E.D.I Blogs (BlackBalled?)

At last our newest album has dropped and is well received by anyone who’s heard it! Needless to say I’m proud of it and of my OUTLAW brothers (Hussein Fatal and Young Noble). We dedicated the better part of two years to making the "KILLUMINATI" series and "PERFECT TIMING", all 3 sounding completely different from one another. Not one song used twice, not even a single verse was recycled. It is widely known amongst hip-hop journalist and consumers alike that we are making some of the best music of our careers! Unfortunately for us we are held to a much higher standard than your average artist. People expect us to be as good as or better than Pac, a feat no artist has accomplished to date, in my opinion. And if we can’t do that, at least reinvent the wheel or solve famine in Africa! Lol! Still we press on in spite of it all. We were and still are super-excited about the album and the possibilities (i.e. sales,touring etc). We feel like we did our job, as far as getting the word out to our core base. We even got a little help from "the man" himself, when the whole "ashes" thing hit the blog-sites, XXL, all over the internet, shit even TMZ (TV version) had ya boys on their show! I say that to say this is the most visual we’ve been in years, and for us that’s a big deal because we normally shun the spotlight that most rappers crave. We’d rather be in the studio, doing shows and spending time with our families, but we understand it’s apart of the game so it’s nothing! Interview after interview, 1 dumb question after another…don’t matter, "lets just do it so we can spread the word about this great album we’ve put together!" is what we say to our selves. 


          What’s frustrating is the lack of support we’ve received from our distribution cohorts! Now let me give y’all a brief tutorial on how this shit works: Labels ship according to hype, and Soundscan history. Our album was not as hyped as LIL WAYNE’s or GAME’s of course. We are not on Interscope or Cash Money, two labels we were affiliated with in the past. If we were, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. Fontana shipped based on our last "album" which was actually a "mixtape" or "street album" {WE WANT IN}. Our last official album was "OUTLAW4LIFE 2005 A.P." That project was well on its way to being another 100,000 plus seller (independently) until Bayside/33rd Street recs went bankrupt and subsequently out of business. I haven’t checked in a while, but I believe it’s between 40 and 50 thousand scanned right now. Fontana shipped 1500 pieces of "Perfect Timing" to Bestbuy….W.T.F?!??!? To reach Billboard you have to scan at least 4K!


Itunes and Amazon.com are some of the retail web-sites that have it, in the states or Canada, but we have a HUGE international following and do to no fault of our own "Perfect Timing" is not available for those consumers yet! Fontana placed blame on some mix-up in their legal department (hmmm..) They had over 4 weeks to do it! Now I know the game has changed. Mom and Pop record stores are virtually a thing of the past. THEY were some of our biggest supporters, by the way! Wherehouse, Sam Goody, Tower (who actually owned Bayside) and record stores alike are all GONE. What are we the consumers left with? Wal-mart (clean versions only!) Target, Best Buy, HMV, FYE or the internet. Perfect Timing is available for FREE DOWNLOAD like it’s a mixtape on web-sites that I won’t mention,(I’m sure yall know about em already!)


We don’t have the money or the time to chase em all down, so it is what it is….And yall wanna know why this is the "last" album??? Smh. We give out free albums and muthafuckers don’t respect the grind enough not to illegally download the shit you want em to pay for! We got hip-hop web-sites that traditionally hate on anything we do (one even said Scarface’s verse on "pushin on" is better than the whole album,ouch!) Most reviews have been positive though. (see XXLMAG.COM’S)


          We plan on shooting a video really soon, something that can go on MTV or BET. Even with that you have to be be careful because they sometime require that your single be getting radio spins. We’ve been getting some love in that department, though. Ironically, mostly, in NewYork (shoutout KaySlay) and satellite radio (shout to Sway from MTV and Shade45 for the love). Fontana and the company who invested in this project (krude) assured us that they are going to "step there games up". Hopefully they keep their words and we will start to see more, in terms of marketing and promotion for "Perfect Timing"… This is how we feed our families, so yea it’s important to sell records, but honestly when we started this album our goal was to put out a great hip-hop CD and I feel like we accomplished that, even if you gotta go on a scavenger hunt to find it!


And still sometimes I have to wonder…"are we blackballed?" TIME WILL TELL.


To our families and supporters…


SALUTE!