Mental hip-hop: music news that matters (Jan. 2008)

Franki Chan puts Steve Aoki on blast

2007 was a really good year for local DJ/label head/impresario Franki Chan. So good that for the first e-mail blast of the year from his IHEARTCOMIX label, he took the term literally and put former partner and current nightlife nemesis Steve Aoki on full blast.

“Despite the efforts of […] Steve Aoki to surpress [sic] our existence to the world using his greater fame, greater wealth and influence to pressure publications not to write about me/us (yes, we know, Nylon and BPM),” reads the email, “pressuring friends and former friends to either not be our friend or work with us (Rony’s Photobooth, Royal Rumble, among several others) by threatening them a loss of pay or acceptance into his circle, pressuring Cobrasnake to jettison our friendship almost immediately upon our break-up and consequently, or maybe voluntarily, erasing mine and close friends out of existence on the website and blatantly lying in advertising to steer people away from our events [at this point in the email, he offers a link to documentation of this last point on the website of music/culture magazine The Fader], we’ve been able to make it out at the top of our game, unafraid of the future, unafraid to speak and armed for the wave of [sh*t] to come.”

Whew! We can only imagine the flurry of smack-talking making the rounds of Hollywood clubs and American Apparel stores all over the city right now. Stay tuned for any diss-rap responses that might come from the Aoki camp.

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