You better not be too exhausted after your raunchy Chinese Valentine's romp as this weekend gets off to a banging start with the arrival of some old school rap legends in Taipei. Tonight at Luxy the rap group Naughty By Nature will be spitting rhymes and dropping beats. The famous trio from New Jersey comprises MC Treach, MC Vinnie, and DJ Kay Gee.
The New Jersey rap group was spotted by Queen Latifah, and was signed up with Tommy Boy, after which they dropped the hit single OPP ("Other People's Property"). This immediately made them rap superstars and unlike a lot of other groups they were able to stay street and achieve pop status, continuing to release hits like Hip Hop Hooray and Hey! Ho!. Problems arose in the group and DJ Kay Gee decided to leave and concentrate on his production career. Fortunately, even with this loss, Naughty By Nature still had the skills to create hot tracks.
The Vinyl Word has got some good news and bad news this week on the rap front. First, old school legends Public Enemy won't be turning up this week so don't believe the hype. They were supposed to turn up this Wednesday at MoS, but the gig has been postponed. Now the good news: On Aug. 26, someone who isn't old school will be rocking MoS, namely N.O.R.E..
PHOTO COURTESY OF LUXY
Tonight MoS will be featuring DJ Backside -- so-called because she has a nice ass. She is also known for her ability to keep the club hyped and being the first lady on DJ Rolo1-3's (founder of the legendary Pirate DJ) new crew, Core DJ Family. DJ Backside also runs the radio show The Hot Spot on 106 KMEL in the US. Guest starring tonight will be US DMC Champion DJ Imperial.
Saturday night at Luxy will be Hybrid, a night of progressive beats and house by DJ Reason and DJ Kaoru. DJ Reason has released such vinyl works as The Toolz Press and DJ Kaoru won the first IRON DJ series.
This Saturday will also feature the return of G-Club to MoS. G-Club is made up of Gerald Elms, Dan Tait, and Shovell. Gerald Elms is the producer/DJ of the group, and known for being involved with Roger Sanchez and DJ Disciple, plus helping remix the likes of Mary J. Blige and Sophie Ellis-Bextor. Dan Tait is the technically skilled DJ in G-Club and Shovell, a percussionist, has worked with the likes of M-People, Chemical Brothers, and Primal Scream. Unfortunately he's an Arsenal fan.
For all you people out there who were disappointed by the typhoon ruining Aquaboogie 3 last week, there's supposed to be a party at Daxi Beach this weekend. But don't bank on it because it looks like another case of rain stopping play.
This month the government ordered a one-year block of Xiaohongshu (小紅書) or Rednote, a Chinese social media platform with more than 3 million users in Taiwan. The government pointed to widespread fraud activity on the platform, along with cybersecurity failures. Officials said that they had reached out to the company and asked it to change. However, they received no response. The pro-China parties, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), immediately swung into action, denouncing the ban as an attack on free speech. This “free speech” claim was then echoed by the People’s Republic of China (PRC),
Exceptions to the rule are sometimes revealing. For a brief few years, there was an emerging ideological split between the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) that appeared to be pushing the DPP in a direction that would be considered more liberal, and the KMT more conservative. In the previous column, “The KMT-DPP’s bureaucrat-led developmental state” (Dec. 11, page 12), we examined how Taiwan’s democratic system developed, and how both the two main parties largely accepted a similar consensus on how Taiwan should be run domestically and did not split along the left-right lines more familiar in
Many people in Taiwan first learned about universal basic income (UBI) — the idea that the government should provide regular, no-strings-attached payments to each citizen — in 2019. While seeking the Democratic nomination for the 2020 US presidential election, Andrew Yang, a politician of Taiwanese descent, said that, if elected, he’d institute a UBI of US$1,000 per month to “get the economic boot off of people’s throats, allowing them to lift their heads up, breathe, and get excited for the future.” His campaign petered out, but the concept of UBI hasn’t gone away. Throughout the industrialized world, there are fears that
The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) controlled Executive Yuan (often called the Cabinet) finally fired back at the opposition-controlled Legislative Yuan in their ongoing struggle for control. The opposition Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) acted surprised and outraged, but they should have seen it coming. Taiwan is now in a full-blown constitutional crisis. There are still peaceful ways out of this conflict, but with the KMT and TPP leadership in the hands of hardliners and the DPP having lost all patience, there is an alarming chance things could spiral out of control, threatening Taiwan’s democracy. This is no
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