Blue Scholars

Blue Scholarswith Don't Talk to the Cops! & Brothers From AnotherFilmmakers create movies. Bloggers report the news and shape public opinion. Explorers travel the globe, seeking out new cultures and sharing experiences. DJs and producers craft beats and tracks using an alchemical mix of audio artifacts and imagination. Rappers fashion rhymes and navigate the cadences of vocal delivery characterized as flow.Blue Scholars do all these thingsand a hell of a lot moreevery damn day. First and foremost,… Show more DJ/producer Sabzi and MC Geologic are a music group. They do the fundamental things bands have done for decades: Make records and play live shows. But those are just points on a plane, bright stars in Blue Scholars ever-expanding universe. It all revolves around using everything at our disposal to be good storytellers, says Sabzi. Chuck D famously likened hip-hop to CNN, but frankly, Blue Scholars make Anderson Cooper and company look lazy by comparison.Blue Scholars informally call their music cinema art rap, yet most folks will probably just hear it as smart 21st century pop. The duo is just as likely to take inspiration from the sugar rush of Empire of the Suns feel-good hit Walking on a Dream (check out the Empire Remix of New People) as from a classic Lalo Schifrin soundtrack. The roster of former Seattle Sonics or observations about Fox New commentators may provide the springboard for their next round of poetic musing.Meanwhile, Blue Scholars are constantly churning out new missives as quickly as the inspiration hits them, disseminated via the Internet. Whether provoked by current events like the passage of Arizonas Immigration Law SB1070 (Joe Arpaio, credited to Geos alter-ego Prometheus Brown), or contemplating how the Future went from a sparkling wonderland of flying cars and personal jet packs to a post-apocalyptic wasteland shot in shades of ash and bone (Paul Valry), Blue Scholars react to real events in real timewith music that sounds fresh because it is.Since 2002, Blue Scholars have been based in the 98118, decreed the most ethnically diverse zip code in America by the 2010 Census. Like the greater Seattle region, that neighborhood embodies the multi-cultural miasma that spawned Blue Scholars, the joining of forces between an Iranian DJ/producer and a Filipino rapper. These are dudes who nourish their bodies with Vietnamese coffee, Ethiopian injera, and steaming bowls of ph. Thanks to music, they have mingled with guests at a party hosted by renown glass artist Dale Cihuly, and conducted workshops at a Colorado juvenile detention center.

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