We're still in dem streetz lookin' for candidates, but it's harder to get flicks for Martorial Elegance these days when every pensioner done up to the nines in a polyester approximation of Prince's Purple Rain outfit is a snarling psychopath who starts spitting and swearing at you and every dickweed in head-to-toe Ed Hardy has their kid with them. Seriously, try getting a sneaky shot of some faux-homme using Peter Andre as their fashion inspiration who happens to be pushing a buggy without getting pounced on for being a pervert. "I'm not taking pictures of your kid, honest! I do a blog where we rip off The Sartorialist and I was taking a picture of your shit jeans with rhinestone recerations of scenes from the old testament on the back pockets, mate!"
Thankfully, Killa Barratt is much more brazen than us and recently sent over a bunch of sly snaps he's taken recently.
Question : is it possible to somehow distill the essences of eurotrash, British white trash and your average Next shopping middle-aged bloke into a single pair of shoes which appear to have been crafted from the skin and dung of a Styracosaurus by prehistoric man?
Steady B, Cool C and their weedcarrier/pistol shiner Ultimate Eaze may have offered rap-nerds the challenge of coming up with our own humourous acronyms for their C.E.B group (Countin' Endless Bummings/Buttfucks wins every time for the 3 lifers), but Dope-E of The Terrorists and K-Rino's first group C.O.D dispensed which such formalties entirely when they dropped their one and only EP under the name C.O.D AKA Cummin' Out Doggin' back in 1990 :
Best EP title ever? Clearly, international readers are going to be unfamiliar with big Stan up-top, but do Americans, Canadians and continental Europeans practice the dogging too or have you got your own country-specific terms for it?
Anyway, as the first proper outing by both Dope-E before he formed The Terrorists and K-Rino before his solo debut in 1993 (he'd dropped a 12" under the name of Real Chill back in 1986 which I've never heard but, suprise suprise, a couple of godamn Finnish dudes are selling on Discogs currently. Worth taking a shot on for around 30 Euros including postage?) and possibly the first real South Park Coalition release, you might imagine this is only of note for it's amusing title or K-Rino's Scouser style shellshuit top and Dope-E's dapper mustard coloured outfit on the cover or as an historical artifact, but it's a pretty good EP, you know.
Here we find our 2 S.P.C allstars as a duo in the vein of EPMD with both of them rapping and Dope-E as the Erick Sermon figure handling all the production. As is often the case with releases from this era, the best moments are the nutgrabbin' We Have Rap Skillz! track and the We Hate Golddigging Groupie Skanks! track :
C.O.D - Clever Word
Absolutely no faffing about with this one as K-Rino emerges fully formed as the K-Rino I first heard on Ganksta N-I-P's S.P.C posse track Rough Brothers From South Park 2 or 3 years later to demolish this shit. File this alongside Headin' Fo' My Trunk by PSK-13 under the banner of S.P.C bangers you'd use as entrance music if you were a 90s ECW wrestler.
C.O.D - Fulla Dem Games
2 birds with 1 stone on here, as this is the EP's ode to misogyny and the prerequisite bass heavy car-friendly cut rolled into one. Chalk this one up as an early example of shot-firin' at nappy headed hoes, but the song's finest moment is K-Rino referring to a less than trustworthy lady of the night he's come into contact with as a "scheming lil' parrot". This seething resentment continued for 9 years until LL Cool J finally squashed the long-standing beef between rappers and the parrot community when he took 1 for the team and allowed himself to be outshined by one in Deep Blue Sea.
Boothe just posted this and I couldn't resist reposting it here. Please forgive such flagrant thievery and click the pic' for full size details :
The main reason I'm posting this here, though, is that it got me pondering something : short and stocky frame; always wearing some sort of glasses; a fondness for such items of clothes as plaid shirts, chambray shirts, khaki chinos, indigo jeans, varsity jackets, coach jackets, and Nike Cortez; friendly with a man who wears slim fitting jeans and Nike hi-tops; generally antisocial; constantly entering bad relationships, sexist pig/hoe killer; known for adopting dual personas and using pseudonyms; extreme stingyness regarding monetary matters; employed by a white haired Jewish bigwig..
Or
Did anybody ever see George and Eazy together in the same room?
Eazy E - Eazy-er Said Than Dunn
Bonus :
Sag-talk via some hack NY politician, Greenpeace with a bad case of the shits, Mr. Mixx from 2 Live Crew, and yours truly over on Fat Lace.
Primo may have hooked Guru up with countless incredible beats, but ever since 1994 my favourite Gang Starr cut has been a Keith Elam production :
Gang Starr - Code Of The Streets
Fuck internet-revisionism that Guru wasn't a great rapper, but I really hope the rumours of him and that cloth-eared hack Solar buggering each other weren't true. He could've done so much better if he was a clandestine lover of cock.
I'ma pour out a lil' strawberry and banana smoothie out for you over lunch.
When I say video, it's just 'Ro in a blue hoody standing around in an undisclosed location as Trae, Lil' Boss, Jay'Ton and some other weed-carriers mill around in the background, but that's it needs to be. As far as rap-merchandise goes, I'd really like one of those A.B.N vests Jay-Ton is wearing to lounge around the house this summer. Where can I get one?
So, according to the rankings on my Mp3 player, this is one of my 10 most listened to songs of the last 5 years alongside such imperishable all-time favourites like Vocal Test by Integrity, Area by De La, Real N*ggaz Don't Die by NWA, and Walk Like A Man by Frankie Valli & The 4 Seasons, yet despite the fact that I've apparently listened to it over 500 times I still don't know if I could flawlessly recite the whole thing acapella when inebriated and packed toe-to-toe with the local riff-raff in a grubby watering hole like your average Houston resident can :
A fact which Wheelchair Jimmy exploited when he happened to be in town. This is basically the rap equivalent of Mick Foley's shameless playing to the crowd where he mentions the city he's in mid-shoot and then gives a thumbs up to the assembled rabble as they whoop with delight :
I initially thought Mo City Don Freestyle was intended to honour DJ Screw as it has the feel of a classic Screw tape freestyle (though it doesn't sound half as good Screwed And Chopped as Respect My Mind) with a tip of the hat to Paid In Full, and I suppose there's elements of both present, but an interview with 'Ro a few years back brought forth the revelation that the track was in fact a homage to DJ Jimi & Juvenile's N.O classic Bounce For The Juvenile :
DJ Jimi & Juvenile - Bounce For The Juvenile
And it's like "Oh shit!". And not just because he's obviously rapping over the Paid In Full remix like Juve' did, but stylistically, you can hear it with his delivery and the way he drifts from rapping to harmonizing so effortlessly. I always tend to think of the key influences to 'Rother's harmonizing being Pimp C, Bone Thugs & Harmony, Nate Dogg, and 3-2, but you listen to this and slightly later Solja Rags era Juvenile tracks and it dawns on you just how big of a Juve' influence there is to Z-Ro's style in genral too.
Dennis Edwards - Don't Look Any Further
So, I guess this would be as good a time as any to look back at some key Southern uses of Don't Look Any Further and the Paid In Full remix sample. Let's completely ignore I'm A D-Boy by Weezy & Birdman, though, eh? Partially because it neither works as a tribute to an N.O classic (unlike Go D.J) or a token track designed for the N.Y market (unlike, say, Tha Mobb which is just a perfect filtering of Dipset through an N.O Lense), but mainly because Univeral Records are firing Cease And Desist orders at rap bloggaz posting songs by their artists left, right and centre and your boy here is hiding in the trenches right now. Man, why didn't I read that post by Rafi on Oh Word about the situation more carefully?
Lil' Slim - Bounce Slide Ride
Ain't gon' lie, I was completely oblivious to the existence of this track and Lil' Slim's first tape The Game Is Cold (which is so impossible to find outside of the south that a copy has never appeared on eBay and it isn't even listed on Discogs) until Noz posted this as part of his 2nd N.O Bounce compilation. You thought trend records were the domain of the Roxanne saga in the 80s and the more recent Crank Dat craze? Me too, but we've got eggs on our faces right now as Slim's semi-tribute to Bounce For The Juvenile came hot on its trail in 1992.
Scarface - Mr Scarface Part 3 The Final Chapter
Scarface's The World Is Yours was a weird album which found itself caught in a limbo between DJ Ready Red's 1991 N.Y/L.A-derived sound on Mr Scarface Is Back/We Can't Be Stopped and N.O Joe's 1993 Till Death Do Us Part gumbo-funk where a good portion of the songs didn't quite knock accordingly due to the production nexus they found themselves a part of, so it's no suprise that the 2 best songs on the tape were so successful because they fell squarely into either camp; You could imagine Dying With Your Boots On as another 'Face solo track on Till Death Do Us Part next to It Ain't and Cereal Killer, and Mr Scarface Part 3 The Final Chapter still sounds fresh despite the played-out Dennis Edwards and Commodores samples, and closes the Mr Scarface trilogy on a Army Of Darkness styled truimphant note, as opposed to, y'know, an anticlimatic Godfather 3 or Return Of The Jedi type one. Seriously, is there a finer trilogy valediction than Army Of Darkness?
UGK ft. Three 6 Mafia - Like A Pimp
It was odd that two groups with such distinct sounds which helped define their respective regions would opt for a backing track drenched in New York history for Three 6's first appearance on a UGK song, but the Country-Rap is strong on this one as it's a replay by Pimp C full of lavish guitar flicks rather than a sample giving the song a looser, more trunk-friendly feel. Throw in a classic Pimp hook, pronged scratches and great verses all around (my, doesn't DJ Paul rip it?) and a song which makes you curse the fact that both groups only made a handful of records together.
But it's a pity this mook from today's American Apparrel Rummage Sale riot in London didn't befall the same fate as Johnny-Boy during the pool hall fight scene in Mean Streets :
The police here in the U.K need more guns to deal with fluffed-up imbeciles like this, and these U.K streets need more dames in American Apparel wet-look shiny leggings like this :
I was given that Cornbread.. CD when he was in Columbia, SC for whatever reason back in the early 2000's. He wound up buying a Cadillac from my neighbor's car shop.
He also made a brief appearance in the DVD: "Dirty States of America".
Robbie at Unkut might get Markey Fresh vs. Lord Alibaski and T-Ray vs. Dante Ross pwn-fests in his comment section, but here at The Martorialist we get dudes who casually mingle with real rap icons like Mello-T as he's on his way to cop a caddy in Columbia, South Carolina. Read it and weep, hataz.
Youtube only has the first five minutes of the Dirty States Of America documentary and there's nothing on GoogleVideo or DailyMotion, but this could be a decent watch if they don't spend too much time blabbering on about da 4 eLeMeNtZ/NY hip hop and instead focus on the influence of Ice-T, NWA plus Too $hort, the history of the South and it's lineage between the different regions, so I may track it down. No Asher Roth, but doesn't Big Gipp have some nappy ass hair in his part where he's talking about the indifference to OutKast by the east and west coasts at the '95 Source Awards?
Boi-Dan gets props ova here for his info, but the comment of the day goes to a fellow by the name of Adam, whose detective work has lead to the most bizarre pairing since Primo and Xtina :
Adam said...
I was trying to do the same thing and your work allowed me to follow the trail somewhere really quite bizarre. Check this out:
It's a joint album, The Godfather Mello-T and Dr. Frank McCune (A real middle aged health professional), and you know what, It's not as bad as you might think, especially "interlude 1"
In Louis Theroux's Call Of The Weird book, Mello informs Louis that he's now coaching little league and that he's added songs with titles like You Can Make It If You Try to his rap-repetoire, but still, Mello and a middle aged black doctor who sounds like an incidental character from Scarlet Street making an album built upon the theme of "Health dispariry" (nope, me neither) is a difficult idea to wrap your head around.
I've yet to hear anything from this other than the interludes by Frank on his Myspace which Adam mentions, but I'd be willing to put money on it being better than that upcoming Damien Marley & Nas trainwreck collaboration album, which is bound to feature an intro to a song where Nas and Damien sit in front of their mics making stupid sucking noises as they pretend to smoke blunts in the studio that's even more awkward sounding than the one from Nas & Dr Dre's Nas Is Coming.
Oi, Adam - if you've got the album can you hook up some highlights, please?
I also now have the Wild Liffe Society Nothing But A Come-Up (Move M.F Move)/Bald Head Ho EP from 1991 I mentioned in the first post in my possession which I'm hoping a friend will rip for me in the next few weeks. What I was expecting was a bargain-bucket regional appropriation of Geto Boys or Poison Clan, and that's precisely what the record delivered, with Nothing But A Come-Up (Move M.F Move) being the top-dog of two tunes featuring boasts of the group ridin' limos while others are cabbin', a pretty fresh use of Funky Drummer, and the dynamic of a rowdy chant and an Ice Cube vocal sample as a hook. It's also notable for a rap-nerd such as myself since it's the first Gangsta-Rap record to eminate from Mississippi.
Since I don't have that for you at the moment, you'll have to make do with another catchy lil' number from the 1995 Wildliffe Society album for now :
