The most important thing you can do on the internets this decade is vote in the 2nd Annual Weed Carrier Awards, now expanded to cover sports, film, TV and comic books.
The Greatest Man Alive, Da Wizzard of Odds and V-Born kicking rhymes over finger snaps for the Krush Rap show. Larry Larr gets a quick jab in at Cool C, while EST buries his old crew and his former manager in typically acknickulous fashion. Hopefuly footage of the time that one of the Hilltop threw a quarter at EST at the basketball court and the resulting brawl will turn up one day.
Logo designed by Tony Bones / The Home Office.
Much has happened since our last meeting. Those of you who couldn’t afford the original Platinum membership packs have requested other options to show your support, and the landscape has shifted somewhat. Hipster Rap ate itself in a blur of day-glo, but new enemies have emerged in it’s wake. Now is not the time to rest on our laurels and pat ourselves on the back for a job well done, for the war rages on. Here are some of the major issues facing the CRC in 2013:
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After speaking to Uptown (of ‘Dope On Plastic’ fame) the other week, he mentioned an interesting story about his involvement in the 1989 New Music Seminar Battle For World Supremacy:
Uptown: I battled for World Supremacy – that was the year that Freshco and Miz won. I made it to the semi-finals – it was me, Serge from Ohio and Freshco. When we get into the final round, one of the associates of Tommy Boy comes up to me and says, ‘Freschco’s ‘4 At A Time’ is doing great right now, it would be real good if he won this contest’. I’m like, ‘What? What are you asking me to do?’ While I’m talking to them, my time was running out. So I had to run on stage – if anyone has video tape of that final, you’ll see I run on stage and tried to come-up with something real quick – and then Freshco kinda capitalised on it, ‘Why was you takin’ so long, are you scared of me/I don’t think you was prepared for me!’. He said some real slick shit and he won that title. I was like, ‘How in the world…?’ That was the same year where Miz won, but DJ Alladin also got kinda jibbed. Me and Alladin talked about it at one time, ‘We should get together and make a song’, but it never panned-out.
Did the Tommy Boy staff somehow rig the results?
Check this video of the finals and you be the judge:
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Twenty five years of amassing records, CD’s, tapes and magazines is all well and good, but having relocated the Unkut Dot Com HQ on numerous occasions over the past two years has really stretched the friendship. Having all of your music on a portable hard drive is not such a bad thing when you’re living in Mom’s Basement or living under a bridge, and the older and lazier I become, I find it quicker to download a vinyl rip of something I want to listen to rather than spend an hour trawling through the ‘total kaos, no mas confusion’ that is my record collection.
While I’m not about to dispose of the spoils of a lifetime of hip-hop hoarding this week, it got me thinking…what would it take to part with your entire collection? An obscene amount of money? Permanently moving to another country? World peace?
Has the student defeated the master? Pete and Roc offer separate takes on 10cc’s MOR classic. Please attempt to ignore Papoose‘s involvement when casting your vote…
As a rule, I prefer to change up the tried-and-tested hypothetical question of which celebrity you would like to shove into an active volcano with something a little more grimy. Not that Unkut Dot Com is any way, shape or form condoning the killing or causing grievous bodily harm to rappers, producers and deejays, but just for the sake of argument, let us suppose for a second that you were in a position to shove someone like Swizz Beatz in front of a bus without anybody suspecting foul play…who would you choose? Call it natural selection if you will…the culling of the less talented musical individuals for the betterment of our ears.
Don’t hold back now…the Unkut comment section is protected by doctor/patient confidentiality.
It’s the most common accusation leveled against Tri-State Rapper Dudes – ‘They’re so boring!’. Non-progressive hip-hop can seem that way to kids raised on Outkast and Freestyle Fellowship, because…well, there are a lot of bland, generic rapper’s hailing from the Rotten. What one listener considers ice-cold nonchalance is boring monotone to the next. Instead of me spending the time and effort to actually devise the list myself and then have to read a stream of comments complaining that I forgot to include Lloyd Banks, I thought I’d open the floor to nominations. If you include a reason why the Rapper Dude in question is so coma-inducing then you’re more likely to get them through into the short-list for voting.
It was bound to happen eventually. As I approach seven years of wasted youth as rap blogger dude, I’ve decided that it might be time to escape from the basement for a stretch and take it to the streets, as the Doobie Brothers once harmonized. That’s right, I shall be packing-up my cardboard box of old rap magazines and start sleeping somewhere under a bridge in Queens sometime this April. For any irate Weed Carriers out there, now you’ll finally have the chance to punch me in the face if you think that will somehow make the awful reality of your career decision suddenly vanish in a puff of indo smoke. It will also offer me the chance to drink 4-Loko at will, meet the four girls who follow me on Twitter face-to-face and eat some effed-up burgers with the Internets Celebrities. Hopefully it will also allow me to make amends for the wrongs I committed against the group known as M.O.P. when they were last in my town.
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After months of preliminary rounds to establish the finest remixed tracks from hip-hop’s best and brightest (according to a couple of hundred East-Coast Elitist’s, of course) we finally have our final nine. Go in!
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A few weeks back I asked if anyone had any ideas for the Wild Card Round, but after going through the list I decided to go back to the drawing board and pick eight essential remixes that haven’t been covered yet. Once this is decided, the winners of this and the previous eight rounds will battle it out for the title of The Greatest Remix Of All Time, at least according to Unkut’s Conservative Rap Coalition (aka The East-Coast Rap Elitists). Whether on the strength of the new lyrics or just taking an otherwise shitty track and making it sound good, these eight remixes all win in their own way.
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Let’s be honest – it’s all about the ‘Best Kept Secret’ remix. That shit is a monster! That being said, I’ve always had a lot of time for the ‘Knock ‘Em Out Sugar Ray’ remix as well. The ‘Posse Is Large’ remix is included simply as a reminder of the lost art of conga loops…
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Dante Ross broke down the science of the Dummies back in my interview with him last year:
“One thing I gotta say – I had a partner through all this stuff named John Gamble. Up until the second Everlast record I worked on, damn near everything I ever did with him. He was like the engineer of the team, but also a producer, and he’s an incredibly underrated part of the element. Geeby Dajani, he was my partner in the beginning. He put us together and then he wasn’t really involved from a really early point, after maybe the first Brand Nubian record I didn’t really fuck with him on music too much after that. Maybe H2O a little bit, but that was it. The thing was I was more dominant in making the music, so we kinda had to stop working together ‘cos I was just too ambitious and driven, so I just kinda went for mine. The whole time though, I had Gamble next to me, helping me clean my shit up, make it sound better, fixing up my programming – very underrated element. I was just wanna give him thanks, props and praise. I just wanna shout out my partner John Gamble, ‘cos he’s an ill dude.”
Now we’re pulling out the big guns. Pete Rock has had a long and varied career, but in terms of his remixing work, he really peaked early on in as a result of being the ‘go to’ guy for much of the early 90′s. His two primary techniques during this period were to either add subtle but effective tweaks to the original formula, as he did with the ‘Slow Down’ remix and the vastly improved ‘Straighten It Out’ remix, or to completely flip the original and recreate it as a hyped-up, horn-soaked assault on the senses. Regardless of the style he utilized, he was able to make even the worst MC listenable for 4 minutes, which pretty much says it all.
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I recently bumped into Premier backstage when he was last in town, having promised Marco Polo that I’d drink his share of the free beers. I vaguely recall exchanging a few wisecracks and sharing some weed with him, as well as witnessing Masta Ace eat an entire bowl of fresh fruit and Ed OG betting Premo that he’d be the last to leave the hotel tomorrow or some shit….[end name-dropping session]
Why have I chosen these eight remixes from the Works of Mart discography? Because they bang the hardest. Cue comments complaining that I’ve forgotten his stuff for Da King & I or that overrated Ras Kass remix.
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