20 year old R&B songstress, model, fashion designer Phlo Finister (www.phlofinister.com) sits with us for her first interview ever on camera. She talks about her vision for the new youthquake movement, switching up styles and being that poster girl.

Been wanting to interview Hit-Boy for a while, such an impressive resume for sur a young producer. In this interview he describes the beginnings of the Surf Club, linking up with Polow da Don & Chase N Cash, getting on the Drop The World joint with Lil Wayne, AND linking up and working with Kanye and producing the beat for the Christmas joint. 

Nardwuar is the king of interviews hands down and this possibly is his best one (at least if you are a Currensy fan), thanks to a very responsive Curren$y who is growing so much as an artist. SXSW just confirmed to me Spitta's one of the tops. I was also able to attend a panel by Nardwar but I have to say with his last interviews at SXSW he's showing he's on top of his rap game and killing us ALL!

Second part of the Diddy intronisation... Odd Future "the future of the music industry" storming on stage, watch how Diddy hands the mic over, and the now infamous episode of Tyler getting hit by a bottle and demanding the culprit to hand himself over to the wolves (OFWGKTA). And please admire this front row point of view footage, I feel like I was able to capture the action quite clearly. 

While it may take a while before we feature OddFuture because dixit Tyler "i hate being under that westcoast hip hop La thing, that shit is corny to me." I ain't mad at him, I thought I'd share this skate video because..... it's really really good.

Laughter just barely overtakes the beats tripping out of his house as Exile opens the door. He’s been working on his rap album, the one he’s been making since 2007, during the same time he and Blu were making “Below the Heavens.” Of course, with the exception of one beat, he’s also doing the production.

Exile lives both sides of the coin. Seeing him socially, you can almost imagine him as a happy-go-lucky fourth grader, playing some prank and then running off to hide and stifle his giddiness.  But in the studio, Fashawn, for whom Exile produced last year’s “Boy Meets World,” says Exile is all business. He agrees. “I know exactly what I want, and I know how I want it, and I’ll tell you.  First I’ll have to get to know you so you won’t hate me.  Or I’ll have to be quiet when I first work with you and let you do what you wanna do.  Even if I don’t like it, I can’t tell you right off the bat or it could fuck up the relationship.  It’s like getting to know a woman; you can be yourself, but you gotta do a little dance.” 

He walks into his lab, a small room with one wall almost covered in old black and white photographs yellowing at the edges.  “That’s my dad,” he says.  “I’m gonna take his reels, and I’m gonna make a whole album from that. And I’m gonna re-release my dad’s stuff.  It’s a great way for us to work together while he’s gone.”

The son of a musician, Aleksander Manifredi didn’t see his father from age six to thirteen—he was “fucking around with drugs, so it wasn’t the right environment”—but he’d give Aleksander drum lessons when he did see him.  His mother, who was in and out of mental institutions, partied with his sister, a “crazy goth chick” who did a lot of drugs, which left Aleksander to be the grown-up in the house.  His father passed away when Aleksander was only eighteen, and still bitter. 

He recalls a story about Blu: “I remember this one time, Blu was having family problems, and he really wanted to see his mom.  He was in Long Beach, so I went there and took him to his mom’s- he didn’t have her number, but he just knew he had to see her.” But Blu’s mother didn’t live there anymore, so Exile drove him all the way back to Long Beach. “At this point, it was like, five in the morning.  And this song by Johnny Cash comes on, about his father, and I’m just crying in the car. And I came home, and I made this song about my dad, and it’s one of my favorite songs on the album.”

It seems his past—the early responsibility, youthful resistance and retrospective reconciliation—has influenced his affinity for uncovering some of the best, and youngest, talent to emerge from the West Coast in the past few years.  Fashawn was 20 when he and Exile made “Boy Meets World,” and he and Blu began working together when Blu was 19.  Both albums they created are reminiscent of backsliding gospel-choir anthems, or lullabies a 1940s chanteuse might’ve sung in a sad, soul-soaked club—all overlaid with Exile’s signature MPC trickery.  

Exile envisioned replicating the sort of mentor relationships that early East Coast pioneers established.  “I wanted to help bring up the West Coast, find artists like DJ Premier or Marley Marl would do,” he says, “Blu’s style grew and developed before my eyes.  Back then he was an artist who didn’t really have any solid material, and I saw potential in him.”  But he aims for symbiosis in the studio, growing with and building a relationship with the artist. “I’m not religious but I definitely believe in putting what you want out there and it coming to be.  Sometimes I’ll pray to have a connection with the people I’m working with.”

With statements like that, you can’t help but consider Exile an embodiment of the 16th century origin of the word “artist.” Yes, he’s realistic, jokingly asking how he can get his name on everybody’s lips, but he’s also deliciously removed from the current commerciality and dizzying pace of hip hop. He hates the Internet because it demystifies so much. He’s not really sure what’s going on in L.A.’s concert/club scene.  He asks what Wiz Khalifa is “teachin’ the kids.”  

He began doing graffiti when he was thirteen, and just churned out a piece in Germany on his recent European tour. Scattered around his house are “found object” sculptures he’s made.  And his spirit has the youthful curiosity and buoyancy of an artist: He suddenly leaps up from the porch and lopes off to retrieve a little sculpture with which he wants to play show-and-tell. 

“All I want to do is to do what I do and make people have fun, a more positive time,” he says simply. Without a trace of arrogance, he completes the thought, “In every way, really, I’m doing exactly what I planned on doing, making classic records for the West Coast.”  Correction: He’s making artistic records for posterity. 

Just found the track "Average Joe" from Kendrick Lamar's upcoming O.D., which is set to drop September 15th.  Seeing him destroy The Roxy earlier this month and hearing him obliterate this song, I'm convinced he has a gun for a tongue.

Add this to the news that Jay Electronica's pushing for Act II: Patents of Nobility to drop on his birthday, the 19th, and September's looking like December.  

Thanks, Keep It Simple Stupid.  

Got 'em runnin' scared, tryna catch up/57 Heinz Gregory the dance legend/make music I'm steppin' out at a major event/best dressed in attendance and I never left the house

The Big Easy-turned-Big Apple rapper is no newcomer, already having been signed with both classic NOLA labels, No Limit and Young Money/Cash Money Records.  I first heard him sounding a lot like Lil' Wayne on the 2006 track "Where Da Cash At," a rather uninspired ode to pimpin'. 

That was obviously an ill fit.  After he and Weezy went their separate ways, he hustled on his own until he and former Roc-A-Fella Damon Dash started hanging out.  Curren$y so roused him, Dame decided to resurrect the label and make "Pilot Talk," Curren$y's third studio album, its first release. Though Curren$y added the dollar sign to his moniker, he's now much more interested in gettin' high than runnin', uh, honeys.  

His "This Ain't No Mixtape" was easily one of the best, and out West, most slept-on, rap releases of 2009. Playing with a "J.E.T.S.ons" theme (yes, a lifestyle mantra, "Just Enjoy This Shit"; yes, a riff on the cartoon; yes, I told you he likes the green), the album's production is spacey, breezy, and even a little jazzy.  Pack Curren$y "The Hot Spitta's" easy southern drawl in, and "This Ain't No Mixtape" was so sticky hipsters and 'heads alike had trouble removing it from their iPods.  

The Don Cannon-produced mixtape, "Smokee Robinson," dropped on the eve of the Saints' Super Bowl win and was downloaded 96,000 times in 14 hours. That portends well for the almost-completely Ski Beatz-produced "Pilot Talk" (Monsta Beatz and Nesby Phips contribute two minor-key, other-worldly beats for Spitta to snap on), a dreamy trip whose cloudy haze is cleared by Curren$y's easy lyrical flips.  

And those Creative Control videos just keep comin', and comin' clean.  

Follow Spitta's hilarious similes/metaphors on Twitter until "Pilot Talk" is released July 13th. It's Chex Cereal, indeed.