My homie and frequent collaborator (and also kindred spirit to my art director Dust La Rock) Cody Hudson has relaunched his website Struggle Inc., which now also has the alias CodyHudson.net. Same thing.
Go spend a good half hour browsing through it, it’s a real joy. Very easy to navigate and full of great works including the images I pulled above.
Also check out Cody’s blog here.
Picture taken July 2008
Some of you know that I have a (sort of) brand called Sunglasses Is A Must. It’s just the name I use when I collaborate with other brands to make clothes, accessories and whatnot. I’ve had a couple of tees with Sixpack, my first ever tour tee with Kiser, my Capture The Flag cap with New Era x Skoold In Korectnuss, and even Kidrobot’s Grateful Bear bore the SIAM logo.
In 2007 I started a project with Zoo York and enlisted the help of my 2 most trusted designers, the closest I have to partners in SIAM: Dust La Rock and Cody Hudson. We started working on a pack that would include a varsity jacket, a skateboard shaped like sunglasses (which can really be skated on) and a tee.
Working with big brands can be tricky though because there’s marketing budgets and cycles and all sorts of red tape. But Zoo were always supportive, in large part thanks to our homie Kimou (Grotesk)’s involvement. Last year I got a sample of the deck, pictured above. I wanted to blog it so bad, but I couldn’t… Well, unfortunately the project is dead so here it is folks, my skateboard… my skateboard that you’ll never have! Haha. Don’t worry though, we’ve always got more goodies in the oven.
I have two announcements to make.
First, I did a mixtape called “Kanye’s Soul Mixshow” (I didn’t pick the title) for this Japanese label and it just came out. I think it’s a Japan-only situation, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some CDs eventually showed up on our shores. The concept is pretty simple: it’s all soul records that Kanye has sampled. So the challenge was to take all these records that happen to be linked to Kanye’s catalogue and make a good, coherent mix out of it. I’m pretty happy with how it came out. Kanye hosted the whole thing. And it’s not some generic drops; he actually tells funny stories while the samples are playing. My favorite is during the Cam’Ron “Down & Out” sample, he goes into this whole thing about “this is my favorite beat that I didn’t really do”… You gotta track down the CD to get the scoop!
Last time I wrote I was close to finishing up the Kanye tour overseas, where we hit festivals in no particular order and slept half-hour nights like it was going out of style. Yes, it was a hard one. We did manage to end it off on a grandiose high note. Our last show was in Nice, France (in a surreal field full of olive trees that obstructed the view of the stage). Kanye had decided to splurge and stay at a different hotel in Monte Carlo, and late that night we all went to meet up there, had a bacchanalian good time and drove back to catch our early-morning flights home.
