All photos by Evan Daniels for A Thousand Grams.

As the week wore on, we started to get our proverbial groove back. We had the daily routine down (shower, show schedules and RSVPs, NYU panels, food, show 1, show 2, show 3...) and could get anywhere in the city with relative ease. Hip-hop was beginning to make more of a showing as well, with showcases from Nah-Right/On-Smash, Fools Gold, Plug Research and more. Outside the Nah Right show was a madhouse, with an inteminable line and several marquis names being rejected from the door. After chatting up Plain Pat and Maestro out front for a bit, we decided to chuck the deuces and leave the show to every other hip-hop blog you read. This was a good move, because we ended up meeting up with Exile across town.

 

To complement our earlier breakdown of hip-hop's latest dynamic duo, here's some decent video (and poor audio) of their performance from CMJ. More exclusive coverage coming soon.

All photos by Evan Daniels for A Thousand Grams

We're no strangers to New York. Although ATG has roots in Texas, Evan and I first met in The City That Never Sleeps as bright-eyed young interns for CBS and Time Inc. all of one year ago. Since then, we've stayed in an empire state of mind, and CMJ was the perfect opportunity to swoop back in, take the city by storm and hold it down for hip-hop like we love to do.

Our last day at the 'Roo came with a sense of accomplishment. Most festivals don't last four whole days. Most festivals aren't sprawled out over 700 breathtaking acres (in all manners of speaking) of farmland, transforming each day into a series of impromptu treks. Most festivals don't require you to survive on port-a-potties and "alternative shower solutions" for the better part of a week. But Bonnaroo was all those things and much more, and by the time we were preparing to leave Manchester, it felt a little like heading for the barracks after a battle: bittersweet. (editor's note: I've never been in a battle.)

Few artists in any genre have the good fortune or fortitude to keep the embers of their cultural relevance aglow two decades into their career. Fewer still, can claim to have fundamentally changed an art form, and then survived to see their innovations imitated, warped, forgotten, and payed homage to all while continuing to create, raise a family and lead a relatively normal life. With It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, one of the most celebrated hip-hop albums of all time, Chuck D and his inimitable side-kick, Flava Flav, crystallized for the masses the acute aggression and political unrest that had stirred below the surface of hip-hop since its inception, and became synonymous with a black power movement still very much alive today.

We caught up with the surprisingly congenial icon at the 2009 Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival as he was preparing to perform It Takes a Nation in its entirety, and talked with him about longevity in hip-hop, the meaning of Barack Obama, and why Jay-Z's crusade against autotune is so misguided.

I'm not gonna lie: our first night camping at Bonnaroo was pretty much a disaster. A rainstorm descended on the grounds and wiped out our fragile camp site, forcing us to pack ourselves like sardines into our borrowed white Buick Regal for the night. Thankfully, Day 2 of the fest brought solace from the urban north, with a line up of enough stellar New York City acts to take one's mind off the ruggedness of the outdoors. We caught up with some of our favorite Brooklyn bands in the hip-hop deficient early part of the day, and were more than pumped for the evening's highlights: legendary NYC heavyweights The Beastie Boys and Public Enemy. 

All photos by Evan Daniels for ATG

The first day of our 'head-first excursion into the heart of Manchester, Tennessee was a dizzying balance of highs and lows, consisting of more hours of driving than we care to remember, a credentialing snafu, an arduous attempt to pitch a tent with little-to-no requisite experience and, finally, a couple hours of high-energy, toe-touching, tag-teaming hip-hop.

This music is so perfect for summer.

I'm getting ready to head up to my home-away-from-home in Austin, TX, where I'll be flying out to Nashville to rendezvous with my road-trip entourage en route to Manchester. And People Under the Stairs, who will be playing at Bonnaroo Thursday, make just the right kind of hip-hop for sunny afternoons like this one: Part UGK meets De La Soul, part MURS covering "It Was a Good Day..."

We've been working on this one for a minute, and it's high time we let the word out. A Thousand Grams has selected Bonnaroo, the sprawling, four-day musical mayhem in the middle-of-nowhere Tennessee, as the second major festival of its inaugural year...

On the official showcase tip, well, go read the official schedule.
But lots of you aren't sure where to start. It's an overwhelming wave of criss-crossed events.
ATG's starting ace, Cass Luskin, is kind enough to reveal his personal conference schedule. Like the Big East's, it's a long and brutal trek, but makes time to encompass every noteworthy hip-hop artist here in Austin on official business.