Fruity red pants? Check. “Fairy flying” dancers on some Harry Belafonte’s stage production in Beat Street? Check. Corny orchestral backing? Check. MJ white gloves and fudge scarf? Check. Please kill yourself immediately if you enjoy this guy’s rapping on any level.
A few recent G Rap cuts, a couple of which are due to feature on the new album. Plus a nice feature with M.O.P and Mobb Deep from the old Frankie Cutlass LP and one of the better songs from the Click Of Respect project.
Flavor Unit fanatics – stay tuned for my interview with Ali Ba-Ski (aka Lord Alibaski) later this week. (more…)
Whether it was the fact that he uttered the line “keep it moving like Soul II Soul” on two different songs on his album with little concern, or his boast of being willing to “straight piss on bitches”, Neek comes off like the thinking man’s version of NORE, minus the shitty music.
In classic indy vinyl style, each release was on a different label – Wastelandz Entertainment, Large Entertainment, Freeze Records, From Da Bricks Ent. etc. – although I’m assuming these just reflected who paid to get the record pressed more than anything else (there’s a shout out to “Motherfuckin’ Man” crooner Joe Flav thanking him for the $1500 on the Backs N Necks EP). (more…)
Remember the hyped-up kid that traded rhymes with Large Pro on “Fakin’ The Funk”? Neek The Exotic got his first shot on MC Shan’s “Don’t Call It A Comeback” / “Pee-Nile Reunion” single from the (never released) Hip Hop Roughneck album, as he went for his over a Large Pro/G Rap beat. Thanks to a handy accapella version, this verse also provided the choruses to half of Neek’s future songs – “Top Billin’” style – and introduced some classic Neek-ism’s such as “rip ‘em flip ‘em” and “backs ‘n necks”.
It’s hard to pin down what exactly sets this Wastelandz resident apart from the pack, but Neek’s combination of excitable semi-Shout rap delivery, unique timing and occasionally ignorant content over banging tracks is a good combination in any situation. His duet with Paul Sea over superb J-Love and co. production is also worth checking, not least of all to hear Large say “for real you know the deal this is unkut” and Neek to let us know that “me and rap stick together like hookers and patent leather”. “Exotic’s Raw” and “Rip ‘Em Flip ‘Em” are taken from his first solo single, which was the first in a series of indy vinyl drops he released with musical assists from Xtra-P and Yusef Lateef. More of these to follow in Part 2…. (more…)
Ever wondered what it would sound like if rap was made in a cave? So did Rick Rubin. In fact, he even went as far as to “Reduce” LL Cool J’s first two records into echo-splattered dub excursions….oh wait, Jazzy Jay made “I Need A Beat”. Let’s assume that Rubin did actually do this mix though, even though it was more likely the work of Burtoozie. The “Zootie Mix” is complete chaos from start to finish, while the “Burnt” version starts off slow but peaks in a sea of murderous echo. Not to be outdone, Noel Rockwell (with an assist from Marley Marl) presents a demented version of his dedication to the Wopp dance in the “Stub Version”, where a young Blaq Poet explains the required moves between bass kicks, scattered snares and more reverb than thought humanly possible. Three of the finest examples of why we need to bring back abrasive noise to hip-hop. (more…)
You might remember Killa Sha as the guy that Rafi called a weed carrier at the “BK Hip-Hop Festival”, but Sha Lumi is no new jack. Apparently he was rolling with Tragedy back in 1986 as a member of the Super Kids with Craig G, although the only record ever credited to the crew was Trag’s solo “The Tragedy (Don’t Do It)” aka “Coke Is It”. He had a group called the Killa Kidz who you might remember getting shouts on mid-90s Mobb joints, so he’s been active through the various eras of Bridge rap. But where as some of the old QBC vets have fallen-off, gotten lazy or wasted superior vocals on weak beats, Sha has dropped a series of hardcore street albums like The Black Eminem (ho-haa!) and Da Billy Colez Story.
After bumping his first official album for the past week, I’ve gotta admit that this most entertaining album I’ve heard all year. Everything from the superior beat selections, “righteous ignorant” lyrics and over-the-top adlibs (that make Jim Jones, Tony Yayo and Solomon Childs all sound restrained) come together to knock ‘em out the box. Large Pro, Ayatollah, J-Love and Havoc all deliver winners as expected, but even the up-and-comers like Jewelz Polar, DJ Rated R and Grudge come through, and as a result only two of the seventeen cuts get the skip treatment. Sha delivers the energy of a youngster but without the classic freshman mistakes of wack skits or corny song concepts. He sticks to a script of non-progressive Bridge street rap, but builds on the lessons from mentor Trag and vets like Large Pro while adding his own unique twist. He also makes several references to being a “chubby chaser” – how many dudes have got the stones to put that on a record? If you don’t own this by the end of the week, you might as well put on some white sunglasses and tight jeans before throwing yourself into the nearest river.
A year-and-a-half ago I caught-up with The Skinny Boys from CT to discuss the good, the bad, and the downright ugly of the music business.
Robbie: How long were you performing together prior to the Weightless album?
Superman Jay: We’ve been together since 1981. We would rock shows with a guy named Arthur Armstrong from ‘80 to ‘85, when we actually got our deal rolling.
Jockbox: We were already doing shows and established before we even got signed, doing local shows and shows down South – just all over, just performing and putting our name out there. Promoting ourselves and whatnot.
Was that the same line-up back then?
SJ: Actually, the original Skinny Boys were me – Superman Jay, Jockbox – Jock Harrison, my brother Shaun Harrison and another guy named Robert Durett, who we called ELD. So there was actually four. Then Durett had end-up leaving – he left because of personal issues like management, mainly. When you recorded the album, were you just using a drum machine and turntables? I would say the “Jockbox”, the record “Ill” on the Weighless album, “Get Funky”…the two human beat-box records and “Ill” were actually written by us way before we even met our management – Mark and Rhonda Bush. If you look on most of the records, it has on there “Written by Rhonda Bush” and “Produced by Mark Bush” and that’s not true, because [on] all of our stuff we did our own production other than the help of Chuck Chillout and Flavor Flav. We always wrote our own stuff, and that’s to set the record straight. Me, Shawn and Jock always wrote our own stuff and always produced our own stuff.
I always suspected that it was some shady paperwork when I read those credits.
SJ: It’s one of them things like that, because even when we had to go to court behind it, when you look at things like the master tapes – you see three black lines going through our names and then you had their names over top of ours. Written over! I hate to harp on it, but it was a nightmare to go through.
J: Behind all the great performances that we did…not to be braggadoctious, because there’s a lotta greats out there in hip-hop, but I feel that we put a good show on, we made great records and we stayed true to our fan-base. It was just a fact of management breaking things down. We could have been probably one of the greatest of all time, but that’s what happens with money situations and things like that. That’s the bottom line to it. (more…)
In case you haven’t caught the QB Story documentary about Trag, I thought I’d drop this classic segment that features footage of Bridge legends like Poet and Marley, a young, drunk Nore and Capone and crew getting effed-up and messing with the cameraman.
It’s not all “classic rap” around the Unkut Dot Com offices. Between reviewing CD’s for magazines and getting sent free shit, I have to listen to pretty much everything that comes out, and it’s no picnic. let me tell you. I only really bothered putting Rugged Intellect’s album on to hear the G Rap feature, but it turns out this Canadian actually has more than a nice guest list to offer.
Robbie: When I first saw the track listing to the album, I thought to myself “Either this guy’s forked-out a lotta cake to these dude’s to get ‘em on his album, or he’s actually dope enough for these dude’s to do tracks with.” I was glad that it was the latter.
Rugged Intellect: [laughs] Yeah, definitely man.
So how did you connect with all these legends?
When I was first putting together this album, I hooked-up with Domingo, who I’m sure you’re familiar with. After the situation with the label that I was signed with kinda disintegrated, me and Domingo hooked-up. He really believed in my talents and we came to a decision that we were gonna work on this album, and him being in the industry for so many years, he had a lotta relationships with a lotta of these artists. He facilitated some of these artists getting on the records, like Kool G Rap for example. That’s why he was co-Executive Producer of the album, coz he was instrumental in helping me do a lotta things.
Being from Montreal, how did you get your foot in the door in the US?
Even before I started rhyming, I told myself “If I was ever to rap, I would definitely want to make it in New York”, because if you can’t make it New York, then there’s no purpose in you even rhyming. That was always my focus. Even when I was over here and didn’t know anybody, that was always my motivation. So when that dude got at me with the deal up in California, that’s why I took it so quickly. I was like “Bam! This is my shot! I’mma take it. Boom!” Shit didn’t work out the way it was supposed to, but it definitely led to a lot of those opportunities, like working with Domingo and a lotta other people. (more…)
Aside from pumping out pretty much the only mix CD’s worth checking for right now, J-Love has done some nice shit on the production side of things. He just dropped Street Savior 7 and Hidden Darts Volume 4. Here’s four winners that made it to vinyl….
Ghostface Killah & Trife - “Clipse of Doom (Remix)” (more…)
