Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Freeness:: Ira Lee, Takaba & K'Naan

I don't know about you fine folks, but I'm still feeling fantastic about the Saints big win on Sunday night. Of course I've been a Saints for like 20 years, so perhaps the euphoria engendered by the feel-good story that is the Saints bringing a title to the city of New Orleans, that is still facing some well-documented challenges, has faded already for some. Not me though friend, this will keep me on a high for the foreseeable future.

Because of that, I'd like to spread some goodwill around like Saint Drew spreads the ball to his myriad of receivers. So then, some free hip hop is on tap for you. I've written about the unorthodox excellence of Ira Lee a few times in the past, but despite that exposure to our tens of regular readers, Ira is likely still flying way under the radar here in Canada. How does Ira plan to combat that? Quantity. In conjunction with Ryan Stinson and the Wack Blog, Ira Lee's retrospective mixtape 47 Minutes Too Long is available as a free download. It's a great introduction to what Ira sound, point of view, his history - I recommend it highly.

This might surprise you, but there's a lot of music coming out of Toronto. Despite the fact that we reside out here on the actual east coast of Canada (we love you Upper Canada, but people doing an "Eastern Canadian tour" than doesn't come out here still irks us), we hear from a lot of folks who are flying under the radar in T.O. One such label is indie hip hop outfit Takaba Records, which is the homebase for a group of folks who unabashedly to that real "underground" hip hop for those of us who still appreciate it. I've reviewed a couple of their releases, including a great album from Modulok, one of the main proponents of Takaba, but now you have a chance to hear what else the label has to offer. Cool Like The Pulse of a Corpse features a number of the folks currently associated with the label, from Canada and elsewhere (London, Tokyo, Latvia!), and it is available as a free download here.

As a finale, I'm going to point you towards The Messengers, a collab between K'Naan and J. Period that features new K'Naan songs that are made from the libraries of Fela, Bob Marley, and Bob Dylan. I've written about this project before, but not since they put out the full, final mix, so I figured I'd point you in it's direction, because it is really an impressive piece of work, both from the lyrical and production ends, so kudos to K'Naan and J.Period. So go check it out.