Adriel has prepared a Kanye-style response:

It is beyond me why there are people who take the time to travel all the way to shows with unattainable expectations in their hearts and then who are going to be all pissy when what they get doesn’t fit into their tiny little world view of what should or should not happen at these shows… why not just STAY AT HOME AND REVIEW YOUR LEFTOVERS MOLDING YOU’D PROBABLY HAVE A BETTER TIME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  I’M ALL FOR CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM BUT I REFUSE TO PAY ATTENTION TO PEOPLE WHO CALL THEMSELVES PRESS AND THEN USE SARCASM AND ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT THE AUDIENCE TO PIECE TOGETHER A SORRY EXCUSE FOR A REVIEW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1!!!!!!!!  OF COURSE THERE WEREN’T A LOT OF PEOPLE AT THE SHOW… WHAT PART OF “EXIBITION SHOWCASE AT A SMALL VENUE ON A WEDNESDAY BY AN INDIE GROUP DOING A NONCONVENTIONAL GENRE IN A NONCONVENTIONAL FORMAT” DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND??????????????????????  DID IT MAYBE CROSS YOUR CLOSED-MINDED MINDS THAT YES SOME OF THE PEOPLE AT THE SHOW ARE FRIENDS (BECAUSE WE HAVE FRIENDS, DOY) BUT THAT MOST PEOPLE THERE ACT FAMILIAR WITH US BECAUSE THEYRE RETURNING FANS FROM PAST SHOWS AND PEOPLE WHO FEEL PERSONALLY CONNECTED TO US BECAUSE WE KEEP IT TRILL WITH OUR FANS?????……. IF YOU’RE LOOKING FOR A STADIUM OF PEOPLE WHO DON’T KNOW EACH OTHER MAYBE YOU SHOULD GO TO A MILEY CYRUS CONCERT I’M SURE IT WOULD BE RIGHT UP YOUR ALLEY. ILL-LIT IS DOING SOMETHING THAT IS OUT OF THE NORM, WITH NO OUTSOURCED PROMO OR MANAGEMENT SO EXCUSE US IF WE DON’T DRAW CHEETAH GIRLS NUMBERS… AND OF COURSE IF WE’RE GOING TO BE DOING HIP-HOP AND SPOKEN WORD THERE ARE GOING TO BE ASPECTS “TYPICAL” TO A HIP HOP AND SPOKEN WORD SET LIKE CALL-AND-RESPONSE. THERES A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THINGS THAT ARE CLICHE AND THINGS THAT ARE FOUNDATIONS.  NEXT YOU’RE PROBABLY GOING TO SAY THAT WE WEREN’T BREAKING BARRIERS BECAUSE WE WORE PANTS LIKE OTHER “TYPICAL” ARTISTS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!… BUT HAVE YOU EVER SEEN IN-DEPTH SOCIAL COMMENTARY DISCUSSED AT A CLUB STANDING ROOM ONLY???  DID YOU SEE ALL THE PEOPLE AT OUR SHOW LOSING THEIR FREAKING MINDS AND SPAZZING OUT ON THE FLOOR?????  DID YOU NOT NOTICE OUR FULL BAND THE HI-LIFES, LIGHTING, AND 60-OUT-OF-75 MINUTES WORTH OF MUSIC ALL THAT YOU FAILED TO MENTION????  NO SO SHUT YOUR TRAP!!!! AND THEOPHILUS LONDON IS THE FUTURE OF BROOKLYN HIP HOP AND WHAT YOU CALL “EMO RAPS” IS ARTISTIC TRANSPARENCY THAT’S DIFFERENT FROM THE BLING AND HOS AND MONEY TALKS THAT YOU PRESS PEOPLE HAVE BEEN HAILING AS GROUNDBREAKING FOR CENTURIES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
AND ALSO CAN I SAY THAT IF A SHOW’S DOORS OPEN AT 8 AND IT ENDS UP STARTING AT 10:30…………………………..THAT’S PRETTY DAMNED GOOD!!!!!  WHAT TYPE OF BILL COSBY HIP-HOP SHOWS DO YOU GO TO THAT START ON TIME?????????????  YOUR NEGATIVE ENERGY CAN’T STOP US FROM CHANGING THE UNIVERSE AND YOU CAN’T REVIEW AN EXPERIENCE, SQUIDBRAINS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Oyy, we’re finally getting around to digging up the footage from our recent Natural Electricity Tour!  Here’s the intro to our set, a new song written by Ruby, called “The Rebooty Shake.” The sound in the video’s a bit wacky but we really really liked the lights at this show.  More to come soon!

The Natural Electricity Tour is over!!!  And being that we did a horrible job keeping you updated while we were on the road, you can expect this site to be a wasteland for a bunch of footage, photos, rants, and west coast vs. east coast beefs for the next couple of weeks.

In the meantime though, check out Venus Zine’s review of our Crash Mansion show:

VENUS ZINE: iLL-Literacy’s Natural Electricity Tour is Bigger than Poetry in NYC

by Niema Jordan.  Thanks Coolhand Luke for the pic!

Well, we’re approaching the end of the Natural Electricity Tour, and like always, we’ve been doing a horrible job of keeping y’all updated on our excursions.  The good news is that we’ve got loads of photos and footage both on and offstage, and we’ll be sure to put you on game as soon as we get some time to go through it all.

In the meantime, here’s some footage of an impromptu jam session that broke out in the Boston basement of our iLL-homies Invisible Inc., who rocked with us at our Boston College show on the 10th.  Definitely one of the highlights of the tour, members of iLL-Literacy, the Hi-Lifes, and Invisible Inc. all falling into a cypher that listed until the wee hours of the morning.  This is part one, and we’ve got some mo fo yo ass in the near future.  Keep it locked!!!!

The good people at Oh Dang! Magazine rolled through to our show at Milk SF a couple weeks back and had some flattering words for us, and some AMAZING photos! Check out the feature here.

Also, check out the write up on Ruby and the release of Miss Universe, which we also celebrated that spectacular night!  Love to Phalary Long for the words and Suzy Salazar for the fresssshhhh pix.

We’re hitting NYC on Wednesday!  Besides the excitement of rocking our 2nd headline in the big city, we’re also juiced about seeing Theophilus London, the mad fresh dude from Brooklyn that’s rocking with us at Crash Mansion!  For a taste, check out his video “Higher” featuring Jesse Boykins III!  Also, make sure you do your research, and cop his free mixtape JAM!

It’s the last day to buy advance tickets to the show!  Cop them here.

Yo. Coming at you live from the telly in Atlanta. It’s 2:35 which means we were supposed to check out like 3 and a half hours ago, but that would’ve been pretty ambitious seeing that most of us were up til 7am, and even after that half the band decided to catch a late-night (a.k.a. early morning) bite at Waffle House before passing the fuck out.

Anyway, that has nothing to do with this post, but here’s the cover art for the next single off Dahlak’s Live from the Boondocks: Commencement, “Black Genius.” We’ll be dropping it for free download (appropriately) on November 4th for you to bump on your iPod while waiting in line at the polls.

LETS MAKE HISTORY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The East Coast tour is ON!!!!!!!!  And what are those strange concoctions in Dahlak’s hand and sprawled all over the bed, you ask?  Why, it’s “So Uncool,” iLL-Literacy’s very first ever street single!  Don’t YOU wanna hear it???

Well, we’ve been dropping so many freebies online lately that we figured we’ve got to have some kind of incentive for y’all to come out to our shows…so we printed up a gangload of CDs of “So Uncool,” which also features a couple of other exclusive never-before-heard tracks, as well as advanced copies of Dahlak’s Commencement, to be distributed exclusively to the good people who come out to our shows.  And oh yeah, they’re absolutely free.  What. A. Deal.

We only have a limited run, so get yo ass over to an iLL-Lit show pronto.  And Atlanta cats, you can kick the whole thing off by coming over to Morehouse tonight.  Yeeeee!

There are so many benefits to having Tezeta as our tour manager this fall!  Besides the fact that it means Ruby won’t be the only female in a van full of men burping and scratching themselves, she’ll also relieve us of the soundcheck/merch table/paperwork/get-into-performance-mode multi-tasking that we normally have to juggle minutes before our show!

Tezeta Stewartz has been an iLL-homie since the beginning, and is an incredible poet herself, taking our sister collective SickSpits to their first college national slam back in 06.  Now a part of the iLL-Lit family, she’ll be the boss mama making sure the Natural Electricity Tour runs as naturally as possible.  Just look at how on point her meeting minutes are, even in the midst of her computer being dead!

we posted this already but had accidentally put the 27th insted of the 17th (which is tomorrow, yo!). just in case you were planning on hightailing it to merced. yee!

Okay, so the big-label artists usually announce their tour dates before the tour starts, but, um, we’re not big-label artists.  Even still, we have a RIDICULOUS 12-CITY TOUR that’s hitting both coasts and we’d be oh-so-delighted to see you at one of these suckers!  For everyone else, worry not…we’re hoping to cover the whole map with our big ass tour in the spring.  Yee!

10.10 - Fresno, CA - Fresno State University - BEEN THERE DONE THAT
10.17 - Merced, CA - UC Merced - RSVP
10.26 - San Francisco, CA - Milk Bar - RSVP
10.30 - Atlanta, GA - Morehouse College - RSVP
11.01 - Williamsburg, VA - William & Mary - RSVP
11.03 - Harrisonburg, VA - James Madison University - RSVP
11.05 - Ithaca, NY - Cornell University - RSVP
11.07 - Swarthmore, PA - Swarthmore College - RSVP
11.10 - Boston, MA - Boston College - RSVP
11.12 - New York, NY - Crash Mansion - ON SALE SOON
11.13 - Providence, RI - Brown University - RSVP
11.15 - Syracuse, NY - Syracuse University - RSVP

*BONUS: DAHLAK SOLO DATES!!!*
11.04 - Middletown, PA - Penn State Harrisburg
11.14 - Tuskaloosa, AL - University of Alabama

All show details @ www.ill-literacy.com/shows

So unfortunately, scheduling our November east coast voyage hasn’t quite been the “have the venue booked 6 months in advance and sell out tickets in 14 minutes like Hannah Montana” story that we were hoping for, so apologies from iLL-Lit that we haven’t been able to announce the Natural Electricity Tour in a fat yummy orgy or dates.  But we DO have a number of shows that we’re oh-so excited about, so we might as well start listing them!

And what better city to represent le coast of the East than NYC?? (sorry, Lynchburg).  We’ll be hitting Crash Mansion 2 weeks into the tour, and rocking with Brooklyn’s finest, Theophilus London!  Tickets go on sale soon (and by “soon,” we don’t mean “not soon,” like we did for the tour date announcements).

Yeahhhhh we were going to announce the rest of the tour dates this week but we got some more bookings.  Next week.  PROMISE.  In the meantime, BEHOLD: flyers of all colors!

Fri 10.10, 7pm: California State University Fresno
Satelite Student Union (SSU), Fresno
$5 w/ student id, $10 w/o
Also featuring BXU & Ise Lyfe

Fri 10.17, 8pm: UC Merced
Lakireddy Auditorium, Merced
Free

Sun 10.26, 8pm: Milk Bar
1840 Haight St. San Francisco
$8 presale / $12 door / 21+
Also featuring the GetBack
Tickets @ brownpapertickets.com

PLUS: East Coast & Down South dates in a bit!

The Natural Electricity tour begins in just a few weeks, and we’ll be announcing the tour dates STUPID SOON! In the meantime, here’s a tiny tiny glimpse of what we’ve been whipping up every Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday in Sacramento–Dahlak and our drummer OJ working on the remix to “Hey Girl” off Dahlak’s Dual Consciousness: