The Black Keys Remove Their Fan Forum Message Board

The Black Keys (or rather their website administrator) have removed the band’s fan forum message boards. This single line statement, on the page where the fan message board was hosted on the BlackKeys.com website, gives notification of the removal – http://www.theblackkeys.com/forum/index.php:

We have removed the message board, but encourage fans to create their own elsewhere. Thank you, The Black Keys

For the last few months many fans had noticed the lack of admin involvement on the boards and the lack of removal of spam and random porn posts. Perhaps this prompted the removal of the boards? Maybe it all just got too hard and unwieldy, yet long term forum members could have been asked to moderate.

Comment is being sort from The Black Keys management.

It’s a real shame since the forum boards were a good resource and place for fans to interact. Some fans had posted more than 1000+ times.

Clearly the band are hoping the message boards will be re-created by a fan(s) external to their site. They clearly have no future desire to administrate or host the boards and it is a final decision. Kind of a strange thing to do since it brings so many fans regularly to their site and by default makes it easy for the band to communicate with fans at short notice.

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‘Strange Rhymes’ Black Keys Mash Up for Blakroc Volume 2?

Listen to it here, a wicked mashup of The Black Keys’ Strange Times track aka Strange Rhymes by rapper Faimkills.

What do you think: Wack or Rocks?

The Black Keys Fan Lounge is lovin’ it. It probably wont make Blakroc Vol. 2 but, hey, it’s worth a shot. Maybe someone out there wants to put together an album of Black Keys inspired mash ups?

Since all the hoopla blew up about The Black Keys Blakroc project the spotlight has turned back to the mash up sound of blues and hip hop. It’s nothing really new, just hopefully something worth listening to and doesn’t evolve into something Limp Bizkit might produce.

For those who haven’t heard it check out this previous mash up of Jay Z vs The Black Keys previously reported on by The Black Keys Fan Lounge. The possibilities are endless.

Faimkills is a fan of The Black Keys and he notes is looking forward to the new Blakroc release:

With all of the terrible genre-bending many artists try to do nowadays this is something that is very sonically cohesive and I will be excited to pick up on Black Friday.

I embrace lo-fi quality recordings, that is one of the things that drew me to the Black Keys to begin with, their gritty raw, garagey sound.  And as a rapper, it’s hard for people to grasp tho idea of lo-fi music in a hip hop setting because everything in rap tends to be overproduced.

If you want to connect up with Faimkills, here’s how:

collective/makeshift label: Steal Mantra
from: Inland Empire, Southern California
sites: myspace.com/faimkills , twitter.com/faimkills
upcoming projects: A Hot Ghetto Messtape free download Oct 1, 2009 (“Strange Rhymes” will be on it.)

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Patrick Carney from The Black Keys on Twitter

Almost as exciting as hearing about the The Black Keys’ new Blakroc project, is realising that Patrick Carney from The Black Keys is on Twitter. Here’s his address – @patrickcarney

How pleasing to see Pat on there since this site reported on hope for a Black Keys Twitter page.

There have been people hijacking other people’s names including a false Black Keys address. The Black Keys Fan Lounge therefore contacted Pat to verify the authenticity of the account and he confirmed the address it is indeed his. The comments certainly are uniquely his you’d have to say.

Pat’s Twitter stream are now rss fed down the right hand side of this site’s home page.

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The Black Keys and Blakroc

Well, the rumours have been confirmed. The Black Keys’ collaborations with notable hip hop artists including the RZA, Jim Jones, Mos Def, Pharoah Monch, Q-Tip, Ludacris, ODB, Billy Danze of M.O.P., Noe and Nicole Wray are being released in an album on November 27, 2009.

How the album, recorded over 11 days with 11 artists, pans out is going to be very interesting. There’s only a brief snippet of the recordings over at blakroc.com (and below).

You can also listen to the track Hoochie Coo mp3 here featuring Mos Def, Jim Jones and The Black Keys.

The album is not such a surprising development considering The Black Keys long held love all things hip hop previously documented here on The Black Keys Fan Lounge. How interesting to see the respect is mutual considering the ‘Keys were on a primarily hip hop line up at The Roots Picnic.

How very cool it is to see The RZA on there, who this website has long hoped would work with the band. He’s a veritable music svengali, alike Dan ready to branch out and take educated risks. For Dan and Pat, who are such big Wu-Tang fans from their high school days, it must have been like their musical lives had turned full circle.

Consider also how Damon Dash, the Blakroc producer, was turned onto The Black Keys:

My assistants, who are now actually A&Rs, were going to a Black Keys concert for their birthday and I wasn’t invited,” he explained. “Usually on their birthdays we all do it together and the reason why I wasn’t invited was because the concert was sold out . And I had never heard of The Black Keys and I was like y’all still gonna go without me. And they was like ‘Yo it’s The Black Keys.” So I was like, lemme hear this group. So I start listening to them and they actually became my favorite group. They were on heavy rotation so we just reached out and we kicked it with them and I was like, ‘I wonder what would happen if we got Jim Jones and the Keys in the studio’ and Jim came in and all of a sudden Mos came in and then [it] just built from there.

Make sure you sign up to Blakroc.com and check out the full length trailer. With such slick production values on the video, and emotive black and white photography of all the artists, clearly this whole project will surely end up as either a stand alone documentary or deluxe cd edition filler.

Every week (friday) there is going to be a new webisode released onto the site. Dam tasty behind the scenes action. Here’s webisode 1:

Blakroc short trailer:

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