If you’re a regular here, you know we’ve been pushing the music of Crown City Rockers, as well as the solo releases from MC Raashan Ahmad, for quite some time. Of course the primary reason has always been the simple fact that the music is great, and sorely overlooked by the critical elite. The whole crew should be even bigger than they are.
But even with the music aside, Raashan’s an interesting cat, always a pleasure to hang out, shoot the shit, and work with. We filmed a talk Johnny Firecloud had with him backstage at our Rock For Justice Give A Damn benefit last month, and put it together with some live highlights from his solo set:
After Raashan’s music and approach is covered, he and Johnny get into a good little talk about the record industry, with a question both of us like to ask artists: Reality is ugly these days. But in a perfect world, what would a label do for the artist?
Raashan recently put together (with Oakland pride) this fun little small-budget video for Mobstar Life, the lead track from his brand-new release, Soul Power:
Soul Power is currently available through Antiquiet Releases, where you can stream the entire album for gratis, or purchase all (or some!) of it in MP3 (320k or VBR), AAC, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, or Apple Lossless!
This morning Raashan told us we can give another track away, so now you can grab Mobstar Life and Lambada for free!
By the way… Antiquiet Releases is powered by Bandcamp. They didn’t ask us to say anything on their behalf or anything, I just personally feel the need. The experience of working with them has been great, and all the feedback we’ve gotten so far on the purchasing process has been positive.
We very much look forward to putting more releases out this way, and we really hope Bandcamp catches on in the mainstream. If you’re as sick as we are of navigating horrendous, buggy, ad-cluttered MySpace profiles just to hear a song by a band you don’t even know if you like yet, or if you’ve ever actually tried to purchase anything from MySpace Music, you know we all need something better. And from where we stand, Bandcamp is lined up to be that killer. No ads, no fees, no handicaps- they truly empower artists to compete in the online market. They’re on our team.
[...] support from that show- Raashan Ahmad. His interview from the same night can be viewed here, and we’re still pushing his brand-new solo release via Antiquiet [...]