Hip Hop War Report

Archive for the ‘Hip Hop Gear’ Category

Hip hop wear is urban fashion for the street. Whether its design brand apparel or generic white t-shirts, your gear says a lot about you. Here’s some recommendations for where you find hip hop wear at wholesale prices…

Dr. Jays. The definitive spot for urban fashion and apparel for men, women and children. Based in New York City, their website often sells similar fashion styles for between 40-60% of retail. If you’re looking for the hottest gear without paying top dollar for it, the Dr. Jays website is the place to be! They offer a wide variety of hip hop designer brands like Marc Ecko, LRG, Rocawear and Evisu both in their store and online. The site is really clean and easy to navigate for those who don’t live in NYC or are looking for wholesale discounts.

Hip Hop Closet. Where Dr. Jays is the premier provider of urban wear, HHC strives to bring the highest quality clothes for the lowest price possible. Offering fashion designs by Babyphat, Sean John, G-Unit and Azzure at over 40% off the retail store price, HHC is definitely a spot for quality hip hop wear. Admittedly, their accessories don’t have the same selection as Dr. Jays, but the clothing lines are an absolute steal at those prices. I highly recommend HHC for the hottest urban fashions.

Club Urban. Similar to HHC’s philosophy of high quality for low prices, Club Urban has an impressive selection of the latest gear and accessories. Their website is on point for shoppers: you can search various brand names by color, size and price – it practically creates your next outfit for you! Both the store and website provide great options, and you can easily kill a few hours shopping.

Herban Stylz. This well respected fashion provider has tons of great clothes and accessories, though the selection can sometimes be hit or miss. However, if you are dead set on finding the newest urban fashions Herban Stylz cannot be overlooked. On top of the large selection, this store has some of the best customer service is the industry- even better than Nordstorms, in my opinion. They feature fashion pieces by the crate, so don’t browse unless you’ve got the time!

Urban Venom. This British clothing store carries a distinct style of fashion. They offer apparel designed by Makavel, Akademiks and Miskeen all of which help define this store as a premier provider of apparel and accessories.

The five stores are the brightest spots for the latest hip hop wear. They all offer great websites for browsing, and you save heaps of cash on designer fashion. If you’re going for the best (and are willing to pay for it) Dr. Jays still remains king, but the others certainly provide quality wear for a reasonable price.

Hip hop music beats use to be a sort of black arts for me. I spent the better half of the 1990′s collecting gear and book after book that allegedly was made to teach me how to lay down some phat beats. I spent upwards of 10K dollars in search of the “secret combination” of gear that would allow my creative juices to flow. I had only assumed that if there’s something you don’t have the talent to do… just throw some more money at it until it clicks. Obviously there’s some faulty logic going in here, as I’d gotten pretty far in debt and still couldn’t lay down a decent instrumental.

Here is some of the “industry standard” gear that I had accumulated. Don’t get me wrong, these tools are an important part of many studios… but these days most of them are completely redundant or unnecessary.

Sampler: The centerpiece of creating all hip hop music beats Synthesizer: Much of the melodic lines came from these bad boys Sequencer: Let’s you compose your beats…often redundant as many samplers have one built in Mixer: I’m not talking about a DJ mixer either..I’m talking about a piece of gear that will let the sampler, synth, and sequencer plug into, and the sound gets mixed into a stereo source. Multi-Track Recorder: This is what will record the hip hop music beats.

Funny thing is, these days all this gear is completely unneeded. As long as you have a decent computer, you can lay down some pretty chunky sounding beats. Hip hop music beats shouldn’t cost your entire life savings to make…how could you possibly enjoy cranking out some crunk while worrying that your latest purchase won’t put food in your baby’s mouth?