. Ask a kid if they want to see a magic trick and they will get excited and shout YES!. They will be glued to the TV just as I was when I was growing up. Is the lack of specials because of network’s catering the the bread and butter of marketing demographics, the teen and 20’s crowd? That may be it, after all, a kid can’t go out and buy a 6 pack of Budweiser American Ale or buy a Ford truck. It’s kind of sad that prime time TV has become what it has. Where has all the magic gone?

While John McCain and Sarah Palin lie about all of their changes, Barack Obama is sitting back and telling the country what he plans for change. Take a look at his new 2 minute ad. It’s simple, yet powerful. If you are tired of the lies that the Republicans are spewing (and they are lies, the media has called them out on every lie forcing them to change their story), then get involved and help out the Obama campaign. Make calls, pass out literature, or donate. Do whatever it takes.