URB x Society Theory Present Eli Escobar x Just Blaze x A-Trak - Fat Beats NY Closing Sets

Here’s the latest clip from URB HD in conjunction with Society Theory – both collectives came together and were able to capture impressive footage of the legendary closing of Fat Beats. Offered is a documentary-style visual of some of the festivities that took place with Just Blaze and A-Trak. You can also view the full description from the folks behind the video after the jump, enjoy!

Words:
Normally, our video content is crafted with a more straight forward description or related article to the subject matter at hand. For this particular piece, I have decided to go with a a decidedly personal touch.

When the news of Fat Beats closing their locations hit home for me, first through the social networking rounds and then through the actual calls that I started to receive from friends, diggers, and [hip hop] afficionados, there was a delayed sense of mourning that is just now finally starting to set in.

My age group grew up in a ‘tweener’ generation — our hearts grown and rooted in the soil of analog tape, film, and vinyl, and our eyes and hands reaching towards the digital future.

My original thought was that the demise of Fat Beats would become a symbolized death knell to those things that I had been weened on as a child that lived through the golden age of hip hop and electronic music — vinyl records, analog sounds, raw film stock, et al. Before these ‘cultural blips’ became ingrained into the mainstream conciousness, they were spread piecemeal through word of mouth, through tape trading, and those things that would eventually grow into the mechanism of the digital peer to peer network and distribution system.

You can imagine my surprise after getting the ok to send one of our _st shoot teams into the heart of the event days ago, that my previous feelings of requiem would give way to feelings of pride and joy for the event. Seeing the emotions and hearing the sounds that I had started to receive from our shoot team, made me proud to have said that I had set foot in that space, that I had grown up in a much maligned ‘tweener’ generation, and that I experienced both the analog and digital art form in its glory and birth.

The first set of footage to hit on media networks had prepared me for what I could be getting from my shooters — what I actually got was something much more. It was with that that this truly became a piece that I felt needed to harken back to the ‘instant vintage’ styling and the historical feel of some of the records and sounds contained herein — taking great care to capture the scene, moods, and emotions that were present within the society that had gathered to bear witness to a mecca of hip hop and vinyl closing its doors. Moreover, it was created with the idea that this act and feel like an analog ‘historical document’ that conveyed the roots of a generation but was built with the tools of the next.

With that, my [video] editor’s note ends with the following — Long Live Hip Hop. Long Live Vinyl. Long Live Fat Beats.

Words by Phil Nacionales for URB Magazine