You might recognize this beat (minus the ‘Nautilus’ loop) from the first Godfather DonHydra Beats album. Jerry from Hydra told me about these joints years ago, and they recently saw a very limited vinyl release on One Leg Up, who also just posted a quality God Don interview.
Who’s to blame for this unfortunate development? NERD made looking gay and yelling “ironic” lyrics hot for a minute, while Missy Elliott made shitty rapping over 808′s all the rage, before Kanye ‘Liberache’ West made fruity sunglasses blow-up…combine them together and you’ve got “Party Rocking”. Let’s take A-Trak‘s description of The Cool Kids when I interviewed him last year:
“Their music sounds like the first Beastie Boys album or old Ice-T from the era of ’6 N The Morning’, or old NWA. The dudes are, image-wise, all the way street-wear’d out, like on some Hypebeast shit. It’s the bridge between those scenes, but it all sounds effortless.”
Sounds bad, right? But it doesn’t stop there. Lil Mama, MIA, Kid Sister are but three of this new wave of “ironic” rappers who seem hell-bent on achieving new levels of sucking at rapping. Lupe Fiasco and Kidz In The Hall might not get around in Day-Glo smedium tee’s but they still have a gimmicky, calculated vibe to everything they do.
Whether it’s wearing 80′s gear and garish print hoodies, rapping about skateboards and BMX bikes or making songs about nail polish/lip gloss, these wacky young ‘uns are poised to take ‘tarded rap to the next level. Love that robotic repeating chorus trick that everyone does too. Don’t even get me started on all the shitty white rappers from NY that traded in their army pants for tight jeans…
Continuing my conversation with The Bomb Squad‘s Keith Shocklee, we discuss the early days of Public Enemy, park jams and some of their outside projects.
DJ Johnny Juice told me about how you guys made-up a bunch of group names and then filled the spots?
Keith Shocklee: What we was doing was a low-scale Motown for rap music. We just made demo tapes, but we had an outlet – our radio station. That kept everybody close together. Everybody had their own crews, sometimes we put certain people in the crews. We had the Classy Crew – these three girls from Hempstead – nice little hot girls. They rhymed, we took the ‘Hey Mickey’ beat and they did a crazy song to it. We used to put together our own little shows, man. Had like a little tour! Back at that time it was real easy – people had never seen stuff like that. We couldn’t get the big guys to come out to us all the time. We wanted the Treacherous Three – they won’t show, they were like ‘Long Island? Ehhh!’ We did a party and Spoonie G was ‘sposed to come through. We paid him half his money in advance – he ain’t never show! Everybody used to think Long Island was ‘Ehhh!’ until they come out here and find out there was a huge hip-hop community, because everybody from Long Island – they keep forgetting – they migrated from the city! My moms was the only one that lived out on Long Island, she had nine brothers and sisters, so we always had to go to Manhattan. That’s how we knew about Flash and Bambatta and all of them. It wasn’t because we heard about them, we had to hear from my cousins and ‘em, then we had to go see them! Then we got to the point we just go and hang out at the spots. Chuck’s family’s from out there, Flav had some family out there. Most of the kids that lived out in Long Island had some relatives in Manhattan or The Bronx or Brooklyn. The real city cats, like the rappers, didn’t understand that. We were like a third-world [country] to them.
We was our street team. We just said ‘Yo man, we gotta go hang-up some flyers!’ It was illegal to hang-up flyers, cops used to watch us hang-up all the flyers and wait for us until they thought we was finished and make us go back and take ‘em all down! [laughs] They used to bust our chops! We had a strategy for when we threw parties. It became an unwritten hip-hop rule – if you were a street promoter you always tried to throw a party on the 1st or the 15th. That was either pay week or people got their welfare checks. You gonna throw a party? Make sure the people have money! ‘Cos sometimes you throw a party in between, like at the end of the month when everybody’s money is spent-up, nobody will show! (more…)
Long Island was the proverbial underdog in the mid-80s. While The Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens all wrestled for rap dominance, Strong Island residents would journey into the city to check out shows before returning home to deliver their own twist on what they’d witnessed. It turns out that, somewhat removed from whatever trends were dominating the music that particular month, L.I. would prove to produce some of the most original hip-hop of all time. Boasting EPMD, De La Soul and Rakim amongst it’s residents, it was also the birthplace for the unstoppable force that the world would come to know as Public Enemy. Keith Shocklee from The Bomb Squad breaks down their founding days for part one of a two part feature.
Robbie: Was Spectrum City a mobile sound system in the early days?
Keith Shocklee: We started out as Spectrum City DJ’s. We used to DJ all the parties where we were from – which is Roosevelt, Long Island. We used to DJ the high school parties, people used to have us do thier house parties. This is mid-70s, goin’ all up to the later part of the 70s. We just started playing regular club music – at that time it was more like soul music. The hip-hop scene was still in it’s incubator stage, where the hip-hop scene became more MC-oriented, so you’re talking about coming in from around ’73, ’74, when we started out at a spot called Roosevelt Youth Center. Roosevelt Youth Center was kinda crazy! Now I’m going way back to where we originally started. Roosevelt Youth Center, what we did was the community thing, everybody come there, hang out. They had karate classes, dojo classes, arts and crafts – different things just to keep us off the streets, from just whylin’ out. One of my neighbors – Krandle Newton – put together inside of this youth center, along with my brother and this other guy Ujima, just a little radio station. Because at the time, cats used to come to the park and set-up their column speakers with a turntable and just play music for people in the park. They took that concept, ‘cos I was real young, and turned it into a little make-shift radio station in the youth center. We played music and was teaching the kids in there how to be a broadcast DJ. My man Krandle had some communication skills, because he went to a engineering school, Ujima knew some things, my brother wanted to get into the music thing. From then, we just played the music within the station and we had people come and talk over the mic, just like a real radio jock. So the kids coming to the station thought we was a real station. We had our own little call letters just like a regular radio station. Back then we had WBLS and WWRL, which was the call letters for real commercial radio stations, so we called ourself – within the youth center – was WRYC. The ‘W’ is the call letter for all the radio stations and the ‘RYC’ was Roosevelt Youth Center. We just imitated what the major radio stations was doing. (more…)
In internets time, a day is a week, a week is a month and a month is a year. So allow me to introduce some ancient links from the stone age that was April 2008:
Fame‘s work for his own shit took a minute to get noticed since he was standing in Premier‘s formidable shadow, but even dating back to Firing Squad, he took Preme’s formula and added his own twist. Grabbing those ‘Microphone Fiend’ drums for ‘Put It In The Air’ was an act of pure genius – sure, Doom did it first on ‘The MIC’ but it worked better here – while ‘All Of The Above’ is the perfect M.O.P record in all it’s abrasive glory. Just to show some range, ‘New York Salute’ eases back on the throttle but still gets over. As for ‘Here Today…’? Cot damn!
Fizzy Womack is better than your favorite producer. Dude found a bag of records on the street in the rain and came up with ‘Cold As Ice’. He also made a beat out of the sound of a clip being reloaded. What more could you want? Here’s some of his best freelance work.
Too cheap to buy music and can’t be bothered waiting for the ten seconds at RapidShare? Start a blog and watch those free CDs roll in. You used to be able to sell them for beer money, but that’s not as lucrative as it once was. Occasionally, they’ll actually be worth listening to and/or keeping.
Payroll Records -The Master Catalogue
Nice collection of everything ever released on this small but notable indy label that ran from ’88-’90. You’ll know ‘Droppin’ It’ and ‘Versatility’ off the bat, but there’s more to the collection than just Bizzie Boys and Supreme DJ Nyborn. You even get all the instrumentals, dubs and accapellas on the second CD. (more…)
Public Enemy and The Bomb Squad were ahead of their time in more ways than one. Beyond the sonic innovation and hardcore lyrical content, the crew also pioneered the kind of self-sufficient work-ethic and forward thinking that would later be repeated as part of the RZA‘s Wu-Tang master plan. The most significant step was their recruiting of local artists to create a stable of crews to further their expanding musical direction – in effect mentoring promising rookies in minor league fashion. What follows are the stories of two of the artists that were put-on by Hank and Keith Shocklee, their cousin Eric Sadler and Chuck D in the late 80s.
DJ Johnny ‘Juice’ Rosado started out as part of the Kings Of Pressure (who dropped a couple of incredible songs before personnel changes resulted in a half-baked album) and went on to perform many of the scratches on PE songs that we all thought Terminator X had executed. He still works with Chuck to this day, having produced much of the group’s recent output. Son Of Bazerk had a far different experience after signing on with Hank, finding himself trapped in career limbo for seven years following the mixed reaction to his experimental debut LP, best remembered for the schizophrenic ‘Change The Style’ single and contribution to the Juice soundtrack.
Robbie: There were two different line-ups with Kings Of Pressure – the one from the singles and the one from the album. How come?
DJ Johnny Juice: It’s a weird story, I’ll hip you to it. What happened was, after the first single there was a lot of bullshit that went on. Some of the cats started getting big-headed. We did a song that never came out, we did a buncha shit! Remember that shit ‘Till The Strength Stay Up’? Flav was playing the keyboard on it. We did a lot of shit, man, and it just never happened because of whatever.
I started deejaying a lot for Public Enemy, doing a lot of the stuff for their production. I was with The Bomb Squad, so a lotta the guys got jealous of that. It was a lotta weird shit happening, ‘cos we were put together by a contest. Hank and Chuck and them dudes had a contest, before PE’s first album came out, to try and find them. They had names for all the groups – Kings Of Pressure, Son Of Bazerk, The Hellraiders, Terminal Illness Crew, Leaders Of The New School – they had all these names, and they were finding dudes.
Son Of Bazerk: Dub Side Gangsters, Funky Frank And The Street Force… (more…)
Finishing up ‘Demo Week’ with the tail-end of the alphabet. In retrospect, half of these shits aren’t really ‘demos’ but however you want to describe them – ‘roughs’, ‘rehearsals’ or just ‘unreleased’ – it’s fair to say that a lot of great music never makes it to retail. Thank fuck for mix-tapes and underground radio.
Pete Rock & CL Smooth - ‘We Specialize’
Not exactly a demo, but shit wins regardless. (more…)
Two new joints from the Freestyle Professors. ‘Who Am I’ is from the forthcoming Gryme Tyme project. Assisting Branesparker on production is an impressive line-up of Bronx heavyweights, including Lord Finesse, Diamond D, Showbiz, Minnesota, Buckwild, and Ahmed.
Continuing on, more vaulted material for your steering pleasure. Hiss added free of charge.
Ed OG - ‘I’m Different’ (demo)
Taken from the recently released Life Of A Kid In The Ghetto – Demos & Rarities 2CD, this version used Eddie Bo‘s ‘Hook ‘N Sling’. I always liked that ‘S’ themed style second verse. (more…)
