How in hell did I forget Coolio? I remember wanting to go upside his head with something heavy for being a humourless, dour prick over Weird Al's wanting to filk Gangsta's Paradise. As in, dude? You are really NOT all of that. Shut up and let the boy make you even more money.

True, true. But I loved the song, though, and the hip-hop kids around the Long Beach Poetry scene were totally into it.

edit: holy SHIT, I remember the Prophets! Wow. Lot of water under the bridges between now and the Panther years.

I've seen them play once -- I was literally the only white guy at their Long Beach show, and I was working for their label. Nicest guys, and MAN they showed the upstart little rappers how it was done -- no sampling, no scratching, just blistering energy and percussion. Absolutely amazing show.

Oh, excellent site! Thanks, Cindy. Marked. Also, Cristal was to the fore in NY. It's okay - I've had it before, what with the whole rock and roll thang - but there are champagnes I like better that cost a lot less. Gimme a 1990 Pom or a 1995 Veuve any day. I think this one is really popular just because it's so damned pricey. It's less about the bubbly than it is about the bling, the equivalent of those damned gold chains and diamond studs.

I loved the song

So did I. I got violently earwormed with it and had to listen to Nirvana to make it stop. But that's what made it so filkable.

Mmm, Veuve. A FOAF who works for a wine distributor introduced me to that stuff. Yummy.

Congratulations on an excellent deal/project, deb! I can see a hip-hop thriller being hugely popular. It seems like a natural genre for teh setting, but I haven't heard of anything of that description before. Out of curiousity, are you setting it in the 90s or today?

Out of curiousity, are you setting it in the 90s or today?

The initial event - a girl named Nona is killed by a single shot as she's coming out of an LA club with a bunch of Industry heavies - happens in the late nineties. A lot happens today, with him looking back.

Basically, the shooting is solved at the end of book three, which would be about eight years later. And it can't be proven.

I like it. Quite a lot.

Can I make a library plug for your research on the contemporary mid-90s stuff? SFPL (and Berkeley or somewhere) will have magazines like Vibe - which is my memory of the big hip-hop magazine from the 90s - in backfile, either in paper or on microfilm (SFPL certainly says they have Vibe from 1993 on, but I can't make enough sense of their record to see what format the older ones are in). You can read about 1995, for example, as it happened, see what was hot each week and month. Rolling Stone I'm sure would be available though of course it's much more mainstream, and there may be other smaller magazines I'm not aware of, but your sources would know titles and then you can send the librarians happily scurrying to find them for you.

Signed, geeky about library research.

wrong thread...

_t, my friend Danyel was editor for Vibe for awhile; she still contributes.

editing because that's flea, not _t...

Deb, do you have any Lauryn Hill, or Fugees? I think you'd like The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, which I have and and YSI to you.

Tep, alas, I loathe Lauryn Hill. She drives me nuts. I do love her guitarist, though; Wyclef can seriously play.