Nice video, BS boys.  We still love our Cali winters though.

LL-homie filmmaker Eli Jacobs-Fantauzzi makes his Bay Area premiere of his new documentary, Homegrown: HipLife in Ghana.  The film is a decade’s account of Ghanaian hip-hop crew VIP’s growth as artists and rise together as a collective.  Check out the trailer above!

Jan. 3rd Bay Area Preview Screening of HomeGrown: HipLife In Ghana
Q&A w/ Eli Jacobs Fantauzzi, Director
V.I.P (vision in Progress), HipLife Stars Live from Ghana
Intersection for the Arts
446 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
You Got 2 Chances…
Matenée Movie @ 3pm Q&A @ 4pm
Movie @ 8pm Q&A @ 9pm
(suggested donation $5-$10)

EDIT: Yesterday we listed the screening as taking place TODAY (12/30) but that’s actually the LA screening.  SoCal heads stand up!

Dec. 30th Los Angeles Preview Screening of HomeGrown: HipLife In Ghana
Q&A w/ Eli Jacobs Fantauzzi, Director
V.I.P (vision in Progress), HipLife Stars Live from Ghana
The Downtown Independent Theater
251 South Main Street
Los Angeles, CA 90012
movie @ 8pm ($8)

iLL Homie Dandiggity is a poet, artist, teacher, PR manager for sneaker company PLSTK, and an extraordinarily wonderful being with a vibrant energy! AND he’s the only guy we know who can rock a Dragonball Z afro without fail. This month, he’s featured on, Design Rehab, a blog by Creative Strategist Barry Lai. You can find him under a segment appropriately entitled Healthy Hustle, featuring entrepreneurs and young hustlas like our Dandiggs!

Check out his feature HERE!

There are few people who get a shorter end of the stick than those born the day after Christmas.  Besides probably getting a massive amount of regifts and “this is for your birthday aaaand Christmas” presents, it must be difficult and confusing to follow Jesus’ unbirthday.  However, if you’re Bay Area super producer/emcee/sweater vest wearer/iLL-homie Trackademicks, you simply brush it off and make a slappin’-ass joint for yourself and throw it up on YouTube.  And with all the work he’s done for Phonte, J*Davey, and Lyrics Born, a whole video dedicated to yourself is well deserved.  Happy birfday homie!

Check out more fre$h coast livin at Tracka’s blog.

Oy, and if you’re in the Bay on Tuesday, come to PST to celebrate!

BONUS: His mixtape that you’ve hopefully already had since April

We finally got some pix from the Keys 2 the City show we did with Blu and U-N-I!  From all different angles, son!  Check them out after the jump.
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All right Barack, we did everything we could to get you in office, but only under the condition that we’d keep it real with you when you fucked up, and yo, you fucked up when you invited anti-gay rights pastor Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at your inauguration.  WORD???  Did you not notice that there were kind of a lot of people who were upset about Prop 8 passing?  Letting the grand wizard of homophobia kick off your presidency might not be exactly the kind of response we were hoping for from you.

For us commonfolk, there’s an online petition that’s circulating to convince the Obama transition team to give Warren the boot.  Hopefully Barack listens and switches that fool out.  That’s some change we can believe in.

Sign the petition here.

Bambu’s long-awaited video for his new single “Crooks & Rooks” is out!!!  Check it out at his OkayPlayer feature and show some love!

Back in November the prediction was made that Erykah was going to beat Jill in the dance-off at Devil’s Pie.  Well, in the end we learned that the real winners were the people who attended and had a great time!  Okay, that was incredibly canned and corny…UNLIKE THE FREE DOWNLOAD OF THE MIX AVAILABLE HERE!!!!!!

Hey, it’s the end of the year…wittiness will resume in 09.

Normally when someone uses the word “eclectic” to describe something, you expect it to involve things along the lines of raw beet sandwiches and knitted boxer shorts.  However, anything that involves our iLL-homie Dandiggity is automatically fresh, which overrides all.

He’s been holding it down for the past few months as a writer for the superdope blog Blind I, and earlier this week he dropped Eclecticuts Vol 4., probably the best collection of hip-hop, soul, and house that you’ll hear for the rest of the year. Ooooooooooooh it’s so bangin!

Click here to download, and click here for the tracklisting.  HOt diggity!

It’s been nearly a year since we launched the Papa Lo Down, following our publicist Paloma Belara’s one-stop guide to the independent artist’s hustle.  As we go into the second year, we’ve given the page a design makeover, and have a sharper focus on all the lo-down you need to get it poppin!  (okay that was lame, but the NEW PAPALODOWN.COM isn’t!)

*Keep it locked, we’ll be redesigning Adrizzle.com, Rubyisill.com, and *gasp, could it be???* Dahlak and Nico shall be joining the blogosphere.

2009 will be all about making green, in all ways imaginable.  As we here at iLL-Lit go deeper into exploring the concept of Natural Electricity, we’ll be showing y’all the best ways to keep the planet and yourselves extra fly.  So even though our UC Berkeley homies at Maganda Magazine are coming kinda intense with their logo of an earth wrapped in roots sprouding a clockworking battery that blossoms a flower with a fist in the middle (see?  intense.) we’re all about it!

They’re accepting literary, audio, visual, and film submissions for their upcoming issue entitled GENERATE.  And just to show how much they’re all about saving energy, their December 19, 2008 submission deadline really means January 20, 2009.  That’s right, act like the future is now!  Or now is the future?  How about you just click the jump to get submission details and to see that intense-ass battery-fist-flower-power thing.
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Not saying that rolling up your sleeves, wearing stylish fedoras, or smoking ambiguous cigarettes makes you black…just calling bullshit on the recent debates surfacing on whether Barack is really black because he’s multiethnic.  Ohhh boy.  Are we seeing some sort of backwards one-drop rule being implemented here?? Are governmental organizations going to stop passing him flyers now because he’s a halfy?  Don’t make us increase our Youtube hits on your ass!!

But it’s true, now that Barack is our president despite naysayers insisting that his blackness disqualifies him from being so, they’ve resorted to trying to disqualify his blackness, on the basis of his white mother.  Just be careful guys, remember what happened the last time someone talked about a black presidents’ mama:

As we continue to show you the things in this world that feeds our brains and souls for our own work, may we present to you the 2nd season premiere of Flight of the Conchords!  Arguably the funniest show on television, Conchords does a great job of weaving music with theatre and comedy, which has given them the ability to translate their show from a celebrated BBC radio series to a highly-accliamed HBO television series to a Grammy-award winning music group to a great live show.  Another great example of cats who are bending not only genres, but also artistic mediums!  Check out their variations of below, first from the HBO series and then from the live show:

Last year we participated in The Hybrid Project at Intersection for the Arts, a theatre series aimed at expanding the scope of spoken word through the implementation of music, dance, and theatre.  This year, the tradition continues with a hottttttttttt lineup!  This coming weekend, our iLL-homies Jose Vadi and Jason Mateo will be presenting brand new pieces.  We’ll be there Thursday…come through and kiiiiiick it!

The Hybrid Project
@Intersection for the Arts
446 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA
Buy Tickets