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All Music Guide:
Mike Ladd is an iconoclast hip-hop figure, a producer with studio smarts and an intelligent MC as well, but a man with a wide-ranging set of aims that occasionally interfere with his music. The Bronx-based Ladd, whose roots lie in poetry and performance, has close ties to largely spoken-word artists like Saul Williams or Carl Hancock Rux as well as underground rap maestros like El-P or New Flesh. Born in Cambridge, MA, Ladd played bass or drums in varying types of garage bands while in high school and gathered a diverse set of influences, ranging from Funkadelic to King Tubby to Minor Threat to the work of Chess staff arranger Charles Stepney. He stayed close to home for college and spent time as a graduate student in English Lit at Boston University. He gained favor in spoken poetry circles, winning the Nuyorican Poets Café Slam and also having his writing published in the 1996 protest tome In Defense of Mumia. He'd also begun producing and rapping, and released his first album, Easy Listening 4 Armageddon, in 1997 on Scratchie. Critical praise led to a deal between his Likemadd label and Ozone Music for 2000's Welcome to the Afterfuture and the following year's Vernacular Homicide EP. Ladd had already recorded a 1998 single for top British underground label Big Dada, and he returned there for his third full-length, 2000's Gun Hill Road. The first in a series of underground full-lengths staging a battle between the forces of good and evil (in hip-hop), it appeared as the Infesticons and earned the highest profile of any of his releases. The second, Beauty Party (recorded as the Majesticons), followed in 2003, and that same year Ladd collaborated with keyboardist Vijay Iyer on the post-9/11 inquiry In What Language? (the duo also completed Still Life with Commentary in 2007, and Iyer added his skills to a number of Ladd's solo records). In 2004 the Berlin-based label !K7 released the musician's genre-bounding Nostalgialator -- reissued in North America on Def Jux in early 2008 -- and the following year both Negrophilia: The Album and Father Divine came out.
Wikipedia:
Mike Ladd is a hip hop artist. He is an owner of the Likemadd label.
Biography
Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Mike Ladd is influenced by Funkadelic, Charles Stepney, Bad Brains, Burt Bacharach, Kraftwerk, Bollywood, Jungle Brothers and Divine Styler.
Mike Ladd has released several solo albums, including Easy Listening 4 Armageddon, Welcome To The Afterfuture, Negrophilia, Father Divine and Nostalgialator. He also released Gun Hill Road as The Infesticons and Beauty Party as The Majesticons. He released two collaborative albums, In What Language? and Still Life With Commentator, with jazz pianist Vijay Iyer. He has collaborated with artists such as Company Flow, Rob Sonic, Saul Williams, U-God, Busdriver, Blue Sky Black Death, Daedelus, Jackson and his Computer Band, Coldcut, DJ Spooky among others. He has remixed songs for the likes of Yo La Tengo, Antipop Consortium and Enrico Macias. Mike Ladd has toured extensively for several years throughout America, Europe and Asia, establishing a cult following in the process.
Mike Ladd received his B.A. in Black expatriates in the Nineteenth century from Hampshire College and an M.A. in Poetry from Boston University. As a Fellow at the Institute for Arts and Civic Dialogue at Harvard University, he produced and directed Blood Black and Blue, an audio documentary/performance about Black police officers in the United States. In 2005, he completed a fellowship at the Asia Society, where he created a musical/theatrical/visual installation In What Language? with Vijay Iyer. It was a project about people of color in relation to globalization in the context of airports. They also put up another installation Still Life with Commentator, which was commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music for 5 nights of performances.
Mike Ladd has been published in several literary magazines including Long Shot Review and Bostonia. His work is also featured in the book Swing Low, Black Men Writing and several anthologies, including, Aloud: Voices From The Nuyorican Poets Café, In Defense Of Mumia, Bum Rush The Page, Por La Victoire and Everything But The Burden.
Mike Ladd now lives in Paris with his wife, daughter and son.
