MobStyle weekend # 2 : the videos

The reason that Youtube is The Goose Which Keeps On Laying Golden Eggs has less to do with finally knowing the gruesome answer to what would happen if a monkey skull-fucked a frog or clips of teenage girls dancing to We Want Some Pussy by 2 Live Crew which prove that the old cliche of Hot Girl With Fat Friend even extends to the internet, and more because old rap videos I never knew existed just keep appearing on there month after month after month. Who knew Nobody Move by Poor Righteous Teachers and Lacville '79 by Devin had videos? Not me until the invention of Youtube. What really gets my G-Spot tingling, though, is when ridiculously obscure stuff which you'd never have imagined would've ever had a video just appears on there out of the blue. Nothing by MobStyle the group has turned up yet - please please please let there be a promo for Wanted By - but old Azie and Pretty Tone Capone videos have, and this is something we should celebrate.

If MobStyle were the original Dipset - and they almost certainly were - then they had two Cam'Ron's in the group with Azie as group leader/businessman Cam and Pretty Tone acting as Lord Of Ig'nance stylized rapper Cam. I suppose that would make Gangsta Lou a combination of Juelz et Jim, and Whip Wop Freaky Zeeky. Gangsta Lou, who isn't particularly fond of one Joseph Guillermo Jones II, will kill me if he ever reads this post and sees that i've called him MobStyle's equivalent to Jim Jones. This is entirely possible because I'm currently emailing Mello-T's manager to try and arrange an interview with The Godfather after he replied to my post on the Mello-T episode of Louis Theroux, and Mr Low Kash recently replied to my post about Play Time Is Over by Mr Low-Kash 'N Da Shady Bunch on Fat Lace, so if you're reading this, Lou - totes sorry, bruv.

Azie - What's Going On, Black?



Long before the likes of 2pac, Nas and Bone Thugs were rapping over Phil's shit, Harlem dudes were all up on the tip : DJ Brucie B used to play various Phil C jams at The Rooftop, Doug E. Fresh was being backed by Ill Phil samples in '88, and Azie used an "oh lord" from In The Air Tonight for the main single from his 1991 solo tape Street Wise. The difference between this and rappers cosying up to Coldplay is fairly uncomplicated : In The Air Tonight was as state-of-the-art as anything by Kraftwerk and as bleak as anything by Joy Division, while Coldplay are just a bitchmade version of Radiohead, who themselves were just a wetter version of Talk Talk minus drugs, Jesus and a copy of Ry Cooder's Paris, Texas soundtrack. To make it even simpler, when Coldplay get together with the black ppl we get pure-uncut faggotry like this, but when Phil parlays with his African-American pals moments of sheer genius are born.

Anyway, I wonder if Azie paid for this sample, and if he did, what Phil thought about his music being used to soundtrack a song by a former drug dealer about multiple real life murders where Azie is already beginning to point fingers of suspicion at members of their crew for Rich Porter's murder? Since Dipset are back together again, they should keep that old Uptown flame for Phil alight and get whatever Myspace producer who does their stuff nowadays to sample one of the "IIIIIII"s from I Can't Dance by Genesis. It could be either totally Bomb Squad-ish or totally RZA-ish and I'm sure you'll agree that either of those possibilities are a better option than being fucking Arab Muzik-ish.

Pretty Tone Capone - Case Dismissed



I have no idea who directed this, but it's almost as if they trepanned their way into my head and extracted my fantasy of what a Pretty Tone Capone video should look like, and I'm amazed that this apparently used to get play on The Box back in 1992 according to the Youtube comment section gallery. The scene where P.T has his boys bumrush the barbershop with their guns drawn and then strolls in with his dame to have the workers attend to his chest hair and cuticles was pretty much the zenith of all rap videos until Code Name by White came along.

Bonus beats :

MobStyle - The 80s



That Azie solo Mobstyle cut with their original producer L.G which he put out to help co-promote his Game Over book in 2008. Couldn't find any working links for it anywhere so I thought I'd throw it up for archival purposes.

So Azie didn't die when he was shot nine times in 1987, but perhaps him living was a sisyphean punishment where he's doomed to spend the rest of his days putting out projects (albums, documentaries, movies, books) which everyone on the planet are oblivious to, bar the residents of Lenox Avenue, J-Zone, and white 30-something Europeans like me.