Every city around the world has that crappy radio station that plays all your favorite, what’s poppin’ now, Hippidy Hoppidy music. Well here in CT, Hot 93.7 is ours. Their slogan is Blazin 18 Jams In Row, but really 8 out of those 18 jams is the same song. You guys know what I’m talking about, real crappy DJ’s that try to scratch and make their own remix out of some R&B song or watered down Hip Hop song swearin’ they are live, but really just playin’ themselves out. Yup that’s them.
In any event, back in 2003 my friend was interning at this radio station for a hot minute and he came to ILC with the idea of doing some tees for their annual Jingle Jam concert. Now, for all ya’llz not familiar with the Jingle Jam, it’s a concert that Hot 93.7 puts on featuring all the artists, R&B and Hip Hop, that are hot at the time, in the month of December right around X-Mas…not sure if the Jingle in Jingle Jam gave that away or not.
I was like shit, cool, sounds like we can get some exposure and get the ILC name out there more. So I met with Jay Ricketts, the promotional manger at Hot 93.7. Now he was a cool dude, so cool I was kind of confused why he worked there…but whatever. So we agreed that the trade off for the tees will be shout outs on the radio once a day until the Jingle Jam, which turned out to be like 2 weeks. Shit, we were amped.
So here are the designs we came up with.
So the peeps at Hot 93.7 loved the designs and gave me the list of sizes to run off. Now, at the time it was a good feeling but fast forward to today and we would have never worked on this project. It was definitely out of ILC’s element and what we are all about. However, it was definitely a good learning experience.
Here’s a pic of Jay Ricketts, my boy Chris and myself.
So that’s how the tees came out. Not really sure who these dudes were, but they were rockin’ the tees, so we snapped a flic.
The only good thing that came out of my dealing with Hot 93.7 is that I got the opportunity to meet Nas. Now if you’ve been living in cave or are just too young to know, Nas made the GREATEST HIP HOP ALBUM to date, Illmatic. Released on April 19, 1994 no rapper will ever be able to top this Hip Hop album.
Yup, Nas, the greatest rapper of all time. Now I know what some of ya’llz might be saying to yourselves, “But Cas, what about Lil’ Wayne…or like Drake aren’t they better?” Nah, these cats are about as crappy as a clogged cap when you about to finish a burner and you have no caps left and no one is around and you left your cell phone at the house and you live about an hour away.
Make sure you stay tuned in next week for the EBIS Part 2 blog. It’s gonna get grimey.
