Monday, May 3 2010

Happy Birthday James Brown

It was a fun weekend at The Rub at Southpaw as well as doing The Rub in Philly. What sucks is that someone crashed into my poor car, totalling it. So my car is now dead, a hunk of metal, and that is my Sobb Story…

Looking on the bright side, today is the born day of The Minister Of New New Super Heavy Funk, James Brown. The world of music would not be the same were it not for him of course, and my DJing wouldn’t be what it is today without question. But all that is a given and I don’t even need to speak on it. But for real I figured this would be a good time to re-up my James Brown mix that I did for the Mad Decent Podcast a few years ago. Basically it was something that I put together really quick, comprised solely of joints that I loved that fall under The Godfather’s umbrella. It’s real short, clocking in under 30 minutes, but I could have gone on for weeks making this mix. The homie Diplo asked me to do this for his podcast, but I’ll let him put it in his words:

“James Brown died on Christmas, and I couldn’t do any more podcasts til we did it about him. Cause James Brown gave birth to this podcast and he gave birth to everything in modern music – nothing is the same after he was here and now he’s gone and I feel bad for people in heaven that have to rewind through his life cause it must be pretty damn nuts. This mix of JB songs and production credits is under 30 minutes and I thought I was listenin’ to it for 3 days before it ended. Mix was done by Cosmo Baker… he’s a true hero to me. I used to go to Fluid on Monday nights to check Cosmo at his party called Remedy… It was on fuckin’ Monday nights and it was packed thick and Cosmo would drop his signature style of hip hop and classics and weird stuff no one would expect but would turn it out… I recognized Cosmo as that dude from the On The Go video that was in 9th St. Records and bought Funk INC. and McCoy Tyner LPs for like a dollar (that was crazy staged cause I know that dude behind the counter was mad cheap!)… At The Remedy I saw everyone from Phill The Soulman to Cash Money to MF Doom to DJ Drama up in there playing… I even slipped Pharrell a copy of Newsflash on 12” on a Monday. So JB gave birth to everything in modern music then Cosmo was a dude that gave birth to DJs like me. I had to ask him to do this mix cause he was a more then a mentor… his James Brown science is like Mr. Wizard… As you can listen these days Cosmo is killing it as a member The Rub in BK and doing loads of parties from Calgary to Tel Aviv on the weekends so I suggest you go to see him play or you will lose a little bit of your soul…” – Diplo, 2007

01 The Land Of Milk And Honey With James Brown by cosmobaker