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How I Discovered How to Listen to Jazz

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How I Discovered How to Listen to Jazz

By Rob Parkour

 

 

            On a beautiful afternoon during the summer of 2015, I drove to my best friend Sam’s house in North Plainfield to trip on LSD. For me, the trip was a comeback of sorts. Tripping on various psychedelics was a weekend tradition with my group of friends in High School. We’d wear old sports jerseys, smoke, listen to trippy music, and laugh. Our tripping golden era was during 2004-2005, my junior year of high school. As our weed smoking increased, our psychedelic trips became so infrequent that we had only one trip during the second semester of senior year: that trip was the last time I tripped on any type of drugs until that day.

Okay, that’s a lie. Three months earlier, my backup weed connect told me he could get his hands on some acid. Sam and I took four tabs each, and watched the complete first season of the hood web series Money & Violence, which is like The Wire if you took out the politics, actors, and budget. It was Sam’s first time seeing the show, and my second: doing something as ridiculous as tripping LSD to a hood YouTube series was an on brand way for us to reintroduce ourselves to the tripping game.

We huddle around Sam’s laptop and are transported into the world of Flatbush Brooklyn, where everyone either wears a Yankees World Series Patch fitted or a Brooklyn Nets snapback.  I know Sam’s under the influence when he starts comparing Money & Violence plots to Shakespeare multiple times during the same episode.

You know how people say everything under the sun has been said or done? I can safely say Sam and I are the only people to trip acid to the complete first season of Money & Violence. That just gave me a great idea. You know those Ayahuasca trips people take in the wilderness where they trip so hard that they confront demons and come back new people? Well think about that concept and apply it to Money & Violence. Fill up a van of 10 brave souls, go into the deepest parts of the woods, meditate, take a sheet of acid, and completely give yourself up to the genius that is the first season of Money & Violence.  After the trip is complete, Sam will lead a group discussion centered around comparing Shane and Tai’s story arc to Hamlet.

As fun as that trip was, the acid wasn’t the strongest.  I was definitely tripping and experienced feelings that I wouldn’t have otherwise felt, but I was still very much in control of myself and experienced minimal visual distortion of colors or shapes. The Money & Violence trip was equivalent to getting very buzzed off five beers, and knowing there’s still another level to reach if you want to get drunk.

When I get to Sam’s I unload my backpack which has my Xbox 360 and Bose Bluetooth stereo.  At the round table we both set up shop in our personal GB stations and chop it up while listening to rap.  The acid that I’m given is not from the same person as last time, this time the person purchased the acid at one of those Jam Band music festivals where the acid is so strong it makes wannabe Phish groups sound bearable.

“Should I take one or two?” I ask Sam who gives me a look that said ten years ago you never would’ve asked that question. I take two tabs, and less than an hour later I scratch my leg. When I bring my head back up a wave comes over my body intensely. All of a sudden things are brighter and I can’t stop smiling. My cheekbones are starting to feel sore because I can’t stop cheesing so hard.  Sam looks at me and can tell the LSD dropped, he is sitting this trip out and being my trip advisor instead of my tripping partner.  His early 80’s music fetish aside, Sam has the best taste of music out of anyone I know and there’s no one else I’d trust more to curate the music for my trip. Sam turns on YouTube on his SmartTV and plays Afrobeat Godfather, Fela Kuti. Coming up on acid and watching Fela’s sets was an out of body experience similar to discovering masturbation. During hour 2 of our Fela experience, YouTube was experiencing buffering issues that couldn’t be solved but luckily Sam had a laptop full of downloaded music that needed no internet to listen to.

“What are you in the mood to listen to?”  Sam asked as he lorded over his MacBook that contained his music library.

“No rock but no rap either.  Need something with real instruments that has rhythm to it.”  Eventually we landed on Jazz.

“Have you ever listened to Thurst by Herbie Hancock?”  Sam asked while he scanned his iTunes.

“Nope, only Headhunters.”  I responded, referring to Herbie Hancock’s most popular album. Sam pressed play, Mike Clark’s drums came on, and my life was changed forever.

Before we dive into Thrust, let me explain my personal history with Jazz.  In elementary school, I owned a very small collection of cassettes and CD’s, none of which were Jazz.  They mostly consisted of The Beach Boys, Elvis, The Beatles and Jock Jams.  I moved to Georgia in 1999 during Ludacris’ and OutKast’s heyday which I got swept under: The Beat 95.5 FM gave me my (mostly southern) base education in Hip-Hop.  The same year my family bought a CD stereo for the living room, and I even got a little Sony Jukebox for my bedroom. I took two CD’s out of my parents hard Red CD case, one was a Doo-Wop mix that you may see on TV, and the other was Jazz music from the Big Band era.  Don’t ask me why, but listening to Big Band Era Jazz was my hype music to listen to before a baseball game.  The music was from another era and had a certain level of class to it which made me feel like a grown-up listening to it.   A couple years later I made my stereotypical first Jazz purchase, Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue.  I moved to New Jersey and got really into buying CD’s at Borders with my friends. I wasn’t consciously buying Wilco albums over Jazz albums but that’s what I was doing. Throughout all those trips to Borders I only remember buying three Jazz CD’s, Getz/Gilberto’s self-titled album, John Coltrane’s Giant Steps, and A Love Supreme.  There were so many other genres and unknown artists for me to discover that it didn’t occur to me to go further down the road with jazz.  At this point of my life I used jazz as a nice change up to the rock and rap I loved, putting it on as background music as I messaged my friends on AIM talking about our crazy trips.  During high school, I listened to more soul and standards which left jazz as a distant fifth place.

In my early 20’s I would put on jazz playlists on Songza and use it as background music as I wrote.  Of course, now I know this isn’t the way to listen to jazz, but at the time I was uneducated and liked the vibe it gave me as I wrote.  It’s curious that I didn’t go down a jazz rabbit hole at some point. With rock and rap especially, I took great pleasure in going into the deep recesses of the genres and finding diamonds in the ruff. I think there being no vocals subconsciously made me look at it different.  During this time, I got further into John Coltrane and Miles Davis, familiarizing myself with their five best albums but I was slow to give other artists a shot.  Charlie Parker was the only other Jazz musician whose discography I sought out but that was easy because his entire recordings are in like two places.  I would listen to Headhunters by Herbie Hancock only because I was aware of how it’s been sampled so many times in hip-hop.  I liked Jazz in the same way someone “likes” football but only tunes in during the playoffs.

“Holy shit this is incredible, what the fuck is this?!”

“Thrust. Jazz-funk, really good isn’t it?”  Sam can tell my answer by my eyes bugging out at Mike Clark’s drums, Paul Jackson’s bass and Herbie Hancock’s Piano melts my face off.

“This is fuckin amazing too!” I yell at Sam as the next track “Actual Proof” somehow eclipses “Palm Grease”

“Word big guy, one after another on this album.  All the songs are great,” Sam says as he chuckles.  I keep repeating to Sam how good the album is as if the album will stop playing if I stop complimenting it.  Sam’s vigorously researching online, but from my GB station at the round table I can’t tell if he’s looking up more jazz albums or deciding what food to have delivered at 3 in the afternoon.

It turns out both. 30 minutes later he changes the album, and ten minutes after that Sam’s sister comes down the basement stairs holding food, really making it feel like 2004. They ask if I want any food.

A few quick notes on Thrust before we move on.  Thrust is a better album than Headhunters.  It’s my fault for not investigating this on my own but based on everything written on his albums, Headhunters is his best from his funk period but this sentiment is dead wrong.  Thrust is funkier and better than Headhunters, I don’t care how many times “Watermelon Man” and “Chameleon” have been sampled.  The upgrade from Harvey Mason to Mike Clark is a big reason why Thrust is better than Headhunters.  It is probable that this is the only time that replacing a black drummer with a white drummer made the music better and funkier.  “Mike Clark may be the funkiest WASP of all time,” Sam said, and he’s not wrong.

Why isn’t Mike Clark more famous if he’s so good?  Bad timing. Jazz-funk never took off and morphed into Weather-Report-style bullshit, and his prime coincided with the 80’s which is when jazz was in the process of being institutionalized and forgotten by society.  After Thrust, which was his first project, Mike Clark was featured on only one more Herbie Hancock studio album, Man-Child, which is good but fails to live up to its predecessor.  He performed on Betty Davis’ They Say I’m Different album which I’ve never listened to but supposedly has a cult following.  Herbie Hancock enlisted him for his Headhunters group. When guys like Donald Byrd do this, it reminds me of a rapper standing out on a few features on an album then getting invited to join a group that will never live up to the master’s work.  The Headhunters were jazz fusion’s version of The Outlawz, relegating poor Mike Clark to Yaki Kadafi status. The Headhunters album is okay, but all the jazz-fusion Herbie was involved in post-Thrust lacks the grab you by the collar intensity you feel when Mike Clark is jamming away in “Actual Proof.”  Mike Clark did have one last shining moment before jazz faded away commercially. He was featured on Eddie Henderson’s Heritage album in 1976 that opens with “Inside of You,” which Clark Kent sampled on the classic Jay-Z & Memphis Bleek song “Coming of Age.”  I’m sure Mike Clark would appreciate me using one random song that Jay-Z happened to sample him to highlight his entire post-Thrust career.

“Fuck food, give me more jazz!”  I tell Sam with pupils the size of saucers.  Food is the last thing on my mind, even though I took the acid on an empty stomach, I am not hungry and it seems like I’ll never be hungry again.  Music seems 1000 times more important than food.

To keep up with the jazz-funk vibe, Sam puts on Miles Davis’ On the Corner album as he envelops himself into a sea of Ricotta and Mozzarella.  When I join Sam outside for his post meal cigarette, I am struck by the formations the clouds are making.  The baby blue sky never looks more vibrant and all the clouds start morphing together into weird shapes that eventually reveal themselves as the lady in the Starbucks logo.  As much as I want to enjoy nature on my trip, my weed and jazz are in the basement, and those are the only things I need.

When we get down to the basement, we listen to more of On the Corner which is the best jazz-funk album, and one of the best jazz albums of all time.  Sam tells me On the Corner and Birth of the Cool are his favorite Miles Davis albums, and I appreciate the juxtaposition of that take.  It was obvious how I wanted to spend the rest of my trip, listening to jazz. I sat back and soaked up all the instruments in the clarity you only get on psychedelics. Sam pounded away at the computer researching what album we should listen to next.

“Mingus Ah Um is one of Ian’s favorite albums, he put me onto to that at MKA.”  Sam tells me referring to a high school friend of his.  Sam puts the album on and every song is as amazing. “Yo! How is this so fuckin’ good?!” I’d ask as Sam chuckled at my enthusiasm.

Next Sam plays Saxophone Colossus by Sonny Rollins which sounds impossibly good.  “Where has this album been my whole life?” I ask myself as I soak in the sounds like a junkie enjoying a hit.

“Brilliant Corners by Thelonious Monk is a classic,” Sam says as he changes the album and takes a seat on the couch. I can tell Sam is creeping close to a food coma because every time I say something to him his responses become shorter and shorter. I get so wrapped up in Brilliant Corners that I miss the fact that Sam hasn’t been responding to anything I’ve been saying for ten minutes. Sam’s officially passed out and I’m tripping too hard to drive home. I call my girlfriend at the time and ask her to pick me up. Stupidly, I tell her the truth—I was so high I thought telling the truth to my girlfriend was a good moral play that would work in my favor. She asks me why the hell would I ever do something so dumb and not to come home until the next morning when I sobered up. One of the things about doing psychedelics is you have to be in a comfortable environment with positive energy people and have nothing like school, work, or driving on your plate. I assumed the LSD was going to be on the weaker side like the first trip but my biggest mistake was not lying and telling her that my car broke down and I needed a ride. I couldn’t undo telling her or talk my way out of it, so I was stuck alone in a negative energy headspace.

I tried to shake Sam to wake him up because I didn’t want sit alone to soak in this feeling of rejection during the peak of my trip. When Sam’s in a food or drug coma there is no waking him up. During a weekday trip in high school, after trying to wake Sam up for ten minutes, Sam’s mom literally stepped on his head while closing his bedroom window, and Sam didn’t flinch. I gave up trying to wake Sam out of his carb coma and walked over to his MacBook and tried to find something that would bring my energy back up after a disorienting and negative interaction on the phone my girlfriend. I put on Smokey Robinson and The Miracles’ Greatest Hits. Wrong choice. Don’t get it twisted, Smokey is an all-time legend and that compilation is one of the greatest soul compilations in history, but instead of getting me out of my feelings it threw me further into them. When “Tears of a Clown” came on I couldn’t hold it anymore and started crying like I haven’t cried since I was locked up. The irony wasn’t lost on me and I couldn’t control the tears, they were flowing out of my eyes so fast that my nose started running. As a man, I naturally try to hold back tears and can generally control them unless it’s an extreme situation but there is no controlling your tears when on acid when shit goes left, it just all comes out. I felt sad and alone and knew if I stayed in this current mind state I would start reeling and who the fuck knows what dark and scary places the trip would take me. I had one bad shrooms trip in high school which was one of the most terrifying experiences in my life, I was sure I was going to die. I can still remember crawling to the bathroom like an infant to escape my trip. My friend’s brother’s room was next to the bathroom, and he fell asleep with ESPN on the screen. Something about seeing Marc Bulger and Matt Hasselbeck on the screen comforted me and let me know that I was in the clear.  When I returned to my friends’ room, I could not believe that my bad trip had lasted only 20 minutes. Before I escaped to the bathroom, I felt like I was stuck in the bad trip for months.

I was determined that a bad trip was not going to be my fate for the evening. I stopped crying and turned off Smokey Robinson. I needed entertainment comfort food so I searched Sam’s DVD shelf for something to watch. I brought over Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon a couple months back and popped that into my Xbox. The British accents in the movie really freaked me out for some reason, and I ejected the DVD within minutes. Sam’s DVD shelves left a lot to be desired. I had brought over a Spike Lee DVD box set a year ago trying to get Sam to watch Do the Right Thing. I bought my dad the DVD set for his birthday when I was in high school. Not to get sappy, but it really felt like my dad was looking over me making sure I would have an enjoyable movie experience that didn’t include English accents.

Which Spike Lee film should I watch? Do the Right Thing is one of my favorite American films of all time but I’ve seen it so many times. Clockers would be a fun watch on acid but I’ve also seen it a bunch of times. I’m not in the mood for Crooklyn, and Jungle Love would have had me back in my feelings. Mo’ Better Blues is my perfect option. I’ve only seen it once, and after my jazz epiphany earlier in the afternoon, no movie could be better to watch than Denzel Washington playing a fictional trumpet player. The movie largely takes place in smoke-filled jazz clubs, the same places I imagined I was in when Sam and I listened to Brilliant Corners mere hours ago.

Sam wakes up as Joi Lee’s character gives birth. I’m not sure how many people can say they’ve woken up and the first thing they saw when they opened their eyes was a woman giving birth, but Sam is now one of those people.  Sam and I watch the last 15 minutes of the movie, then have a hearty laugh about the absurdness of him waking up to that scene.

Listening to Charles Mingus and Thelonious Monk earlier were great, but after watching Denzel play a fictional trumpet player, I wanted to hear the best trumpet player in history. “Put on Miles in the Sky” I tell Sam who’s somewhat shocked I picked such a late album. We listen to the album on YouTube which is great because I can see the trippy album cover while I do gravity bongs at Sam’s round table. Since I’m going to be staying at Sam’s until the next morning, I take the last tab of acid I have which kicks my trip back up but not to the extreme point from earlier. Having weed to smoke is essential during a trip: somehow it calms you down and intensifies your trip at the same time. Weed, music and good people are the only essentials for a successful LSD trip.

Sam and I spend the next 7 hours smoking and listening to various albums in Miles Davis’ discography. After Miles in the Sky we listen to Round About Midnight, Birth of the Cool, Milestones, and Miles’ first studio LP Musings of Miles. After that, we listen to the four albums that were recorded during two sessions in 1956 at Rudy Van Gelder’s studios in Hackensack, New Jersey. Miles’ quintet at the time consisted of the stacked team of John Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul Chambers and my man Philly Joe Jones (is that jazz’s death lineup?). Those sessions resulted in Steamin, Workin, Cookin and Relaxin’ with the Miles Davis Quintet. The latter album was so good that Sam and I couldn’t believe it was such an unheralded project.  During the span of listening to Miles Davis with Sam I said “God, this is so good!” approximately 200 times.

Sam must have felt like he was tripping when we found our way to Doo-Bop, Miles Davis’ last album he recorded with the one and only Easy Mo Bee. “How high do you think he was when he recorded it?” I ask. Without replying Sam rolls his chair to the side and just points to a shirtless, washed Miles on the cover.

Around 4 AM Sam says he is going to bed. His mom is on vacation, so he tells me I can use her bedroom whenever I feel tired and want to pass out.  An hour later, I bring my Bose speaker into Sam’s mom’s bedroom and play Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain, one of the few Jazz albums I already have saved to my phone.  I keep falling asleep for five minutes and waking up thinking I had slept for hours.  Around 7 AM, I manage to fall asleep for a full 20 minutes and wake up in a pool of sweat, I feel like I had just had a complete night of sleep.  I don’t remember staying up for 48 hours being a side effect of acid.

I know my girlfriend will be on her way to work by now, so I pack up my bookbag and gravity bong at 8 AM, and step out into the light of day. I’m still a little loopy as I drove home, but I concentrate very hard and make it home safely.  I realize I haven’t eaten in over a day, so I walk up the street to Dunkin Donuts and buy two egg and cheese croissants.

The next thing I do is download Miles Davis and John Coltrane’s complete discographies and upload them to my phone: just in case of an emergency I’ll have more than Sketches of Spain at my disposable.  After that, I sign up for Google Play because there’s too many jazz albums for me to download, I need to have the world of jazz accessible to me at all times.  When my girlfriend comes home from work 8 hours later, I’m still smoking gravity bongs and listening to Miles Davis.

I tripped two more times over the remainder of 2015 and did a mini one-hit trip early in 2016 before temporarily hanging up my psychedelic jersey in the rafters. The other trips were fun, especially the following trip when Sam and I tripped to Killa Season in an attempt to recreate our Money & Violence trip. My last full trip was Sam and I playing Fifa on Christmas Eve while we listened to jazz for 14 straight hours. My mini comeback to tripping after being out the game for so long reminded me of Magic Johnson’s 1996 NBA comeback. I wasn’t the tank I was in my tripping prime, but I could still run the point forward and give you 15, 7 and 6. Acid is an eye-opening experience that helps you realize things about life and yourself that you wouldn’t have otherwise known: there’s a reason Steve Jobs said it’s one of the most important things he’s ever done. The downside is there’s a certain haze it leaves you in after, and I’m not talking about the haze that hovers over you the day after. I feel there’s a certain number of trips people can take before they get burnt out and stupid. Some people can handle it more than others. Like most things acid can be a good or bad thing depending on your body chemistry and the mindset you enter it in.  You do experience a feeling of “I know exactly how things work now, how I need to treat people and what I need to do,” while tripping, but that is fleeting and can’t be recaptured on demand.  I feel I have a decent number of trips left in me, but I’ve decided to use them when I’m in a more stable chapter of my life.

My psychedelic phase ended, but I haven’t gone a day without listening to jazz since that fateful trip. Every night before bed I listen to jazz for an hour as I unwind, smoke and think about my master plan. One of the great things about jazz is there’s so many interesting things going on at any given moment, but if the situation calls for it, jazz can also fade into the background in a way rap, rock and even soul can’t. Even after three years of listening to jazz non-stop, I find new discoveries in albums that I’ve listened to time and time again. I can’t describe technically what draws me to jazz so much. It’s positive vibrational music that’s appropriate morning or night, happy or sad, driving or relaxing: it can guard all five positions.

Penguin’s Guide to Jazz core collection and other lists served as a great starting point to help lead me to artists I either didn’t know or wasn’t familiar with their work as front-men. Freddie Hubbard’s Open Sesame lead to Hubtones and before you know it, I had a phase with over 5 different Freddie Hubbard LP’s. There are certain legends that cannot be defined by one compilation or LP, heck, a lot of the greats were already out of their primes by the 50’s when the jazz LP resembled what we now know it as. Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Art Tatum and others are legends with catalogs so grand in scope that you can’t just listen to their greatest hits or their best live album.

After the mind-blowing experience of listening to Thrust on LSD, I searched for a jazz-funk album that could live up to it.  Nothing could live up to Thrust or On the Corner, but searching for a great jazz-funk album lead me to Grant Green’s Alive album who quickly became one of my favorite all time jazz musicians.  Only Wes Montgomery can hold a candle to Grant Green on the guitar. Alive is probably the third best jazz-funk album ever but doesn’t even crack Grant Green’s top 3: his recordings with Sonny Clark are some of the best jazz records ever recorded.  Donald Byrd’s Blackbyrd was the only other jazz-funk album that did it for me.

I took recommendations from the few people in my life who had an actual opinion on jazz. One of Sam’s favorites is Clifford Brown which lead me to a heavy phase of listening to his album with Max Roach. It’s cruel that Clifford Brown died in a tragic car accident after being one of few jazz players in that era to not be involved with drugs. While delivering pizzas I became cool with an older black man who worked at the front desk at the Hilton. I would be running late with a bunch of deliveries waiting for me back at the pizza shop but I always made sure I had enough time to chop it up with the man who grew up listening to the albums that I was just getting into. “Have you ever heard of Errol Graner’s Concert by the Sea…..what about the Dexter Gordon Our Man in Paris album?” He would laugh out loud and ask me how I heard of these albums that he loved but hadn’t listened to in so many years.

Another cool thing about jazz is how you can find your next favorite jazz artist by looking at the lineup.  Like Cannonball Adderley’s work on Kind of Blue?  Then you’ll be sure to love his album as a leader Somethin’ Else.  The collaborative aspect of jazz reminds me a lot of hip-hop and sports.  During a film session, Lakers coach and fellow LSD fan Phil Jackson was trying to get Kobe Bryant to stop playing selfishly and get Shaq and his teammates more involved. Phil Jackson paused the tape and relayed a story of John Coltrane going on an unbelievable solo and at the end of it Miles stares at him coldly and says, “Hey, man, sometimes you have to know when to put that shit down.” God, I love Phil Jackson.

My first year of listening to jazz every night was thrilling. Right as I was done listening to The Eminent Jay Jay Johnson I would already have Lee Morgan’s Sidewinder in the chamber as my next classic to digest. Andrew!!! By Andrew Hill, The Real McCoy by McCoy Tyner, The Amazing Bud Powell, Moanin by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, Back at the Chicken Shack by Jimmy Smith, Sonny’s Dream by Sonny Criss and so many more.

Like Miles, John Coltrane is an artist that I have to digest every one of his studio albums.  Coltrane’s discography is one of the most diverse catalogs in all of music.  A Love Supreme, Giant Steps and Blue Trane are three of the best jazz albums ever.  He has another five or so records that are A’s and even unauthorized releases like Coltrane’s Sound became one of my favorite random jazz albums.  But John Coltrane’s catalog like all other jazz musician fails in comparison to Miles’ prolific career.  Let’s break down his important albums into categories.

Albums that are in the Pantheon of greatest albums regardless of genre:

Birth of the Cool, 1957 (recorded in ’49-’50)

Round About Midnight, 1957

Milestones, 1958 (my favorite jazz LP of all time)

Kind of Blue, 1959

Sketches of Spain, 1960

In a Silent Way, 1969

Bitches Brew, 1970

On the Corner, 1972

Albums that range from A- to A+:

Musings of Miles, 1955

Dig, 1956

Walkin’ with the Miles Davis Quintet, 1957

Steamin’ with the Miles Davis Quintet, 1957

Workin’ with the Miles Davis Quintet, 1957

Relaxin’ with the Miles Davis Quintet, 1957

Miles Ahead, 1957

Miles Davis and the Modern Jazz Giants, 1959 (recorded in 1954)

Porgy and Bess, 1959

Someday My Prince Will Come, 1961

E.S.P. – 1965

Live at the Plugged Nickel, 1965 (I could have included any number of Miles’ Live albums but this is the best)

Miles Smiles, 1967

Sorcerer, 1967

Nefertiti, 1967 (Miles contributed three classic albums to the best year in music history)

Miles in the Sky, 1968

Filles de Kilimanjaro, 1969

Jack Johnson, 1971

Live-Evil, 1971

1958 Miles, 1974 (recorded in….1958)

Agharta, 1975

Water Babies, 1976 (recorded in ’67-’68, I seem to be the only person who likes this album)

If you’re keeping track at home, that makes a total of eight pantheon albums. Every Beatles album is an A- at worst but even the Fab Four don’t have that many best of the very best albums. Please Please Me, A Hard Days Night, Rubber Soul and The White Album are four albums are undisputedly in the pantheon. You could construct an argument around including Help!, Sgt. Peppers, With the Beatles and Magical Mystery Tour but it’d be a reach. Including two of those four albums in the pantheon would be a stretch and still leave The Beatles two albums behind Miles. Even if you wanted to get greedy and include all four of those albums to make it an even 8 vs. 8 you’d still have Miles’ TWENTY-TWO other albums that fall in the A grade scale. Twenty-two. That type of output is unmatched by anyone in Western recorded music history. Marvin Gaye, Michael Jackson and 2Pac all have at least three pantheon albums…wait a second, are we sure Michael Jackson has a third pantheon album? Let’s give Michael Jackson the benfit of the doubt because his best stuff is that good. Okay so that leaves them with 27 more A-level projects to go until they reach Miles’ level. Christ, there’s genres out there that don’t have a total of 30 A-level albums. Miles wasn’t pumping out these albums using the same formula ala Future. Cool jazz, bebop, hard bop, avant-garde, funk, fusion, orchestras, international sounds, electric sounds, rock etc. Miles was the on the forefront of nearly every post 40’s change in Jazz.  It was also Miles who slowed down the furious pace in jazz and saved it from becoming a caricature of itself.

In 1987 Miles Davis was invited to the White House and shockingly a lot of the old white people had no idea who he was.  Nancy Reagan turned to Miles and asked what he has done to merit an invitation.  Miles replied with a straight face “Well, I’ve changed the course of music five or six times. What have you done except fuck the president?”

Being an incredible musician wasn’t the only thing that drew me to Miles.  He was very cool and carried himself with the same swagger as a rapper or boxer.  Finding out Miles was a boxing nut was one of the many cool things I found out about Miles when I read his biography that was written with help right before he passed. There’re so many interesting stories to read in there from Miles kicking his heroin habit in his childhood home in St. Louis, to Philly Joe Jones’s drug escapades. Maybe nothing was cooler than finding out that Sugar Ray Robinson and Miles Davis were close friends. Eventually I slowed down on listening to Miles every week, but more than any of my other favorite artists, I go back and listen to one of his great projects. There’s so many of them that it’s impossible to tire yourself out.

When I get a tattoo to represent a piece of art that impacted my life I try to keep it simple and not just paste the person’s face on my skin. I have my favorite Japanese novel Kokoro in Japanese letters. I have the Fassbinder film Fear Eats the Soul to pay homage to a film that changed how I look at cinema. I love those tattoos but I don’t think I’d love looking in the mirror every day and seeing Fassbinder’s chubby face tattooed on my arm.  With Miles I broke this rule. I didn’t want to get a stereotypical Bitches Brew tattoo, or one of the famous pictures of him blowing the horn. I got a tattoo of Miles just how I envision him when I close my eyes: playing in the midst of a cloud of smoke at Birdland, the jazz corner of the world.

Dead Serious Track by Track

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Dead Serious Track by Track

By: Rob Parkour

 

 

 

Sometimes being outside of the echo chamber can be healthy.  Das EFX members Dray and Skoob met through a mutual friend on a road trip while attending the HBCU Virginia State University.  The man sitting between Dray and Skoob leaned back, so the two could hear each other’s raps.  Dray (Teaneck, New Jersey) and Skoob (Brooklyn) had roots in the New York City area, but this was before the internet and the two had to rely on their imagination to come out with an original sound: necessity is the mother of invention.  The two up and coming MC’s eventually formed a group and were discovered by Erik Sermon at a college talent show, who rigged the contest so the two MC’s would lose and famously gave them an easy ultimatum “would you rather have a hundred dollars or a record deal?”  The duo kept in touch with EPMD and eventually signed to their label, and what followed were words, styles, flows, references and sounds that were completely unique, but soon spread throughout hip-hop.  Let’s unpack their classic 1992 debut Dead Serious track by track.

 

“Mic Checka” – The catchy, hard driving second single leads off the album.  References to Gadzooks, Geronimo, Gladys Knight, The Flintstones and Annie in the first handful of bars lets the listener know they’re in store for something different.  The “Iggity” suffix the group added to words sets them even further apart than their unique pop culture references.  Adding iggity to the end of words came about because Skoob and Dray didn’t like pauses in their verses, so they tried to figure something to say to fill those pauses.  In conversation and music, the small moments of silence tell their own story. One would think logically that emoving these breaks of silence would hurt the music.  Wrong.  The iggity and other made up sounds the group uses to fill in the pauses actually add rhythm to their rhymes.  The iggity sound became their signature and many groups jacked the style as the group moved away from the sound after their debut.  DJ Clark Kent put it best, when he said the group using “iggity” was them playing DJ and scratching their words.

The group barely finished the song before the album because they couldn’t come up with a hook on the song, until one of the producers came up with the idea to loop one of Dray’s lines in the same song for the hook.  May seem like a lazy cop out, but it worked and proves a looped sample of a hard line is always better than a forced “melodic” hook.

 

“Jussummen” – Dray and Scoob weren’t backpack rappers, gangster rappers, pimp rappers or punch line rappers: they were just two friends getting busy on the mic.  The “La Di Da Di” Doug E. Fresh sample, “just some men that’s on the mic,” provides the simplicity needed for the track.

“Well I’m the jibber jabber, jaw like Shabba/Ranks making bank, operating like Trapper John M.D./yea, that’s what folks tell me/I plan on going far and be a star like Marcus Welby.”  If you read that opening line, you’d probably be confused and wonder why a golden age hip-hop song could make references to Trapper John M.D. and Marcus Welby, two Doctor sitcoms that, um, didn’t quite stand the test of time.  I love the logic: everyone is rapping about women, money and status, but we’re going to reference TV shows that no one will remember in 20 years.  If you have a sense of humor like mine, you’ll listen in glee as Dray and Skoob reference Shaka Zulu and Orville Redenbacher in the same line.  Who else would apologize to Mr. Keebler for loving Nabisco-Brand Vanilla Wafers, and reference Stella Doro breadsticks in the same verse?

A good sense of humor can only carry you so far.  Go back to the first line and listen to how the pauses and bar breaks are manipulated to break up Shabba and Ranks. It may seem easy but there’s a high degree of difficulty in pulling it off right. Their unique lyrics and wordplay rightfully get the attention, but their incredible knack for understanding pauses, cadences and rhythm is what makes their music flow and bump.

 

“They Want EFX” – The biggest single of the group’s career was written when the two were poor, struggling college students.  The beat came from two friends from Brooklyn, and the duo tinkered and looped James Brown’s “Blind Man Can See It,” until they found what they were looking for.

I tried getting into Das Efx many years ago, but gave up when I found out, after a deep internet rabbit hole that there’s no explicit version of Dead Serious available.  Fans hoped that the 25th anniversary release of the debut would finally give them the explicit only version of the album to no avail, and it doesn’t seem the explicit version is coming any time soon. Only an edited version being available is a unique circumstance, but oddly there’s not much information about this anomaly online, other than Das Efx fans complaining about it to each other in hip-hop blogs.  The dirty version of this album has to exist somewhere, right?  Das Efx fans deserve closure on this strange case, just tell us A.) if dirty version album exists B.) why the dirty version was never released and C.) why the hell can’t you release it, we’ll give you money?

In this particular case I was wrong for giving up.  Listening to a clean version of a Das Efx song is different than trying to listen to a clean version of “Murder” by UGK.  There are certain rappers that curse so often that censoring the curses leaves too many gaps for the listener to fill.  My best friend Sam put the clean version of Capone-N-Norega’s War Report on my phone, and the pauses were so numerous and frequent that I had to turn the album off while I cursed Sam off in my head for what I perceived as a cruel joke.  Das Efx doesn’t suffer from this fate: their curses are infrequent and the breaks and cuts used to cover curses actually sound pretty good.  I finally decided to give the album another shot a few years ago and was shocked that I immediately forgot the songs were edited, and got swept up in their sound once I stopped looking for edited curse words.

Skoob heard KRS-One say, “they want effects,” and instantly knew that’d be the hook for the song.  Other than Wu-Tang, I can’t think of another rap group that just said, “fuck making hooks, I’m either going to sample a line or forgo the chorus.” This is a great thing that could have saved us a lot of boring hooks if more groups/rappers adopted this method for a chorus.

 

Think about how creative and interesting your voice and delivery have to be to make these lines work in not just a song but a worldwide single:

“My waist bone’s connected to my hip bone
My hip bone’s connected to my thigh bone
My thigh bone’s connected to my knee bone
My knee bone’s connected to my hardy-har-har-har”

It’s not all about jokes and pop culture references: okay it’s always about pop culture references but Das Efx can sound hard too.  “A-Blitz shoots the breeze, twiddly-dee shoots his lip/Crazy Drayzie shot the sheriff yup, and I shot the gift.” Now that’s not a hard line in the Kool G Rap sense, but go listen to the line in the song and tell me it doesn’t give you that fearless, I’m-better-than-you vibe that the hardest rap instills in you.

What is the most important cultural moment for “They Want Efx?”  In the 24th episode of the 2nd season of Beverly Hills 90210, future radio host/rapper David Silver (played by Brian Austin Greene) is relaxing in a lounge chair, listening to his Walkman as he raps along to Das Efx’s breakout single.  “But I can fe-fi or fo, diddly-bum, here I come/So Peter Piper, I’m hyper than Pinocchio’s nose/’Cause I’m the supercalafragilistic tic-tac pro/I gave my oopsy, daisy, now you’ve got the Crazy I’m Crazy with the books” Poor David Silver is about to rap through the entire verse, before Steve Sanders comes over in a AC Slater style tank top and, without asking, turns off Das Efx and tells David “we have to talk business”. This is a very important footnote to the history of the group’s biggest single and should be treated as such.

 

“Looseys” ­– Das Efx holds the honor of being the first (only?) group to rap about having to take a shit in public.  In the days where all rappers were too cool for school, this humorous take on a very relatable situation must’ve been a breath of fresh air.  In hip-hop it takes big guts to rap about different subjects and situations, and not be afraid to make yourself the center of the joke.

For the fourth straight track, Das Efx samples a rapper for the hook, using a line from Special Ed’s “Hoedown” song, and again the decision pays off.  This song has maybe my favorite sequence on the whole album, “I scored 26, I caught a fake and now I’m outty/I’m takin it to the hoop and then this kid tried to foul me/Boom to the gutter, I hit the floor, I wanted to flip/I couldn’t, damn, all of a sudden I had to shit.” Having to shit in the middle of a basketball game when you have 26 points (what were they playing to, first to 50?) is funny, but I’m more impressed that Skoob didn’t settle for a contested midrange jumper, instead opting to take contact and go for the more efficient shot at the rim.  Dray and Skoob have the same chemistry in songs that a point guard and center have after doing thousands of pick and rolls: if I don’t point out the basketball and Beverly Hills 90210 references than no one will.

Solid Scheme produces every song on Dead Serious, except “They Want Efx” and “Klap Yo Handz,” which ironically are my two favorite beats on the album.  Solid Scheme (Chris Charity and David Lynch) did an incredible job producing this project: they put different spins on samples and concepts we’ve already heard.  There’s an unfounded rumor that EPMD ghost produced the album since they discovered the group and have the Executive Producer label on the album.  The production shares some qualities with EPMD’s early 90’s work and it’s common practice in hip-hop for the master to help his protégé: 50 Cent “giving half of his sophomore album” to Game, D.O.C. writing Doggystyle or Dr. Dre allegedly ghost producing Eminem’s beats.  This is not the case here: these beats have their own flavor and are plain better than any 90’s EPMD project.  Had EPMD came up with these beats they would’ve kept them for themselves.

The bigger mystery of the album is what the hell happened to Solid Scheme after 1993.  They went on to produce Das Efx’s sophomore album Straight Up Seweside, which I haven’t given a long enough listen, but strikes me as one of those albums that was rushed to capitalize on the sudden success of a debut, using cutting room floor tracks to make up the majority of the album rather than starting from scratch.  Has anyone ever compared Straight Up Seweside to With The Beatles?  Solid Scheme produced only three songs on the group’s third album while DJ Premier, Easy Mo Bee and Pete Rock handled the rest of the project that was critically panned.  Side note: I need a hip-hop 30-for-30 on how Easy Mo Bee, Pete Rock and DJ Premier in the mid 90’s wasn’t enough to make a good album for a group as talented as Das Efx.

The rest of Solid Scheme’s production career consists of three Das Efx credits from their ’98 LP, a handful of PMD solo tracks, and one track for a rapper named Crown that I’m afraid to find out more of.  That’s it. What the hell happened? How do you go from producing one of hip-hop’s greatest debuts to obscurity in two years without having a musical drop off or scandal?  Where the hell did Solid Scheme go?!  Reach out to Myriad Muzik Solid Scheme, and tell your side of story!

 

 

“Dum Dum” – Solid Scheme comes up with another great beat by sampling Otis Redding’s “The Happy Song (Dum Dum),” and Run DMC’s “Here We Go (Live at The Powerhouse).  Solid Scheme has a knack for infusing old school samples with 80’s rap hits.

This is the second straight song where Dray and Skoob get on their Slick Rick and give us story time, except this time it’s not about being away from home base when you have to take a dump.  This track is about the how females don’t want anything to do with you when you’re down and out, but when you start achieving success, they want you.  The beat is really cool, the content is fine, but overall this is the weakest track on the album.  It’s a great sign for an album that the weakest song is a solid song that is enjoyable enough that you don’t skip over it.

There is one song in particular that could take this spot.  “Hard Like a Criminal” was the B side to the “Straight Out the Sewer” single.  It’s another banger from Solid Scheme and is also a storytelling song but with more substance.  Dray proves himself to be master of the pen and Skoob better at the ridiculous pop culture punchlines.  The song appears on the 25th anniversary edition but for some reason was left off the 1992 release.  In general, its better to keep albums shorter and tighter, forcing you to cut the fat, but in this case it’s different: Dead Serious is only ten tracks, has no fillers, and clocks in at under 40 minutes.  “Hard Like a Criminal” is a great loose track that would’ve been a top 4 song on the album and should’ve been included.

 

 

“East Coast” – It’s fitting that Rakim, Erik Sermon and KRS-One are sampled in the hook of a song titled East Coast.  The bridge for the song shouts out more legends but there’s one name in there that doesn’t fit, let’s see if you notice which name doesn’t belong with the rest:

EPMD
Heavy D
Redman
Special Ed
Main Source
Slick Rick the Ruler
Brand Nubian
K-Solo
A Tribe Called Quest
Gang stiggity-Starr
BDP
Kool G Rapper

I understand that K-Solo, like Das Efx and Redman, were signed under EPMD but come on, you can’t put his name next to those legends.  When I hear the names of all those classic artists, I’m instantly brought back to their classic material, but when I hear K-Solo’s name all I think about is the Keith Murray fight, and him taking a lie detector test on Beef II to prove to ex-cellmate DMX he wrote “Spellbound,” (SPOILER: the results were inconclusive.)  I would totally watch a show where rappers took lie detector tests to settle beefs.  Come on my new Rap Lie Detector show 50 Cent, and let’s find out how much of The Documentary you actually wrote.

As I mentioned earlier, having a base knowledge, but being removed from New York City radio forced the group to come up with their own sound and style while they went to school in Virginia.  Many acts tried to copy their style like labelmates Da Youngstas. Jay-Z, who has a history of being liberal in borrowing styles (what up, Young Chris?), is said to have taken Das Efx style, but in reality, he was just using the style of his OG, Jaz-O.  Funkdoobiest and Fu Schnickens were the most brazen in their use of the duo’s distinct style.  Common before he found his voice and was still known as Common Sense also borrowed from the duo.  Dray said that everyone wanted to “wear Carhartts and Timbos.”  That’s such a great way to describe that hard, gutter, winter time sound that groups like Onyx and Wu-Tang perfected. Carhartts and Timbo music!

 

“If Only” – Another incredible beat that many choose as their favorite instrumental on the project. The beat flips Stanley Turrentine’s “The Man with the Sad Face.”  The beat is a departure from the “Straight from the Sewer” grimy, Boom Bap beats.  The beat is richer and would sound more in place on a Spice 1 album.   Doug E Fresh and Slick Rick’s “La Di Da Di” is sampled for either the second or fifth time on this album, I can’t keep track.

Dray has a hilarious line in his fourth verse where he says “I’m kniddity Gnarly Dude!” in a tone that sounds like he’s mocking a Saved By The Bell extra who won’t leave him alone.  I could transcribe their funny lyrics, but you don’t get the full effect unless you listen to the record and hear the tones, inflections, and mannerisms in their voices.

 

 

“Brooklyn to T-Neck” – Since I’m from New Jersey I get excited anytime a random New Jersey city gets shout out in a bar, let alone a song title.  For the 8th straight song, and last time on the album, the duo uses a sample as a hook but this time you can’t blame them.  Rapper Chubb Rock shouted out both of the rapper’s hometowns in his song “What’s the Word”.  When something that unlikely happens it’s meant to be.

The beat stands out as different from the rest.  Joe Tex’s often sampled “Papa Was Too” is used here as well as The Bar Kays’ “Humpin,” but with two great samples at hand, it seems like Solid Scheme should have produced something a little stronger. Like the beat, the raps are fine but leave something to be desired.

 

“Klap Ya Handz– My favorite beat and song on the album.  The beat is produced by someone from Brooklyn named Dexx.  It’s this song that the duo performed at the talent show that lead to them being discovered and signed by EPMD which forced them, against their parents’ wishes, to drop out of their senior years in college.

Similar to how Digital Underground used Parliament’s “Flash Light” on “Rhymin’ on the Funk,” then for the sick beat on “Danger Zone”, Das Efx uses the same “Blind Alley” by The Emotions sample they used on “Jussummen” for this track.  If you just went to YouTube to listen to “Blind Alley,” all you will hear is Big Daddy Kane’s “Ain’t No Half Steppin’” sample.  A great part about sampling is you can use the same song for a sample over and over because they all have tiny cracks and crevices to make the beat sound your own, despite the original song already being synonymous with another artist.

It doesn’t seem possible that the first ever recording of the group could be my favorite song, but I can’t lie, this is the song I’m most excited to hear when it comes up and the most disappointed when it’s over.  Skoob sounds like a veteran as he glides over the smooth beat.  I’m not sure why I love this beat so much but it’s just great.  I tried to look up Dexx to see if he produced anything else and not only did I not find anything else by him but I now know who Famous Dexx is. Bad Times.

 

“Straight Out the Sewer” – The hook was born when Dray, waiting in the booth for the beat to start, was messing around and said “blah blah blah straight out the sewer” and Parrish made him repeat what he said birthing the hook and the song.  I love little antidotes like this that prove that a lot of artists’ greatest sayings and lines happen by accident rather than trying to force it.

Creepy moment: the line “So give me the mic check, get respect, dude, I’m gnarly/
I betcha if I was Ken, then I’d be fuckin’ Barbie.” This whole time I thought the line was “I betcha if I was ten, then I’d be fuckin Barbie.” Not only did I not find it weird they were rapping about underage sex with Barbie, but I thought it was a funny Das Efx-y line. Obviously, it’s way cooler and makes more sense to say if you were Ken you’d fuck Barbie.

Das Efx was more than just a ‘new rap duo’ they were different, they were really underground, like in the sewer with rats and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles underground. This was the last song recorded from the album and the stir-crazy, high-in-the-early-morning sound comes across on the song.   Credit to Parrish for realizing that “The Sewer” would be the groups identity, shooting videos in sewers and making their logo look like the Sewer manhole covers you see in streets.

 

Dead Serious is a certified Hip-Hop classic.  Despite being only 10 tracks and 39 minutes, Das Efx’s debut deserves to be in the Top 100 all time.  The originality, great production and lack of filler stand out even in an era where there were many New York choices and different regions of the country started popping up.  Let’s see where Dead Serious ranks in the classic year of 1992.

 

Albums better than Dead Serious:

Dr. Dre – The Chronic

Redman – Whut? Thee Album

Gang Starr – Daily Operation

Pete Rock & CL Smooth – Mecca and the Soul Brother

Eric B. & Rakim – Don’t Sweat The Technique

Diamond D – Stunts, Blunts & Hip-Hop

Grand Puba – Reel To Reel

Kool G Rap & DJ Polo – Live & Let Die

Showbiz & AG – Runaway Slave

 

Albums that are on a similar playing field as Dead Serious:

Spice 1 – Spice 1

Compton’s Most Wanted – Music to Driveby

UGK – Too Hard to Swallow

 

Albums that are worth mentioning but not as good as Dead Serious:

Ice Cube – The Predator

EPMD – Business Never Personal

Boogie Down Productions – Sex and Violence

Lord Finesse – Return of the Funky Man

Common Sense – Can I Borrow A Dollar?

Da Lench Mob – Guerilla’s in the Mist

Too Short – Shorty The Pimp

Fu-Schnickens – F.U. Don’t Take It Personal

Double X Posse – Put Ya Boots On

Twista – Runnin off Da Mouth

DJ Quik – Way 2 Fonky

N2Deep – Back To The Hotel

MC Ren – Kizz My Black Azz

 

Albums released by rappers who haven’t gone through puberty yet:

Chi-Ali – The Fabolous Chi-Ali (Just wanted to mention Chi-Ali in two straight articles)

Kriss Kross – Totally Krossed Out

 

“Classics” that I can’t rank because I haven’t had a long phase with them yet:

Pharcyde – Bizarre Ride to the Pharcyde

Beastie Boys – Check Your Head

Arrested Development – 3 Years, 5 Months and 2 Days in the Life Of…

 

The early and mid-90’s were the golden age for the Hip-Hop LP.  1992 doesn’t ring in my head as the best rap year ever but the top four albums, The Chronic, Mecca & The Soul Brother, Whut? Thee Album and Daily Operation are top 25 albums.  You could easily construct an argument that Dead Serious is not a top ten album from 1992, but to me it gets the nod out of the other three choices for the 10th spot. Spice 1 isn’t as memorable and UGK hadn’t entered their prime.  Das Efx ability to truly stand out during rap’s most competitive era proves to be their biggest accomplishment.

Sex Packets Track by Track

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Sex Packets Track by Track

By: Rob Parkour

 

 

Digital Underground are best known for discovering Tupac, and Shock G’s silly nose and personas. Dig further than that and you’ll feel lucky when you unearth their 1990 debut Sex Packets.  Digital Underground has many moving parts so let’s start unpacking the album track by track.

 

“The Humpty Dance” – Shock G, leader of Digital Underground, wears numerous hats on the album.  Humpty Hump, the star on this track, is his most famous.  Big glasses, fake noses, colorful outfits, and a clown-like personality make Humpty a loveable albeit silly character.

The line “I like the girls with the Boom/I once got busy in the Burger King Bathroom” feels like it was written for my friends and I.  The song is so fun, in today’s pop climate it would be damn near impossible to release a radio single this pro-fun.

For better or worse, this song will always be associated with the group.  The beat is very recognizable, the famous drum loop is a Sly & The Family Stone sample, and the handclap snare is from a Parliament song.  There may be older, more classic beats, like “The Message,” but for me this beat is the most Hip-Hop-y beat of all time: it’s been sampled by over 100 artists.  Any true Hip-Hop head can recite Jay-Z’s opening line on Public Service Announcement, “Allow me re-introduce myself, my name is HOV, H-to the-OV,” but how many know Jay-Z’s paying homage to Shock G with that line?

This illustrates the problem of how Digital Underground is remembered: our mind pulls up images of Shock G’s ridiculous outfits and nose, but real rappers and producers know they’ve been biting/paying homage to the group for years.  Three years after “Humpty Dance” came out it had already been sampled 20 times.

Next time I get accused of body shaming at work I’m going to pull a Humpty and reply “Yeah I called you fat, look at me I’m skinny!” Should be enough to get me on the unemployment line!

 

“The Way We Swing” – I’m sure the label made the group put “The Humpty Dance” as the opening track but this is the true intro for the album. Shock G displays the sound the group is going for. This is ironic, because the group is known for their original mixture of jazz, funk and live instruments, but the beat samples the Jimi Hendrix song “Who Knows.”  This particular track doesn’t stand out, but it gives you an understanding of what type of sound you’re getting yourself into.

The cassette version of the album has “Hip-Hop Doll” following this song, an extended “Gutfest ’89” (yes, please), “Sound of the Underground,” and “A Tribute to the Early Days,” all of which do not appear on LP, CD or any streaming sites.  The songs are on YouTube: I’ve listened to them a few times but it wouldn’t feel right reviewing them because I’ve listened to the rest of the album 497 times more than those three unreleased songs.

 

“Rhymin’ on the Funk” – This is the Digital Underground sound we know and love.  The beat is the first of two on the album that samples Parliament’s “Flash Light”. Sure, other groups may have sampled Parliament in the 80’s, but no one at the time was mixing sounds like Chopmaster J and the rest of the production team.  Speaking of other Digital Underground members, we finally get introduced to our second MC of the evening, Money B. Money B has an interesting voice and a smooth flow: I’m glad he appears on numerous songs, but I’m also glad Digital Underground stuck to the Buckshot/Dres formula of giving the better rapper two thirds of the verses.  You have to give credit to Black Moon and Black Sheep for choosing to feature its star more prominently.

Growing up, I always wished that OutKast would have employed the two thirds formula and let Andre 3000 take more shots.  Since rap is so competitive, I imagine it’s not easy telling an Alpha male rapper he’s not good enough to get half the verses, but at the end of the day you should do right by the music, and I truly believe OutKast would have been even better if Andre 3000 was allowed to rap more of the verses he clearly wrote for Big Boi. Not every group has a power struggle: Pimp C, Havoc and Capone are good enough to warrant a 50/50 split, but you can’t tell me that 8Ball & MJG wouldn’t have been better if they didn’t have MJG rapping so much.  Let’s move on to the next song before I type another triple negative.

 

“The New Jazz One” – Usually I don’t include interludes on my track by track breakdown but this one is smooth and uses real instruments, remember those things?

 

“Underwater Rhimes (Remix)” – The song is delightfully silly.  Shock G performs it under his alter ego MC Blowfish, which is exactly what it sounds like, but somehow not lame.  Only an MC like Shock G and a group like Digital Underground could make a song this mindless actually bump in the whip.

The beat samples “Chameleon” by Herbie Hancock which feels like it’s been sampled a million times, but apparently it’s only been sampled by “Words of Wisdom” (check out my 2pacalypse Now review), “Money on My Brain,” by Kool G Rap (overwhelms the beat but it’s such a sick sample it sounds great), and “Cell Phones Dead” by Beck (umm). What happens when you mix a Parliament sample with a Herbie Hancock sample? A beat so good that you can sound hard on the silliest of songs ever.  This was one of my favorite songs to bump in the car, and one time at a light I was caught rapping passionately the line “Well I’m a deep sea gangster, underwater prankster/Kissin’ all the girl fish, dissin’ all the…,” and realized the car to the right of me was staring. Let’s just say I was so embarrassed that I contemplated running the red light and wrecking my car in the intersection.

 

“Gutfest ‘89” –  Mix this song with baking soda and water and let me freebase it.  Gutfest is exactly what you’d think it is.  I know what the ladies are thinking: sex parties? Gross. You are way off base on this one: “Gutfest ‘89” is for men and women alike.  When you’re attending something called Gutfest, how could you not have an amazing time?  I hereby command that from this point forward all Playboy Mansion style sex parties will be called “Gutfest ‘89.”

“Gutfest ’89” is a tour de force by Shock G.  First, he plays a news reporter from Oakland California named Ted Casey who is interviewing Scott Thompson (also played by Shock G) for exclusive coverage of Gutfest.  Bill, live from the scene, tells Ted everyone is having a fun time, while the fictitious band Blue Death plays in the background.  Bill also informs the audience of the rest of the lineup which includes:

The Who: Keith Moon’s whole life was one big Gutfest party.

The Clash: Something tells me whoever wrote this lyric either thought The Clash were a British Invasion band, or The Who were a Punk band.

Digital Underground: Why not?

EPMD: Joe Strummer and Erik Sermon would’ve been like two peas in a pod.

Miles Davis, Chick Corea & Herbie Hancock: What the fuck is Chick Corea’s name doing in the middle of two musical titans.  Come on, Shock G, do better!

The Who: While The Who get announced for a second time the piano starts playing The Doors.  I really hope Shock G didn’t think “Break on Through to the Other Side” was a Who song.

The beat is up tempo and groovy.  The Dexter Wansel sample is an eclectic choice, shout out to that Philly sound.  I feel artists of his era and sound weren’t being utilized enough during the Boom Bap James Brown drum sample era.

Shock G (as himself) has a great line “Black girls, white girls, candy stripe girls, girls with lots of back fat/It’s safe to say more healthy guts then you can shake a stick at,” then Money B slides through so seamlessly you don’t even realize the transition.  Money B also provides the hook which may sound simple “crazy guts, crazy guts, it’s Gutfest ’89,” but that simplicity is all you need on a song that has this much going on.

At the end of the song, Bill and Ted continue to have a conversation that is genuinely entertaining.  I would absolutely watch a show where Bill and Ted investigated and gave coverage of any and all sex parties.  I love Shock G as a rapper but he missed his calling as the greatest voice actor of his generation.

 

“Danger Zone” – “Flash Light” by Parliament is used for a second time, but this time for the hardest beat on the album.  This beat goes in the car: you’ll be rapping to yourself hard as hell about a crackhead.  Which begs the question, why use the hardest beat of the album for a song about the dangers of crack?  I’ve turned this question over in my head many times and ultimately it doesn’t matter why they did what they did, a lot of times we overthink our outlandish impulses until we sap the fun and creativity out of what we’re doing. I’m sure if Digital Underground had an “intelligent” conversation about making a song about a Blowfish rapping about other sea animals, then they never would have made or remixed that genius song.  Digital Underground went with the flow and weren’t scared to be as ridiculous as possible: that takes a lot more courage than it sounds.

Let’s be clear about one thing: Shock G is a real MC and no punk.  When he raps “You see, your boy Shock G wrote this/To open up your mind, do you know who I am, deliverer of the rhyme/My job is to verbally slay suckers, Like an Uzi spray motherfuckers.” Sure, those lines as read on paper may not be of the, to quote Combat Jack, “Lyrical, Miracle, Spiritual” type, but you have to listen to how tough Shock G sounds while he spits theses lines.  I’m not the only one that thinks so either. Later in the album, one of Shock G’s characters is listening to same bars as he negotiates a drug deal.  Backpack rapper geeks go on XVideos and search “Dead Prez lyrics” in the search bar, but what they don’t understand is so much of rap is how pleasant your voice is to hear, your flow and the unquantifiable coolness factor that some rappers have and Wale doesn’t.

Another question has been bugging me about this beat.  Why hasn’t anyone freestyled over it?!  This beat is dying for someone to spit 100 bars of murder on it.  This beat and many other Digital Underground beats should have been used and abused during the mid-00’s glory days of freestyles over classic beats.  Sometimes you’ll listen to an album cut of a classic rap album and be like “I remember that beat from a G-Unit mixtape.”  I’m sure there’s been freestyles over some of the Sex Packets beats, but I can’t remember any of the top of my head.

DJ Kenny K has the middle verse on this song for his lone album appearance.  For a DJ, Kenny K has a natural flow that would sound good even if it wasn’t over such a great beat.  Kenny K introduces us to dope fiend Carla who “has crack every night for dinner.”  Dope fiend Carla is a great nickname for a crack head: it makes me feel like I’m watching an episode of “The Corner.”  Kenny K continues to glide over the beat and instructs Shock G to “grab the nine.”  Shock G grabs said nine, comes back on the beat. and gives me one of my favorite lines on the album, courtesy of poor, old Dope fiend Carla:

“Stuck her head in the car, it was Dope fiend Carla/She said “Can you spare five dollars?” I said “hell no”/She said “why?  I’m not asking for much”/I said “bitch, I’d rather give a crippled crab a crutch)”

Bitch, I’d rather give a crippled crab a crutch?  What can you do after a line like that other than do a chef kiss in the air?

 

“Freaks of the Industry” – I had this song, featuring the the most female grunts in the history of music, playing as I was picking up a friend of mine to go on a hike.  The problem was I forgot his girl and two kids were also coming along with us and the females grunting seemed to get louder and louder as they approached the door of my car. I scrambled to find my BlackBerry to change the song.  I was so terrified from this close call that I turned Digital Underground off all together and put on Bobby Womack for the ride.  As the kids say, this song is NSFW.

Money B sounds so good over the track that he gets first dibs on the song, but Shock G quickly comes to steal the show with a story for the ages.  Shock G is with a lady who looks like Vanessa. Money B questions, The Right Stuff Vanessa?” As if anyone past the year of 1990 would remember her crappy album or singing career.  Shock G corrects him that this young lady reminds him of another Vanessa, Vanessa Del Rio, the Reggie Miller of Porn, a trendsetting star ahead of its time.

Shock G lays out the scene in shockingly vivid detail. My favorite part is how the story starts: “You’re lying on your back with your head on the edge of the bed/The booty’s two feet from your head.” I like when my rap verses start off with hints of face sitting. Unfortunately, there was no face sitting as Shock G gave himself these choices: “A, take the time to find a condom/B, you walk right over and you pound ’em/C, tell her that you want her love/Well the answer is D, all of the above.” Despite the furniture squeaking, everything is going according to plan, that is until “the booty starts making that clapping sound,” which wouldn’t be a problem, but Shock G’s pervert friends are in the next room. “The clappin’s getting louder, you don’t want them to clown you.” What type of creepy, asshole friends was Shock G hanging around at this time?  Not only are they not giving Shock G any type of privacy but they’re going to clown him for blowing the back out of a bootleg Vanessa Del Rio?!

This brings us to Shock G’s second multiple choice question of the evening: “What do you do: A, you simply back up off her/B, you hit it just a little bit softer/C, you take it out and put it in the butt/Well, D is what I do….” Shock G is so flustered that he’s contemplating anal. Luckily Shock G figures out a solution, “I put a towel on floor by the two-inch gap under the door/Now they can’t see me anymore/Check the locks so they can’t clock, but they can listen/There’ll be no bargin’ in and there’ll be no dissin.” You see all Shock G has to go through?  He has to stop mid-strokes and barricade himself in the room like a police standoff.  Again, what kind of people is Shock G associating with that he has to worry about them looking under the crack of a door to watch him have sex with a porn star lookalike?  They know he’s having sex and he still has to lock the door. Who on god’s green earth knows someone is having sex and just walks in?

 

“Doowutchyalike” – Second biggest single of the album: there just wasn’t that many beats that sounded like this in 1990.  This track should put to rest any question of Shock G’s level of talent.  He proved his great sense of humor on numerous tracks already, proved on “Danger Zone” he could spit hard, and proved on “Freaks of the Industry,” he’s as good as a high school senior at concealing sex.  This song may not be in my top five for the album, but Shock G’s performance proves him to be one of the most versatile rappers in history.  It takes a certain skill to go bar for bar with another rapper like Jadakiss and Styles P do, but it’s a whole different ball game to go bar for bar with your alter ego.  I’m not sure how he did it but he went back and forth between Shock G and his Humpty Hump alter ego 29 times.  My favorite part of the song is Shock G’s saying “Vanessa Williams you’re so divine/Just wanted to put your name into my rhyme,” not realizing he had a Vanessa Williams (the Right Stuff?) reference in the previous song.  Shock G thought Vanessa Williams would be this generation’s answer to Marilyn Monroe.

 

“Sex Packets” – So far there’s been 8 songs and one interlude.  Including this song, there’s two songs and three interludes left on the album which would leave us with about 25% of the album left.  It’s at this point that Digital Underground decided to make Sex Packets into a concept album about a glowing, quarter sized pill that comes in a condom wrapper.  The pill is supposed to let you experience sexual fulfillment during some type of hallucination.  It’s an interesting decision to wait this long to turn the project into a concept album, but since when did Digital Underground play by the rules?  It’s also an interesting decision to follow up the strongest run of songs on the album, with Shock G crooning back and forth with some guy named Maverick.  I wish I could find more information on Maverick, but there is no information on the singer. In my head, he’s one of the creeps trying to look under the door while Shock G is having sex with a Vanessa Del Rio lookalike.

This used to be my least favorite song on the album, I thought it was slow and broke up the flow, but it really grew on me the more I listened to it.  So much in fact that I would start crooning like Shock G in the middle of work, “Nooo sex could be greaterrrr, it’s a pillllll wrapped in a paperrr,” as my coworkers looked on at me trying to decide whether they should call HR or not.

There’s a haunting moment at the end of the song where Shock G says, “It feels so real,” and some female computer voice replies, “It is real, it is real, it is real….” Digital Underground: on the forefront of the creepy virtual reality sex scene!

 

“Packetman” – Really great beat that’s dying for Jay-Z and Beanie Sigel to freestyle over.  Quick aside: we really need to bring back rappers freestyling over classic beats.  It would force rappers to actually rap, the beats sound better, and it would give the kids a history lesson.  It would help bring the real mixtape game back, and remind the old heads of classic beats they may have otherwise forgot.  I can’t even imagine my joy if a few years down the road I heard a rapper spitting over this beat.

Shock G plays the customer and drug dealer selling the sex packets.  At first, Customer Shock is skeptical until he hears about the sale going on: “3 for $10 it can’t hurt to try it.”  Customer Shock is sold on the packets once he sees his options “Chinese girl, age 17, waist 24, hips 33/Hmmm, this one here says young black virgin.” Apparently Shock is in a reality where the age of consent is 17. Dealer Shock tells Customer Shock that the packets he’s looking at aren’t strong and nudges him towards the ones that last a half an hour.

Dealer Shock is all about gender equality: “By the way, I need something for my woman/Sure, I got guy packets.”  Dealer Shock cares even more about doing his share in keeping America’s divorce rate down, “If you’re married, it’s no big deal/You’re not cheating at all, you’re just poppin a pill/And if your wife’s got a headache and wants to hit the sack/It’s cool, take a packet fool.”

Eventually Customer Shock comes back a happy customer: “My god man, that was like nothing I’ve ever had in my life, it was like she was really in the room with me!” Dealer Shock gets excited thinking about his future earnings.  Customer Shock is already fiending for more packets, except he’s “kinda tapped right now, hook me up and I’ll get ya Tuesday.”  Once Customer Shock realizes Dealer Shock won’t front him any packets, he goes full stereotype crack head, “See this TV here?”.  Dealer Shock is disgusted, “Ohhhh, here we go man.  I got enough TV’s.”  Customer Shock pleads, “Come on man, it’s brand new I just paid $500 for it.”  Dealer Shock doesn’t budge, and says Customer Shock’s “wife will do cuz I can’t mess with this stuff myself”.  The symbolism of that is obvious, but the highlight of the track is Dealer Shock’s disgusted reaction of Customer Shock offering him a VCR: “If I get another VCR I’m going to hurt somebody!” How many VCR’s could Dealer Shock possibly have?  What was the over/under for the amount of VCR’s a crack dealer owned in 1990?

 

Sex Packets is rap’s most unique masterpiece. There’s no one quite like Shock G. Digital Underground’s sensibilities and humor are on another level.  It’s an album that’s so pro-fun that Shock G will make you smile on your darkest day.  It’s closer to being a top 50 album than a top 100 album.  Being weird, having a gimmick, wearing funny outfits and singing in rap is all the rage now, but do they know where it came from?

Black Sheep Track by Track

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Black Sheep Track by Track

By Rob Parkour

 

 

 

De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest are the two groups that come to mind when you think of the Native Tongues Collective.  If you’re having a conversation with an OG, he may bring up the Jungle Brothers, but often times the New York via North Carolina alternative hip-hop group Black Sheep gets forgotten.  Part of the reason Black Sheep gets overlooked is their sophomore slump, the disappointing ‘Non-Fiction’ album that bricked commercially and critically.  Another reason they’re overlooked is that Black Sheep members Dres and nymphomaniac Mr. Lawnge don’t have the star power Phife Dawg or Q-Tip have.  Regardless, it can’t be denied that 1991’s ‘A Wolf In Sheep’s Clothing’ is a golden era classic.  Let’s unpack the album track by track:

 

“U Mean I’m Not” – I’ll never forget the first time I pressed play on the album and this 84 second song got me so amped I wanted to punch someone in the face.  It’s such a hard track that I literally checked my iPod to make sure I had the right album. I thought, “no way a Native Tongue group could come out the box with something this hard.”  Dres, the star of Black Sheep, goes hard even on a parody track of gangsta rap.  Obviously Black Sheep wouldn’t be who they are if they just did songs like this, but if you can make a song and beat this hard you shouldn’t be afraid to dip back into those waters every now and then.

 

“Butt….In the Meantime” – Of course Black Sheep follows up the hardest track on the album with the softest.  The listener gets so hyped off the first track and then gets brought down with the wimpiest track on the entire album.  Following up the hardest track with the most boring? I bet it was Q-Tip’s idea.  Lyrically the song is fine, it’s the beat that isn’t good. “The Bridge Is Over” sample is the only thing saving the beat from being one of those Native Tongues songs that’s so slow and boring you skip it.

 

“Have U.N.E. Pull” – Chi Ali (much more on him later) reminds current listeners what era they’re in by wishing he could fly like Jordan, and knock people’s heads off like Mike Tyson, before settling on wanting to be like Prince so he could “bag all the honeys”.  This is a typical Black Sheep song: a lot of their songs make you feel like you’re walking around with Dres as he schools whoever’s willing to listen, and Mr. Lawnge as he tries to find his next girl to smash.  Their songs take on a back and forth conversational tone. In your mind’s eye, you can picture them chopping it up on the corner after a long day.  A lot of duo’s compliment each other, but you can tell they don’t hang out with each other outside of the studio.  UGK is an example of that. It was clear from their music that Bun and Pimp C had a great working relationship, but went their separate ways once the music was done.  You don’t get that vibe from Black Sheep: they seem like best friends which makes the rest of their career that much more puzzling.

 

“Strobelite Honey” – Dres goes to a club and sees the silhouette of a shapely lady he’d like to talk to.  Said girl steps out of the club lights and Dres tells the girl “I thought you were someone else.” This answer doesn’t satisfy the young lady, she demands his number, Dres gives her a 1-900 number, and he tells her he forgot his coat, and that he’s double parked.

 

“The Choice is Yours” – The following songs are my favorite examples of when a song is remixed and fundamentally changed:

“Boyz-N-Da-Hood” (1986) – The original is on N.W.A.’s forgotten debut LP but the beefed-up version with an additional verse appearing on Eazy-Duz-It is the classic.

“One More Chance” (1994) – Ready to Die doesn’t have any tracks you feel the need to skip but this one is one of the weaker ones, unless you love hearing Biggie talk about having sex.  With a Debarge sample, along with Mary J and Biggie’s wife Faith Evans, the remix takes the original to a whole different level.  The remix is impossible to hate.

“All I Need” (1994) – Method Man was the first member out of Wu Tang to get a solo record. Tical is a gritty, raw record that gets maligned because it’s not Cuban Linx, Ironman, or Liquid Swords.  The “All I Need” that appears on Tical fits with the rest of the albums vibe, but the remix featuring Mary J Blige in one of her best moments is an all-timer, the ultimate song to play for your hip-hop appreciating girlfriend during the honeymoon stage.

“It’s All About The Benjamins” (1996) – The only song on this list where the original has its own lore.  The original version featured just Jadakiss and Sheek Louch and was released on a DJ Clue Holiday mixtape in 1996.  It was such a banger at the time that Funk Flex allegedly played it for one hour straight at the Tunnel which comes out to around 17 times in a row.  I need to know more Tunnel antidotes like this: we need a Tunnel: Oral History of rap’s greatest hip-hop club.  The remix has Missy Elliot on the hook, an incredible Lil’ Kim verse and Biggie over a beat change that he was born to spit on.  Puffy thought he could do no wrong with the concept and made Rock remix the accompanying record with a video directed by Spike Jonze.  “It’s All About The Benjamins (Rock Remix) enlists Tommy Stinson, Rob Zombie, Dave Grohl and something/someone named Fuzzbubble: it’s as ridiculous as it sounds.

“I’m Real” (2001) – The original that appears on J-Lo’s second studio album is nothing more than a filler R&B/pop album cut that’s way too long.  When Ja Rule added flavor and his verse over the new beat the rest was history.  The remix is a best-case scenario for mixing R&B and Rap.  Most importantly hundreds of thousands of pre-pubescent boys, like myself, fell in love with J-Lo during the video.  J-Lo in a pink Velour zip-up and shorts made me recalibrate everything I knew about women.

“Ignition” (2003) – R. Kelly put both Ignition’s back to back on his Chocolate Factory album.  The original is forgettable, and the remix was on MTV every hour and became R. Kelly’s last mega hit.  The universal approval of the remix is clear: anytime you’re dancing and you hear “Now usually I don’t do this but uh
Go head on and break ’em off wit a lil’ preview of the remix” everyone goes “Ohhh!” and starts dancing in a slow, melodic grind.

“Outta Control” (2005) – The original version is included on The Massacre and features one of Dr. Dre’s worst beats from his last relevant run from 2002-2005.  The remix is also produced by Dr. Dre, features newly signed Mobb Deep, and sounds nothing like the original.  Due to the remix not having an advanced single, listeners were confused and downloaded the original “Outta Control” thinking it was the remix. This caused both songs to chart. Something about the weak original “Outta Control” accidently charting and counting as a Billboard “hit” makes me laugh.  The remix replaced the original on the special edition of The Massacre, and also appeared on Mobb Deep’s lone G-Unit album Blood Money (Me, my best friend Sam, and a crackhead Sam met at a bus stop in Summit are the only people that still stand by Blood Money). “Outta Control Remix” was 50 Cent’s second to last street hit (“I Get Money”) and a sign of the beginning of the end. However, in 2005 you could not tell that to me and my friends during our epic summer fueled by G-Unit mixtapes, copious smoking, and The Documentary.

 

“To Whom It May Concern” – A song attacking all the unoriginal artists at the time who were using the cherished art form to sell out.  Mista Lawnge provides maybe his best verse on the album, complaining about artists that crossover and go double platinum. It’s been said his line gave EPMD the idea for their ironic hit single “Crossover.”  Dres has so many different ways to complain about how rap is becoming commercialized that you sense he could go on for 300 bars. My favorite part about this song though is Dres telling rappers to give the funky drummer back to James, shout out to Clyde Stubblefield.

 

“Similak Child” – White moment: I didn’t know what Similak was.  My Google research and this song tells me that Similak is a brand of baby formula, an alternative to breast milk.  I was still confused, how the hell can you look at someone and tell if they were breastfed or not?!  Who’s volunteering this information, is this a common topic of conversation?

In my mind this song takes place in the same club that Dres had issues with the “Strobelite Hoes.” Please bear with me, I’m also trying to learn if being a Similak child is a good or bad thing.  At first, I thought it was a bad thing because it meant the woman’s mother wasn’t around to breastfeed, but the more I listened to the song, I think being a Similak child is a good thing because your parents not only were there but went out of there way to pamper you.  Most importantly, because formula has lots of nutrients, it means you developed a nice body. Dres ends his verse with the line, “Your mind is brighter than your booty, it’s the carton that I seek.” I’ve spent much time contemplating what that bar means and I’m still not quite sure: again this song makes me feel very white.

 

“Try Counting Sheep” – I can’t quite put my finger on the production.  It’s not a jazzy slower beat like some Tribe songs, and it’s not ‘hard’ like a lot of early 90’s New York production: it’s an inimitable sound that belongs completely to the duo.  Some of the beats have an unusual pace that forces Dres to change his flow on a dime: his ability to be agile with his flow may be his greatest strength.  His flow isn’t the most effortless but there isn’t a type of beat it doesn’t work on.

 

“Flavor of the Month” – Mr. Lawnge’s contributions to this song are limited to him debating between ice cream flavors.  “Do I want vanilla or chocolate?” he asks himself (chocolate’s the obvious choice).  Mr. Lawnge decides neither of these options will do and asks the poor ice cream employee what the “slammingest flavor out this month?” The last time I went to get ice cream shop, I nearly went into the bit before I realized that no one except for me would know what the hell I was talking about, but by all means next time YOU get ice cream, ask them what the slammingest flavor out there is.

As usual, it’s up to Dres to do the heavy lifting which begs the question: are you part of a rap duo if you’re only rapping 30% of the time?  I haven’t done the math, but Mr. Lawnge is absent on over half the songs and on the other songs he usually has just one verse.  It works for the Black Sheep, because Dres is the better rapper, and Mr. Lawnge’s comic relief would get old on every song.  Still, not having even a third of the verses makes you less a member of a duo and more like Cappadonna “starring” in Ironman.

Because rap is so competitive the hierarchy in duo’s is clear.  Prodigy of Mobb Deep, Andre 3000 of Outkast, Bun B of UGK, Erik Sermon of EPMD, Noreaga of C-N-N, 8ball of 8ball & MJG, Kurupt of Tha Dawg Pound, Pharoahe Monch of Organized Konfusion, Billy Danze of M.O.P. and Pusha T of The Clipse.  The only other prominent album I can think of that has one group member starring so clearly is Smiff-N-Wesson’s Enta Da Stage album where 5ft was only on 4 of 14 songs, while Buckshot had 10 solo songs on the project.  Looking at it from that angle makes Enta Da Stage seem like a Buckshot solo album.  I wouldn’t go as far to call Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing a glorified Dres solo album, but it’s an interesting question.

 

“La Ménage” – *VIEWER DISCRETION IS ADVISED*

Dres gets the first verse and stays pretty clean until he “starts five play.”  The young lady informs Dres she’s about to come: Dres response?  “It wasn’t foreplay because I used my thumb.”  What a genius, right?  Dres starts his second verse, before Mista Lawnge realizes it’s a song about sex, and kicks Dres out the booth.  Mista Lawnge was born to make a song like this, I imagine he wrote 10 verses for this type of song, and Dres made him pick his best one.  In the song, Mista Lawnge enters in his drawers as the young lady questions if he lives up to his “Mr. 9.5” nickname.  Mista Lawnge ends his verse with one of his most classic lines, “Don’t get offended by the position I recommended/Doggy-style is my shit/The bottom is what I hit.”

Let me preface my Q-Tip rant:  Q-Tip is one of the best producers of all time. His production on the three classic Tribe albums are up there with the smoothest production in hip-hop history.  He held his own as an MC on those albums, and will go down as one of the 50 or so most important musicians in hip-hop history.  Before you feel bad for him, remember Q-Tip has done and said some morally questionable things in the past, and this era of hip-hop is completely different than the current climate.

With all that said, you have to chill Q-Tip.  I never understood the appeal of a two-guy threesome/running a train.  Call me old fashioned but I don’t want to see another man while I’m having sex, and don’t want a man looking at me while I have sex.  In his biography, Pimp C had a great rant about how suspect two-male threesomes are. I’d try to find it to quote, but his biography is 700 pages long.  First off Q-Tip, you start your verse by immediately referring to Mista Lawnge as Sugar Dick.  Hey Tip, I think that’s a nickname only his girlfriends call him.  Just two lines later Q-Tip challenges the said MC to, “live up to your label Mista Lawnge Sugar Dick.”  WHOA, pass the remote control so I can pause Q-Tip.  It’s weird to refer to another rapper as Mista Lawnge, and doubly weird to refer to him as Sugar Dick twice in four lines.  Q-Tip approaches the young lady to “finish the task,” but not before telling “Lawnge, she wants it.”  Yeah Q-Tip, she’s in a hotel room with three strangers, I think she’s down for some sex.  After he’s done, Q-Tip does the math of the night as Mista Lawnge is still on his mind: “Tip plus Lawnge plus ho equals wet sheets.”  Q-Tip has like 9 bars and refers to Mista Lawnge in five of them.  One thing is for certain about this studio session: Dame Dash was not there!

 

“Gimme The Finga” – Another interesting beat that sounds simple but was probably difficult to come up with and produce.  Dres’ hooks are pretty good, he uses them as a vehicle to break up a song, and often the hooks come out of nowhere.  This song has two of my favorite lines, Dres rapping about eating and washing down a Knish, and telling us his favorite show is “Who’s the Boss?” Not Fresh Prince, not A Different World, not In Living Color… nope Dres has more eclectic taste than that and only Tony Danza will do.

 

“Hoes We Know” – The most Native Tongue beat on entire album.  Dres refers to the casualness of his sexual encounter in an amazing way: “we stepped off and we Niked, we just did it”.  You’d think based on the title of the song that Mista Lawnge would have a verse, but he has a much more important role on the song.  After opening a book entitled “Hoes I Knows,” Mista Lawnge transforms into an old uncle whose voice sounds like the grandfather in The Boondocks.  The following types of hoes (their words, not mine!) are mentioned:

Black Sheep Hoes: Very promiscuous, “down to swing.” Uncle Lawnge has caught the rumors “I heard dem hoes be swinging.”

Triple H Hoes (Half and Half Hoes): AKA milky ho, very stuck up. They “act like invented poonani,” but that doesn’t stop Uncle Lawnge from yelling excitedly, “Half and Half Hoes!!!” before admitting he knows them.

Similak Hoes: Hey I know what Similak is!  Similak hoes “bring an instant erection”.

Red Light Special Hoes: “Hold the fly complexion.”  White moment: At first, I thought the red light referred to “happy ending after massage” chicks. Apparently, it refers to women on their period.  I don’t feel as bad because Uncle Lawnge was also confused: “Red…what the, what the fuck is that boy?!”

Sexual Chocolate Hoes: Complicated “like a game of a bridge”.  Uncle Lawnge is very familiar with this genre of female.  “I knows about sexual chocolate hoes, I knows.”

Goya Hoes: Are fly but “will wear anything.” They also excite Uncle Lawnge, “Wooh!!!”

Pork Fried Rice Hoes: These ladies “don’t understand the language,” but that doesn’t stop Uncle Lawnge enthusiastically yelling, “Oh, gimme some!” once Dres inaudibly describes them (cracks me up every time).

Someone, Mr. Lawnge I’m assuming, spends the last minute of the song begging to pee on a girl in the same tone of voice a child uses when asking for a toy.

 

“Black with N.V.” – My personal favorite beat and song on the album.  If Mr. Lawnge was born to rap on “Le Ménage,” then Dres was born to rap on this type of beat.  The song is about how African Americans’ history is hidden from them and the ensuing effects of such ignorance.  Native Tongue groups and backpack rappers have the challenge of rapping about conscious matters, while maintaining the bounce and confidence boosting sound hip-hop is known for.  2Pac and Rakim are the standard of how to tow that line.  Dres obviously isn’t in their league, but this song is the shining moment of his career.  He goes from rapping smoothly on the hook and immediately turns it to level 10 and starts ripping shit.  Dres does so many great things on the song: it’s his version of David Robinson’s Quadruple Double game.

 

“Pass The 40” – Is it still a posse track if it features a 14-year-old, not one but TWO A&R’s and a rapper named Hot Dog?  The glory days of the posse track were still to come but that’s no excuse.  Two years earlier, label mates De La Soul released “Buddy,” featuring The Jungle Brothers, Monie Love, Queen Latifah, Q-Tip, and Phife Dawg.  Two months earlier, label mates A Tribe Called Quest released Low End Theory, featuring the Leaders of The New School, allowing Busta Rhymes opportunity for his breakthrough verse.  In 1989, D.O.C. released the first West Coast posse track, “The Grand Finale,” a personal favorite.  If that wasn’t enough examples, Black Sheep could have just listened on repeat to the greatest posse cut of all, “The Symphony,” from Marley Marl’s In Control Vol. 1 album.  You’re on a label with De La Soul, Queen Latifah, Monie Love, Jungle Brothers and A Tribe Called Quest, and all you could get was a teenager, two A&R’s and a flunkey Jamaican rapper?

Let’s start with Chi-Ali because his story is interesting.  Being billed as a rap prodigy at such a young age must come with certain baggage. Being the Tracy Austin of rap must be hard.  Wait, you’re telling me there’s no cross section of golden era hip-hop and 70’s Women Tennis?  As a grown man I can’t imagine chopping it up in the studio with some of history’s best rappers, but that was Chi-Ali’s life before he even started high school. Imagine being an 8th grader, having a rap video on Yo! MTV Raps, and having your own album (while wearing Infared 6 Jordans on the cover).  After his debut, Chi-Ali didn’t pursue a rap career any further, and stayed out of limelight, until in 2000 he fled New York after being featured on two “America’s Most Wanted” episodes.  He served 12 years of a 14-year manslaughter sentence.  After coming home, he briefly dipped his feet back into rap and released a single for a song titled “G Check,” featuring Jadakiss.  The video looks like a lost episode of Money & Violence.  A documentary about Chi-Ali’s life is set to release in 2019.  If rap had 30 for 30s, Chi-Ali’s life story would have been one of the first handful of episodes.

It’s great to finally hear Chris Lighty’s voice on an album.  Just kidding, it’s terrible.  Chris Lighty fans can rejoice for he had the best A&R verse on the album.  The second best A&R verse belongs to someone named Dave Gossett who raps with a hitch in his flow and these little yelps at the end of his lines that make me physically cringe every time.  These A&R’s must have have had some serious dirt on Dres or something.  Chris Lighty was probably in bed one night and his girlfriend was like, “it’d be so cool if you also rapped.” He turned to her, “oh you wanna hear me rap, babe?” and proceeded to call Dres and demand a verse on the album.  When Dres told Chris Lighty he didn’t have enough people for a posse track, Chris gathered the most motley crew in the history of posse tracks, and grabbed whatever A&R’s, teenagers, and struggle rappers he could find.  I don’t think we’ll be bouncing our grandkids on our knees telling them about the time we heard two A&R’s rapping on a same song.

This brings us to Mr. Hot Dog.  Black Sheep bucked the popular trend of having a reggae influenced track on their album, opting instead for a Jamaican rapper.  If Hot Dog doesn’t sound like a rapper, that’s because he’s a dancer.  Hot Dog is a member of the A.T.E.E.M. not to be confused with Ransom and Hitchcock’s A-Team.  You’re probably familiar with A.T.E.E.M.’s star member, Chubb Rock. In 1992, Chubb Rock was one of most popular rappers following his radio friendly singles on his 1991 sophomore album.  You’re definitely familiar with the production duo Trackmasters who are known for “Juicy,” “I’ll Be There For You/You’re All I Need To Get By,” “If I Ruled The World,” and many others.  The A.T.E.E.M.’s debut album is entirely produced by Trackmasters and has the greatest album title in the history of hip-hop: “A Hero Ain’t Nuttin but a Sandwich.” I’ve never heard the album, but based off the title, it’s made my sacred top 100.  “A Hero Ain’t Nuttin but a Sandwich” needs to be discussed and referenced more often. I just need that album title in my life, someone make it happen.

It’s a shame Dres had to run with the bench unit for this track but he does his best to clean up at the end of the track.  The beat on the song is one of the better ones on the album, but I guess you have to have a good beat if half the rappers on the songs are A&R’s.  In no particular order here is a list of my favorite dozen posse tracks (not including the already mentioned classics):

B.G. ft. Big Tymers & the Hot Boys “Bling Bling” (1999)

Main Source ft. Nas, Joe Fatal, & Akinyele “Live at the Barbeque” (1991)

Jay-Z ft. Beanie Sigel, The Lox & Sauce Money “Reservoir Dogs” (1998)

Master P ft. Fiend, Silkk the Shocker, Mia X & Mystikal “Make ‘Em Say Uhh!” (1997)

Nas ft. AZ, Foxy Brown, & Cormega “Affirmative Action” (1996)

LL Cool J ft. Fat Joe, Foxy Brown, Keith Murray & Prodigy “I Shot Ya (Remix)” (1995)

Heltah Skeltah ft. O.G.C. “Leflaur Leflah Eshkoshka” (1996)

Ma$e ft. Black Rob, The LOX & DMX “24 Hours to Live” (1997)

Snoop Doggy Dogg ft. Nate Dogg, Kurupt & Warren G “Ain’t No Fun (If the Homies Can’t Have None)” (1993)

Noreaga ft. Nature, Big Pun, Cam’ron, Styles P & Jadakiss “Banned from T.V.” (1998)

The Luniz ft. E-40, Spice 1, Shock G, Richie Rich, Dru Down & Michael Marshall “I Got 5 On It (Remix)” (1995)

50 Cent ft. The Game, Lloyd Banks & Young Buck “Y’all Niggas Ain’t Fuckin With Us” (2004)

 

“Choice Is Yours (Revisited)” – Classic hook and classic beat.  The song is frequently listed on all the greatest rap singles lists.  KRS-One, Nas and N.O.R.E. have all made songs paying homage to the iconic single.  The tragic part about the song is it will forever be known as “the song that’s in the KIA Hamster commercial.”  To be clear, I’m not mad that Dres and Mista Lawnge got a check for the commercial, it’s great that without having to get up off the couch they can guarantee money for future generations of their family. But at what cost?  If your greatest artistic achievement is forever linked with driving Hamsters, does that make the money worth it?

“Yes” – The song is fine. It doesn’t stand out, and would have been better served following, “U Mean I’m Not.”  I’m not so much against the song as I am with the placement.  Having a ho-hum song wrapping up the album is a curious enough decision, but placing it after your best and catchiest song is unforgiveable.  Going from “Choice is Yours (Revisited)” to “Yes” is a bummer…and then the album ends.

A Wolf In Sheep’s Clothing certainly deserves to be in consideration for the Top 100 rap albums of all time.  The uniqueness of Dres and the album probably gives it the edge over albums that may otherwise be a more enjoyable listen.  As far as Native Tongues albums go, I have it ranked either fifth or sixth.  It’s clearly behind the first three A Tribe Called Quest albums and De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising.  I struggle with placing it above De La Soul Is Dead, because of the incredible Prince Paul production, but I think Wolf In Sheep’s Clothing deserves the nod for fifth because it’s more consistent and has much more actual rapping.  Until next time Dres and Mista Lawnge (who now goes by the more professional Mr. Long).

Lil Wayne ‘Tha Carter V’ Album Review

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For nearly a decade Lil Wayne had the entire rap section of the music industry on lock. 2004’s ‘Tha Carter’ was the beginning of Wayne’s domination, the following year’s second installment of the series elevated his profile to immense proportions. The rise didn’t stop till the series did. 2008’s ‘Tha Carter III’ literally made Wayne “The Best Rapper Alive” a self fulfilling prophesy and self spoken affirmation turned reality. Label politics aside Wayne’s status is solidified with his triumphant return in a time where a musician’s window of opportunity has been sized down by social media and the super speed of the media cycle. Super producer Mannie Fresh returns, Wayne brings past staples into the present seamlessly, with a 2018 version of ‘Special Delivery’ on ‘Uproar’, an Ashanti feature which sounds like a YMCMB compilation album crossover single, and rhyme schemes and flows long forgotten in the ‘mumble rap’ days of the current.

This feat is pulled off simply because Wayne is the influencer who birthed the current culture. He can bring things from his past easily into the modern paradigm because he is the one who shaped it. Every rapper today claims to be a ‘rockstar’, and proudly professes their diverse influences and rock fandom but it was only Wayne who allowed this to be accepted, pulling out guitar solos with zero practice had more of an influence on music than a purist would have ever anticipated.

 

‘Tha Carter V’ boasts introspective and honest tracks like ‘Open Letter’ ‘Mess’ ‘Don’t Cry’ ‘Famous’ -which features the rappers own mother- and ‘Let It All Work Out’. This openness is an attribute often overlooked when analyzing Wanye’s artistry. Production on the LP is pristine and inventive, at times though also dated, not negatively- his rhyme schemes are dated as well but due to the direction lyricism has gone songs like ‘Let It Fly’ featuring trailblazer Travis Scott shows why Wayne is lyrically miles ahead of the pack, he takes a limited rhyme concept and stretchs it out to near limitlessness extending on a self-created lyrical meme to an extent that seems almost impossible. In the streaming era Wayne, though never one to really release short albums, manages to make a daunting 23 track album have enough twists,turns, and changes in emotions to keep the listener interested. In it’s entirety ‘Tha Carter V’ is the much needed stamp on a legendary career, a polarizing figure in Hip-Hop where purist at times would place Wayne in the position of the person solely responsible for the commercialization and downfall of the culture, ironically with his return his talent is the one elevating the new generation conceptually, lyrically, artistically and emotionally.

 

Rating 8.3/10