Yesterday we caught up with the charming lad Theophilus London at his videoshoot for “Humdrum Town” to film the very first episode of Ruby Says Hi, Ruby’s new show that’ll be airing in 2010 on our new video channel ILLAVISION (or ILLtv? we haven’t decided which overused/unoriginal moniker to go with yet).  Soooooo much craziness coming up this year, thou hast no idea!  Scroll down to check out some screenshots (which I’m not gonna front like I didn’t stylee jack from T. Enami) and enjoy the track below, featuring Jesse Boykins III who also happens to have a creepy moving picture below.

Theophilus London “Humdrum Town”

Ruby Says Hi coming to a screen near you, son!!!!

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Earlier this week I showed you how to build a basic press kit, which is basically a way to brag about yourself but through a humble PDF format.  Once you get your press kit out, hopefully you’ll start receiving (dun dun DUN!) press coverage.  However, unless you’re Kanye, you won’t always be followed around by photographers with cameras you can disassemble, meaning that oftentimes when bloggers, magazines, and other press people want to use pictures of you they’ll have to resort to swiping pixelated Myspace pictures of you playing beer pong.  Unless you have a photoshoot, of course.

Here are some tips for your photoshoot:

1. Hire a real photographer: Not just a friend who got an SLR camera for Christmas and carries it around parties to take pictures of chicks.  Now trust that if there’s anyone who is all about taking bootleg photos taken on a $60 digital camera and Photoshopping them until they look all artsy and usable, It’s me.   But if you’re serious about promoting yourself as an artist, I highly recommend dropping some dough on a professional photographer who understands stuff that’s kind of important, like lighting and focus.  Another benefit of a professional photographer with experience is that they can help cut through the awkward posses that musicians have a natural gravitation towards.

2. Step your style up: Just because your mom liked the way you dressed up for your cousin’s wedding doesn’t mean that it’ll hurt to summon the help of the likes of a stylist, makeup artist, blah blah blah.  I know I know…you’re thinking to yourself, Aww fuck that!  I gotz my own stylee, son!  Can’t no one tell ME how to look! (it’s true, your inner voice talks like a member of No Limit Records) And yes, many of you out there are very fly and can probably clean up nicely.  But if you’re not, it’s a good idea to humble up, lest you end up with 200 pictures of you posing in a white tee in front of a Cadillac you found parked in front of IHOP.

3. Tell a story: the point of a photoshoot is to display images that will capture interest, fascination, and a desire to write or learn more about you.  Remember that oftentimes people will see your photo before hearing your music (especially if you’re posted on a blog), and if they don’t recognize your name, the photo will often determine whether or not someone clicks the link at all.  When someone sees your shoot, they should be able to get a sense of your personality, emotions that your work incites, sense of humor, how seriously you take yourself, etc..  For example, if your shoot entails you just standing there dogging the camera, it might suggest that your song will bring back memories of a middle school yearbook.  I’m just sayin.

4. Have your files ready: As a graphic designer, there’s nothing more annoying than an artist sending me their Facebook thumbnail and telling me to turn it into a poster.  Make sure that your photos are high-resolution (300 dpi is best), and you have color options for print (CMYK) and web (RGB).  If you have no idea what I’m talking about, a professional photographer will.

5. Always credit the photographer!!!!: When working with a photographer (as well as graphic designers, engineers, other artists), the more you make it a mutually beneficial process, the better the results will be.  In the same way that you need a shoot to show off yourself, photographers prefer to take shots that they like as well and that they would want to put in their portfolio.  It allows them creative freedom, and also having you showcased in their portfolio will help publicize you more!

With all that said, I present to you iLL-Literacy’s most recent photoshoot, c/o the wonderful, magnificent, painfully talented Ariel Zambelich!  Great shots in her portfolio linked to her name, as well as on her running blog.  Besides her being kind enough to introduce us to Tilt, she’s also an amazing documentary photographer with a great eye for lighting and positioning.  We needed someone to capture the fact that we take our art seriously, but we don’t take ourselves too seriously, and her style was perfect for the tongue-in-cheek approach that we made on this one.  I know it’s a little…different, but

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Click the jump for the shoot.

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Non-captioned photo recap at The9thStreetParlor.

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Yesterday, in order to avoid the online-obsessiveness that comes with RELEASING OUR VERY FIRST SINGLE EVER, I decided to hop on the train to visit Chinatown, my place of ultimate peace and contentment.  Yes, that might seem  ethnically predictable, but find me someone who doesn’t find peace and contentment where they make homemade dumplings and custard tarts, and I’ll show you someone with a hole in their soul (except those who can’t eat custard tarts because they’re lactose intolerant…in that case they just have a hole in their digestive system) (I’m lactose intolerant but no one can take me from the custard.  NO ONE!) (Onward to the point…)

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The other day Nico was sitting on the stoop admiring our new Brooklyn neighborhood when someone walked by, stopped to look at our building, and said, “Wow…that used to be the drug building.  Crazy…”

AND SO IT BEGINS!!!!!!!!

Apologies, my iLL-internetlings, for the sparse number of posts in the past couple of weeks.  Rest assured that big teeeengs are headed this way.  As of last Monday our days have been filled with endless visits to Ikea, Home Depot, and Target.  I now despise them all.  If I see another Trones cabinet, I will hit somebody.

Ahhhh, the sweet smell of gentrification.  In our block people still get their chain snatched in broad daylight, but it gets to happen in front of a wine bar amidst people with berets and pugs.  About 25% of our meals have come to consist of Jamaican patties and Jameson, and we have collectively spent over 30 hours in department stores deciding on what kind of sponge to buy.

Meanwhile, our apartment, which was supposed to be finished on the 10th, continues to welcome construction workers at 7am to drill holes in the wall while we try to get past our hangovers (they’re only seldom).  If there’s any advice I can give you as a new New York tenant, it’s don’t pay the landlords ANYTHING until they’ve installed toiletseats in all the bathrooms.  If there’s any other advice I can give you as a new New York tenant, it’s don’t talk shit about your landlords on a high-traffic blog that everyone has access to.  Poof.

Oh, the things we do to save money.  In order to pay the least for shipping our stuff from Cali to NY, we packed all of our lives into a Uhaul in Oakland, drove it to Sacramento to pick up Dahlak’s stuff, and packed it at the pod company’s terminal, which was shipped to Brooklyn while we were at Bumbershoot.  When we got to NYC, we packed up all that shit into another Uhaul, and drove it to our spot, where we were met with the fun challenge of figuring out how to get our mattresses and boxsprings down the narrow stairway.

I don’t know how or why we thought moving into a new apartment would be as simple as shipping a few boxes of clothes and buying a toaster when we got there.  Our apartment is by no means run-down or shabby, but it’s ridiculously stripped down.  Like, no toilet paper rollers stripped down.  Like, exposed wires that have been painted over stripped down.  But alas, it’s the quiet of the storm before we release our music and go on tour, so we’ve been spending the past week getting our Martha Stewart on.  Here’s a picture of Nico post-hit-his-head-on-the-corner-of-the-cabinet.

While we waited for our rooms to get set up, we positioned our mattresses along the floor of the downstairs area (where our studio will be) like a slumber party.  A sawdust-filled, dusty-bedsheeted, 3-hours-of-sleep-per-night slumber party.  Wheeeeee!

Jumping on mattresses with open circuits sticking out of the ceiling = fun.

I don’t remember where or how I took the following picture, but we no longer have that mirror.  Or that guitar.  Or that bottle.

If there’s yet more advice I can give you as a new New York tenant, it’s don’t put one in the air before going to the Atlantic Mall for the first time ever, or else you might end up getting lost in this hallway:

So with the apartment filled with cardboard and bubble wrap, we begin to make home.  I’ll post pix when we’re done!

Come home Dahlak!  Weee meeeeeess youuuuu!  And also, we don’t want to move your boxes around anymore.  I tried to use one of your bins as a stepping stool and I broke it.  Sorry.*

*I’m not buying you a new one.

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A couple of weeks ago before we took off for NYC our homie Ariel Zambelich came through for the iB4the1-era’s first photoshoot.  More to come when our first single “Gentleman’s Kool-Aid” drops next month.  Watch it now.

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We have a love/hate relationship with St. Louis.  The thing about it is there’s a lot of love, but yo, there’s a whoooooooole lot of hate (we’re not the ones hating though, we swear!!).  Lets start with the love.

On Wednesday the good people of ABS and Connect4 at Washington University piled us into their cars and brought us to campus where they fed us with bomb ass Thai food and homemade cake with our name on it (this is the love part).

And you know what…if we had it our way, we’d always get to come in a day early and be fed noodles and dessert.  It was so much more than that.  Oh yes…controversial jokes, and as a very first, the organizers broke out in a cypher and freestyled for us!  And then they took us out to buy wine and demonstrated the stanky leg for us.  What more can a bunch o iLL-Literates ask for??

Well how about some RACISM??  The next day hotel management mistook Drizzle for a Chinese delivery boy, and then an old white lady complained to that same hotel management because we were on the lobby computers when she wanted to use them.  Guess whose side they took???? Hmmm.  Maybe the Sheraton just doesn’t like spoken word.  That must be it. (That’s the hate part)

Fortunately, the Washington University people saved us and brought us to campus where we had an incredible show opened up by the WU SLAM poets and The Middle Class, quite possibly the dopest new artists in all of Missouri.  And Missouri’s a huge state!  Well, it’s medium-sized.  But that’s still pretty damned good.

Shouts to Bryant Stewart, manager of The Middle Class, and iLL-Lit supporter for some time now.  And just so you understand just HOW fly these STLiens roll…………………………………

PENNY LOAFERS WITH AN ACTUAL PENNY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  Untouchable.

Aiight St. Louis, it’s been trill.  Off to bed we go.  BTW, we tried our best to online-check into our Southwest flights early, why are we still in the B section??????????

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Dahlak, Kid Cudi, 88-Keys, and some other guy discussing their John Singleton-directed remake of Ninja Turtles.

Via Prometheus Brown’s gallery

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From Drizz’s blog:

uggghhh we’re in chicago right now, fresh from our show at urbana last night and i had high hopes of photoblogging this trip as well as our times in austin for SXSW beginning tomorrow, but alas, amidst rush packing, recovering from anesthetics, nursing my eye, and just being a doofus, i left my camera at home.  so instead, here are some belated pix of our adventures at arizona state last week.

Check out more pix here.  We had a great time with the folks at UIUC too!  We couldn’t take pictures, but just look at the ones from AZ State and imagine everyone with sleeves.

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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.

From rehes:

From Oh Dang!:

From our own camera backstaaaaage:

BONUS: It’s Hopie!

Much love to IMEEM!

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