Tim Fite Reaps Enormous Praise For Over The Counter Culture
Billboard Calls Fite’s New Free Disc, “The First Must-Hear Album of 2007”
Confirmed for Bonnaroo This Summer
Brooklyn-based multi-genrist Tim Fite is garnering rave reviews for his new album, Over The Counter Culture, which has been available for free download through his website (www.timfite.com), iTunes, and emusic since February 20th. Fite’s fifteen tracker – a blistering examination of commercial culture and it's adverse effects on life in general, and on rap music specifically – has yielded acclaim from Billboard, NPR’s Sound Opinions, The Boston Globe and The Chicago Tribune.
“One of the best albums of the new year can’t be bought,” writes The Tribune’s Greg Kot. “Over the Counter Culture is both a critique and a celebration of hip-hop. It’s packed with crackling beats, wicked humor and ‘did he just say that?’ audacity.”
Elsewhere, The Globe called OTCC “the kind of brazen, self-aware political critique that harkens back to early Public Enemy,” while Billboard’s Todd Martens proclaimed the disc, “the first must-hear album of 2007, a scathingly sarcastic look and consumerism, politics and corporate hip-hop.”
Temporarily putting the folkish leanings exhibited on 2005’s acclaimed Gone Ain’t Gone (Anti-) to the side, the sharp-edged OTCC took shape because – as Fite told The Globe – he needed “to blow off some steam,” adding, “With the climate of our culture presently, with the war and the escalation of bad business and globalization and commercials, commercials, commercials, I couldn’t make another encoded album.”
“You cannot address politics about consumerism and put it out in the same way that any record would come out,” says Fite in the Billboard feature of the decision to give his music away. “It would be wrong . . . As much as I need to pay my bills, and it’d be great to sell some records, this is not a record for sale. These ideas are not for sale. These ideas should be for free.”
As word spreads on Fite, the thought-provoking artist has just been confirmed for the world famous 2007 Bonnaroo Festival, slated for June 14 – 17 in Manchester, Tennessee. And in related news, Fite’s new video for “Camoflage” – in which he intones “a fashion statement for a fascist nation” – is currently featured on the You Tube main page and has already received over 150,000 plays.