The other day Bay Area songstress Siaira Shawn over to bless our next installment of iB4the1 with some ridiculously amazing vocals.  You’ll be hearing her on two tracks, tentatively titled “4the1″ and “Fly Me Away.” In the meantime, do yourself some good by downloading her freEP, The In Between.

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Stay tuned my people, the message in our music is more encrypted than in our poetry, but I dare say it gets deeper.

iLL-Literacy “Gentleman’s Kool-Aid”

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Dude, how dope is my little sister??????  A few weeks ago Kim (or as I call her, “Mui Mui” or “Kimbellybutton” or “Burly Girl”) asked for a bunch of track names, logos, and photos for a school project.  Not thinking much of it, I slowly got her the stuff, and then now BOOM!  A more glorious physical inception of iB4the1 than I could have imagined.  Perhaps we’ll be seeing a version of this in the future when the iB4the1 boxed set drops??  Opps, did I say too much again?

Thanks for the great work, sis.

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Yowza.  I know the updates to this site have been sparse.  To all the iLL-homies who have hotness coming out these days before SXSW, my deepest apologies, I shall be back in drizzletron mode soon.  BUT IN THE MEANTIME!!!!!  Here’s some footage of “Pledge of Big Dahdee,” the piece that intros our entire show.  It’s coming up!  Ruby just landed in Austin.  I’m about to drop Nico off to the airport and then Dahlak and I hop on the plane at 6am.  I will work diligently to keep you all updated on our first official SXSW experience.  Enjoy the video, my dear internetlings….footage of the SXSW performance in all its HD glory coming shortly after our arrival!!

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Apologies, dear Internetlings, for the sparse posts lately.  I’ve been working on a short film that’s going to be our spring tour trailer and the intro to our live show!  In it, we explore spoken word in a more traditional sense than what was in iB4the1.1, but still very much about the funk.  At times I wonder if we’ve gotten too tongue-in-cheek with our message, but at the same time the traditional model of a political poem is something that I don’t see myself going back to any time in the near future.  I admire George Clinton for being a magician – for expressing thoughts that would often be considered heavy-handed in a way that incited people to dance, for being able to effortlessly transition from disco funk to spoken word, and for the ability to have fun the entire way through.  What better way to lead a movement?

Parliament “Chocolate City”

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iLL-Literacy ft. Passion “The HereNow”

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Being that Dahlak’s back in Cali for the holidays and the others have picked up dayjobs (damn you, economy!) I’ve been left to my own lonesome devices…literally.  So if you’re one of the trusty iLL-Literates who checked our site on your phone today, you might have noticed a new surprise.  Tadaaaaaaa!  A mobile app website!  Now you can soak up all your iB4the1.1 goodness anytime, anywhere (except for most Targets, where for some reason I can never get reception).

Developing a mobile version of your website is good for several reasons:

1. Today, more than 30% of online surfing is done on mobile phones. And even though I just pulled that statistic from my ass, I’m pretty sure it’ll be true at some point.  I just know that a hell of a lot of people do it now.  And being so, you want to make sure that you have an option for your site to be quick to load and easy to navigate.

2. You’ll be ahead. Despite the growing amount of mobile web surfers, the majority of sites haven’t caught up, which leads to a vast amount of sites that are logged onto via phone, and quickly met with frustrated visitors.  Why not be one of the refreshingly updated sites?

3. You won’t be behind. Which is different from being ahead.  Not only does having a mobile site get you with the times, it also ensures that anyone who comes on your site isn’t assed out.  Since most mobile browsers aren’t compatible with Flash, most audio and video players, and other things that people like to use to spice up their sites, they’re completely unusable for people who come on your site through their phone.  Each visitor is important, and you want to make sure they have what they need to support you.

4. You’ll have more creative freedom. If you’ve developed a site and have been keeping the mobilians in mind, you might opt to keep your website simple in consideration of all that.  But why do that?  Creating a mobile version is pretty simple, and allows you to go all out for your web followers.

So when our record dropped a couple of weeks ago, I went on the front page of our site and noticed that it was pretty much useless if not logged onto through a computer.  The videos didn’t work, no one could download or listen to the album, and the links were teeny tiny.  Look how sad my fingertips were.

Really, the main thing that we want people to be able to do on our site are to listen to our music, watch our videos, read our blog, and contact us.  The site as it was didn’t provide a decent solution to any of them.  Figuring out how to make this was much harder than actually doing it, so I thought I’d break it down as it worked for me.  Join me as I take you on the process, and hopefully together we can start a mini-mobi-revoluti.

1. Create a “mobile” directory. I made ours m.ill-literacy.com, but you can also create a subdirectory like www.yoursite.com/mobile or whatever.  This is the light version of your site that mobile users will be redirected to.

2. Keep your site light. Most mobile phones can’t read Flash, and would take forever to load heavy images.  Being so, build your site with the most basic HTML and CSS coding possible.  If you’re not a site builder, I recommend checking out Adobe Dreamweaver (which costs beaucoup money though) or Taco HTML which is a decent free alternative.  Save all your images as low to medium quality since it won’t make a difference on a mobile browser, and be as sparing as possible.  Remember that, at least right now, folks are surfing their phones more for function than extravagant design.

3. Keep your site simple. There’s not really any special coding required for your actual mobile site.  You just want to make sure it fits in the browser, is easy to navigate, and doesn’t take the visitor much to figure out, since they’re probably on the go while looking at your site.  I decided to model the iLL-site after an iPod to keep the navigation intuitive.

4. Size up. Based on the artwork for our music you already know that I hate following design guidelines.  But with mobile web technology still in its earliest stages, I had to pull back a bit to make sure that it was usable.  Since we have an iPhone house, I’ve been relying on word of mouth to test the compatibility on other phones, but I kept the width of my content at 1000pixels, which is the default that iPhones use.  Many mobile browsers adapt to website widths so if your site is basic enough they should pick up your dimensions fine.

5. Audio = MP3. It’s somewhat convenient that we’re giving our music out for free anyway, because at this point the only audio that works universally for browsers is a basic link to an MP3…which can be a problem if you’re trying to go platinum off your single.  But if not, a link will work just fine, and even though it might take a little time to load, in the end people can listen to your tracks iPod stylee.  Sweeeet!

6. Video = Youtube. I personally prefer Vimeo’s interface, but alas, tis not compatible with mobile phones yet.  We have our video link leading directly to a Youtube playlist, where people can see our embarrassingly low playcounts.  Consider yourself special!

7. Don’t do too much. Depending on the functionality of your site, you might not have to completely remake a site.  I only created two pages specifically for this (the front page and the “Listen to iB4the1.1″ page.  The others lead to pages that are either already mobile compatible, or that don’t have to be fully mobile functional as long as it does the job.

8. Redirect the people. The majority of my research was figuring out how to get the damned thing to redirect for mobile phones, and most of the guides involved a bunch of coding and engineering that I’m not familiar with.  I finally stumbled upon a Javascript code that so far proves to work for iPhone, Blackberry, and Android so kapoww!  Place this code in the header of the page you want people redirected from, right below your title:

 <style type="text/css"><!-- body {   background-attachment: scroll;   background-image: url(images/ib41wallpaper.jpg);   background-repeat: repeat-y;   background-position: top center; } --></style>
<script language=javascript>
<!--
if((navigator.userAgent.match(/iPhone/i)) || (navigator.userAgent.match(/iPod/i)) || (navigator.userAgent.match(/android/i)) || (navigator.userAgent.match(/opera/i)) || (navigator.userAgent.match(/blackberry/i)) || (navigator.userAgent.match(/palm/i)) || (navigator.userAgent.match(/windows/i)))
{
location.href='http://m.ill-literacy.com';
}
-->
</script>

Except where it’s red, replace it with wherever your mobile site is.  Here’s what it looks like from our front page:

<html>
<head>
<title>iLL-Literacy | iB4the1.1 out now for FREE!</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
 <style type="text/css"><!-- body {   background-attachment: scroll;   background-image: url(images/ib41wallpaper.jpg);   background-repeat: repeat-y;   background-position: top center; } --></style>
<script language=javascript>
<!--
if((navigator.userAgent.match(/iPhone/i)) || (navigator.userAgent.match(/iPod/i)) || (navigator.userAgent.match(/android/i)) || (navigator.userAgent.match(/opera/i)) || (navigator.userAgent.match(/blackberry/i)) || (navigator.userAgent.match(/palm/i)) || (navigator.userAgent.match(/windows/i)))
{
location.href='http://m.ill-literacy.com';
}
-->
</script>

9. Use a plugin. Yikes I hope you read all the way through before beginning, because if you’re on WordPress there’s a plugin that automatically makes our blog mobile compatible!  I haven’t tried it on ours because I’ve hacked so deep into our design I’m worried that if I do anything to it the monster will turn into Barbara Walters.  But I’ve heard great things about it, so dare to try HERE!  Also, let it be noted that if you’re running your site via Blogger, WordPress, Tumblr, etc, you should check to see if your site might already be mobile compatible, because it might be!

And voila!  Your very own mobile site.  Now the people can jam free to your music.  Go off and prosper!

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In the kitchen:
Nico: Does that post look self-indulgent of us?
Drizzle: No
Drizzle’s inner voice: …yeah…

…fuck it.

After two days of being out, the people are talking about iB4the1.1 and the overall consensus is…weirded out!!! Thanks so much to everyone who’s helped us push this! Here are some links and quotes that made us feel all warm inside.  I have to say that over the course of the past two days I’ve been hipped to hella blogs that I never knew about, and now I’m really worried about how much more addicted to my googlereader I’m about to be.

Also, these are just the links that either bounced back to us or that people notified us about.  If you posted or saw something that’s not on this list, let us know at contact@ill-literacy.com.

If you want to be an official presenter, it’s not too late!  Just click HERE.

Refined Hype – “Oakland is on some other ish, and if you didn’t believe me before I’ve got even more proof of the region’s creative energies in the form of iLL-Literacy‘s dope “IB4the1” project…I’ve got Chapter 1 of their upcoming musical novel and I won’t front, it’s has the potential to be a game changer.”

Hella Clean – “Imagine going to a Baptist church, dressed in your Sunday best, and somehow you end up at the circus…. on ’shrooms…. with a mouthful of Sour Mambas and a handful of arcade tokens. I think that about describes it.”

MADE Jewelry – “What makes this album not only sound futuristic but truly BE the future are the provocative lyrics set to the medley of fresh beats.”

2dopeboyz – “I was instantly intrigued with the artwork so I decided to give them a chance. Glad I did… this stuff is pretty sweet.”

Oh Dang! – “Bay Area ex-pats iLL-Literacy are among the few artists that I genuinely get excited about.”

Angry Asian Man – “I’ve been listening to some sample tracks, and it sounds like taking a frantic ride through crazytown… and I like it.”

Ruby’s Glamourbaby Trails – “Creating a space for an idea that has no comparison is the closest we humans come to summoning magic. iB4the1.1 is the new magic.”

Cookin Wit Grease – “It reminds me a bit of some Kid Cudi (only not as sad) or Janelle Monae (only not as wild) funk infused alternative hip hop stuff.”

Oakland Local - “If you’re familiar with the Oakland’s spoken word and hip hop scenes you probably already know the deal with iLL-Literacy. If you’re new to the game then this new digital download is a great primer to one of the areas most well known and longest running performance groups.”

The Brownstone Project – “They keep making hot shit, I keep supporting it!”

MC K~Swift – “I believe that knowledge is power. Music is a way of sharing information, also known as data, which is knowledge. Music gives us power.”

Dope Huge – “It’s so refreshing to be constantly surprised and intrigued by an album.”

Not Quite Milionaires – “…fresh, young way with words. Straight up talent.”

Manila Gorilla – “When I think of Oakland, I think of the Videograf episode with the Mike Dream / TDK interview at the Oakland tracks, Tower of Power, Davey-D, Raiders caps and Starter jackets, and of course, our friends iLL-Literacy.”

The Free Experience – “Praise to these brothers for pushing the limits of consciousness and entertainment and doing it almost effortlessly.”

Project Comepassion – “iLL-Lit has definitely evolved through the years…still creating movement among the people but giving them that reminiscent vibrancy that’ll connect you back to pretty much, you, where all movements should begin.”

ColinResponse - “These dudes work their arses off, are gifted, brilliant, humble, and able to harness their musical-artistic chi and reverberate it through the speaker in ways that are as cool as Clyde Stubblefield drumming for James.”

Jon de Castro – “iLL-Literacy has always stayed on the forefront of innovation in spoken word, but with the release of their first EP, they are a force to be reckoned with in the music scene.”

Papa Lo Down – “iLL-Literacy always seems to impress me with not only their artistic direction, but their business savvy thought process.”

The 9th Street Parlor – “iLL-Literacy is definitely on the verge of something potentially influential and musically progressive.”

Hyphen Magazine – “I’m rocking out to it right now, at work. No joke. My co-workers are staring at me funny.”

Thickwitness – “When three brilliants like Dahlak Brathwaite, Adriel Luis and N.I.C. gather around a microphone and make art, it’s gotta be special, right?”

Unsigned Magazine – “The multi-talented performance collective goes all out on this one.  It’s in there.”

Uncultivated Rabbits – “It’s a funky, fun, creative album with, of course, meaningful words coming from incredible poets.”

DJ Matt Werner – “Pushing the genre boundaries of spoken-word and hip hop.”

Blind I For the Kids – “The boys from Ill-Literacy have been awaiting this day for a long time, and so has many of their fans. And luckily they made it FREE for all to appreciate as well!”

Chiz Abroad – “If your head doesn’t start bobbing when you press play…. I don’t know if we can still be friends.”

The Av Club – “I literally don’t know where to begin when it comes to describing the incredible talent and dedication that iLL-Literacy has and just how important they are, not only to the world of spoken word but to the community of creative minds pushing for social awareness and racial unity amongst youth.”

The Getblog – “Surely these new Brooklynites have put their all into this project, so click the link and give it a listen!”

Benita Dix – “I’m very excited that they are around…authentic folks with a message behind what they say.”

Diary of a Hollywood Douchebag

Apt. 78

ATF Radio

Certified Fresh

Hopie Spitshard

Unfound Empire

Hip Hop is Cool Again

AznRaps

Bayrock Studios

Digital Soul Experience

Sound in the Signals

This is John Book’s Music

Missleeding Films

Life in Practice

One Imagination

Awww thanks, PEOPLE!

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If you’ve heard our record, you’ve probably caught our drift that we’re huge on double-entendres.  After a plethora of title ideas, we finally landed on iB4the1 not only as the name of our record, but a code that speaks to the way we develop our music, interact with each other, and ultimately live our lives.  It’s our mission statement.  But hey.  We’re artists.  So we don’t like giving meanings away all at once.

So to start off, here’s Bootsy Collins explaining his interpretation of “the1.” It’s all science!

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Yuup, along with synopses, credits, and custom artwork for each track.  You can check it out an iPhone or iPod touch…if you happen not to own one of those robots (don’t worry, one day they’re going to kill us all in our sleep anyway) you can see it in the “lyrics” tab on iTunes.  Woop woop!

Download the record if you haven’t yet!

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