Slick Rick - Treat Her Like A Prostitute (Movie Version) (From Teenage Love 12"; 1988)
Slick Rick is the Orson Welles of rap : an alltime great whose reputation rests on his early work (the War Of The Worlds prank and Citizen Kane; The Show/La Di Da Di 12" and The Great Adventures Of.. LP) despite the fact that, while he never quite topped those early achievements, he went on to to have a highly respectable career (The Magnificent Ambersons, The Lady From Shanghai, A Touch Of Evil and The Trial; Rick's 3 90s albums, enviable catalogue of unreleased tunes and various song stealing cameo spots). Rick even had his own personal Xanadus in Rikers Island and the Florida deportation centre he was detained in.
Contrived celluloid-to-rap analogies aside, it's always puzzled me as to why the studio beatbox version of Treat Her Like A Prostitute with Doug E. Fresh from Tougher Than Leather didn't make The Great Adventures.. instead of the inferior Bomb Squad version which opens Rick's debut LP. Not only is it the definitive version of the song but it also feels more comfortable amongst the likes of The Ruler's Back, Children's Story and Mona Lisa than the harsh, almost Mantronix-ish LP version and it's suprising it doesn't get more praise given that The Show and La Di Da Di are two of the most beloved tracks of the 80s.
Of course it doesn't get the love afforded to the previous 2 Rick & Doug collaborations because the only place you can find it is tucked away as the last track on the B. side of the Teenage Love 12" and the reason it didn't appear on The Great Adventures.. was down to label politics and the rumor that Russell Simmons didn't want Doug to steal his star's thunder, especially after he'd gone to the considerable trouble of splitting them up in the first place.
But this post was written to bemoan the situation, damnit, and not actually answer the questions posed with record-nerd trivia and idle gossip relating to Russell's shiestiness.
Bonus beats :
The Beastie Boys doing Desperado, an unreleased track recorded some time in 1987, on stage in the Tougher Than Leather movie :
The Earth is a stultified, barren wasteland with an aching void at its core until a CDQ version of this song appears, preferably on a 12" with Scenario on the flip. Sort it out, someone.
Because you can find rare videos for hitherto unreleased 2006 Young Bleed songs and Big Mike & 6'2 songs featuring Young Bleed on there which don't exist in any other format.
Young Bleed - Put Your Stamp On It
Big Mike & 6'2 ft. Young Bleed - Down Home
Only problem is both are iffy sound-wise so even if you rip the audio (tip of the hat to Sha Deezy for the YoutubetoMp3 audio program which has seen everything from Dead Mike doing I'm Black, Y'All in CB4 to the Mastermind theme to Lox freestyles to the n.W.o entrance music being ripped 1*) they sound as though they were recorded in a kettle somewhere in Llandudno.
The Big Mike & 6'2 song can be excused for the dodgy quality as it was intended for a collaboration album between the two rappers which has been shelved due to Mike and 6'2 falling out with label who planned to release it (*2) but Young Bleed has released numerous albums since then and Put Your Stamp On It hasn't appeared on any of 'em. What an awkward bastard, eh?
*1 Don't you just hate when people upload movie scenes onto Youtube and then replace the music contained within the scene with their own cackhanded compositions? Case in point, I can't find the soundtrack to the 1986 Antipodean sci-fi flick The Quiet Earth anywhere and wanted to rip the main score used in the opening scene where the sun rises above the ocean but the selfish buffoon who uploaded it has seen fit to the edit out the building grace of New Zealand Philharmonic Orchestra's symphony and insert his own lumpen arrangement in its place. Setting angry wasps on this oaf would be too kind a punishment.
*2 Since we're talkin' about Big Mike falling out with labels it seems the perfect oppurtnity to pose this question : Is Big Mike the most couragious rapper in the game? What other rapper out there has the cojones to not only beef with J. Prince, a man with a reputation so fearsome that Suge is Peanut Butter Wolf in comparison, but to actually firebomb the Rap-A-Lot offices? Okay, he was shermed up at the time, but what other rapper would still be walking without a stick? Mike, we salute your intestinal fortitude.
Here at The Martorialist we're not overly fond of the Po-po. Granted, this is because we're empty vessels who had our codes of morality shaped by NWA and Black Flag songs, but we do have legitimate reasons to hate the ol' bill, stemming from the times we were arrested for drawing obscene graffiti on the Mormon church as kids and for a drunken taxi-rank incident when we were early 20-somethings which involved a cracked window pane, the bumrushing of an empty taxi-cab and a police officer who looked exactly like P.C George Garfield. Swear down.
These days, however, we're more refined and enjoy nothing more than seeing meth abusing white trash being tasered and then having alsations set on them by Cops on tv and laughing as trustfundafarian protestors get tear-gassed in real life but, don't get it twisted, we still got no love for Five-O, yo, as we'll always call a copper a fucking pig..when their back is turned and they're out of earshot, obviously.
And when we can't do that, we just get our jollies from watching the police station massacre scenes from both The Terminator and Maniac Cop 2 (tagline : You have the right to remain silent...forever!), whooping with delight as our hefty, inhuman antiheroes get their 187 on a motherfuckin' cop on. Reeeeeeeeeewind :
Apparently there's going to be a Maniac Cop 4. As the only people on this spinning molten sphere who genuinely enjoyed The Lost Boys 2 : The Tribe, we're casually anticipating it.
The old-school vs. mid-school beef between the Bronx/Harlem and Queens finally reached boiling point in the late 80s during a tumultuous few years which saw BDP's tete-et-tete with the Juice Crew snowball into a full scale war on wax between the two boroughs (with occasional interuptions from Brooklyn and Philly), the slew of dis records Kool Moe Dee and LL traded, and Melle Mel throwing the rattle out of the pram by refusing to give up his freestyle championship belt to Mikey D at the New Music Seminar, but tensions had been bubbling ever since Run Dmc genre-shifting Sucker M.C's in '83.
Much in the same way that Henleys has recently usurped McKenzie as the brand of choice for the generic white trash who populate the U.K, Run Dmc's emergence and debut LP forever changed the landscape of the rap game previously ruled by the holy trinity of o.g old-school groups. Collective stinkeyes were sent in the direction of Run Dmc by The Trecherous Three and The Coldcrush Brothers but it was The Furious Five who were most vociferous in their contempt for the Queens trio as they spent much of their recorded output throughout '84 and '85 firing subliminals before Run Dmc's truimphant Raising Hell LP in '86 was the final nail in the coffin for the old-school, only for the cycle to cruelly repeat itself mere months later when a thinly veiled dis track entitled Ego Trippin' by some Bronx group called Ultramagnetic MC's who you may have heard of poo poo-ed their elementary lyricism and left the front gate open for groups like Eric B. & Rakim, Kool G. Rap & DJ Polo and BDP to kick in the door, thus supplanting Run Dmc from their thrones and sending them hurtling down the rap-game hierarchical system, bar the odd Beats To The Rhyme or Pete Rock produced moment.
And why were The Furious Five the original Madd Rappers? Fear because Run Dmc's state-of-the-art tuff sound was the death knell for old-school rap? Jealousy because Run Dmc successfully crossed over to the mainstream and were makin' that Barry White money? Insecurity because Run Dmc's street-friendly Kangols, bombers and Lee jeans steez made their ostentatious attire seem mad gay?
Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five, Paris, 1983.
A bit of all three, probably, but the embittered dis records The Furious Five made in protest like Step Off and The Truth ended up being some of their finest tracks and, perhaps inspired by the new competition, Melle Mel produced some of his greatest work like Beat Street Breakdown, World War III and King Of The Streets during this period. Don't watch dat, watch disses :
Grandmaster Melle Mel & The Furious Five - The Truth
The first Furious Five LP sans Grandmaster Flash (the original Eric B in regards to lack of contributions for records his name was credited on) with Melle Mel reluctantly taking up the Grandmaster mantle at the request of Sugar Hill Records boss Sylvia Robinson. The album's highlight is undoubtedly Mel's epic World War III but The Truth was the album's statement-of-intent track with a suspciously Sucker M.C's influenced production allowing the group to defensively point out that their sartorial flamboyance pulls a certain class of bird that a group of lads in tracksuits and trainers couldn't hope to follow and that, just because they look like drag queens, they're not actually fooken' puffs, okay?
The Furious Five - Step Off
'84's Step Off stands up as probably the best full group record The Furious Five made and one of the best examples of that mid 80s sound which was a fusion of electro and post-Run Dmc starkness alongside Fresh, Fly, Wild And Bold by Coldcrush. A synth interpolation of For The Love Of Money by The O'Jays is the base for Melle Mel to start the song by casually belittling Sugar Hill label mate Busy Bee before the late Cowboy and Scorpio unleash a torrent of disparaging jibes towards Joey, Daryll and Jason. Rumors that The Furious Five were pissed off at Run Dmc because Jam Master Jay once laughed at Scorpio's Hi-Tec Silver Shadows remain unproven in a court of law.
Melle Mel - King Of The Streets
What initially appears to be a record waxing lyrical about his own self-mythology whilst proclaiming himself the real hometown hero of NYC, upon further inspection '85's King Of The Streets is revealed as an extended attack on both Run Dmc and the new prince of rap LL Cool J. It sounds positively quaint in comparison to the likes of King Of Rock or Rock The Bells but remains an amusing dis record and an interesting historical artefact, nonetheless.
Bonus beats :
Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five - Gold
You thought The Furious Five's bitterness didn't extend beyound making defensive records towards Run Dmc and LL in '84 and '85? Think again, mayne. Flash and the group briefly recoalesced in 1987 to perform at a Madison Square Garden charity concert and then went on to release an underwhelming reunion album called On The Strength the year after, with the singular highlight being Gold where dookie ropechain wearing (and, it's worth pointing out, Russell Simmons affliated) rappers like Slick Rick and Eric B. & Rakim to their shitlist of new rappers worthy of their scorn. Not sure what i love more about this tune : the fact they had the audacity to sample Rakim on a tune which vilified him or the bizarre kazoo rendition of the break from Baby Huey's Listen To Me during the hook. Either way, you can't beat a bitter bully, as a certain gameshow host nearly once said.
You've gotta give Melle Mel his due, though : dook was sporting Budweiser gear a good 4 or 5 years before Kool Keith's all-over print Budweiser hat on the cover of Critical Beatdown and over 25 years before Supreme's Budweiser collabo'.
The sartorial choices of the chronically obese fascinate me. When you're this big gluttony has clearly taken precedence over both health and appearance, and, one imagines, comfort is favoured over any semblance of style but surely there have to be more flattering ensembles than green fleeces which look like they were made for Bar-None from Too Much Trouble, sweatpants which blend the least aesthetically pleasing shades of blue and grey into a fusion of sheer drabness (btw, whatever happened with the scientists Cam'Ron had working for him to develop a new colour which he planned to patent for his trademark use on the follow up to Purple Haze?) and the techy runners my dad bought from Millets a decade ago?
If Big Pun could be the size of Saturn and unable to move unaided by Terror Squad weedcarriers, yet still channel Hiroshi Fujiwara, Martin Fry from ABC and Slick Rick into a single get-up then you really have no excuses for that outfit, luv'
Here's a video for a song by a corpulent rapper whose moniker doesn't include the words Big or Fat/Phat :
I mean, all the live at the amphitheatre scenes in Wild Style are unfuckwithable, Treacherous Three & Doug E. Fresh doin' Santa's Rap and Melle Mel's rendition of Beat Street Breakdown in Beat Street are great, and the Circle Jerks trussed up in matching tuxedos sauntering their way through a lounge version of When The Shit Hits The Fan in Repo Man is a headfuck, but the the Cro-Mags's storming their way through It's The Limit and Hard Times as The Iron Skulls in 1987 flick The Beat looks down from Mount Olympus at all other contenders for the position of best live performance in an 80s movie.
Let's see what teh internetz has to say about this scene :
tmolesky (2 years ago)
Yup - the movie that they were filming was called "the Beat" and the Cro-mags were called "Iron Skulls"My friend Jason (singer from Krakdown) was the one screaming "hard times" in the mic with Bloodclot - I remember that day like yesterday because I almost had my neck broken by a 300 pound stage diver...
danmack6872 (2 years ago)
I remeber skipping school that day also to to see this. It was the first time for me seeing the cromags live and it was awesome. Also, remember going into the men's room where the people filming were giving and offering everyone coming in there lit marijuana joints because it was footage they were using for the film. Have to see it was the fist and only harcore show I ever went to where I recieved free food and pot.
filler01 (10 months ago)
Ahhh to be alive during the hardcore 80s scene....I was still swimmin in my pops balls....
Yet more C-Bo. This one is yanked from his 1995 second full-length Tales From The Crypt and it's his very own Juicy with a dashing of It Was A Good Day, only featuring a third verse full of slanging talk and whoozy G-Funk synths throughout via Mike Mosley/Mobboss Productions. Unless you're unfortunate catch Swine-Flu, MRSA or some new strain of the Black-Plague in the next week then the hook to this tune is the most contagious thing you're likely to be exposed to in the next 7 days and, had the heatwave they'd predicted for today materialized, this would have been a perfect soundtrack to it. There's a slightly different video version of this one with E-40 too.
Big Noyd - Shoot 'Em Up (Bang Bang)
Big Noyd ft. Havoc - Air It Out
I tried Pilates but all i got was my first case of piles with all the pressure the intense squatting involved put on my arsehole. I've laughed at this scene from Deadwood many a time but, yo, i feel your pain now, Al. So, since your boy got the big hemorrhoid it's the perfect oppurtunity to welcome some Big Noyd into the Great songs from forgotten rap albums club. One of the great simple pleasures in life is the combination of hearing Q.B cameo king Noyd (his verse on Mobb's Burn is one of my fav' guest spots of this decade) rhyme guns with dunns or street with heat, beef and police over Alchemist production, as evidenced on these two tracks from his 2003 platter Only The Strong. It's rather sad that we don't get to hear Noyd over Alchemist production more often since Alan The Chemist has an unfortunate tendency to ruin beats which Noyd would sound perfect by rhyming on them himself with his awkward, crackafied monotonous voice. Know yer limits before you achive official Eric B. on the mic status, Alan.
K-Rino - Sharp Angles
K-Rino - Scientific
Since Houston residents and H-Townphiles are the only people who seemingly know or care about K-Rino a new ruling has come into effect for this series where we're declaring every K-Rino album to be forgotten in order to post a plethora of 'Rino jams in future posts. A couple of tracks from his 1993 debut have already been plucked for your delectation so we'll nab this oppurtunity to get up-to-date with two tunes from his 2008 set Triple Darkness Volume 2 : The Lyrics, which was the best of the Triple Darkness trilogy. Ras Kass and Canibus are the two glaring reference points but the self-styled syllable scientist from Texas might find those comparisons faintly insulting as he was doing the whole dense wordy rap thing before either of those hacks and, unlike both of them, he's made more than 2 good songs in his career. So, combine super-scientifical rapping which doesn't fall into the trap of sounding too awkward (Ras Kass with his cramming too-many-words-per-bar) with typical SPC aggression (think : Point Blank or PSK-13 rather than Ganksta Nip) and back it with some of the dusky production you'd find on the most doomful tracks on one of them newfangled Scarface or Z-Ro albums and, hey presto, we have Sharp Angles and Scientific.
Contrary to the belief of El-P, space-rap isn't supposed to sound like a flatulent Robbie The Robot falling down the endless staircase from the last episode of Ulysses 31 with Henry Blofeld talking on top of it, it's supposed to sound like this :
G-Side ft. P.T - My Aura
Damn. Who needs a Dungeon Fam' reunion when you got young 'uns flipping that whole luscious sound with an Alabama twist? P.T's hot-salmon coloured shirt kills it too.
Not a bad week for Martorialist approved producer Mick Vegas with this and the wah-wah geetar laden country-rap of that new Young Buck tune :
Young Buck - Bury Me Alive
So Buck really has signed C-Bo is his Cashville Records imprint? Interesting. C-Bo is long since past it but i'm certainly down to hear him and All $tar together over some Mick Vegas beats.
Last time i dj-ed out i was running low on tunes and threw the Snoop freestyle from the extended remix of Afro Puffs on and, whaddaya know, it ended up being my favoutite tune of the set. Snoop's stream of consciousness on here is more entertaining than the combined careers of Joe Budden and Rick Ross, and even low-rollers like MF Grimm, Viggo Mortensen as Lalin in Carlito's Way and Davros couldn't help but wanna get their 2-step on to that Dre beat :
Why, since there's already the G-Funk remix on the Afro Puffs 12", they couldn't have made this into a proper B. side track rather than a remix with a Snoop freestyle starting it i don't know. It could have been Puffin' On Blunts And Drinking Tanqueray part 2 with Rage herself and Tha Dogg Pound following Snoop with some similarly nonsensical freestyling. Rappers just don't know what they're doing sometimes.
"And there is art in making music a raft upon which a movie sails away" - David Thomson.
The synergy between music and image in movies account for the majority of the scenes which have received the most rewinds from me over the years, as witnessed in previous posts here deifying various scenes from The Wanderers set to songs by The Surfaris and Dion DiMucci & The Del Satins, my utter obsession with the Driving Reflections montage helmed by There's No Easy Way Out by Robert Tepper from Rocky 4, the warehouse party shootout as Am I Black Enough For You? by Schoolly D plays in the background in King Of New York, the reason why i slightly prefer Casino to Goodfellas, Link Wray's Jack The Ripper pounding away as Richard Gere dips through backstreets to avoid the cops in the 1983 remake of Breathless, Radio Raheem explaining the meaning of his LOVE HATE 4 finger rings to Mookie as Fight The Power pumps out of his boombox in Do The Right Thing, any of the scenes featuring music by The Geto Boys in Office Space and so on.
But there's nothing quite like the marriage of men walking to music on film. Sure, it's a device which has been rinsed post-Reservoir Dogs and downright abused by crap British flicks featuring token scenes of men-walking-in-slow-motion-to-song-x inbetween plots which involve various Stephen Graham, Danny Dyer, whatshisface from Doctor Who and various ex Family Affairs actors swearing at each other in pitch-perfect mockney accents in the last decade, but when it's done right it's like movies were created solely for its purpose. Here's some of the best examples :
Mean Streets
There's a couple of reasons i'll always slightly prefer Mean Streets to Taxi Driver : One is the pool-hall fight scene soundtracked by Mr Postman by The Marvelettes and the other is this scene where Johnny Boy walks into the bar flanked by the two Jewish boho' broads in slow motion to Jumpin' Jack Flash by The Stones. So effective is the alliance of sound and picture here, it doesn't even matter that the broad on the left is possibly David Schneider in a wig.
The Outsiders
As far as movie scenes which feature Them songs go, Harry Dean Stanton's detective driving on the highway to Baby Please Don't Go in Wild At Heart is only trumped by the extended opening scene of The Outsiders where Gloria plays as Ponyboy and Johnny meet up with Dallas on the corner and go for a stroll around town taking in beatdowns of knife wielding Mexican hitchhikers, garages where a double-denim clad duo of Patrick Swayze and Tom Cruise work, and leggings children who may or may not have been being cheeky. Exciting stuff but Gloria sounds sweetest when it simply soundtracks Dallas eyeing up the square chick who passes them and his swaggering up the street smoking a fag as Ponyboy and Johnny follow suit.
The opening scene from The Wanderers where Walk Like A Man by Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons (AKA the best song ever alongside The Ghetto by Too $hort ) rings out as various Baldies saunter their way up the avenue to meet up with head Baldie/human pizza-hoover Terror before cutting to a freshly shaven headed Turkey diddy-bopping the other end of the avenue in a bid to become a member of the toughest street gang in The Bronx was pencilled in to fill the third and final spot here but it's only gone and been removed by the user so we're gonna have to end this post with a grainy old tv performance of Frankie Valli & The 4 Seasons lip-syncing their way through Walk Like A Man and the scene from Point Blank where Lee Marvin's Walker strides through the corridor with the sound of his heels hypnotically clip-clopping along the floor and Johnny Mandel's haunting score accompanying the interspersed flashback sequences instead :
Straggly mullet, sandals, ole-Tom-Hanks-after-he-becomes-a-kid-in-Big-lookin'-ass oversized suit jacket and t-shirt; you wouldn't usually expect to see any of these phrases in a paragraph which contains the words fly motherfucker but walk with me on this one as i think my man below is onto something :
Here at The Martorialist we'd probably jock the decomposed corpse of Fred West if its crumbled rancid remains were scooped up and placed inside a polo tee and white kecks ensemble but you have to admire Zelda from Terrahawks's twin brother here for matching his striped tee to his socks & sandals. Furthermore, you also have to marvel at his belief defying ability to keep his outfit coke-white even though he spent his afternoon suppin' beer outta plastic cups, smokin' rollie fags, groping his missus and drunkenly stumbling about like a boozed up version of James Mason in Odd Man Out. It's hard to keep them white threads pristine, mayne. Isn't that right, Simon? :
I'm not really tryna pay more than £25 for a single record no mo' but i really want C-Bo's Liquor Sto'/4 Deep debut 12" from 1993. My birthday is comin' up in october so someone should procure it me now as my present.
There are certain relatives i'd sell to Russian people traffickers if i had to choose between their wellbeing or never being allowed to listen to any lo-fi G-funk from Sacremento's finest (no offence, Brother Lynch Hung) again. Sorry various second cousins and aunts 'n' uncles i've only ever met at funerals but them's the breaks.
C-Bo - Liquor Sto'
C-Bo - 4 deep
These two tracks went on to appear on C-Bo's 1994 debut album Gas Chamber, which gets luh over here, but as this 12" was, essentially, his demo pressed onto wax they're perhaps a smidge rawer than the rest of the album. C-Bo everyday narratives manage to cover every base you'd want covered by a 1993 gang$ta rap record (Mad Dog, cadillacs, Dickies shorts, cops, sleazy women, guns, weed, pissing in fast food establishments, OJ & OE, driving under the influence, house parties, nappy headed hoes, token references to whites as peckerwood punks, groupie ass hoochies who catch loogies, explanations on how car-jackers and cops be crampin' a brother's swag') and he's accompanied by Mobboss Productions creating a minimal groundwork of synthes and samples and then lettin' some fella called James Jones, who later went on to play on B. Legit's The Hemp Museum album, embellish them with fonky guitar which make a whigga wanna bust the same jittery moves every listen to Zapp & Roger or old DJ Quik inspire. I like Q.B thug shit homaging MC Shan as much as the rest of y'all dunns but Marley's VROO VRRROOOO-es from The Bridge have never sounded better than when they were used on early 90s g-funk like 4 Deep and Dre & Death Row's Bitches Ain't Shit.
