[View the story "What Will the Maid Think?" on Storify]

p.s. – If you are going to contribute, and by all means I hope you do, two things:
1) Leave a $20 – Don’t fuck with the maid unless you are going to compensate them for the gag.
2) Tweet me that pic @radioestes

It’s always a good day when my dude Rage laces me with some new heat from his group, Notes to Self… Even better when there’s a little Fashawn thrown into the mix.

Check out Mr. Polite below, which is a head-nodding homage to the situation that a lot of artists face on the road.  An unnamed rapper told me years ago that the common “I’m on tour” courtesy towards women goes as follows:

• Keep your chick at home and be sure to tell her that you miss her on the daily
• Have tour girlfriends in every city (i.e., “I call my Omaha girl when I’m in Nebraska”)
• Rinse, repeat, and hope no one finds out

Please, stay classy, fellas!

Mr. Polite with Fashawn by NotestoSelf

Vajra, how does it feel to be the best deejay in the world?  I’m not going to lie, when I heard the news that my dude Vajra had taken the 2011 World DMC title this year, I wasn’t surprised as much as I was completely proud.  Like, making me cry proud.  Those who know Vajra have witnessed his dedication to the craft and know that this title is very, very well deserved.

Check out his 2011 World DMC Competition set above and praise the turntable Jesus.

Nothing but love & huge congrats to the champ!

Anyone that knows me well enough knows that Dj Babu is probably one of my most favorite creative forces in the music industry today.  Check out Notes to Self‘s latest video which features the Babu-produced track, Lick Shots and some overall solid tour footage.

Big ups to Roshin from Notes to Self and be on the lookout for their upcoming project, “It Used to be Dark (Recoil),” which is scheduled for release soon.

If there’s one thing that I’ve learned about living in LA over the past few weeks, it’s this:  you better have some fresh music to listen to in the car or you will go insane.  No, seriously.

Luckily, my dudes Deux Process has taken care of my dilemma properly with their lastest release from their sophomore album, The Price of Dreams, which is slated for release later this year.

Check out the track below & enjoy.

The Ballad of Lost Angels ft Roscoe Umali (EXPLICIT) Prod. Vise Versa by Deux Process

Wowsers.  No, I mean really.  Wowsers.

There’s really nothing better than waking up to an inbox full of hot shit from my LA fam, Deux Process.  Check out the video for their first single, Story of My Life, which was produced by GRocka & Medi (that beat… weeeee!).  Their second album, The Price of Dreams, is scheduled to drop later this year.

Definitely worth more than a few spins — and keep an eye out here for an exclusive interview with Deux Process on PopularLemonade in the coming days.

Download the track via deepees.com or show some love by supporting Deux Process by purchasing the single on iTunes.

It’s no secret that all of us absolutely adore music.  In fact, it’s one of the bonds that has brought all of us together.

In the essence of summer concerts and music festivals, we wanted to share our very first concert experiences with you — from the shameful, the hilarious, and the awesome.

Don’t believe me?  Check out some of my favorite excerpts before the jump.

Enjoy!

– Rachel

I was addicted and as long as I had music to comfort me, my mom’s terrifying anger couldn’t break my spirits. – Alli Sands

What I’m trying to say is, “Fuck you, mom.” – @2509

Women scrambling for their purses and men lighting the pews on fire. – @radioestes

He’s the Michael Jackson of white people. – @2509

@radioestes

My first concert was Ladysmith Black Mambazo at Cherry Hills Community Church in 1989.  Ladysmith was fresh off their Paul Simon/ Graceland tour.  My folks took my sister and I to church in Cherry Hills, though we lived in the Harvard Gulch neighborhood [in Denver].  Probably a case of the come-upins.  Donating relief-aid to Africa had a certain cache in the late ’80s.  Kids there were starving.  Across America, there was a savage crack war going on in the cities.  Rich white-people in gated communities liked their black people tame and non-threatening.  Therefore, they pitied the prior and punished the latter.  I don’t remember much about the show but I remember being awestruck by the band. Ladysmith killed it.  A dozen black men in Cherry Hills would have typically created a riot.  Women scrambling for their purses and men lighting the pews on fire.  But those black men were Africans; Afrikaans actually.  They sang in faint whispers and wore dresses.  They were polite and courteous.  Their music was gentle and reserved.  I’ll bet the preacher still sweat a bit.  Probably sent his daughters home.

Alli Sands || @AlliHeartsMusic

Get ready to deduct one million cool points from my score because my first concert was the Family Values Tour 1999. In 8th grade, I was absolutely in love with Limp Bizkit and when my friend told me her older sister was taking her to see them at the Pepsi Center, I knew I had to go.

Twelve years later and I still vividly remember that night. All the girls dressed as the dancers from the “Nookie” music video. The overwhelming smell of weed. The rising anxiousness that was building up inside of me as I sat through Staind, Method Man & Redman, and a slew of other acts waiting to see Limp Bizkit take the stage. Finally, the lights went out and the opening chords of “Break Stuff” blared through the cavernous sports arena and before I knew it, the show was over and I had lost my voice entirely from screaming along as Fred Durst rapped each & every lyric. Leaving the Pepsi Center that night, I knew my world would never be the same.

I unlocked the front door to my mom’s house to find her waiting at the top of the stairs. As soon as I saw her standing at the top of the stairs, I knew that the pain in my neck and head from the excessive headbanging of the evening was nothing compared to the verbal beating I was about to receive. Being that it was after midnight on a school night, my mom’s Jewish neuroses went into overdrive around 10pm when she tried to reach me on her cell phone which she had let me borrow in case of an emergency. For those of you that don’t know the pleasure of having a Jewish mother, I’d like to inform you that when I say, “she tried to reach me on her cell phone,” I mean she had called her phone 48 times (literally) not to mention getting in touch with my father and stepmother, the Pepsi Center security office, and the Denver Police Department.

You better believe I was grounded but it didn’t matter. I was addicted and as long as I had music to comfort me, my mom’s terrifying anger couldn’t break my spirits. I had experienced live music for the first time and I made a promise to myself to pursue the feeling that overtook my body and mind the night of the Family Values Tour.

Rachel’s note: If you’d like to buy the Family Values Tour 1999 compilation CD, you can do so here — but none of us really recommend it.

Tim Davids || @2509

My first concert was the Denver stop of the Garth Brooks World Tour in July 1996, at McNichols Sports Arena with my mom. I think this is supposed to be embarrassing. It is not, and here is why:

Garth Brooks rules. If you ever decided to care about one mainstream-pop-watered-down-southern-rock-pretending-to-be-country-music-even-though-hank-williams-or-johnny-cash-never-fucking-sounded-like-that artist, it needs to be Garth Brooks. He’s the Michael Jackson of white people, down to the time he turned himself all pale and grew weird facial hair and pretended to be a whole different person in order to release an album with a little less twang in the guitars. RIP Chris Gaines.

Here is what I remember from the concert:

• The drummer was in a giant class cage contraption, which Garth Brooks would run up and down over during the show.
• Garth Brooks was chubby and he’d been on that tour for a while and with the amount of physical exercise he was doing every night he must’ve loved pizza and beer more than his unborn children. See also: Beth Ditto, who spends three hours a night jumping around like a cocaine addled monkey but is still a big (sexy) girl.
• I love everything more than my potential unborn children, which is why they’re still unborn (aborted).
• Garth Brooks crowdsurfing and stage diving and his hat staying on somehow.
• The entire stage lighting on fire and then Garth Brooks jumping through the fire.
• A thunderstorm happening on stage, including thunder, lightning, and rain, when Garth sang The Thunder Rolls. So far he’s harnessed the power of three of Earth’s elements – Water, Fire, and Heart.
• Garth Brooks grabbing onto a swing with his bare hands which immediately catapulted out over the entire crowd across the arena before returning him to the stage. I saw KISS on their first farewell tour and Paul Stanley swings over the crowd to a small stage they have set up in the middle of the floor, but he steps into it and straps himself in and it takes like 45 minutes while Gene Simmons grows wings and spews blood to distract us. Brooks just grabs a small slippery bar and jumps while an engine ratches his swing up to 30 mph.
• It’s pry not that surprising that FriendsinLowPlaces is kind of a badass and the StarChild is kind of a pussy.
• I got a really really gay t-shirt. I don’t mean that in the frat boy way, where gay means lame, I mean it in the gay way, where gay means men touching each other’s genitalia. At the end of the show, the only size they had left was an XL. I’ve always been fat, but I was 10 years old.

I wanted a Garth Brooks shirt, and I got a sundress. I wore it with pride, as often as possible, until I fell and fucked up my knee one day playing basketball (I probably tripped over my giant shirt) with my other fat 11 year old Mexican friends and thus used it to blot the absurd anemic bleeding that threatened to end my existence before I could touch a girl’s boobs.

By the way, when I was a kid I was absurdly obsessed with Michael Jackson, probably ’cause I thought if we ever met he’d love me the way the local priest did. He came to Denver with the Dangerous tour and my mom decided not to tell me because I was “too young for all the stimuli.” That could’ve been my first concert.

What I’m trying to say is, “Fuck you, mom.”

Rachel || @popularlemonade

Alright.  I really don’t like to admit this and it takes away any street cred I may or may not have earned over the past 29 (ouch) years.  My first concert was the Under My Spell Tour in 1992 and I was ten years old.  I could have sworn that I was in second grade, but Google is telling me that I was in third.  Or maybe fourth.  But I digress.

I had already missed Michael Jackson‘s BAD tour, to my parents’ ultimate failure.  They wouldn’t let me go because I was like, four.  So whatever.

They ended up taking me to see Paula Abdul and Color Me Badd at what is now the Comfort Dental Amphitheater (formerly known by its much less corporate name, Fiddler’s Green).  I don’t really think that either of my parents knew much about either act, outside of the fact that I really fucking loved Paula Abdul.  I don’t think I had ever been so excited for anything in my entire life.

I thought I was going to meet Paula.  I thought that was what happened at concerts.  I had every single video on VHS and my bedroom walls were plastered with her photos.  It’s almost comical to think about now — I still remember her fucking birthday.  Thanks for that, childhood – hopefully I can use this extensive Paula Abdul knowledge for a future trivia game revolving celebrity rehabilitations.

The concert itself was pretty awesome, minus the awkward nature of hearing a bunch of guys sing, oOoOOo I wanna sex you up! while sitting next to your father.  Paula absolutely killed it and my parents bought me a tour book before we left for the evening.  I remember trying to remember every single moment that evening.  Her choreography was stellar and I remember standing on my seat, trying to see over adult ass heads, and singing along.

I was mesmerized. It was just like listening to all of her tapes.  I remember being so geeked when Paula‘s oh-so-famous costumed wolf-dog-lover thing came out and rocked Opposites Attract with her… and somehow, the Internet has footage of this exact thing.  Thank you, Internet!

Oh Paula.

Kanye West doesn't care about record-store people.

Itunes released the new Kanye/ Jay-Z record, Watch the Throne yesterday. Best Buy has the exclusive CD release for 10 days beginning August 12th. Independent record store owners are pretty pissed about it. They addressed the artists in a letter:

Dear Jay-Z and Kanye West,

Dedry Jones, The Music Experience
Mike Dreese, Newbury Comics
Judy Negley, Independent Records
Mike Batt, Silver Platters
Tobago Benito, DBS Sounds
Brian Faber, Zia Records
Karen Pearson, Amoeba Music
Bryan Burkert, The Sound Garden
Mike Wise, Monster
Rob Roth, Vintage Vinyl
Joe Nardone, Jr., Gallery of Sound
Jonathan Fernandez, Rasputin Music
Dilyn Radakovitz, Dimple Records
Dustin Hansen, Graywhale Entertainment
Bill Kennedy, BK Music
Jim Bland, Plan Nine
Steve Wilson, Kiefs
Tom King, Central Square Records
Alayna Hill Alderman, Richard Storms, Record Archive
Karl Groeger, Looney Tunes
Paul Epstein, Twist and Shout
Nancy Salzer, Salzer’s Records
Rick Ziegler, Indy CD
Laura, Finders Records
Deon Borchard, Nic Fritze, The Long Ear
Chuck Oken, Rhino /Mad Platter
Allan Miller, John Bevis, Disc Exchange
Charlotte Kubat, Magnolia Thunderpussy
John Kunz, Waterloo Records
Chris Avino, Rainbow Records
Mike Fratt, Homers
Rich Koch, Off the Record
Skip Hermans, Skip’s Record and CD World
Jason Patton, Oz Music
Quinn Bishop, Cactus Records
John Timmons, ear X tacy
Lou Russell, Lou’s Records
Roger Weiss, Streetlight Records
Terry Currier, Music Millenium
Andrew Chinnici, Lakeshore Record Exchange
Michael Bunnell, The Record Exchange
Mike White, Boo Boo Records
Steve Baron, CD Central
Eric Levin, Criminal Records
Pat O’connor, Culture Clash
Dan Plunkett, End Of An Ear
Paula Kret, Exile On Main St
Chris Penn, Good Records
Doyle Davis, Grimey’s
Travis Searle, Guestroom Records
Jim Mcguinn, Hot Poop
Isaac Slusarenko, Jackpot Records
Jason Nickey & Heath Byers, Landlocked Music
Todd Robinson, Luna Music
Darren & Jim Blase, Shake It
Anna & Chris Brozek, Slowtrain
Kimber Lanning, Stinkweeds
Tom “Papa” Ray, Vintage Vinyl

meh...

C’mon fellas – share the shine.

Need I say any more?  It’s Steve M’fucking Urkel, for the love of all things good.  You remember him.  The Laura Winslow loving, suspender toting, ultimate geek of all nerdom.

Looking good, Jaleel.

Love the choreography and the shout to the 1950s – be sure to pick up The Lady Killer if you haven’t already.