Kustoo

V.I.P. on Burn Notice

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 09:26:45 -0700

Hey Fuzzies,

It is your boy KU again. I just wanted to send out a quick note to let everyone know that one of my songs was on last nights episode of Burn Notice. The song is called V.I.P. and was played during the second club scene on the show.

I just added the song to my page for your listening a.k.a. buying pleasure. LOL ENJOY.

The episode is called Bad Blood and you can watch it at the following times on USA.

AUG 14 10:00 PM BAD BLOOD

AUG 14 01:00 AM BAD BLOOD

AUG 16 05:00 PM BAD BLOOD

AUG 18 11:00 PM BAD BLOOD

Also I just started my Twitter page. Feel free to join.

House of Blues - Los Angeles

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 19:51:45 -0700

Hey All,
We are back at the House of Blues on Sunset this Friday, June 13. We go on about 8:40 p.m. The show is FREE, but you have to get tickets from one of us in the band.

For tix, hit me on AIM - kusteazy or email me here on fuzz.

Friday, June 13
Showtime: 8:40pm
HOUSE OF BLUES - Sunset
8430 Sunset Boulevard
West Hollywood, CA 90069
18+ FREE
We all have tickets so contact your contact in the band or just reply with how many you want and we will get them to you.
thanks.

jon. tim. pete. josh. ku.
vajramusic.net
kustoo.com

Drillbit Taylor Rap Battle Clip

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 11:32:27 -0700

Hello All,
I got the chance to work on the film Drillbit Taylor last year, and now some clips are online. Here is a clip of the rap battle scene I co-wrote with Seth Rogen. Enjoy and go check out the film when you get a chance.

Assumptions Live - Back from the depths!

Thu, 03 Jan 2008 13:26:09 -0800

This is a song I have with the incredible Opera singer Katherine Terray. You can find out more about her [url=www.katharineterray.com]here.[url]

TheCapitalClinic has been a big fan of this song and keptit fresh in the minds of the fuzz folks.

For some reason it is not here anymore. The blog disappeared!!!

Well I am putting it back up for all to enjoy.

Capacity

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 13:39:45 -0800

I just posted a new song I did with an artist name Jierra. I just feature at the end. The producer is a guy names Boss Beats. Love to hear your thoughts.

TRL - How weird!

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 15:28:41 -0800

Word is they will be talking about me and my character from the movie Walk Hard on TRL today. Feel free to check it out and let me know if you see anything.

Walk Hard Red Carpet

Sun, 16 Dec 2007 19:37:23 -0800

For those of you that may not know, I am in the new movie coming out on December 21 called WALK HARD. I play the role of a rapper at the end of the movie. I was on the Red Carpet the other night and they have some highlights online. Check them out when you get a chance. My interview comes up at about 8 minutes in. There is also a music video for the song I was a part of for the movie. Check that out below.

Here is some footage from the Red Carpet. I show up about eight minutes in

This is the music video for the song I wrote for the movie. It is Not Safe For Work. LMAO

Here is the Music Video. NOT SAFE FOR WORK

Walk Hard Movie Soundtrack.

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 12:43:43 -0800

So I have a very small part in the new movie Walk Hard scheduled to be released on December 21. I am excited as you can imagine. So I just wanted to show a little link love for the movie. I have personally seen the movie already and it is hilarious.

I am also on the soundtrack. If you have a chance go to iTunes and buy it:) Or at least buy my song on the soundtrack. It is song number 30. (You Make Me So) Hard.

www.walkhard-movie.com
http://www.myspace.com/lilnutsackmusic
http://www.myspace.com/walkhard

New Songs

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 12:38:35 -0800

So I know it has been a while, but I posted some new pics and some new music. I would love to hear your thoughts on both. Mostly the music though.

KU a.k.a. Kustoo on the "Vajra Sound"

Mon, 30 Jul 2007 16:49:46 -0700

KU/Vajra @ The Joint Saturday and @ The House of Blues Next Saturday

Fri, 27 Jul 2007 14:55:58 -0700

First, thank you to everyone that came out to 14 Below last night. The show was hot. Literally!! We had a great time and I look forward to seeing everyone else at The Joint! Also, we will be playing the House of Blues on Sunset on August 4. We will be giving away tickets at the show at The Joint.

KU & VAJRA

This SATURDAY, July 28
The Joint - 8771 W Pico Blvd
Los Angeles, CA
Show time: 10:30 p.m.
21+
$8 Guest List (Reply to this email with name)
$10 @ the Door
Everyone that comes to the show will get two free tickets to our show at
the House of Blues on Sunset for next Saturday. More info to come.

Thank You for your continued support. By the way, Big B is playing tonight @ Fais Do Do's 5257 West Adams, Los Angeles, California. 90016. contact Big B at bizzlekong@gmail.com or Plus at amariplus@gmail.com for tickets....

ku. josh. tim. pete. jon.

Kustoo.fuzz.com
kustoo.com
vajramusic.net

CHECK OUT A VIDEO OF KU AND VAJRA LIVE
KU AND VAJRA MASH-UP
FOR MORE INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT Amari Smith/ Manager (323) 864-7953
Imani Malik/Manager (310) 415-4563

www.Kustoo.com

Santa Monica - Vajra and KU Live! - Thursday

Thu, 26 Jul 2007 00:45:24 -0700

Here is a calendar of our upcoming shows:

VAJRA, KU, DANICA ROZELLE, & J7 D'STAR

This THURSDAY, July 26
14 Below - 1348 14th St. - Santa Monica, CA 90404
Show time: 9:30pm
21+
$7 with Flyer (Attached)
$10 without Flyer

KU & VAJRA

This SATURDAY, July 28
The Joint - 8771 W Pico Blvd
Los Angeles, CA
Show time: 10:30 p.m.
21+
$8 Guest List (Reply to this email with name)
$10 @ the Door

Thank You for your continued support. By the way, Big B is playing Friday night. The Show is July 27, doors open at 9:00 pm. all ages, It's at Fais Do Do's 5257 West Adams, Los Angeles, California. 90016. contact Big B at bizzlekong@gmail.com or Plus at amariplus@gmail.com for presale tickets....

New KU and Vajra Mash-Up Video

Mon, 16 Jul 2007 16:58:01 -0700

Check out the new Vajra and KU Mash Up Video. Let me know what you think in the comments.

Kustoo Cloned???

Mon, 02 Jul 2007 09:53:37 -0700

So over the past few weeks, a few of my friends have been asking me if I am in the Kelly Rowland video because there is a guy that looks just like me. So upon further investigation, I realized that there is someone there that looks just like me. Check it out for yourself:

Kelly Rowland Video

Fast forward to like 2:08 in the video and you will see my twin.

Update: KU and Vajra with Danica Opening for Biz Markie

Wed, 27 Jun 2007 11:47:59 -0700

I just wanted to send a quick update to everyone regarding the show this
Thursday. The tickets at the door are $25, but you can get them from one
of us in the band for $15. However, we only have a limited number of
tickets, so make sure you contact us to get your tickets. There is no
need for anyone to pay $25 when we have them for $15. It is like we are
giving you the homie hook-up. lol

But seriously, we only have a few left so get at us.

KU and Vajra with Danica are on at 9:30 p.m. SHARP - so get there
early!

God Bless
KU

See below for more information regarding the show
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
That's right folks!

On Thursday, June 28, 2007 @ 10 p.m. KU and Vajra with Danica are
opening for the OLD SCHOOL once again!

COME SEE BIZ MARKIE perform live at the Key Club in
West Hollywood. VAJRA and KU (KUSTOO) will be
opening the show and will be joined by the songstress
DANICA!

CONTACT KU FOR TICKETS (818) 332-1766.
The presale price is $15 and the doors open at 9:00pm.

THIS IS A FAMILY SHOW so AGES 15 and OVER are welcome!

There are special performances and a FULL NIGHT of
entertainment at one of the best venues Hollywood has
to offer! Please buy a ticket, come out and support.

KU and Vajra with Danica are on at 9:30 pm SHARP - so get there
early!

BIZ MARKIE is on at 11pm.

THE KEY CLUB
9039 Sunset Blvd.
West Hollywood, CA
90069
310-274-5800
www.keyclub.com

Hope to see you all when you BUY your tickets from me
and then AGAIN at the event!

www.myspace.com/kumusic
www.vajramusic.net
www.kustoo.com
www.danicarozelle.com
http://kustoo.fuzz.com/

CALLING ALL MUSIC FANS - VAJRA, KUSTOO (Me) & BIZ MARKIE -- LIVE @ THE KEY CLUB JUNE 28th, 2007

Wed, 06 Jun 2007 15:04:55 -0700

That is right folks! VAJRA and K.U. are opening for the OLD SCHOOL one again. COME SEE BIZ MARKIE perform live at the Key Club on Hollywood. None other than FUZZ members, VAJRA and K.U. (KUSTOO) will be opening the show! PLEASE CONTACT ME or the K.U. and VAJRA for tickets. The presale price is $25 and the show is 21 and over w/ID and doors open at 9:00pm. VAJRA & K.U. are on at 10pm and BIZ MARKIE is on at 11pm.

WE HOPE TO SEE YOU ALL THERE IN SUPPORT OF FUZZ BANDS AND IN CELEBRATION OF THE OLD SCHOOL!

Contact me for tickets - kustoo@gmail.com

KU and Vajra in Santa Monica Tonight, June 1

Fri, 01 Jun 2007 12:24:27 -0700

For those of you who have not had the K.U. or Vajra experience live - this Friday, June 1, is your chance!

We are performing at 14 below in Santa Monica, CA at 8:45 P.M. SHARP!

The door cost is $10 (but a nice % of that goes to us - so come out and support). We are the first of four bands - so expect a great night of rock and hip-hop fusion.

14 Below
1348 14th St. (Cross Street is Santa Monica Blvd.)
Santa Monica, CA
90404
21 and over w/ID.

Be sure to mention Vajra & K.U. at the door so that we know you came and sign our fan guest list. To get a sample of the music - please visit us on Fuzz.com or our websites.

Fuzz.com sites
kustoo.fuzz.com
vajra.fuzz.com

Websites
www.kustoo.com
www.vajramjusic.net

-
Hope to see you there!

All Is Fair In Love (Part 2)

Tue, 29 May 2007 21:27:05 -0700

In Part 1 (HERE) I explained the first verse of my song love and where I intended it to go. The funny thing about this art of song writing is how we often take pieces and parts from our own lives and turn them into art. So with that I will get to the second verse.

Love
Verse 2

Its hard to explain, but I knew that the change was Sam Cookin,
caught myself stealing glimpses of this particular misses/
The takeover was vicious, like a thief in the night,
I feed on the hype, which explains why I'm dreamin' at night/
in the blink of an eye, I was becoming something outta nothing,
Adrenalin steady pumpin' just from watching this woman/
She literally kept me coming, I must be losing my senses,
cause like words in my sentences, I see the potential/
Because really were meant to become something thats monumental,
but will she like what I'm into and my boyish demeanor/
and will she love my silly ways and be there when I need her,
and be willing to risk it all from the moment I meet her/
Like I would, cause even in poverty life is good,
and though Kutty is quite hood, she hasn't noticed I stood/
Right next to her, and possibly right next to him,
Which I hope is a best friend or even a next of kin/ Cause....

Chorus:
All is fair in love........
Loves a crazy game.....
And all is changed with time.....
The future none can see..........

I realize that earlier in this blog I made a very big generalization about artists. I said that we take pieces of ourselves and put them into our music. I have no proof that other artists do this, I just know that I do. I think I was trying to justify my insecurities and how I put them into imaginary characters I create in my music.

I say all that to say that in this verse, I took some of my own insecurities and feeling that I have felt and made a character. A character who fights love for so long that when it does happen, it has such a profound affect on his life that feeling of jealousy and inadequacy begin to fill his mind. Everything seems to happen so fast. He goes from a man that despises love in the first verse and starts to find comfort in his loneliness to a man that stands shyly next to the girl that he is beginning to fall in love with. One of my favorite lines in this verse is "Cause like words in my sentences, I see the potential." I used this particular line because I feel like words are some of the most powerful things in the world. They can make you feel and do so many different things. Literally one extreme to the next. For the character in this verse, the potential of these words is only matched by the potential of the love he is beginning to feel in his heart.

But like with anything, he sees this greatness of the love in front of him and cowers in its light. So often we are afraid of achieving greatness and we start making excuses for why we can not be great. So his excuses are he feels childish, immature, poor, uncultured, and silly which all in his mind amount to him being unloveble (or unworthy of her love - more on this in my third verse). In addition, he feels this is why she has yet to notice him. Not only that, the emotion he feels is so alien to him, that he begins to speculate that every man she is with is a romantic interest. Although highly unlikely, he is so engulfed in the passion and rawness of this new emotion that he is unable to control these thoughts.

I heard someone say that love is blind....I often think that love is not blind at all. Instead it has an odd way of translating the truth.

Verse three will be here soon.

CD Sales Plunge - From The NYT

Mon, 28 May 2007 18:12:56 -0700

Plunge in CD Sales Shakes Up Big Labels
By JEFF LEEDS

“Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” the Beatles album often cited as the greatest pop recording in music history, received a thoroughly modern 40th-anniversary salute last week when singers on “American Idol” belted out their own versions of its songs live on the show’s season finale.

But off stage, in a sign of the recording industry’s declining fortunes, shareholders of EMI, the music conglomerate that markets “Sgt. Pepper” and a vast trove of other recordings, were weighing a plan to sell the company as its financial performance was weakening.

It’s a maddening juxtaposition for more than one top record-label executive. Music may still be a big force in pop culture — from “Idol” to the iPod — but the music business’s own comeback attempt is falling flat.

Even pop’s pioneers are rethinking their approach. As it happens, one of the performers on “Sgt. Pepper,” Paul McCartney, is releasing a new album on June 5. But Mr. McCartney is not betting on the traditional record-label methods: He elected to sidestep EMI, his longtime home, and release the album through a new arrangement with Starbucks.

It’s too soon to tell if Starbucks’ new label (a partnership with the established Concord label) will have much success in marketing CDs. But not many other players are.

Despite costly efforts to build buzz around new talent and thwart piracy, CD sales have plunged more than 20 percent this year, far outweighing any gains made by digital sales at iTunes and similar services. Aram Sinnreich, a media industry consultant at Radar Research in Los Angeles, said the CD format, introduced in the United States 24 years ago, is in its death throes. “Everyone in the industry thinks of this Christmas as the last big holiday season for CD sales,” Mr. Sinnreich said, “and then everything goes kaput.”

It’s been four years since the last big shuffle in ownership of the major record labels. But now, with the sales plunge dimming hopes for a recovery any time soon, there is a new game of corporate musical chairs afoot that could shake up the industry hierarchy.

Under the deal that awaits shareholder approval, London-based EMI agreed last week to be purchased for more than $4.7 billion by a private equity investor, Terra Firma Capital Partners, whose diverse holdings include a European waste-conversion business. Rival bids could yet surface — though the higher the ultimate price, the more pressure the owners will face to make dramatic cuts or sell the company in pieces in order to recoup their investment.

For the companies that choose to plow ahead, the question is how to weather the worsening storm. One answer: diversify into businesses that do not rely directly on CD sales or downloads. The biggest one is music publishing, which represents songwriters (who may or may not also be performers) and earns money when their songs are used in TV commercials, video games or other media. Universal Music Group, already the biggest label, became the world’s biggest music publisher on Friday after closing its purchase of BMG Music, publisher of songs by artists like Keane, for more than $2 billion.

Now both Universal and Warner Music Group are said to be kicking the tires of Sanctuary, an independent British music and artist management company whose roster includes Iron Maiden and Elton John. The owners of all four of the major record companies also recently have chewed over deals to diversify into merchandise sales, concert tickets, advertising and other fields that are not part of their traditional business.

Even as the industry tries to branch out, though, there is no promise of an answer to a potentially more profound predicament: a creative drought and a corresponding lack of artists who ignite consumers’ interest in buying music. Sales of rap, which had provided the industry with a lifeboat in recent years, fell far more than the overall market last year with a drop of almost 21 percent, according to Nielsen SoundScan. (And the marquee star 50 Cent just delayed his forthcoming album, “Curtis.”)

In other genres the picture is not much brighter. Fans do still turn out (at least initially) for artists that have managed to build loyal followings. The biggest debut of the year came just last week from the rock band Linkin Park, whose third studio album, “Minutes to Midnight,” sold an estimated 623,000 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan data.

But very few albums have gained traction. And that is compounded by the industry’s core structural problem: Its main product is widely available free. More than half of all music acquired by fans last year came from unpaid sources including Internet file sharing and CD burning, according to the market research company NPD Group. The “social” ripping and burning of CDs among friends — which takes place offline and almost entirely out of reach of industry policing efforts — accounted for 37 percent of all music consumption, more than file-sharing, NPD said.

The industry had long pinned its hopes on making up some of the business lost to piracy with licensed digital sales. But those prospects have dimmed as the rapid CD decline has overshadowed the rise in sales at services like Apple’s iTunes. Even as music executives fret that iTunes has not generated enough sales, though, they gripe that it unfairly dominates the sale of digital music.

Partly out of frustration with Apple, some of the music companies have been slowly retreating from their longtime insistence on selling music online with digital locks that prevent unlimited copying. Their aim is to sell more music that can be played on Apple’s wildly popular iPod device, which is not compatible with the protection software used by most other digital music services. EMI led the reversal, striking a deal with Apple to offer its music catalog in the unrestricted MP3 format.

Some music executives say that dropping copy-restriction software, also known as digital-rights management, would stoke business at iTunes’ competitors and generate a surge in sales. Others predict it would have little impact, though they add that the labels squandered years on failed attempts to restrict digital music instead of converting more fans into paying consumers.

“They were so slow to react, and let things get totally out of hand,” said Russ Crupnick, a senior entertainment industry analyst at NPD, the research company. “They just missed the boat.”

Perhaps there is little to lose, then, in experimentation. Mr. McCartney, for example, may not have made it to the “American Idol” finale, but he too is employing thoroughly modern techniques to reach his audience.

Starbucks will be selling his album “Memory Almost Full” through regular music retail shops but will also be playing it repeatedly in thousands of its coffee shops in more than two dozen countries on the day of release. And the first music video from the new album had it premiere on YouTube. Mr. McCartney, in announcing his deal with Starbucks, described his rationale simply: “It’s a new world.”

When Times Get Hard

Fri, 25 May 2007 12:15:20 -0700

One thing I have found that help me through a lot of what is happening to me right now is going back to old songs and listening to what I had to say. Oddly enough, the verse below is from quite a few years ago, but it rings so true in my life right now. I just thought I would share with you all. Maybe it will help you through something, also.

Verse

I've seen how it changes us, how it just rips apart and take from us
How it makes us feel like this lifestyle wasn't made us/

But Kutty ain't the type to complain, but my life ain't the same
As that image that you've got in your brain/

I'm struggling, like I work in the fields, thats why I'm huggin this steal
I only survive with the help of this quill/

My life spills from the pavement to paper, and from the paper to passion
into my vocal chords to speak how it happens/

from crashing automobiles, to simply keeping it real,
my verses give you the chills and I still haven't earned deal/

it crazy, but my mom is doing better and I'm thankful for that,
puts in perspective when it comes to this rap/

See I'm older a lot wiser, to be honest a lot tighter,
but doesn't mean as much these days to spit fire/

I chalk it as experience, guide me through my ignorance,
Its been a long time so its got to have significance.....