Since everyone other blog has posted all the best Rammellzee stuff already (links to Beat Bop and Gothic Futurism, pictures of his insane outfits or his collaboration with Supreme, videos of his scenes from Wild Style and Style Wars, eulogies noting his influence on everyone from Kool Keith to Cypress Hill to Freestyle Fellowship), I guess I'm gonna have to round this up with his cameo from Stranger Than Paradise, which Jarmusch has still only bettered just the once with Dead Man, where his character - listed in the credits as Man With Money - mistakenly gives Eva the bag of cash. 08:05 in :
And the cameo works as an effective tribute to Rammellzee's two greatest qualities : always on some next-shit with language (was anybody else calling hats domepieces in 1984?) and his get-ups, as we see him resplendent in a Dappy hat, Star Trek shades, a pre-shellsuit jacket, and knee-length boots here :
Phase II and Kase 2 may have been Hip Hop's O.G oddballs, and Jimmy Spicer may have spitting avant garde lyrics on wax before him, but Rammellzee was Hip Hop's first true renaissance weirdo and he remained suitably out-there until the very end. Toodle-pip, 'zee.
A quick post since Big Boi is streaming his solo album in its entirity on Myspace. On an initial skimming-all-the-stuff-I'd-not-heard-before-while-eating-lunch listen, Daddy Fat Sax (despite apparently being based on as Fly By II by Blue; who knew Lee Ryan held so much influence in ATLanta?), Turns Me On with Sleepy Brown, Tangerine with T.I & Khujo, You Ain't No DJ with Yelawolf, and Hustle Blood with Jamie Foxx (the song would be better without his crooning I'll let it pass in this instance) are highlights and thankfully quash all fears that all the album's best songs had already been leaked with Royal Flush, Dubbz, Fo' Yo' Sorrows, Shine Blockas, Shutterbug, and Lookin' 4 Ya.
I'm still not feeling General Patton like that, but it's a decent enough album track alongside the likes of Follow Us and Night Night, and thankfully that song with Mary J. Blige has been consigned to the scrapheap. The main problem I'm hearing here, besides the fact that Sleepy should really do all the singing hooks on any OutKast related album, is that Feel Me AKA the song which played briefly at the start of the General Patton video and probably the most classically Dungeon Family sounding shit on here (ie. it'd sound good being played in a drop-top cadillac) is just the album intro which he doesn't actually rap over. Man, don't cha just hate it when rappers do that? De La's intro to Buhloone Mind State, The Chronic intro, KRS One Attacks from Return Of The Boom Bap, the intro with J. Prince from Till Death Do Us Part by Geto Boys, E-40's intro from In A Major Way, To All The Girls by the Beasties from Paul's Boutique, Ice-T's Home Of The Bodybag from O.G, the intro with Big Tymers from B.G's Chopper City In The Ghetto, Gang Starr's Daily Operation intro, and Hold On, Be Strong from 'Kast's own Aquemini would be some of the most obvious examples of great album intros which should've been turned into proper songs by having rapping on them, but here's a couple of less obvious favourites :
K-Rino - Intro (from Stories From The Black Book)
Basically, K-Rino talking in a funny voice over a killer Bar Kays sample. Wait, it might actually be The Commodores and not The Bar Kays? If I could remember what the song the sample was from I could look it up on the-breaks.com to see if anyone else had ever rapped over it, but knowing my luck it'd probably just turn out that someone really gay like Latryrx or Rick Ross had used it too.
Beatnuts - World Famous intro (from Stone Crazy)
So perfect is the album-setting intro to Stone Crazy that I feel like a whingeing cunt for even mentioning it here, but didn't we all pretty much start blogs in the first place to be whingeing cunts and vainly hope that the female contestants from tv quiz shows and rappers we post about reply to our posts about them? Well, didn't we?
Dre Dog - Intro (from The New Jim Jones)
Andre Nickatina was one weird bastard back in his early Dre Dog days, huh? Lil B should somehow jack the instrumental to this and rap over it, because it was kinda like some proto-Based type isht.
I could use this post to vent about the England result (but only because I lost cash on calling it a 2 - 1 win to Germany) or how fucking Wimbledon on BBC2 has meant no Eggheads, but, nah, we're back to the topic of rappers spending time in the bing tonight. Here's 5 of my favourite rap songs which were released when the rappers who created them were doin' time. And, no, none of them are by X-Raided (his over-the-phone-from-prison recordings are completely unlistenable) or 2pac (the only songs of his I like are on All Eyez On Me.)
Slick Rick ft. Doug E. Fresh - Sittin' In My Car
One of the most puzzling things of recent times is the popularity of British beatboxers like Kela and Beardyman with the student population/outdoor festival goers (you know - the type of people who don't start issuing curses on humanity if they have to use a portaloo) of the UK. I'm someone who listens to La Di Da Di about 10 times in a row whenever it comes on my MP3 player during a throw-the-thing-on-random session but even I have a 5 minute threshold on listening to dudes on stage making funny noises which are supposed to sound like rap records. Realistically, beatboxing should only ever be acceptable when Slick Rick and Doug E. Fresh get together, as they did here for the first time since the Tougher Than Leather version of Treat Her Like A Prostitute, on Rick's Behind Bars LP which he recorded during a quick work release visit home sometime in 1993. The Show and La Di Da Di will always be the 2 songs which sold me on this rap shit as a kid in 1985, but Sittin' In My Car is possibly their finest moment together. Def Jam even shot a video for the vastly inferior video remix with Jermaine Dupri, which lots of dolts apparently appear to prefer to the original, with a Ricky D doppelganger, but I have so much contempt for that version I'm not even gonna hyperlink it.
Mac Dre - My Chevy
Fact : Mac Dre's Back N Da Hood EP is the only recorded-over-the-phone-from-prison release which is anything approachable to listenable (it's pretty good, in fact) and this, the song where Mac rhymed over the beatswitch bits in California Livin', is its highlight. The other version of this with the Khayree breakdown and Mac Mall goin'-off-on-one verse from the Young Black Brotha compilation tends to be better known and is probably the definitive version of the song, but as Mall outshadows Dre on his own shit, the original works best here. It's a pity that a rapper as prolific as Mac Dre didn't go back and re-record these when he got out of prison, but he was probably too busy thinking up politics/drug based shit-puns for his album titles. Shame on him for never thinking up Kush Limbaugh, Amyl Houghton, or Dank Johnson. If he'd ever have done a collabo with a UK artist they could've called it The Ketaminers Strike.
Shyne - Diamonds And Mac Tens (Just Blaze remix)
Things Shyne's post-prison voice sounds like : the plumbing in a Deeside call centre, Federico Marchetti's panicking hands, Joe Budden doing an impression of Jesse West on the Dolly My Baby remix, the grunts Jon Venables makes when whacking off to kiddie p0rn.
Things the Just Blaze remix of Diamonds And Mac Tens sounds like : one of the three great Shyne songs (Bad Boyz and Commission being the other two) which don't leave me cursing Puffy for not giving them to Black Rob or G. Dep instead.
Bun B ft. Pimp C, Z-Ro, Young Jeezy & Jay-Z - Get Throwed
We got a Prisoner Cell Block H(ouston) situation here with both Pimp C and Z-Ro doing porridge when this initially appeared back in 2005, which is enough to counter the fact that Bun B wasn't counting bars in this instance. I'd always wondered why the hell Z-Ro didn't actually rap on this, and it turns out that it was because he was inside at the time at the time of its recording and his contibution was some studio scrap J. Prince and Mike Dean gave to Mr Lee to fashion into a hook with a little help from Jeezy.
Harmony was thankfully restored to the world when both Pimp C and Z-Ro got out of clink to appear in the new extra Pimp & Bun verses video version, and 'Ro rapped over a slightly rejigged approximation of the beat alongside Trae on Still Throwed on the 2nd A.B.N album.
Husalah - Talk It Out
Released while he was in prison, and recorded as he spent about 3 years on the run from po-leese, so, yeah - top that, Gucci Mane. There's a couple of tracks I prefer to this on Huslin' Since Da 80's like Gear and It's Kinda Hot, but this is one of Hus's best self-mythology songs and anything which uses some harmonica which sounds like it's from the Gum-Leaf War episode of Round The Twist automatically secures itself top billin' around these parts. It's also notable because this is one of the songs where Hus refers to himself as "young Felix" which lead to the "your name isn't Felix, it's James!" tete-et-tete in the sprawling and hilarious A-Wax vs. Mob Figaz beef.
I don't think this is in any way XXL related (we won't get the new issue here in the UK for another 3 weeks and Bol's blog is the only thing I read on the XXL site currently so I could be wrong) but this new The Making Of Aquemini piece is a fine read for all OutKast fans. Lots of interesting stuff in the track breakdowns but this in particular caught my eye :
"Return of the 'G'" skit
When neighborhood "thugs" stop by their friendly mom-and-pop record store to check up on that new Pimp Trick Gangsta Clique album, the owner tries to steer them toward "that new, new OutKast" instead. The thugs emphatically decline: "Man, fuck them. I ain't fuckin' with them no mo'."
Andre 3000: I wrote out the skits. It was like a parody of everything going on at the time. Back then all the hood record labels were called stuff like Slap a Bitch Records or Big Dick Records, so we made up the group name Pimp Trick Gangsta Clique. Me, Sleepy [Brown] and Cee-Lo were going to form an actual band called Pimp Trick Gangsta Clique. We recorded some stuff but never released anything under that name. It was really just a funny thing we made up for an album you'd buy at the record store.
Um, yeah. We're gonna need to hear these Pimp Trick Gangsta Clique recording asap, guys. If Killer Mike can leak all the songs he recorded for his unreleased Ghetto Extrodinary album and Prince Paul can give up his Horror City album project for free on Twitter, then the considerably more succesful Andre, Cee-Lo and Sleepy can give these up online for free too.
OutKast ft. Slick Rick - Da Art Of Storytellin' Part 1 remix
Am I the only one who wishes the remix of part 1 with Slick Rick had been the version on the album? The Ruler's voice coming in during the 2nd hook is one of those magical moment in rap for me alongside that bit in Step To The Rear when Puba says "BUS' IT!", or the gunshots after Cube informs the unfortunate fellow that he's won the wet t-shirt contest at the start of Now I Gotta Wet 'Cha or Jim Jones's "THEY FOREIGN!" ad lib after he tells us that it's "money over b's/and my cars, they come from overseas" on Lil' Flip's I Get Money.
We're moving on up in the world here at The Martorialist these days; not only are random dudes creating Spotify playlists based on our posts, but we also have Paramount Pictures firmly on our nutz hittin' us up with exclusive stills from the G.I Joe movie sequel. In this one we find human-chameleon Zartan Zanzibar camouflaging himself as a bench in Central Park to lie in wait to go ham and blast the G.I Joe dudes and dudettes after they've just celebrated Ripcord's birthday with a trip to Nando's :
We know, we know : this one is a little too matchy-matchy for some of y'all pithy square mawfuckers out there, but we're awarding it the first Martorial Elegance 10/10 of the year because a Ronseal tan, white hair and a propensity to strip off at the drop of a hat is some pure Ric Flair steez, and there isn't a man on the planet who shouldn't be aspiring to be the Nature Boy.
Cam'Ron ft. Vado - Ric Flair
I've grown to really like this, y'know. Not as much as Child Of The Ghetto freestyle, Glitter, Pass The Dutchie, I Used To Get It In Ohio, Cookin' Up, and Fuck A Freestyle (AKA the only Cam songs I've really dug since Killa Season), but it's one which I find myself now listening to a lot regardless of the Flair fetishising. It sorta has the feel of what a noughties C.O.C song might sound like, but in a totally good way, as opposed Large On The Streets by Vado, which just sounds like some generic unreleased McGruff song from 1993 which One Leg Up Records have just put out.
This, on the other hand, was a great McGruff song :
Terrorizer is a fine magazine, but I don't have enough of an interest in modern metal and hardcore beyond 6 groups who either started in the 90s or contain members of bands I listened to in the 90s to buy it every month, so XXL is the only monthly music mag I still pick up without fail. Staples like the letters from prison inmates calling whatever rapper was on the cover of the last issue a faggot and the toadying responses to them from the letters editor ("real recognize real, and you look pretty familiar right now"), the Swagger Jacker section (because it's always nice to know that Yung Berg has been interpolating Ma$e lyrics), and the Hacker For Hire advertisments (Is your music being leaked? Is your homeboy a snitch? Is your phone being tapped? Is someone talking bad about you on a blog? Do you think your girl or your man is cheating?) are always welcome, but they always manage to wheel out a couple of marquee pieces per issue too. The Guru article (less yet another tribute, and more of an investigative piece of journalism on Solar) in the latest one fits that bill, but the highlight of the issue is the Making Of AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted retrospective to celebrate that it's been 20 years since its release with track-by-track breakdowns and anecdotes from Cube himself, the Shocklee brothers, Eric "Vietnam" Sadler, Sir Jinx, Chuck D, Flavor Flav, and even Yo-Yo.
In it we learn that Cube originally wanted Sam Sever from 3rd Bass to produce AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted (I mean, The Cactus Album was a decent LP but..) but after Server flaked on a meeting Cube happened to bump into Chuck D in the Def Jam offices and the two agreed to work together, that Once Upon A Time In The Projects was loosely inspired by Sergio Leone's Once Upon A Time In America, that The N*gga Ya Love To Hate was originally conceived as an NWA song, that Flavor Flav was notoriously hard to find with Cube not seeing hide-nor-hair of him for 6 weeks despite the fact that P.E were recording Fear Of A Black Planet in the same building, and that Spike Lee would've prefered if they'd asked him first before using the Do The Right Thing sample at the start of Turn Off The Radio. but what I found most interesting was the breakdown of A Gangsta's Fairytale where we learn about who the kid was on the intro and that it originally started life as a song Cube wrote for Eazy-E.
Ice Cube - A Gangsta's Fairytale
Ice Cube : "A Gangsta's Fairytale" was a song that I wrote for Eazy-E that I ended up keeping. We wanted to use this Mr. Rogers shit in the beginning, and we had the whole thing planned out. And we was like "We need this kid on here talking shit about how we want a real fairytale, not no bullshit." I wasn't from New York, so I didn't really know no little kids out there. So Keith Shocklee was like, "Yo, I got the perfect kid. He's a good kid, but he talks a lot of shit." I asked Keith, "His mama gonna let him do it?" Keith was like "How much you gonna pay him?" I said, "I got a G for him if they come in and do a good job." They came in there, and he stood there and just laced it. He was talking shit! [Laughs]
Eric Sadler : The biggest thing about "A Gangsta's Fairytale" was lil' Les. When lil' Les came on there for the intro, I was like, "Oh, you gotta be kidding me. This is so cool." I didn't know what he was gonna say at all. I just knew that Cube wanted him at the beginning of the record. So once he said the famous line - "Hey, you got some shit for the niggas and bitches. What about the kids?" - man, we all just passed out. [Laughs] It only took him like two or three to do it... He got some cash, and I'm just like, "Okay, we're going to hell for this." But it was perfect.
Sir Jinx : That was the closest you were going to get to an Ice Cube/N.W.A collaboration, because it was written for Eazy-E. You can kinda flip the words around, "Little boys and girls, they all love me/Come and sit on the lap of Eazy-E."
I can definately hear that and it would've worked as a sequel of sorts to Boyz-N-The-Hood. But it wouldn't have sounded like that because Dr Dre would've produced it instead of The Bomb Squad, wouldn't he?. This then got me thinking about Dre productions from 1990 which might've ended up being used for an Eazy-E version of A Gangsta's Fairytale. I can't imagine Real Niggas, Untouchable and Murder Rap as anything other than what they are, and 100 Miles And Runnin' and Menace To Society are both too uptempo and busy for a fairly elaborate narrative, so I'm thinking the most likely outcome would've involved one of these 4 '90 Dre productions :
Above The Law - Another Execution
Livin' Like Hustlers, Freedom Of Speech, and The Last Song from the first Above The Law LP would also be contenders, but this is easily the best fit for Eazy rapping about various cartoon characters having sex and living down the street in Air Jordans, no?
Eazy-E - Eazy Street
Taken from the Superfly 1990 soundtrack, this was the only Eazy-E song of 1990, and a slightly bizarre semi-storytelling song which ends in Eazy getting his Scatman-John on to boot. The most likely Dre production which could've become the Eazy E A Gangsta's Fairytale? Yeah, I guess. Hardly the best fit, though.
NWA - Just Don't Bite It
See, I could really imagine it over Just Don't Bite It with Eazy employing the same sort of stoic flow Ren employed on it, but then that would deprive us of NWA's greatest ode to chicks tooting on the blue veined flute and that would be an absolute tragedy, so I'm gonna pluck for this as being the most likely Dr Dre beat which would've been used for Eazy's A Gangsta's Fairytale. Drumroll, please...
West Coast All Stars - We're All In The Same Gang
Classic Dre production, but totally wasted on the West's very own Self Destruction despite the impressive line-up (NWA, Ice-T, Above The Law and King Tee all on a song together!). These streetz ain't tryna hear positivity from NWA or listen to Michel'le, Young MC and Body & Soul, b (I always had a soft spot for Tone Loc, though), and it's the one Dre production out of this bunch which kinda has the same feel as the Bomb Squad beat on Cube's tale of Snow White & the 7 dwarfs, Humpty-Dumpty, Cinderella, Mr Rogers et al going about their daily business in the projects.
Bonus action :
Another amusing Youtube collage, this time for A Gangsta's Fairytale 2, which is my favorite rap sequel, like, ever. Shout outs to Lil' Les returning a couple of years later too. If only the continuity problems with Walt from Lost's voice breaking could've been that simple :
As well as popularizing an excellent piece of rap slanguage, Pill's Trap Goin' Ham might also go down as an important ATLanta single of 2009 since it's a pretty great song, and I relatively fond of his freestyle over I Got 5 On It (though, as Puffy proved, literally anyone can rhyme over I Got 5 On It and make it sound as majestic as Once Upon A Time In The Projects or Sideways) but he's really exhausted this whole "yo, check out at these forlorn looking black ppl inside/outside of dirty houses" video trick of his with this latest viral single On Da Korner, huh? I have gross, bedsit dwelling scumbag friends-of-friends who use their kitchen sinks as toilets and their toilets as ashtrays, and you're tryna show me how ghetto you are in your 5-room bungalow because your stove has a few gravy stains on it?
I find his rhyming about trappin' ad nausuem terribly irksome too, because even The Clipse can't get away with that anymore when they're far more talented and charismatic than Pill could ever hope to be, and I type this as someone who's never been able to work out which one is Malice and which one is Pusha-T. So many new coke-rappers fail to realise that selling crack is only a minor tenet in the blueprint of Gang$ta-Rap behind rhyming about power, guns, money, women, their mothers/grandmothers, cars, clothes, and food, combined with regional idioms, tasteless humour, and a little redemptive soul-searching if they can pull it off without coming off like too Ned Flanders at the annual family campfire sing-a-long. Shouldn't real Gangsta-Rappers be rhyming about selling Crystal Meth and bent prescriptions for Oxycontin or Xanax in 2010 anyway?
And then there's matter of the likes of Pill and the usually dependable All $tar suddenly rapping over samples first used on old Q.B shit by Kool G. Rap, Cormega, and, in this instance, Tragedy Khadafi; I know Robbie over at Unkut has been incolsolable since Killa Sha went bye-bye last year, but I can't imagine he's gonna start featuring southern rappers just because there's currently a void in the market for generic, retro Q.B beats rap. At least not while Meyhem Lauren is alive, anyway.
When we discuss Boosie we must now talk about him in the past tense as he's never getting out of prison since the po-leese have started building a solid case that he was behind Nu$$ie's murder, but there was a southern rapper who knew how to make Gangsta-Rap which faithfully honoured all of its traditions as he offered us countless entertaining viral 'hood videos with gimmicks like funerals, Adidas sweatsuits, canary-yellow cars, riding in the front-basket of a bike like Snoop in the Who Am I (What's My Name) clip, genuinely attractive hoodrats in hotpants who you might possibly chug one out to, and his own undercurrent of looking like a nasty little hobgoblin to starve off the ennui of jaded Rap-nerds who've spent far too much time on Youtube and WorldStarHipHop watching cheaply made rap videos the past few years :
Lil' Boosie ft. Lil' Trill - Back In The Day
Lil' Boosie ft. various weed carriers - We Out Chea
This is pretty much the architectural equivalent of a lobster-red sunburn tanned flabby 40 year old bloke in a tight nylon England shirt, 3/4 length cargo shorts and a bulldog tattoo :
So much so, in fact, that a person of that desciption walking up the road behind us barked "what you cunts taking pictures of?" before we hastily retreated to the safety of Sha Deezy's ride and got the hell outta dodge.
I really tried to get into the Eng-er-lund spirit of things yesterday. My BFF and I headed to a bar in the early afternoon to keep one eye on the Argentina game and one eye on the vodka & waters (it's all about the paradoxical balance of liver-rotting poison and the nectar of life) and ran into some extended associates, but come 5 o'clock when cretins with painted faces were turning up in droves and breaking into sing-a-longs of Three Lions and Wonderwall, any vague pretense of bonhomie was replaced by contempt and it was time to bounce.
On the plus side of things, though, I made the money I lost betting on a 1 - 1 draw on the France vs. Uruguay game on friday night back by successfully calling the England vs. America game as a 1 - 1 draw. U.S.A! U.S.A! U.S.A!
Clarence Boddicker : "Well, give the man a hand!"
On a related note, DJ's superb chronicle of the World Cup, and Dom's World Cup wall chart of rap part 1 are essential reading.
It's inevitable that this place was going to end up as little more than a trashy Rap-Gossip blog (shoutouts to the Fat Lace homie Dead Perez) posting videos of rappers getting beaten up one day, so why even fight destiny any longer?
About 1:23 in of an otherwise completely inaudible interview :
If there's one motto I live my life by it's : never trust guys who wear any sort of v-neck. Not only does this dude called Nico (apparently a gay Berkerley rapper by the name of Lil' Nico who Lil' B went to school with) sucker punch the Based God during his interview with him at a Pack video shoot because B apparently wouldn't call Soulja Boy for him, but he also has that killer Roberto Duran knockout blow after his initial flurry of pathetically feminine punches.
It's a pity we didn't have the internet and Youtube back before 2004 to document some of the most interesting occurences of beef in rap history. Just think, we could've had video footage of Just Ice turning up on Poet's block, Above The Law administering a beatdown to Da Lench Mob at the New Music Seminar, E-40 and his crew rolling up on Biggie in the Bay, and Will High hitting that Cannibal Ox dude from behind as he was taking a piss.
And here's Lil B's response :
I'm obviously biased because Lil B replying to my video collection post is as close to a celebrity moment that I'm ever gonna get on here unless Kate Russell ever Googles herself and finds my post about her, but black eye and swollen Donald Duck lip aside, B's response is a much more dignified post-knocked-out response than, say, Cam'Ron's infamous Daisy Dukes in the backyard of his tiny bungalow response to Tru-Life and 50, AKA the video which spolied Cam'Ron more for me than a multitude of boring, badly produced mixtapes with like Penz and Vado ever could.
Bonus beats :
Lil B - The Trap
Lil B's latest cut, which is on that same sorta NY influenced tip as Age Of Information/I Am The Hood. I'm guessing he's listening to a lot of old AZ, Nas and Cormega at the moment.
It's the moment this blog has been waiting for ever since we gave birth to it that night back in 2008. No, we haven't stumbled on a Judith from Eggheads narrated sextape of Victoria Coren lezzing off with the Sweet Valley High twins, but it really is the next best thing imaginable as we can finally say Ciou to the managerial genius who thought it was a good idea to play Harry Kewell in a champions League final and piss Xavi Alonso off so much that he left.
Football is still a bit of a Draconian sport sometimes, though. Not because of goalline camera technology not being utilized to the fullest or boring anything like that, but more because it hasn't adopted tactics from the sport of the gods : wrestling. Why, if your team is losing, can't your manager and substitutes run onto the field wielding chairs and get the game nullified, and why aren't managers relinquished of their positions subjected to humiliating leaving rituals in front of baying crowds?
Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Hey Hey Goodbye!
Now, if Gerrard can manage to score an own goal in England's first World Cup game to turn himself into a national figure of hate and have people finally wake up to the fact that he really is little more than a slightly above-average player who comes up with the odd flukey goal which then results in Capello dropping him to allow a holding midfielder to play with Fat Frank instead then, gosh, this is going to be the bestest World Cup since 1994.
This fall from grace would also result in Mourinho coming to his senses and realising that Gerrard is the last player on earth he needs at Madrid and instead securing the signature of the one English player who's absolutely tailor made for the Mourinho style of play : Rory Delap.
