Jon Jon does it again. This time for the Seattle instant summer classic The Physics‘ track “I Just Wanna Beat.” Rapping and flirting in the library. I miss those days.
Get the track, and the whole freely downloadable High Society EP, over here.
I caught Two In The Wave (2010) at Northwest Film Forum on a Saturday night right after hitting up Hempfest. Probably not the best time to catch a documentary in a small room with the hardest core of the city’s cinephiles, but I couldn’t pass up a film about the relationship and fall-out between Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut.
Like I’ve been saying all year, there’s a lil’ rap music video renaissance going on in Seattle these days. In just the first half of 2010 alone, Jon Augustavo (aka Jon Jon, aka @jonjonaye) has dropped 2-3 music videos a month, each one showing growth from the last. He’s done joints for J. Pinder, Sol, Wizdom, Eighty4 Fly, and Roderic to name a few – all finding the rapper in their most natural element. It’s lifestyle realism, in a similar vein as other Seattle hip-hop music video directors (Zia Mohajerjasbi, Stephan Gray), but with slightly more polish and a vibe that echoes the classic YO! MTV RAPS era of hip-hop videos. Jon Jon is also the fastest interview responder ever:
Whilst digging for obscure 90′s R&B online, I came across this video and got introduced to the world of Missy Tone. Maybe it was the stifling heat, but browsing through her 40+ videos of her singing was a cinematic experience. You never see Missy Tone, you only hear her singing. What we see is what she sees: the ground, the sky, a laptop computer, a table, the other side of the room. She lives somewhere in Seattle, where her thick Spanish accent would stand out in most places other than a few parts in West Seattle and the Southend. She must be around my age or older, because most of the songs she sings are early 90′s classics. Her it’s-not-that-serious personality bookends the short acappellas but when she gets into a song, she goes in. She always starts with “What it do?” and always ends prematurely with a giggle.
Everybody had or has a homegirl who just sings whenever she can. Watching these videos was like a Being John Malkovich type trip through that homegirl’s head.
When the homie Kiwi came back from the Philippines in summer of 2007, he showed me a grip of amazing video footage of him rapping with urban poor youth, freestyling and recording in the slum, meeting up with Filipino hip-hop legends Francis M (RIP) and Gloc-9, and several jarring testimonies of barrio life from the youth themselves. It was confirmation of what I’ve been hearing about the PI for a minute – that more and more city kids are expressing themselves through hip-hop music. It wasn’t always that way, and there’s still a long way to go.
I caught Mountain Thief (2009), a low-budget film about garbage scavengers in the Philippines, on the same day I saw Inception,a $200 million film about blurring the lines between dreams and reality. My cinematic cognitive dissonance was peaking, and I welcomed the return to concrete.
Since making a splash with his documentary trilogy (Yellow Brotherhood, Pilgrimage, A Song For Ourselves), the homie Tadashi Nakamura has been working on a full-length documentary on Hawaii-based ukulele virtuoso Jake Shimabukoro. The film is being produced by the Center for Asian American Media. Here’s a video preview cut from some of Tad’s footage, featuring Jake performing “Blue Roses Falling.”
