Good news, gentlemen : I've just received an email from Complex.com asking me to assemble a list of the top ten Rappers who sound like construction workers in real life yet rhyme in strangely effeminate voices during their Rap dayjobs; ergo, I'm currently neck-deep in Youtube interviews with Lil' Dap, Boo & Gotti and the sickly sounding weed carrier from Azie's Blood On My Money CD trying to determine whether their speaking voices are closer to Randy Savage than Miss Elizabeth, but all y'all habitual readers of The Martorialist take priority over any soulless freelance gigs, so here's a primer for the Complex piece with the two best songs by the genre's foremost exponent Lake AKA Lakey The Kid AKA Q.B's ultimate bulletproof Rapping superthug extortion artist whose voice sounds amusingly SISSSAAAYYY on the mic :
Lake - 30/30
(From My Brother's Keeper album; 2006)
Lake - Death Row Is Back!
(From Lake's Home... Death Row Is Back! mixtape; 2005)
The former is his solo highlight from the album he recorded with Cormega, whilst the latter is his beatjack of Dre's Been There, Done That which was released to signify that he was the first signing to Suge and Eric B's failed attempt at a Death Row East in the mid '00s after it became clear that Crooked I couldn't make a good song to save his life. As a fully paid up Q.B Dunn-Rap connoisseur who done shook dice with Karate Joe on the 41st Side I obviously consider both songs indisputable classics that are as good as anything off Illmatic, The Infamous and The War Report, but will concede that Lake has never quite managed to record any music that's as brilliant as his Sub 0° DVD name-calling-session with Prodigy. Not quite as hilarious as the legendary Hell Rell Sub 0° DVD riposte to that interview where Tru Life and Memphis Bleek zinged Dipset, this is still ripe with gossip about the machinations of Q.B Dunn-Rap and the many mythical names from Mobb Deep's Thank you! lists. Even if you've seen it before (hell, I've posted here previously) it's still worth a once-yearly pilgrimage viewing if you happen to be the type of Rap fan who holds J-Love's best of Big Noyd mixtape closer to their heart than any Jay-Z album, bar Volume One :
A genre which made Koch Records a small fortune to cushion the financial blow of all those Krs One, Grand Puba and Onyx albums bricking in the early '00s, and that was almost single-handedly auteured by Jimmy Hart during WCW's late '90s pomp to avoid paying fees to real musicians after all the company's music budget was spunked away on paying for Flair and Hogan to come out to Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra and Hendrix's Voodoo Child (Slight Return), wrestling entrance musik was at its most glorious in the WWF's creative zenith of 1988 to 1998 when Vince employed an in-house crack team of composers to crank out the hits on some Beats By The Pound type shit. Bangerswereondeck, son, yet it's a field still relatively under-sampled in Rap bar the odd song like That's Incredible by Heltah Skeltah and, um, yeah that's really all I can think of.
So, here's 3 classics from the WWF stable them Dipset boys should've graced with their dulcet tones in some form since they embodied the crass humour, alpha male posturing, morally bankrupt theatrics and latent homoeroticism of Vince's great empire better than any other Rap crew before or since :
Iron Sheik - Sheika Theme
I'll never understand an Arabian oil billionaire like Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan when he chooses to waste his money and time on football clubs in the near-Polish grimness of northern England instead of cruising around Dubai in a platinum tank blasting the Iron Sheik's theme at ear-splitting decibels as gaggles of 18 year old Serbian whores take turns to hang off his bellend with their lips, and that's why this beat would've been the perfect backdrop for Cam and Juelz to have gone back-and-forth with metaphors about 'the towers' over sometime between 2001 and 2004.
Ted Dibia$e - Million Dollar Man theme
Capitalism, arrogance, 80s Hair-Metal guitar riffs which sound like they're cribbed from a W.A.S.P song, disembodied cackling, ABBA interpolations - will there ever be another piece of music more tailor made for Dipset to have blessed than Ted's entrance theme? Everyone from Cam & Juelz to Agallah & Shiest to Max & Stack to J.R Writer & Hell Rell could've made a top ten of all time joint over this, but knowing Duke Da God's sometimes questionable A&R decisions it probably would've ended up in the hands of the Virgil of the crew who manaaged to completely ruin the otherwise unimpeachable Dipset City with his verse of "if hip hop was _____" Raps which would even have Ugly Duckling blushing with embarrassment.
Razor Ramon - Bad Boy theme
Eh, truthfully I suppose there isn't much Dipset could've done with Razor's entrance musik other than have Freaky Zeeky use it for a "fly, pelican, fly" Tony Montana-themed mixtape interlude or let it ride out as an intro for the Summer Wit' Miami video with a tracking shot of Jim, Max and Stack walking along Miami beach throwing toothpicks at joggers, but by posting it here I've now got an excuse to hit you with the time a clearly worse-for-wear Scott Hall slapped a British kids TV presenter on the arse on former saturday morning staple Live & Kickin'. Like he told us back in the day - the chicas, dey for fuuuuuuuuun :
Riff Raff SODMG & TKO Capone - Cocky Bastard (From Iced Out My Lighthouse; 2011/2012?)
WHOA!
Well, apart from the "shout outs to Lupe and I play Kweli" line. I get that TKO Capone is okie dokeing folk, but it's a sad state of affairs when those couple of schmucks are still regarded as the Rap intelligentsia, innit?
But I echo everything here about Bo Deal & Mellow G Blanca's Safe Sex because it's like Yo-Yo flipping the trope of You Can't Fade Me from a female perspective, which is a much due subject volteface after Rap's timeworn partyline of "if a bitch gets pregnant, she gets a brick in the stomach" this past twenty years. Sending an MP3 of this out to my whoadie Williams who got his lady friend knocked up again three months after the birth of their firstborn this year; shoulda got wifey to pop a cap in it, cuzz :
Bo Deal ft. Mellow G Blanca - Safe Sex
(From The Chicago Code 2 mixtape; 2011)
In the interests of restoring the misogyny levels to an acceptable level for a Rap blog, here's a semi-riposte in the form of the best song on the new $tarlito EP; not quite as good as its namesake by the Lee Marvin of this chauvinistic Rap shit, but Too $hort, Luke and Suga Free would surely beam with joy at this one :
$tarlito ft. Tha Joker - Ho Problems
(From #UW: Separation Anxiety EP; 2011)
Do you think the majority of Rappers will ever cotton on that the EP is a far better format for regularly releasing new music in the digital epoch than now hopelessly outdated model of the twenty track mixtape? Probably not since the twenty track mixtape is the Rap equivalent of the multiple-dude gangbang on one chick porno flick : it's a major pain in the posterior for main performer and intended fanbase alike (shots of men's hairy arses = interludes involving phone calls from Bun B), yet the industry is too stupid to phase the format out. Rappers : they don't want to perform on stage for more than twenty minutes, yet they expect you to sit through seventy minutes of their recorded music on mixtapes which are lengthier than Jim Jones' jhorts circa 1998.
Apart from both being southern rappers who both debuted in the 90s, the two of them started their careers as single word name rappers who were then forced to adopt the title of one of their albums as a postfix to their Rap monikers; Devin became Devin The Dude after the cover of The Dude confused record store owners and customers alike, and Boo had to become Boo Da Boss Playa/The Boss Player after he retitled, rejigged, repackaged and reissued his Birds Fly South debut as The Boss Player and everybody just assumed that was his name because what sort of dipshit Rapper would call themselves something as unimposing as Boo?
Anyway, I have to confess that I'm barely familiar with any of the music he's released under the name Boo Rossini other than Throw It Up and Immuh from Max Minelli's Me And My Hustle album when he was affiliated with C-Loc's Concentration Camp crew and the odd more recent joint from the C.T.E weed carrier era like All About Me with Z-Ro, but I've been listening to what I can find of his early stuff under his original monikers online this past couple of months and found an underrated masterpiece of melancholy Gangsta-Rap which uses that same damn hitherto-unidentified Part Time Lover cover version sample as AZ's Hustle In My Blood :
"I'm on the block tryna flip it fo' sho a skinny n*gga searching for the rainbow I'm on the block in the same clothes a skinny n*gga searching for the rainbow"
Boo Da Boss Playa ft. King Goldie - Rainbow (From A Hustla's Prayer; 2000)
If you've ever had the misfortune of hearing the Rolling Stones' pitiful Psychedelic-experiment-period plunder of Love's She Comes In Colors you'll already be aware that songs about rainbows generally can't be trusted in the hands of Rock musicians so, as ever, it's left to Rappers to save an entire sub-genre of songwriting, although it's worth noting that Boo & Goldie should probably be wary of what they might find at the end of their rainbow alongside that pot of gold. Kudos to Boo for this song and for also possessing the uncanny ability of resembling both Rap's Da Capo and A-Wax depending on which direction you squint at him.
Anybody have his Concentration Camp-era CD 601? I can't find any working links online and I'm unsure whether it's worth me shelling out $45 on from Amazon which would end up as over £30 factoring in postage and packing. The album could be a dud, but it's very tempting when it's almost entirely produced by "Happy" Perez and there are appearances by C-Loc, Young Bleed and Lay-Lo on there.
De La Soul - A Rollerskating Jam Nam Named Saturdays (From De La Soul Is Dead; 1991)
Thanks to holmes in the Fat Lace comment section who dropped the solomon jewels after Dan speculated about which record Maseo got the inspiration for that WAH-A-WAH-A-WAH-A-WAH-WAH scratch pattern he uses on A Rollerskating Jam Named Saturdays from in the last F.L podcast. I've never heard this Fearless Four joint before because I loathe Problems Of The World Today, but the moral of the story is thus : pay closer attention in future because not very good The Message-lite 12"s from 1983 sometimes come accompanied with forgotten electro scratch jams of major historical significance to Prince Paul-era De La fans on the B. side :
Fearless Four - F4000 (From Problems Of The World Today 12"; 1983)
A Rollerskating Jam Named Saturdays is, of course, one of the only Rap songs you can air-scratch to in public without feeling like an extra in the video for that Dilated Peoples song with the Havoc vocal sample, but could it be that it's not Plug Three getting busy at all and a sample from The Fearless Four song instead? The cut-up breakdown solo by DJ Grand Supreme from 3:25 onwards indicates yes, even though it's never officially been credited anywhere. Ayo De La - dip into that Gorillaz/Nike dough and cut Fearless a cheque, you stingy bastards.
So, this is where I hop aboard the King Louie bandwagon driven by David to ride shotgun alongside ANU by posting the song which convinced me to explore his oeuvre. The obvious stream-of-spazzing-out-in-one-take-over-a-naggingly-repetitive-vocal-sample A Milli record, Louie has cuts which are moredistinctive than I'm Arrogant, but this shit bangs harder than the binmen at 6:40 AM on a monday morning and Louie's got the sort of fancy pants gas on here which has you scheming on peppering real life conversions with its lines, so I think it serves as the best introduction to him :
King Louie - I'm Arrogant
(From Man Up Band Up Mixtape Before The Mixtape; 2010)
It's always been important that rappers should have some sort of identifiable image, but it's particularly necessary in the is-there-anybody-under-the-age-of-30-in-America-who-doesn't-Rap? era when Youtube videos are crucial in getting a handle on what a Rapper's persona is about and most people couldn't pick a ham 'n' egger like Meek Mill out of an identification parade even if he were standing next to Rick Ross wearing a I'M WITH FATTY -----> t-shirt. A$AP Rocky, for example, is instantly recognisible because he's a deadringer for DJ Quik in 1991, has a stomach tattoo in the NWA font and swaggerjacks Haptronic from Superfuture's whole O.G Goth Ninja look, and Louie is equally as memorable since he manages to work the whole fat dude with dreads & chipped teeth shtick way better than Fat Trel and also pulls off the dreads protruding from under a beanie steez without resembling a lesbian Prop Joe like E-40 did when that combination became his default look in 2008 :
Given the "it was me all along, Austin!" secrete managerial curtain pulls on the Rap blogosphere with A$AP Rocky and Main Attrakionz this year, it wouldn't surprise me if Louie turns out to be an elaborate experiment in viral marketing by the SoManyShrimp team with a prosthetically disguised SergDun spitting lyrics penned by David. I guess Louie and Rocky are similar in that their music sounds equally regionally ambiguous, but the key areas where Louie differs are that his influences are broader, taking in the Bay & ATL, not just confined to a couple of specific eras, and, more saliently, he can really, really Rap and has more than 2 good songs. Admitedly this was written before I've had the chance to listen to Live.Love.A$AP but I think his manager's blog in its heyday captured the 90s Baby aesthetic Rocky's music is aiming for better than any of his actual songs, bar Peso and Wassup.
DJ Iceberg's #ManUpBandUp mixtape is the ideal entry point into Louie since it collects most of his best songs from the past year and change into one digital dollop, so I'd recommend starting with that. I've pinky sworn not to post the cuts from his upcoming Dope And Shrimp mixtape I'm privy to, but I'm Arrogant's equal in the slap stupido stakes from it We Like To Partyjust leaked to Youtube. It wasn't me, honest!
