OOF! That could damn well have been your reaction to walking outside into the record-breaking heat or to the screaming blue bastards flying over your crib here last week in Seatown—but it's also the name of the upcoming EP from local heroes Blue Scholars. Having parted ways with Rawkus, Geo and Sabzi are releasing OOF! (due August 25) and a yet-to-be-named full-length (due next year), and rereleasing Bayani through an ingenious partnership with local coffee-roaster Caffe Vita and iconic New York hiphop label Duck Down Records. "With the record industry in flux, conditions are ripe for an alternative," Geologic writes in their sharply penned press release. "One where the artist, rather than becoming an employee of a label or sponsor, contracts the label and sponsors to do work for them. Everybody still gets a check. But it's a relationship where the artists (and their handpicked 'team') not only have creative freedom but economic power." "Or," he continues, "we can keep chasing the big record-deal unicorn." Now pay attention, kids, 'cause I know a whole lot of y'all are still out there in full force with your nets and horn guards, hoping to land a big-bank deal like Cash Money did with Universal 10 years ago: If you don't recognize that those old ways don't work anymore (in any sense), then as the poet laureate E-40 once said, you're "playin' football with basketball rules." Quit grindin' backward.

Up on www.bluescholars.com, you can download a two-and-a-half-minute ditty called "Coo?" off of the forthcoming OOF! Over Sabzi's simple, slinky guitar line and cracking snare, Geo reminisces on times past and pontificates on the state of music and society today; with a ferocity and a fun not heard since the Scholar's debut, Geo injects his narrative with hella personality as he calls out the complacency that allows bullshit to fly—like them goddamn Blue Angels!

That said, there's much fire for the people to be sampled this week in the live sphere, the best I can think of being at High Dive on Thursday, August 6: Fatal Lucciauno, Helladope, Candidt, and Thee Satisfaction—four times the black star power, in full effect. For that matter, big homie J. Moore let me peep the new J. Pinder record, Sky Is Falling, and it's dope; hear some of that new material in a rare set from the young gun himself at Hidmo (on Jackson Street) on the evening of Friday, August 7. (Speaking of J. Moore, make sure you catch him and DJ Hyphen doing Sound Session every Sunday on KUBE at 10:45 p.m., not long after, ahem, Street Sounds on KEXP—call it Seattle Sundays.) On Monday, August 10, at Chop Suey is the "Alpha P Party Revolutionary" with Knox Family, Sarkastik, Kas1, Inkubiz, and DJs Able and Punish. It's also a live video shoot for Suntonio Bandanaz's new single "Boogie Up the Block," so be sure and represent accordingly. Me? I'm going to boogie up my own block right now, as my trusty fan just died in a blaze of glory. RIP.