Ughh! What a night! The day started off with the news that my original 2 guests were going to bail out on me. Cool. So after about a good 2 hours of running around and re-coordinating, I pulled up a few homies consisting of EMC, theroots.com's webmaster Fleece and some cat Aaron who helped out immensely on financials (sure--let's drive to N-Y and not bring any cash! Yea!)

So we mounted into the car about 8:30PM and left North Philadelphia at a blazing speed. The four of us pilled into my hoopty (His name is "Hoopty Hoop") and flew up 95 North to N-Y in record time.

We arrived, parked illegally and proceeded for a keen parking lot in which to urinate in. That didn't work. We parked too close to the venue. There were po-po littered outside EVERYWHERE. While coming up 21st Street to Tramps, we see Fab 5 Freddy talking shit about fabfivefreddy.com and to "ignite it like gasoline babee" or something like that. I just walked past him. haha.

I'm peeping the long-ass guest line and a voice calls out: "Stinke". Lo-and-behold the sole-survivor of the Hiero Crew to make it out East to the show: Opio. Originally, the entire crew was to appear but that didn't happen at the very last minute. Opio confirmed his guest pass was cool, and myself and party were off in the opposite line waiting to get in.

We waited and waited and waited....Naughty By Nature was a performer on this night and DAMN did they roll DEEP. They had so many damn cats on their list, it took forever to get them all in. While waiting, I scoped the scene. An exuberant amount of po-po were littered along 21st St. but seemed harmless enough. You had fools in business suits, cats passing out stupid ass flyers for shit like "The Phat Fashion Show" and some other stupid shit I threw away. It was an extremely diversified crowd mixed up with industry business folk, fans/heads, nominees and then performers and crew.

We got in and it was packed to PHUUUCK. I managed to find Op and we were peeping the entire thing out. There were just HEADS everywhere. The ceremonies had already begun and we had missed Grandmaster Flash, Prince Paul (presenter), Canibus (sniff') aaaaand...oh!....Fab 5 Freddy (haha).

We assumed it would start on "Hip Hop Time". So given doors open at 9PM, the "Hip Hop Time" equivalent would be 10PM. We were off by just a few minutes. A few awards had already been given out as well. Opio and I knew the minute we got there that we had at least won 1 award because dude from Art Crimes received his award and his box was labeled "Hieroglyhics Dot Com". haha.

FINALLY the performances began to roll through. Sedated, I don't quite remember the order, but Naughty came up and fucking RIPPED IT. They are tight as hell live. Op and I went to get a drink and were peeping shit from the back of the club. After Naughty's performance, Chuck D came out and gave a dope ass speech. Chuck is incredibly ill. After Chuck finished his dissertation, Naughty + Crew left and NO JOKE the entire venue saw 3/4 of its attendees leave. That's how deep these fools rolled.

Performances to follow included Rubberoom (yo, these cats are dope), Mountain Brothers (who snuck up on there!!--I didn't see ya'll anywhere in the club! were ya'll hiding backstage??), Jeru the Damaja (who performed old and new. Jeru's dope), Last Emperor (ugh! so sick...), The Arsonists (they had mad beef with the organizers of the event. I think they went over their allotted time and would simply not give up the mic. They were dope tho), and a few other cats.

I think it was about 1:40AM when the rest of the awards were given out. Did anyone peep how Philly straight OWNED the Best Website Dedicated to An Artist category? Peep the nominees:

mountainbrothers.com
theroots.com
hieroglyphics.com
and the BCC web page whose address I don't have

With Opio to my right, and camcorder in hand, Hieroglyphics Dot Com won Best Artist Website and Website of the Year Award which, I think, is like the biggest shit you could win? haha. That shit is dope. We received 2 clear plaques with the SOHH logo printed on them and the Award Name and the name of the site labeled on them. Shit is mad dope. Thank youse to Steve and Fee over at SOHH and everyone that voted for us!! That shit is mad cool.

The ride home consisted of me almost urinating on a bum steady chilling on the down-low in a corner, rolling down our car window which funked like herbs burning from the chalice to ask po-po where the Holland Tunnel was, Stinke driving home hallucinating from sleep deprivation, and theroots.com webmaster buying us tasty cakes and shit. dope.

peace!
-stinke!