What I do, and some love for J-Live

A busy weekend of work just wrapped up. Briefly, here's what I've been up to:
- The Canadian Derby, recapping the race and a profile on HOF jockey Julie Krone.
- Lacrosse, Junior A and B tournaments through the weekend.
- Teams owned by the Oilers (Oil Kings and Capitals).

As I write this, I'm downloading the last few tracks of The Early Works of J-Live. I often feel like the president of the guy's fanclub, or like a door-to-door theology salseperson when I talk about J-Live. Truth is, he's hands down my favourite musician, so you get a lot of bias from me on him.

The older I get/the longer I've listened to him/as mainstream hip-hop continues its transition from irrelevant to ridiculously trife, my respect for J and what he stands for continues to swell. Intelligent, poetic, college-educated, grounded and self-deprecating while still fully aware of his skills on the mic, he is in my mind the single most underrated musician I've ever encountered. The fact that he embraces his stance in the mainstream world—he admits on his most recent album that he's sold approximately 100,000 cd's in his career; he has 3,052 followers on Twitter (Souljaboy, comparatively, has 1.3 million) only raises his stature in my eyes.

Since leaving his job as a junior-high school teacher in NY in 2002 to pursue his music full-time, he's made a modest living crafting songs that have you piecing together what he's getting at years after your first listen to it. Club anthems they're not. This is music that matters.

I've digressed, as I often do when I talk about J-Live. You should download his stuff, he's a genius. After I interviewed him for SLAM in 2006, I was happy to tell him I checked him off of my People I Have To Interview Before I Die list. He was in the second spot, right behind Michael Jordan.