In case you missed it, the shit hit the fan in the comments section of the T-Ray article. Mike Heronresponded to Todd, and T-Ray answered, which led to Mike offering to meet up in person and talk things over while he was in LA. Hopefully this all gets sorted out without anybody losing any teeth. It’s a pity that these old wounds had to be re-opened, but hopefully it’ll get worked out. I’ve also been put in contact with V.I.C to get his side of the story, which seems fair all things considered.
In other news, the interviews have been have been non-stop here at the Unkut Dot Com HQ. Over the past two weeks, I’ve been built with Big Daddy Kane, Percee-P and Kurious Jorge. The Skinny Boys feature will be ready for next week, and the Kane should drop the week after that. There’s also a few others on the cards, but I won’t mention them until they’re in the can.
Elsewhere, Fat Lace magazine returns, in blog form. It also seems to be part of the Rawkus network, which has either bought or partnered-up with a few other rap blogs (including one that seems to be the biggest chomp of Nah Right evah). Anyway, I for one am glad to see “Crap Graff” back in effect.
As if “Verbal Intercourse” wasn’t ill enough, the Gods connected again for the little dunns incredible third LP. For some reason which I can no longer recall, I was a little disappointed with Hell On Earth in the wake of the awe-inspiring (not to mention very influential) The Infamous album. Truth be told, this was a more refined version of the same shit. The beats were sparser and darker, the raps were more paranoid and violent – the Mobb were at the top of their game. Prodigy, who can barely string two words together these days, delivered his most impressive lyrical performance outside of “Shook Ones” on the supreme mathematics that is “Apostle’s Warning”. And who can forget that “interactive” CD-ROM crap that let you pretend you were walking around the Bridge, with the secret code to unlock the song dissing Keith Murray. Good times all round.
In theory, this should be the best shit ever. Panchi and Shabeeno kicking that Bronx hustler shit over Premier tracks, right? That’s what I thought when I got this advance CD in the mail a couple of weeks back. Turns out that this is more of a mixtape/street CD type of complilation (which explains the inclusion of their feature on the final Gangstarr album and that old Ill Kid track) to serve as a prelude to the Pros and Cons LP, with seven Premo cuts. Not a huge problem, but that means that I’d already caught a decent amount of this material on Premier mixtapes and whatnot. Expectations aside, NYG‘z are more than just a bootleg M.O.P, as some might assume, as they deliver solid street-level subject matter over 22 selections. Refreshingly, they point out that they “ain’t no thug, that’s for Pac and the Outlawz” as they unleash superior non-progressive content for the hardcore audience.
Bet you didn’t see this coming, huh? A few additions to the Ced Gee Special I ran alast year. Thanks to Tuff City’s repress, I can now bring you the Ced’s two contribution’s to Funkmaster Wizard Wiz’s catalog. “Grand Concourse & 183rd” is a quality BX anthem set to the reworked drums of Ultra’s original “Travelling At The Speed Of Thought” (aka The Rolling Stones “Honky Tonk Woman”) with some Kool & The Gang horns thrown in for good measure. The A-side, “I Ain’t Wid Dat” mines more familiar territory, but as usual, even the most well-worn break sounds better after some quality time in the Ultra Lab (tinfoil wallpaper and the whole nine).
So I got sent to this Diamond D interview last night by richdirection, which was decent but didn’t really tell me anything that I hadn’t already read in the P Brothers interview with D from a few years back. Thing is, it turns out that the Bronx Bombers aren’t the only one’s repping the name D.I.T.C., which you’ll discover when you click the link at the bottom of the feature…..
It’s times like this I can’t but wonder “What would EST do?”
Gone are the days of wondering “What ever happened to…?” or shelling out a week’s pay on some test-press vinyl action. Chances are, the folks over at Traffic are putting it out on CD right now. By the time you’ve read this, five more albums from the vaults will have been re-issued, and by days end, a further twenty. But for now, I’ll attempt to tackle three recent re-releases:
Remember that corny backpacker phase when everyone was harping on about the elements of hip-hop? That shit was for lames, dames and flames. You wanna know what the essence of hip-hop is? Racking. Call it stealing, shoplifting or even the Five Finger Discount – that’s the real heart of this here game. Think about it – rapping over break-beats is stealing someone’s music and making it better. How else is a twelve-year old kid going to go bombing? Who’s got money for paint at that age, when there’s cheeseburgers and weed to be had? Same goes for music. Back when we still gave a fuck about records, throwing a stack of wax under your jacket was the only way you could cop all the latest import singles from New York. I still remember the first time I bagged-up a record (Rakim’s “Follow The Leader” 12”) at Central Station, while an older writer I didn’t even know kept watch for me. How amped do you think I was to get that platter back home and give it a spin? Nothing’s changed these days. Peep Brad Strut’s “Monopoly” clip and you’ll see him balling his own CD, while the Beatnuts famously declared “if I can’t afford a record I’ll bag it!”
After the Strength and Honor mixtape and his unspectacular track on Marco Polo’s album, I was concerned that Marciano was losing his spark. But if this new track is any indication, he’s back in form for his forthcoming SRC project. Dude is also responsible for some of the best tracks on the UN or U Out album that he dropped with his crew, The UN. For the record, his solo version of “Game of Death” is one of my favorite songs of the last five years (apparently the original version they released on their own label was even rawer). Strong Island don’t eff around!
The final chapter…of course I’ve saved the best ‘till last. T-Ray covers working with Big L, Nas, Cypress Hill and Milano, and fires back at Mike Heron.
Robbie: Then you did “Yes, You May (Remix)” and all that stuff with Finesse.
T-Ray: Yep, and that was Big L’s first time in the studio you know. What happened is that I had another beat that Finesse wanted me to loop up for him. I didn’t like the way the beat he wanted sounded. I had brought a bunch of records with me, and I said “Yo Finesse, I got somethin’ right here man. I’m actually thinking about hookin’ it up, it’s supposed to be for Biz but if you want it I’ll give it to you for this, ‘cause it would work perfectly for this”. So basically, I hooked-up the beat right there in the studio. That final is not even a final, what people hear on that record – that was just a rough mix! I made that beat in about 30 minutes in the studio. Finesse went through his book of rhymes to figure out what rhyme he was droppin’, and Big L came in and I said “Yo, kick me what rhyme you wanna do”, and it was his first time in the studio so he was really green, he was new, and he kicked me his rhyme and it was like “Oh, this is great!” Percee was actually supposed to come down and be on that, but he didn’t end-up makin’ it.
Continuing on from Part 1, Todd discusses being a white guy in rap when Public Enemy blew up, working with Big Beat Records, producing Percee-P, skateboard connections and “Lost Tapes” tragedy….
T-Ray: I’ll never forget walking down the streets of New York City with a fuckin’ red bomber jacket that had a big logo on the back that said “The White Boys”.
[I burst out laughing]
There were six or seven of us, and people thought that we were a racist gang, like skinheads or something. We’re just tryin’ to rap and have fun with young kids – at that time it wasn’t even a grown-up thing, it was like a kid thing – and I’ll never forget people coming up as we’d walk by, and they’d yell “That’s the most racist thing I’ve ever seen!” and I was like “Yo?!?”. I found out I was naïve, I just didn’t understand that people are so lost in their mind, that race really separates. See I grew up in the woods – I grew up in I guess a secluded way or something, and it started bugging me out. I really started learning about the world like that. I learnt about the world through hip-hop, because I was intelligent, I was very smart, but I was not worldly. We were named the White Boys by Black people, but now Black people are looking at this name – because I’m in New York, I’m not down South. They don’t know about how we came up, they don’t know who we are, they’re seeing is a bunch of guys walkin’ round with “White Boys” jackets on. Then I went back to our album – we had a fuckin’ song called “The White Boys Are Runnin’ The Show”! [laughs]. I never thought of it from an angry Black person’s point of view. “Oh shit! They’re gonna take this fucked-up!” We were just with the wrong producers at the time, the wrong managers, ‘cause they didn’t catch onto all of that shit. We were naïve country boys, we didn’t know how people would respond to shit like that. But when Public Enemy came out, that’s when it became super-clear, and my group fell apart.
This one’s been sitting in the stash for a long time. I actually got into contact with Todd Ray after he dropped a comment in defense of DJ Ivory of the P Brothers, who had upset a few Outkast fans during my interview with him way back in December of 2004. By the time I got to speak to T-Ray, it was mid 2005, which makes this conversation over two years old, but no less entertaining. It’s actually so long that I’ve decided to run it as a three parter – but rest assured, I won’t keep you waiting long for the next two installments. From spinning records in South Carolina, to working with Big L, Artifacts and Cypress Hill and eventually working on Carlos Santana’s duet album that sold millions of copies worldwide, this dude has seen some shit.
Robbie: You went through a very prolific period in hip-hop production in the early nineties, working in some really good records, but you were originally a DJ, weren’t you?
T-Ray: That’s how I started out, as a DJ. When I heard “Planet Rock” I just said “Yo, that’s it right there. That’s my shit.” It was on some cosmic shit, it had a beat that was crazy. After a minute, I just started saying “Fuck it, I’m gonna just DJ this shit.” I started getting more into straight hip-hop, more into rhymes, instead of just the uptempo beat type stuff. It just kept escalating from there, man. I just kept deejaying, got up my equipment and kept building. I was in South Carolina, so I started drivin’ up and flying up to New York, and I would just go to Music Factory, near Times Square, and just buy two of everything. Everything that was on the wall. I would come back down South and I started deejaying with only underground New York hip-hop that people in New York didn’t even know about.
