Tuesday 7 June 2016

Sleepin' Sidewayz

Egyptian Lover - I Cry (Night After Night)
(From 1983-1988 album; 2016)


Precisely 30 years before YG rapped about wakin' up with a boner/goin' to bed a loner in 2014, his combination of bedtime horniness/loneliness on the west coast was anticipated and fully articulated on Egyptian Lover's I Cry (Night After Night). 32 years after the song's release in which Big 'Gypt has presumably experienced the domestic horrors of a girlfriend who snores or 3:AM arguments over duvet-hogging, I Cry (Night After Night) now has an official video. This shit was shot to promote his recent 1983-1988 anthology album on Stones Throw Records and therein lies the problem: the Min of L.A Bass & Bump tinkered with perfection by extending certain instrumental sections of his original song before amplifying + compressing certain sounds in the mix. The result? He ended up George Lucas-ing his own masterpiece. Damn, homie.

Fortunately, Greg The Pharaoh redeemed his act of fiddling while Egypt burns by also revamping Kinky Nation (Kingdom Kum) for the 1983-1988 project. As O.G King Freako admitted in the album's liner notes, the original 1986 recording was somewhat of a experiment with a drum machine he was unfamiliar with, so for the anthology he's removed the original drum-track and replaced it with his trusty 808. Exactly 30 years on, a passable filler track from his One Track Mind LP now has more bump than the Great Pyramid of Giza. Maybe KRS Nutso was right about ancient Egyptians being time-travellers from a futuristic civilisation of alien blk ppl after all?

Related: When you see a Devil shelve him.

4 comments:

Kelvin Mack10zie said...

I should add that George Lucas is mentioned only as an example of someone messing up their own work. Fuck Star Wars on every level.

(S/O to American Graffiti tho innit.)

Dank said...

Dam Funk in the vid

Anonymous said...

Egyptian Lover looks better now than he did in the 80s.

L.A said...

THX 1138 is good too.