SDCXTRA RADIO

Thursday, August 11, 2016

Skully



Originally from the Philadelphia area (Norristown PA). Skully found himself influenced and inspired by the sound of 90's music.  East coast and West coast hip hop was predominant to his musical foundation.

The south had yet to emerge as the powerhouse it is today, other than a few groups such as Outkast and SoSo Def.

At the age of 19, Skully moved south to The Greater Tampa Bay FL area.  Immediately upon touching down in Florida Skully was fortunate to link up with a production group who is now known as Grammy award winning producers JUSTICE LEAGUE which allowed him to maintain his lyrical integrity through out the years.

Skully continued to compose music with JUSTICE LEAGUE up until they landed their deal in '06.  At that point, Skully found himself back to the drawing board, however with his dedication to his craft and his ability to connect with other individuals who shared his same passions he was able to help form the movement known as Vegaz Boyz.

Skully was inspired by the constant night life and the "All in" lifestyle of "Vegas" as well as those in his inner circle, so what started as an inside joke became a staple in the inner city night scene for the extravagant parties and non stop indulgence.

Now fueled by the energy from his surroundings, Skully began relentlessly recording and was determined to be the voice of his peers.

A spew of recordings eventually caught the attention of GIG Music Group and through negotiations and mutual goals being discovered, Skully made a wise decision to join forces with GIG Music Group to help take his music career to the next level of success.....

Sunday, May 1, 2016

Bukka White


White was born south of Houston, Mississippi.[2] He was a first cousin of B.B. King's mother (White's mother and King's grandmother were sisters).[3] He is remembered as a player of National resonator guitars. He also played piano, but less adeptly. He typically played slide guitar, in an open tuning. He was one of the few, along with Skip James, to use a crossnote tuning in E minor, which he may have learned, as James did, from Henry Stuckey.
White started his career playing the fiddle at square dances. He claimed to have met Charlie Patton soon after, but some have doubted this recollection.[4] Nonetheless, Patton was a strong influence on White.
He first recorded for Victor Records in 1930.[5] His recordings for Victor, like those of many other bluesmen, included country blues and gospel music. Victor published his photograph in 1930. His gospel songs were done in the style of Blind Willie Johnson, with a female singer accentuating the last phrase of each line.[6]
Nine years later, while serving time for assault, he recorded for folklorist John Lomax. The few songs he recorded around this time became his most well known: "Shake 'Em On Down," and "Po' Boy."
Bob Dylan covered his song "Fixin' to Die Blues", which aided a "rediscovery" of White in 1963 by guitarist John Fahey and Ed Denson, which propelled him into the folk revival of the 1960s. White had recorded the song simply because his other songs had not particularly impressed the Victor record producer. It was a studio composition of which White had thought little until it re-emerged thirty years later.[7]
White was at one time managed by experienced blues manager Arne Brogger. Fahey and Denson found White easily enough: Fahey wrote a letter to "Bukka White (Old Blues Singer), c/o General Delivery, Aberdeen, Mississippi." Fahey had assumed, given White's song "Aberdeen, Mississippi", that White still lived there or nearby. The postcard was forwarded to Memphis, Tennessee, where White worked in a tank factory. Fahey and Denson soon traveled to meet White, and White and Fahey remained friends through the remainder of White's life.[8] He recorded a new album for Denson and Fahey's Takoma Records, whilst Denson became his manager.
Later in his life, White was friends with the musician Furry Lewis. The two recorded an album (mostly in Lewis's Memphis apartment), Furry Lewis, Bukka White & Friends: Party! At Home.
One of his most famous songs, "Parchman Farm Blues", about the Mississippi State Penitentiary (also known as Parchman Farm) in Sunflower County, Mississippi, was released on Harry Smith's fourth volume of the Anthology of American Folk Music, Vol. 4. His 1937 version of the oft-recorded song[9] "Shake 'Em on Down," is considered definitive; it became a hit while White was serving time in Parchman.[10]
White died in February 1977 from cancer, at the age of 67, in Memphis, Tennessee.[1][11][12] In 1990 he was posthumously inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame (along with Blind Blake and Lonnie Johnson). On November 21, 2011, the Recording Academy announced that "Fixin' to Die Blues" was to be added to its 2012 list of Grammy Hall of Fame Award recipients.[13]
The Led Zeppelin song "Hats Off to (Roy) Harper", on the band's 1970 album Led Zeppelin III, was based in large part on White's "Shake 'Em on Down."[14] "Custard Pie", a song on Led Zeppelin's 1975 album Physical Graffiti, also references "Shake 'Em on Down."[14]
The 1963 recordings of White's song "Shake 'Em on Down" and spoken-word piece "Remembrance of Charlie Patton" were both sampled by electronic artist Recoil (mostly a one-man effort by Alan Wilder of Depeche Mode) for the track "Electro Blues for Bukka White" on the 1992 album Bloodline. The song was reworked and re-released on the 2000 EP Jezebel.
In 1995, White's "Aberdeen, Mississippi" was covered as "Aberdeen" by guitarist Kenny Wayne Shepherd on his debut album, Ledbetter Heights. It reached number 23 on the Billboard (North America) Mainstream Rock Tracks in 1996.[15]
On January 26, 2010, Eric Bibb released Booker's Guitar (TEL 31756 02) through Telarc International Corporation after becoming inspired by the hidden stories Bibb felt through holding White's famous guitar.
White's song "Parchman Farm Blues" was recorded by Jeff Buckley, and was released posthumously on the bonus disc of Buckley's album Grace: Legacy Edition.

Friday, April 8, 2016

Eddie S G



As owner and founder of The Forward Progress Sound (TFPS), composer, music producer, audio engineer, songwriter, and multigenre artist, Eddie S.G. is simply a music geek. As a kid growing up in Queens, NY, his passion for music began with his parents and in school. Rock ‘n’ Roll, Salsa, Merengue, and R&B were always in the air around the house, as poetry and playing clarinet in the school band became his hands-on access to creativity. Trouble at home forced him to leave at age 16. From that point on, music became more than just something in the air to him. It became his outlet. He started inking his thoughts, rhyming them, and then turning them into lyrics.

Eddie S.G. signed up to join the Marine Corps in his senior year of high school and left for bootcamp after graduating. After a 7-year career and one year as a Boeing contractor living in the UK, he decided to return home to pursue a higher education in music. He graduated from the Institute of Audio Research with a diploma in Audio Engineering and Music Production in 2010. Afterwards, he attended Fordham University, earning a Bachelor of Arts in Music in 2014. In October 2014, he founded TFPS and began releasing music under his label.

Although Eddie S.G.’s first love is Hip-Hop, he is also passionate about Classical, R&B, Rock, House, EDM, and New Age and tries to listen to everything in-between as well. He takes pleasure in creating music, not worrying about blurring the lines of genre. The music that pours from his heart is dark and deep. Whether with lyrics, instrumentation, or both, he prefers speaking through music, making his sound very personal. This is especially so since he is rather quiet otherwise.

Monday, March 28, 2016

D.W. Griffith

D.W. Griffith

There has been a tendency in modern film scholarship to view the narrative form of motion pictures as a development of an overall production system. Although narrative film was and continues to be strongly influenced by a combination of economic, technological, and social factors, it also owes a great deal to the individual artists who viewed film as a medium of personal expression. Chief among these innovators was D.W. Griffith. It is true that Griffith’s self-cultivated reputation as a Romantic artist—“the father of film technique,” “the man who invented Hollywood,” “the Shakespeare of the screen,” and the like—is somewhat overblown. It is also true that by 1908 film narrative had already been systematically organized to accommodate the material conditions of production. Griffith’s work nevertheless transformed that system from its primitive to its classical mode. He was the first filmmaker to realize that the motion-picture medium, properly vested with technical vitality and seriousness of theme, could exercise enormous persuasive power over an audience, or even a nation, without recourse to print or human speech.
Griffith began his film career in late 1907 as an actor. He was cast as the lead in the Edison Company’s Rescued from an Eagle’s Nest (1907) and also appeared in many Biograph films. He had already attempted to make a living as a stage actor and a playwright without much success, and his real goal in approaching the film companies seems to have been to sell them scripts. In June 1908 Biograph gave him an opportunity to replace its ailing director, George (“Old Man”) McCutcheon, on the chase film The Adventures of Dollie. With the advice of the company’s two cameramen, G.W. (“Billy”) Bitzer (who would become Griffith’s personal cinematographer for much of his career) and Arthur Marvin (who actually shot the film), Griffith turned in a fresh and exciting film. His work earned him a full-time director’s contract with Biograph, for whom he directed more than 450 one- and two-reel films over the next five years.
In the Biograph films, Griffith experimented with all the narrative techniques he would later use in the epics The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916)—techniques that helped to formulate and stabilize Hollywood’s classical narrative style. A few of these techniques were already in use when Griffith started; he simply refined them. Others were innovations Griffith devised to solve practical problems in the course of production. Still others resulted from his conscious analogy between film and literary narrative, chiefly Victorian novels and plays. In all cases, however, Griffith brought to the practice of filmmaking a seriousness of purpose and an intensity of vision that, combined with his intuitive mastery of film technique, made him the first great artist of the cinema.
Griffith’s first experiments were in the field of editing and involved varying the standard distance between the audience and the screen. In Greaser’s Gauntlet, made one month after Dollie, he first used a cut-in from a long shot to a full shot to heighten the emotional intensity of a scene. In an elaboration of this practice, he was soon taking shots from multiple camera setups—long shots, full shots, medium shots, close shots, and, ultimately, close-ups—and combining their separate perspectives into single dramatic scenes. By October 1908 Griffith was practicing parallel editing between the dual narratives of After Many Years, and the following year he extended the technique to the representation of three simultaneous actions in The Lonely Villa, cutting rapidly back and forth between a band of robbers breaking into a suburban villa, a woman and her children barricaded within, and the husband rushing from town to the rescue. This type of crosscutting, or intercutting, came to be known as the “Griffith last-minute rescue” and was employed as a basic structural principle in both The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance. It not only employed the rapid alternation of shots but also called for the shots themselves to be held for shorter and shorter durations as the parallel lines of action converged; in its ability to create the illusion of simultaneous actions, the intercut chase sequence prefigured Soviet theories of montage by at least a decade, and it remains a basic component of narrative film form to this day.
Another area of experiment for Griffith involved camera movement and placement, most of which had been purely functional before him. When Biograph started sending his production unit to southern California in 1910, Griffith began to practice panoramic panning shots not only to provide visual information but also to engage his audience in the total environment of his films. Later he would prominently employ the tracking, or traveling, shot, in which the camera—and therefore the audience—participates in the dramatic action by moving with it. In California, Griffith discovered that camera angle could be used to comment upon the content of a shot or to heighten its dramatic emphasis in a way that the conventionally mandated head-on medium shot could not; and, at a time when convention dictated the flat and uniform illumination of every element in a scene, he pioneered the use of expressive lighting to create mood and atmosphere. Like so many of the other devices he brought into general use, these had all been employed by earlier directors, but Griffith was the first to practice them with the care of an artist and to rationalize them within the overall structure of his films.
Griffith’s one-reelers grew increasingly complex between 1911 and 1912, and he began to realize that only a longer and more expansive format could contain his vision. At first he made such two-reel films as Enoch Arden (1911), Man’s Genesis(1912), The Massacre (1912), and The Mothering Heart (1913), but these went virtually unnoticed by a public enthralled with such recent features from Europe asQueen Elizabeth and Quo Vadis? Finally Griffith determined to make an epic himself, based on the story of Judith and Holofernes from the Apocrypha. The result was the four-reel Judith of Bethulia (1913), filmed secretly on a 12-square-mile (31-square-km) set in Chatsworth Park, Calif. In addition to its structurally complicated narrative,Judith contained massive sets and battle scenes unlike anything yet attempted in American film. It cost twice the amount Biograph had allocated for its budget. Company officials, stunned at Griffith’s audacity and extravagance, tried to relieve the director of his creative responsibilities by promoting him to studio production chief. Griffith quit instead, publishing a full-page advertisement in The New York Dramatic Mirror (Dec. 3, 1913), in which he took credit for all the Biograph films he had made from The Adventures of Dollie through Judith, as well as for the narrative innovations they contained. He then accepted an offer from Harry E. Aitken, the president of the recently formed Mutual Film Corporation, to head the feature production company Reliance-Majestic; he took Bitzer and most of his Biograph stock company with him.
As part of his new contract, Griffith was allowed to make two independent features per year, and for his first project he chose to adapt The Clansman, a novel about the American Civil War and Reconstruction by the Southern clergyman Thomas Dixon, Jr. (As a Kentuckian whose father had served as a Confederate officer, Griffith was deeply sympathetic to the material, which was highly sensational in its depiction of Reconstruction as a period in which mulatto carpetbaggers and their black henchmen had destroyed the social fabric of the South and given birth to a heroic Ku Klux Klan.) Shooting on the film began in secrecy in late 1914. Although a scriptexisted, Griffith kept most of the continuity in his head—a remarkable feat considering that the completed film contained 1,544 separate shots at a time when the most elaborate of foreign spectacles boasted fewer than 100. When the film opened in March 1915, retitled The Birth of a Nation, it was immediately pronounced “epoch-making” and recognized as a remarkable artistic achievement. The complexity of its narrative and the epic sweep of its subject were unprecedented, but so too were its controversial manipulations of audience response, especially its blatant appeals to racism. Despite its brilliantly conceived battle sequences, its tender domestic scenes, and its dignified historical reconstructions, the film provoked fear and disgust with its shocking images of miscegenation and racial violence. As the film’s popularity swept the nation, denunciations followed, and many who had originally praised it, such as President Woodrow Wilson, were forced to recant. Ultimately, after screenings of The Birth of a Nation had caused riots in several cities, it was banned in eight Northern and Midwestern states. (First Amendment protection was not extended to motion pictures in the United States until 1952.) Such measures, however, did not prevent The Birth of a Nation from becoming the single most popular film in history throughout much of the 20th century; it achieved national distribution in the year of its release and was seen by nearly three million people.
Taking the lead in protesting against The Birth of a Nation, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which had been founded six years prior to the film’s release, used the struggle as an organizing tool. The powerful impact of Griffith’s film meanwhile persuaded many black leaders that racial stereotyping in motion pictures could be more effectively challenged if African American filmmakers produced works more accurately and fairly depicting black life. For their first effort, The Birth of a Race (1919), black sponsors sought collaboration with white producers but lost control of the project, which was judged a failure. Other aspiring black filmmakers took note of the film’s problems and began to make their own works independently. The Lincoln Motion Picture Company(run by George P. Johnson and Noble Johnson) and the writer and entrepreneurOscar Micheaux were among those who launched what became known as the genre of “race pictures,” produced in and for the black community.
“Intolerance”: still shot from temple of Babylon sequence [Credit: Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art/Film Stills Archive, New York]Although it is difficult to believe that the racism of The Birth of a Nation was unconscious, as some have claimed, it is easy to imagine that Griffith had not anticipated the power of his own images. He seems to have been genuinely stunned by the hostile public reaction to his masterpiece, and he fought back by publishing a pamphlet entitled The Rise and Fall of Free Speech in America (1915), which vilified the practice of censorship and especially intolerance. At the height of his notoriety and fame, Griffith decided to produce a spectacular cinematic polemic against what he saw as a flaw in human character that had endangered civilization throughout history. The result was the massive epic Intolerance (1916), which interweaves stories of martyrdom from four separate historical periods. The film was conceived on a scale so monumental that it dwarfed all its predecessors. Crosscutting freely between a contemporary tale of courtroom injustice, the fall of ancient Babylon to Cyrus the Great in 539 bc, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day in 16th-century France, and the Crucifixion of Christ, Griffith created an editing structure so abstract that contemporary audiences could not understand it. Even the extravagant sets and exciting battle sequences could not save Intolerance at the box office. To reduce his losses, Griffith withdrew the film from distribution after 22 weeks; he subsequently cut into the negative and released the modern and the Babylonian stories as two separate features, The Mother and the Law and The Fall of Babylon, in 1919. (Although ignored by Americans, Intolerance was both popular and vastly influential in the Soviet Union, where filmmakers minutely analyzed Griffith’s editing style and techniques.)
It would be fair to say that Griffith’s career as an innovator of film form ended withIntolerance, but his career as a film artist certainly did not. He went on to direct another 26 features between 1916 and 1931, chief among them the World War I anti-German propaganda epic (financed in part by the British government) Hearts of the World (1918), the subtle and lyrical Broken Blossoms (1919), and the rousing melodrama Way Down East (1920). The financial success of the latter made it possible for Griffith to establish his own studio at Mamaroneck, N.Y., where he produced the epics Orphans of the Storm (1921) and America (1924), which focused on the French and American revolutions, respectively; both lost money. Griffith’s next feature was the independent semidocumentary Isn’t Life Wonderful? (1925), which was shot on location in Germany and is thought to have influenced both the “street” films of the German director G.W. Pabst and the post-World War II Italian Neorealist movement.
Griffith’s last films, with the exception of The Struggle (1931), were all made for other producers. Not one could be called a success, although his first sound filmAbraham Lincoln (1930), was recognized as an effective essay in the new medium. The critical and financial failure of The Struggle, however, a version of Émile Zola’s L’Assommoir(The Drunkard), forced Griffith to retire.
It might be said of Griffith that, like Georges Méliès and Edwin S. Porter, he outlived his genius, but that is not true. Griffith was fundamentally a 19th-century man who became one of the 20th-century’s greatest artists. Transcending personal defects of vision, judgment, and taste, he developed the narrative language of film. Later filmmakers adapted his techniques and structures to new themes and styles, while for Griffith his innovations were inextricably linked to a social vision that became obsolete while he was still in the prime of his working life.

Post-World War I European cin

Friday, January 15, 2016

Long Beach Playaz


Long Beach Playaz are born and raised in the LBC.  Rapper PDO is a hip  hop Icon in the underground rap industry.  He has been a major part of the westcoast hip hop muvement. Pdo started raping in the 80's and gained fame in the music industry working for KDay radio with the mix masters.

Back in those days hip hop was a positive exspression from within the community.  PDO considers himself a black nationalist  and takes pride in the fact that his music has messages tried inside them to awaken the black community.

Hank Norman aka Maccillicious was a football standout at USC.  He set many records and was suppose to be a star in the NFL.  But Maccillicious had drug and women issues. He did not show up for the bowl game and was black balled from the NFL.  Life landed Maccillicious in the state Penn, Where he began to write and learn the art of raping.  Locked up with Sugar Free, Maccillicious praticed his craft and entertained all the inmates.

In 2014 The Long Beach Playaz was created.  PDO and Maccillicious made there first song which was there breakout song:Somebody real is hard to find.  This song was promoted by Streetpace promotion and landed #24 on the billboard charts.  Take this oppertunity to listen to the Long Beach Playaz, The new sound in the music business
copyright - Tunecore
nbh records... pdo(ascap)
youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/user/PDOLongBeach


#THELONGBEACHPLAYAZ latest music Video performed in Long Beach California on the E/S where RAP Music Video Moguls where produced such as Snoop Dogg, Tray Dee, Warren G, Nate Dogg R.I.P and the Dove Shack this Video is featuring two of the hardest working rappers in Long Beach the King PDO and Vicious Maccalicious from #THELONGBEACHPLAYZ!!!