Murs & Terrace Martin "We On Melrose" (2011) = Number one Hip-Hop release at Amoeba
Amoeba Music San Francisco Hip-Hop Top Five Week Ending March 4th 2011
1) Murs & Terrace Martin ...Are Melrose (Murs 316)
2) Livewire I Pledge Alliegance To The WIre (LivewIre Records)
3) Strong Arm Steady Arms & Hammers (Blacksmith/Element 9)
4) Beans End It All (Anticon)
5) Trackademicks State of the Arts (Honor Roll)
Thanks to Luis at Amoeba San Francisco for this week's Hip-Hop Top Five chart that features the brand new, fun & upbeat
collaborative release from Murs and Terrace Martin on the Murs 316 label, Murs & Terrace Martin Are Melrose. On this concept album these two Left Coast talents morph into a pair of party animal alter egos with tales of partying on such tracks as "We Are Melrose" (above), "Fresh Kicks," "We Got Sumthin (feat. Coi Mattison)," and "Ding Dong (feat. Uncle Chucc)."Amoeba Music San Francisco Weekly Hip-Hop Top Five Chart: 08:27:10
1) Messy Marv and Berner Blow (Blocks and Boat Docks) (Bern One Entertainment)
2) Exile Am/Fm (Traffic)
3) Camu Tao King of Hearts. (Fat Possum/Def Jux)
4) Cut Chemist Sound of the Police (A Stable Sound/Soul Kitchen)
5) Tha Dogg Pound 100 Wayz (Gangsta Advisory Recordingz Inc)
I would not be surprised if you were to look up the word prolific in the dictionary -- at least in the Bay Area rap dictionary -- and a picture of Messy Marv popped up beside the definition. The longtime Bay Area rapper has been consistently releasing new material at such an astonishing rate that it would appear that he never sleeps, never leaves the studio. If you recall just two short weeks ago the new Messy Marv overseen SF collection Thizz City was on the Amoeba Top Five chart. Now this week Marv is back with another new collaborative release, Blow (Blocks and Boat Docks), which shot straight to number one at the San Francisco Amoeba. Released on Bern One Entertainment, this collaboration with Berner features Messy Marv on every track, and is a sequel to their joint project Blow, released late '09. As the title and album cover above implies, this more of that drug slanging school of rap music.
This Is The Life: How The West Was One, the award winning documentary about South Central Los Angeles' legendary early nineties hip-hop spot The Good Life Cafe, is being screened tonight at 8PM (Monday, March 9th) as part of Amoeba's Monday Movies @ Space15Twenty at 1520 N. Cahuenga Blvd. Tomorrow, March 10th, is the official release date of the film on DVD, but it will be available today exclusively at the Amoeba screening. I just recently watched This Is The Life and must say that it is a truly excellent hip-hop documentary, one that tells its story with careful, loving detail. That story is of the 
special place that was the Good Life Cafe, a health food restaurant in South Central, that began holding hip-hop nights once a week at a time when NWA, the area's biggest rap ambassadors, were at their peak.
But the type of hip-hop being performed (a lot of it freestyled) at the Thursday night hip-hop gatherings at this South Central cafe could not have been further from the prevalent macho-gangsta posturing of Niggaz With Attitude (NWA).
special place that was the Good Life Cafe, a health food restaurant in South Central, that began holding hip-hop nights once a week at a time when NWA, the area's biggest rap ambassadors, were at their peak.But the type of hip-hop being performed (a lot of it freestyled) at the Thursday night hip-hop gatherings at this South Central cafe could not have been further from the prevalent macho-gangsta posturing of Niggaz With Attitude (NWA).
Started by the conscious African American woman Bea Hall and her musically minded son R. Kain Blaze with the objective "to shun the pervasive West Coast gang culture of the time and cultivate a robust,
progressive artist community," the hip-hop venue was not only insistently non-violent, non-sexist and non-discriminatory, but it also had a strict no cursing policy. This policy, which surprisingly was embraced rather than resented by nearly everyone, resulted in a higher level of creativity in the music. 
Last week the label Illegal Art did the world a great favor and released a nicely packaged comprehensive retrospective of the best of hip-hop cut-n-paste pioneer Steinski -- something that has never been easily available before, and not all nicely presented together like this.
But this great collection beautifully showcases the legendary producer who, both along with studio partner Double Dee and as a solo artist, directly influenced so many artists, including most notably DJ Shadow, Cut Chemist and Coldcut.
Steinski: What Does It All Mean? 1983-2006 Retrospective is something that belongs in every music collection. The 2 CD set comes with a nice booklet
and liner notes by Hua Hsu that include Steve "Steinski" Stein's comments on each of CD 1's fourteen tracks. Included are the three legendary "Lessons" with Doug DiFranco (Double Dee) -- the first one originating as an 1983 entry in a Tommy Boy Records remix contest -- plus the artist's most important solo outings and remixes including the JFK assassination-themed "The Motorcade Sped On," recorded under the name Steinski & The Mass Media that came as a track on a free 7" EP compilation given away with UK mag NME in 1987. The second CD is the artist's relatively recent Nothing To Fear mix made for BBC London's Solid Steel radio show a few years ago, with song titles for all 28 tracks in the CD booklet.
