It gives us immense pleasure to announce Microkhan’s favorite rapping competitive eater, Eric “Badlands” Booker, is back with his fifth album, Extended Play. As always, Booker’s lyrical content focuses on his gustatory dedication, as well as the perks of being a minor celebrity. The cut above does an excellent job of conveying both the stress […]
Tags:Badlands Booker·competitive eating·hip-hop·music·sports·Yosemite Sam
After an insanely hectic five weeks of virtually non-stop mental toil, we can proudly state that we hit our deadline. The second draft of the Now the Hell Will Start screenplay is safely in our boss’s hands, which means it’s time for us to enjoy a rare moment of peace—a moment that’s sure to include […]
Tags:Ghostface·hip-hop·housekeeping·music·Now the Hell Will Start·Speed Racer
We’re getting down to the wire on a major, major deadline, and thus don’t have even a neuron to spare for poor Microkhan this afternoon. As previously promised, we’ll be back to full strength on Monday. Thanks for bearing with us as we toil elsewhere. As a small token of our immense gratitude, please enjoy […]
As noted yesterday, we’re absolutely swamped with paying gigs between now and Friday, so posting here will be lighter than usual ’til Monday. In the name of picking off some low-hanging fruit as we scramble on multiple deadlines, we’re posting the above classic Big L vid—a tune we never tire of, in part of because […]
We admittedly do too many posts on ’80s nostalgia, especially now that Microkhan Jr.’s existence has us thinking a lot more ’bout our own formative years. But our worldview back during the Reagan Era was pretty American-centric, so we missed out on plenty of great, junky pop culture from more distant corners of the globe. […]
By the time these words go live, we’ll be en route to beautiful St. Cloud, Minnesota for a whirlwind work trip. Odds are we won’t have a chance to blog while on the road, so no fresh posts for the next couple dozen hours or so. Take a break, enjoy some vintage Nas, and we’ll […]
There are two salient factoids that we’d like to pass along about the song above: 1) This was the first hip-hop 12-inch we ever purchased, from the Music+ retail store on Ventura Boulevard. (Don’t look for it—much like the Electric Banana, it’s not there anymore.) We were so enamored of the tune that we recorded […]
Apologies, but gonna be a slightly late start today. We’re in the process of helping our great pal from Arunachal Pradesh catch a plan from LaGuardia to Minneapolis, en route to the big Oshkosh air show. So chew on the above Mood Swingaz track for the next hour or so, and we’ll be back at […]
Tags:Arunachal Pradesh·aviation·hip-hop·housekeeping·India·Mood Swingaz·music·travel·Wisconisn
Poland’s funk era has often been described as “little known,” and not without good reason. We here at Microkhan are intent on correcting that egregious oversight by bringing you the cut above, complete with candy-colored Slavic montage. We’re big fans of the rhythm guitar work on this one, not to mention Irena’s breathy “ahs.”
Tags:funk·Irena Woźniacka·music·Poland·WEFUNK
We’re about to jet downtown for an all-important meeting regarding the Now the Hell Will Start screenplay, so we’ll call it a day with this super-classic clip from Metallica: Some Kind of Monster. Though we’re no great fans of the band, we swoon over the doc—a probing portrait of creative minds in crisis, brought on […]
Tags:Dave Mustaine·heavy metal·Metallica·movies·music·Now the Hell Will Start
Cramming on a Wired deadline this afternoon, so we’ll outro with yet another track that the essential WEFUNK recently turned us on to. The group itself, Strictly Roots, is mighty obscure—as far as we can tell, they released just one album, back in 1993, before vanishing into the ether. But they were big enough to […]
Tags:Fat Joe·Grand Puba·hip-hop·McCrary Twins·music·Strictly Roots·WEFUNK
Talk about one-hit wonders: the above tune, famously sampled in a couple of hip-hop gems, appears to be the only single ever churned out by Lee Mason & His Orchestra. The group is so obscure, in fact, that it’s often not even credited with “Shady Blues”; the song was apparently re-released in the U.K. under […]
We were never the biggest fan of Iron Maiden’s music, with the possible exception of “Prowler” (later memorably covered by the great Trans Am). But we’ve always had a soft spot for the band’s ghoulish cover art, starring a wrinkly, gore-loving skeleton called Eddie. So yesterday, when we saw a fellow Harlemite non-ironically sporting a […]
Been meaning to post this Lost Boyz classic for ages, but it took the invention of the Grooveshark widget to provide the necessary technological push. We were definitely latecomers to this whole album, and for years our fandom extended only as far as the remixed version of “The Yearn” (which we actually scooped up on […]
Though we’ve largely shifted over to using the Grooveshark widget when sharing music with y’all, YouTube remains a go-to place for some truly rare cuts. A good case in point is Spanky Wilson‘s “Kissing My Love,” which we recently heard while trolling through WEFUNK Show #246. It’s a great prime example of the sort of […]
Tags:Daptone Records·Gabriel Roth·music·R&B·Spanky Wilson·WEFUNK
We’ve already expressed our boundless admiration for Madlib’s Beat Konducta in India album, arguably the most perfect slab of sonic creativity we’ve heard over the past five years. Thanks to this new Grooveshark widget, we can now bring you our favorite track off that opus—the song we’ve long imagined as playing over the credit sequence […]
In our never-ending quest to bring you the classic tracks behind our favorite hip-hop cuts, today we bring you the U-Roy and Hopeton Lewis collaboration “Tom Drunk.” It only takes a few seconds’ worth of listening to realize that the song’s best riff was long-ago copped by Reflection Eternal for “Fortified Live,” a tune notable […]
Tags:Grooveshark·hip-hop·Hopeton Lewis·music·Reflection Eternal·U-Roy
We’re prepping to head downtown for the 20th anniversary screening of Do the Right Thing, a momentous occasion that has us on yet another ’80s nostalgia kick. It thus bears mentioning that another great cultural artifact is celebrating an important milestone this year— turns 23! And what better way to mark the occasion than with […]
Apologies for the lighter-than-usual day on Microkhan. We’re actually prepping for the third annual celebration of our legal link-up with the missus, so our thoughts are mostly elsewhere. Don’t fret, we’ll be back at full strength come Monday. Promise. In the meantime, please enjoy the clip above, the discovery of which stems from Wednesday’s Beatnuts […]
In the summer of 1983, my dad took me to the Sunset Boulevard Tower Records to purchase my first two audiocassettes. One was the eminently forgettable Cargo by Men at Work; the other, the legendary Thriller. By summer’s end, I knew every single lyric on that great album, and would watch MTV whenever possible in […]
This morning’s sumo-related post stirred up memories of another Hawaiian-born legend of the sport: Konishiki, aka “The Dump Truck.” Though he never attained the exalted rank of yokozuna—perhaps due to anti-foreigner prejudice among sumo’s elite—Konishiki never let the disappointment get in the way of his artistic ambitions. As evidenced by the above video, the truly […]
Headed downtown to meet with our trusted rep and discuss that frightening concept known as The Future. So we’re gonna outro with the best track off The Beatnuts debut album. Like all songs by the pride of Corona, Queens, the lyrics are definitely not safe for work, so please do not play within earshot of […]
We’re on a soul-crushing Wired deadline for the day’s remainder, so we’re gonna outro with a little vintage Tony Allen. Soak it in, and catch you again tomorrow morning.
Tags:music·Tony Allen·Wired
“Being in that situation made me more humble. I thought there was no way I could ever be off point, and I finally felt what it was to be stifled. I was still studying music theory and trying to make songs though. I didn’t care if she was trying to stab me or throw my […]
Tags:anime·Del the Funky Homosapien·Goku·hip-hop·music·relationships
We honestly wonder what Sandi Saraya‘s four kids think when they encounter video evidence of mom’s eponymous ’80s band. Our best guess is that they feel an almost indescribable mix of embarrassment and pride. Microkhan, on the other hand, can only chuckle at Saraya’s oversized hair, rote guitar licks, and tragically trite lyrics (“Take my […]
Tags:1980s·music·New Jersey·Saraya
We’re taking the rest of the day to hit the creative reset button—that is, catch up on a zillion-and-one e-mails, and start collating all of the project ideas that piled up while we were banging out the Now the Hell Will Start screenplay. So we’ll outro with this gem from the great African Music Machine, […]
Tags:African Music Machine·Louisiana·music·Now the Hell Will Start
Granted, this was a pretty heavy day here at Microkhan—a bummer vibe perhaps not helped by our rare stab at outright earnestness. So let us make it up to you by ratcheting up the zany for our Bloomsday outro: Senor Coconut’s acid-merengue remix of Kraftwerk’s “Tour de France.” The source material is here, if you […]
Tags:Kraftwerk·music·Senor Coconut
It’s so hard to fathom why some talented folks decide to chuck it all in favor of more humdrum lives. Such is the case with the great Betty Harris, who recorded a bunch of outstanding soul sides in the 1960s, then mysteriously disappeared. The cut above was her last, and it’s a Microkhan favorite—an odd-yet-catching […]
Tags:Betty Harris·Connecticut·music
Gonna be a late start today, due to the impossibility of blogging while simultaneously making sure Microkhan Jr. doesn’t throw toys out our fifth-floor window. Back in the game as soon as he decides to nap; ’til then, please enjoy the above video of Ulaan Baatar’s finest buskers. The YouTube poster’s whole channel is actually […]
Right around the time this post goes live, we’ll be handing in Act Three of the Now the Hell Will Start screenplay—yes, the project we’ve been using as an excuse to get away with weak blogging for much of the last month. A momentous occasion, and one we would have toasted with copious pints of […]
Tags:Dirty Dolls Lingerie·Ghostface·hip-hop·housekeeping·music·Now the Hell Will Start·Wu-Tang
