Sub Pop’s recent signing of Seattle’s ascendant hip-hop collaborative Shabazz Palaces highlights an exciting, new example of the city’s legendary and ever-evolving music community. After self-releasing 2 EPs, Of Light and Shabazz Palaces, in 2009, the group quickly gained local acclaim, especially (and most noticeably to us) here within the Sub Pop offices. The Stranger, on Shabazz Palaces:
Shabazz’s almost subliminal messages are universal: ‘Find out who you are and see it/Find out what you are and free it/Find out who you love and need it/Find out what you can and be it.’ It’s a timely sentiment for Seattle hip-hop, which, after years of self-negating/hating or looking too much to the Bay Area and Brooklyn for direction, is enjoying a creative surge and homegrown industry that is—no bullshit—changing the landscape of Seattle music.
With their debut full-length expected and anticipated in 2011, Shabazz Palaces will keep busy playing shows (see below), receiving awards (see below) and turning heads (see them live).
“I think we both have a lot of love, appreciation, respect and energy for music and for each other. Recognizing the fact that business is necessary for maximizing exposure to it, I think we mutually feel that doing business is less a ‘job’ and more an opportunity to exercise those feelings in dope ass ways. Shabazz, we bring a distinct hip-hop mentality from left to Sub Pop, which has established itself wide and deep in r&r from that same field. So, it’s going to be cool to see what gets born from rolling together. And, of course, Seattle is the immeasurable muse, the backdrop, backbone, the foundation to how we all get down. So SP feels a lot of pride around this partnering-up as well. The people, the office, the deal, it all feels super plush. So stay tuned, it’s ’bouts to be on.”—the palaceer, Shabazz Palaces
“It’s in the initials. We SPs need to stick together—and we do. Seattle is our home and that means a lot to both parties. And we’re not stopping at both parties, our professional collaboration will undoubtedly inspire many more parties, with some choice SP music as the soundtrack. To put it more prosaically—but no less sincerely—we at SP are honored, humbled and psyched to have been given the responsibility of further introducing the world to the music of SP.”—Jonathan Poneman, Sb Pop Records.
More about Shabazz Palaces
Shabazz Palaces are the first music recipients of The Stranger‘s Genius Awards. The Genius Awards are given to outstanding visionaries in Literature, Film, Art, Theater, and for the first time ever, Music in the Seattle area. Shabazz Palaces will performing and accept their award at the Genius Awards Party, on September 17th at Seattle’s Moore Theatre.
Shabazz Palaces will also be performing on October 15th at New York’s American Museum of Natural History as part of “One Step Beyond,” a monthly series featuring live music and dancing at the Rose Center for Earth and Space. The series, presented by FADER, has featured performances from Kid Sister w/ Kanye West, Passion Pit, Moby, Animal Collective and more. Details available here.
For press inquiries please contact Kate Jackson at katej@subpop.com or Bekah Zeitz at bekahz@subpop.com
For management questions and artist info, please contact Jonathan Moore at jonjon21@gmail.com
Our beloved and preternaturally talented art director Jeff Kleinsmith and his equally highly-regarded and gifted partner (and a former art director here at Sub Pop) Jesse LeDoux are putting on an 11-year retrospective poster show which opens this Thursday in Seattle. Together, Jeff and Jesse make up Patent Pending Industries and this 11/100 show will assuredly be great. See you there!
11/100 Public Opening:
August 5, 2010: 5 PM – 10 PM
Design Commission
310 S. Washington St.
Seattle, WA 98104
More info:
Jeff Kleinsmith and Jesse LeDoux decided to start making screen-printed rock posters together 11 years ago while working together in the art department at Sub Pop Records. They named their endeavor Patent Pending and used it as a creative outlet and experimental conduit.
As world events have shown, a lot has happened in the past 11 years. The quick version is: They made some posters. Some magazines wrote some articles about them. They opened a screen-printing shop. They did a couple more posters. They attended some Flatstock poster festivals. They taught some classes on poster design. Jesse moved to Rhode Island and opened up Patent Pending East. Jeff started doing some movie posters. Jesse moved the Patent Pending East office to Japan (Patent Pending FAR East?). They did some more posters. They closed the screen-printing shop. Got a couple more Flatstocks under their belt. Broke out of their white paper rut and did a poster on stainless steel (but still did a version on white paper). Jesse moved back to Seattle. They did a few more posters. The long version includes running from creditors due to fraudulent pizza and porn transactions on the company card, trying to hide a 1000-lb paper cutter, run-ins with meth-heads, and a couple major motion picture cameos.
WHICHBRINGS US TO NOW (or this Thursday, to be exact), when Patent Pending will have a retrospective poster show at the Design Commission Gallery in Seattle’s Pioneer Square. Digging deep into the archives, this will be the first time their 11-year body of influential poster work will be seen in its (near) entirety.
11/100 Public Opening:
August 5, 2010: 5 PM – 10 PM
Design Commission
310 S. Washington St.
Seattle, WA 98104
We hope that it comes as no (or even relatively little) surprise that we here at Sub Pop Records are great fans of a few things that are not actually on or directly related to Sub Pop Records. And one of these things that we are great fans of is the Suicide Squeeze record label. The label is both our neighbor and friend and is right now in the midst of an unbelievable Decade Crushing Sale. Read all about it below, but mostly, you should get over there and get you some.
From Suicide Squeeze Records:
After all the party-ending, porch-collapsing celebration, 2009 is history. Dead and gone, and good riddance… Fuck 2009: the hardest year of our past 14 years. What can I say? The raw truth is that if it weren’t for our bands (their fans, and ours) we’d be dead and gone too. Yeah, the collapse of Touch and Go Records—our exclusive national distributor—hit pretty close to home.
As one year of transition and hope becomes another year, stretching into an unknown, yet blindingly exciting future… All you can do is take the deepest of breaths, and hold tight to the things you love the most…
Help us maintain what we love: our family of bands, and the beautifully diverse music they create. And help yourselves, too, to some of this past decade’s great albums and singles… Everything from our most recent release (Russian Circles “Geneva”) to the earliest 7-inches by Modest Mouse and Elliott Smith—massively discounted. Sound to discover, sound to share.
On November 13th Mudhoney will be playing at Neumos in Seattle with Brothers of the Sonic Cloth (Tad Doyle’s band) and Unnatural Helpers. The show is a celebration of Michael Lavine’s new book titled, Grunge. Michael has taken numerous photos of Sub Pop’s artists over the years and many of them go way, way back. The book is pretty frickin’ amazing. You can see some of them in this video. Check it out and come join us. It’ll be fun!
If you’d like to have a copy of the book autographed by Michael, you can catch him at the following locations:
Friday, November 13 there will be a signing at noon at:
Orca Books
509 East 4th Ave
Olympia, WA
360-352-0123
Saturday, November 14 at 4pm there will be a signing at:
Easy Street Records & Cafe
4559 California Ave SW # 200, Seattle, WA
(206) 938-EASY
On September 15th, we’re releasing a new Grand Archives record. It’s their second, it’s called Keep in Mind Frankenstein and, oh man, are we excited about it! We are also pretty excited about the special treat we have for you pre-orderers of this record. If you order the CD or LP (which comes with a digital download code) by September 15th, we’ll throw in a totally limited (and equally sweet) custom screen-printed Grand Archives bandana at no extra charge. This was something the band thought up and we got behind it immediately. Grand Archives want to give their fans bandanas? Then they get bandanas! We will also throw in Grand Archives and Sub Pop related buttons and stickers. So let’s do a quick recap: pre-order by September 15th, get a Grand Archives bandana, buttons and stickers. Plus, the handsomely packaged (the jackets for both formats feature some fancy, gold foil-stamped printing) CD and/or LP! Oh yeah, you’ll also get access to a stream of the entire record so you can listen to it right away. This is very, very good for you.
This Saturday night, Aug. 29, our friends in Kinski will be celebrating their 10-year anniversary! Details about the show are in the note below and you should certainly attend!
Hey Everyone,
We’re celebrating Kinski’s 10th anniversary as a band. Can you believe that?
We’re going to do it at a little bar in Seattle that has meant a lot to us over the years, the Monkey Pub.
The show is this Saturday, August 29th and it’s part of the N.U.D.E. festival. Also on the bill are our pals the Peripherals and Fortress of Victory.
There’s a bunch of other shows happening in the U. District that night as part of the festival too. We’ll be going on later, so swing on by.
And Kinski’s original drummer, Dave Weeks, will be sitting in with us on a couple of our older numbers from the early days.
We’ll also continue the celebration Sept 11th at Chop Suey with Lesbian.
