BLACK STAR
What a long strange trip it’s been.
After four days of battling the blistering heat, sleeping under the Tennessee stars, wandering about the 700-acre campground and singing along with musical legends, my body is begging for rest. My feet are worn, my eyes are slipping shut, my fingernails are buried under heaps of dirt. But I survived my first Bonnaroo, and live to tell the tales of an extraordinary weekend.
The eleventh annual Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival gathered more than 80,000 music lovers to the small town of Manchester, Tennessee for four days of peace, love, and music. While Woodstock may have pioneered the festival movement in America, Bonnaroo has taken over where the hippie extravaganza left off. Bustling with eco-friendly activism, throngs of naked bodies twirling around and mudslides forming across the farm, Bonnaroo successfully transformed technology-obsessed Americans into carefree and wild-spirited festi-lovers - if only for the weekend.
The small town of Manchester, Tennessee has welcomed the bulging crowds of Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival for eleven years - opening its quiet roads and grassy knolls to infiltration by hippies, hipsters, burnouts, ravers, rockers and every other category of music lovers imaginable. Giant RVs, cars stuffed to the brim with supplies and hitchhiking hopefuls invade the nearby Walmart en route to the festival, gearing up for four days of foregoing electricity and showers in favor of nature exploration and musical madness. Excitement flairs during the hours-long wait to the entrance, everyone eager to set up camp and start boogying down!
Hip Hop, arguably the defining music of our era in North America, has become a rising phenomena among the youth in Russia. Over the years the once popular punk gothic rock music genre that defined Russian youth, is now being fazed out by the Hip Hop, with its blends of lyrics and sampling of other genres. As seen in the United States, Hip Hop has played a major role as a muse for fashion as well as other areas of the arts. In the US, Performers/Hip Hop Artist such as Kanye West and Niki Minaj use fashion to distinguish themselves within the industry. Others in the case of West may even cross over and use experiences in Hip Hop as a muse for fashion design.
When: August 22nd, 2011
Where: House of Blues
3950 Las Vegas Boulevard
Las Vegas, NV 89119
Info:
Rock The Bells is an annual hip hop festival that orginally took place in Southern California only, but has since toured throughout the world. The concert features a lineup of high-profile alternative hip hop acts, often headlined by a more mainstream artist. The first festival was held in 2004, featuring a re-united Wu-Tang Clan, who performed 4 months before Ol' Dirty Bastard's death.
Entire tour schedule and tickets here!
This year's Rock The Bells 2011 lineup is absolutely ridiculous, in the best sense of the word. From seminal artists like Lauryn Hill, Nas, Raekwon, Cypress Hill, and Ghostface, to up-and-coming heads like Mac Miller, this epic lineup is inducing permanent goosebumps. This four-city run festival may just be the greatest hip-hop festival of the year.
Last summer Rock The Bells featured several headliner artists who performed their most legendary albums in their entirety for the first time in the history of hip-hop entertainment. Such artists included Snoop Dogg, A Tribe Called Quest, and the Wu-Tang Clan. This year the traditional will continue with Ms. Lauryn Hill performing her multi-platinum, multi-Grammy winning album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill and Nas performing his iconic debut album Illmatic with special guests AZ, Pete Rock, and DJ Premier. That act alone will be far and beyond mind blowing. Want more? You got it. Also set to perform full album sets are Cypress Hill, Mos Def & Talib Kweli (Black Star), and Raekwon & Ghostface. Summer madness has officially commenced.
Critically acclaimed rapper Talib Kweli is performing live Thursday at The Florida Room in the Delano Hotel. The performance is free with an RSVP to the Green Room Society at greenroom@arshtcenter.org and will also feature Agape, featuring Nadia Harris and DJ Maseo of De La Soul.
Kweli is probably best known for being half of the rap duo known as Black Star along with MC turned actor Mos Def. Recently he has teamed up with DJ Hi-Tek to for the group Reflection Eternal. The two released their second album, Revolutions Per Minute, in May.
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