FRESH SELECTS:
Okay, first off – here is Black Spade’s side of the story for the first time since the original e-mail. Note that everything else in the original post and subsequent comments under my name were my thoughts, opinions and words. So here are his:

Credit due to Made Monarchs for putting the video together.

On the other side of things… after two days of dodging questions and beating around the bush, Charles Hamilton finally came through on his word and uploaded the ProTools session files for his version of the “Shinin’” track. Below is a video the homie Primuts Luta of AvantUrb made showing that Black Spade’s original beat is sitting right there in the very file Charles himself uploaded, titled “08 – Shinin’” as it appeared on the beat CD and all.

So what this means is that Charles Hamilton, one way or another, took Black Spade’s original composition (note its a stereo track and not original source files) and added other elements to it. Now, all in fairness – what most likely happened was Charles was given the Black Spade beat on a CD by a mutual friend or something, and he used the beat thinking it was either that person’s beat and they were cool with it, or he thought it was the original break itself (since Spade did re-create it and sing it to mimic the original).

Not a big deal, right? However – Charles should’ve just said that shit from the jump and this wouldn’t have even been an issue, but he didn’t. He claimed that he did the beat all by himself straight from the original record, that the voice heard on his song was a filter and not Spade’s (note there’s no filtered voice part in those sessions), etc. So now this kid’s credibility is completely shot and I can only hope that people continue to treat him as such from here on out.

This is 2009. We are WELL into the internet age at this point. You CANNOT get away with blatant bullshit like this and not expect to get called out and exposed for it.

So in closing – I hope this a lesson for everyone. True artists – please be careful about sending out your demo beat CD’s, uploading tracks to your MySpace, etc. Watermark your shit, date it, copyright it, whatever – just make sure you don’t get Charles Hamilton’ed. And for all the fraudulent artists out there trying to pull similar jack moves – stop.

Don’t be the next contestant on that Fresh Selects screen