DOOM's remix of Cam's That's Me was so much better than the original

Cam'ron - That's Me MF DOOM blend (2004)



Was that a catcall of "lol, backpacker!" I heard from the cheap seats? Motherfucker, I'll cut your balls off to use as a backpack then sell you to a sultan as a serf, and while you're dancing a merry jig for us in your new role as a eunuch jester, the sultan and I are going to snort with laughter at you due to your preference of that airy-fairy Eve album track sounding original version of That's Me over DOOM's vastly grander remix from his Special Blends mixtape. That blend/remix beat is a far better suited milieu to one of Mr. Giles' most thoroughly offensive holdings of court (rape-talk, OFWGKTA fans!), with the pernicious strings, creepy disembodied laughing, and oddly syncopated chopped snares being redolent of what might've happened had the C.O.C sound been alowed to flourish during the pre-Dipset years of Cam's solo career or, simply, the results of what would've happened if Cam had called up Nashiem Myrick & Carlos Broady back in 1999.

MF DOOM - Mullein instrumental (2002)



That haunting string sample is a fair approximation of what I'd imagine a lost Bernard Herrmann score for Orson Welles' version of The Trial to sound like, so I assumed DOOM must've snagged the sample from some secrete highbrow source like a 1967 Polish art-horror movie soundtrack LP which only 6 people own and even then 2 of them are JuJu & Psycho Les. Imagine my suprise, then, at finding out that he was up to his old cartoon plundering tricks and it was taken from an episode of the first rejigged English language version of Dragon Ball Z which went wood on American TV before its incidental musik by the great Shuki Levy was redubbed and rescored for the Cartoon Network by the not-so-great Bruce Falconer, who then had some of his Dragon Ball Z scoring sampled by Shawty Redd on a Jeezy joint. Why does DOOM ever rhyme over other people's production when he's capable of locating the most eerie string sample since What's Beef? in US episodes of anime that originally did them Lucky Louie numbers?

Lip-sing more

3 reasons why Mystikal's performance of Y'All Ain't Ready Yet on Soul Train in 1995 (his first National TV appearance according to whoever uploaded the video) totally rules even though he's lip-syncing and doesn't even get to the last verse. Fast-forward to 0:30 unless you feel compelled to watch a commercial for some gaudy Louisiana-based brand called BR 225 who've done a range with Webbie called - wait for it - Jigg City Clothing :


1. A leopard-print dress sporting Stacey Dash giggling after she announces the title of the song and then M.C UGK-ing Mystikal by introducing him as a "super-talented rap crew".

2. Mystikal finally redeeming himself for using that timeworn "bad like Michael" line in the mid 90s during the 2nd verse by whipping his flannel shirt off and launching into a dance-breakdown of M.J moves right after the words spill from his lips.

3. Ending the performance by ripping his wifebeater apart like he's Hulk Hogan. Nicki Minaj should really conclude all her TV performances the same way; Rick Ross, on the other hand, needs to keep his fucking shirt on as much as possible in future.

Only built 4 Alonzo "Mr Hyde" Brown linx

Dr Jeckyll & Mr Hyde - Yellow Panties (1985)



Remember the snippet of that upcoming interview with Alonzo Brown I posted about last year? Well, the whole shebang went live yesterday, and although the Troy L Smith dude who conducted it indulges in a pet-peeve of mine by calling them Dr. Jekyll & Mr Hyde rather than their officially sic moniker of Dr. Jeckyll & Hyde (because rappers ain't got love for Robert Louis Stevenson and don't adhere to actual spellings of literary classics), it's a dense read which takes in the crucial differences between Harlem and the Bronx, how seeing Luv Bug Starski live on stage in a room full of champagne drinking "dudes with gold chains and girls Jordache and Sergio Valente jeans" at some Uptown nightspot inspired him to start rapping, how Andre "Dr Jeckyll" Harrell once flipped out on him when he turned up to perform a live show in a sweatsuit, his Harlem World Crew days, how Genius Rap allegedly saved Profile Records and their relationship with the label thereafter, how they were jealous of Whodini working with Larry Smith, and his post-Jeckyll & Hyde career which included stints at Cold Chillin' and Warner Brothers, Hollywood restaurants which were ordered to sell fried chicken, and TV shows as diverse as New York Undercover and Cousin Skeeter.

Alonzo "Mr Hyde" Brown interview part 1
Alonzo "Mr Hyde" Brown interview part 2
Alonzo "Mr Hyde" Brown interview part 3
Alonzo "Mr Hyde" Brown interview part 4

The last few paragraphs of page 4 devolve into an irksome cliched old-school rapper rant where he moans about modern rap's supposed lack of variety, but I suppose this guy must be in his late fourties or early fifties by now so he's probably unaware of Curren$y, The Jacka, Yelawolf, Roc Marciano, $tarlito, Lil B, and the late career renaissances of E-40 and AZ. Being one of the originators of Uptown waviness alongside Spoonie Gee, he has no excuse not knowing about Max B, though, so someone needs to burn him a best of CD-R or *cough* my ‘Should've Been The Byrd Gang Album’ compilation.

In lieu of Grove St. Party not being a single...

Waka's Youtube channel have had the decency to conjure up the next best thing, which is a promo which consists of the lyrics in a semi-graffiti font over his modelling pictures :

Waka Flocka Flame ft. Kebo Gotti - Grove St. Party (2010)



You know how we have to take our draconian east coast purists friends who tut 'n' tsk whenever you play Flockavelli aside and attempt to explain to them that Hard In Da Paint and Bustin' At 'Em are just the modern ATL' equivalent of Ruff Ryders Anthem and Ante Up, yeah? I've been trying to explain Grove St. Party to them using similar pre-established N.Y reference points they'll understand by equating it to a 2011 version of a Crooklyn Clan & Fatman Scoop joint. Anyway, this promo isn't quite as good as that flawless WSHH live performance video some dude edited together where half the front row of hefty 'hoodrats were waving Waka masks in the air which now appears to have been removed from both WSHH and Youtube, but it's incredibly helpful because it appears I've been getting various key words in it completely wrong for the past 5 months. Might have been a good idea to run your spell check before going viral, though, Juaquin :



Also disappearing from Youtube recently is the sorta-official (as in co-signed by Max's camp, but not Amalgam Digital) video for Max B's Where Do I Go?, thus depriving future generations of knowing the correct arm movements to make during the "chicka-owww, chicka owwww, chicka owwwwwwwww"s. Or are they "checka owww"s? We need Max's team to put together a lyrics promo for Where Do I Go in the style of the Grove St. Party one above to clear this pertinent matter up.

Great songs from forgotten rap albums # 16

As usual, nothing particularly secrete as such, just a handful of songs I like from albums which came and went with little fanfare and songs I'm tryna put real life friends onto to prevent them complaining that they don't know it when we jam it in the car. # 16 is all songs from the past decade.



AZ - Dead End
(From Unbelivable; 2008)



One day the heavens are going to open, thunderbolts are going to rain down on me, and I'm gonna spend the rest of eternity listening to I Got To Have It on a loop as punishment for trolling Nas fanboys, but even though Undeniable was anything but what its title suggested and the worst album of AZ's career up until that point, it was still more worthwhile than Nas' Untitled disc from the same year due to The Game Don't Stop, the minor-classic single The Hardest 2 with Styles P, and this fairweather friend-admonishing ode to the struggle to recapture the simplicity and innocence of life as a shorty. Piano samples invariably lead to great songs, ditto string samples, so combining the two together here results in some A+ Anthony, with our host thankfully managing to avoid the Memories Are For Faggots type mawkishness that often ruins these type of songs as he goes about his business of imprinting a stamp of N.Y classicism onto proceedings.



504 Boyz - Get Back
(From Ballers; 2002)



If you've been paying attention closely, you may remember that I was blissfully ignorant to the existence of the 2nd incarnation of the 504 Boyz who included the young Curren$y amongst their ranks until a search for some of his No Limit era material last year led to their Ballers album, but since then its 2nd single Get Back has become one of those jams which would cause my cosmos to crumble if it to ever suddenly disappear from my MP3 player during a late-night trip to the 24 hour Tesco. A hi-hat ridden Neptunes replica and a rowdy chorus with references to 'bows are the perfect backdrop for a 2002 No Limit posse track given the label's penchant for shameless trend-hopping, and we find bandana $pitta starting and bookending the song with his own verse and a verse for Silkk Tha Shocker clearly written by him, with the grand imperial Percy Miller betwixt them with a ridiculous thirty seconds of lofty boasts about being able to outrun wild coyotes and checkmate Cagney & Lacey during stop-and-searches.



Mr Lif ft. Murs - Murs Iz My Manager
(From Mo' Mega; 2006)



The Def Jux village isn't exactly teaming with members of the Banger family, much less the Mr Lif household, and Murs when he's in rapping-about-the-rap-industry mode is a territory one daren't venture into without a map and a pair of wellies, but two of rap's most humourless exponents drop their usual po-facedness to poke a little fun of their priggish indie-rap personas here over some Edan production which is like Not Over Till The Fat Lady Plays The Demo with additional ringing telephones, snatches of fuzzy trumpet, and Craig Mack "BWWWWOOOYYY"s. Murs plays Bobby "The Brain" Heenan to Mr Lif's "Mr Wonderful" Paul Orndorff, but what I like most about this joint is that Lif's speaking voice is uncannily similar to dook who played Calvin in Paid In Full so I keep expecting him to tell Murs that he's "just made enough dough to bake biscuits for the projects" or Cam to pop up and call him a "Kermit The Frog faced ass n*gga" as he threatens to slap the shit outta him.



The Jacka ft. Husalah & Too $hort - Die Young
(From The Jacka; 2002)



After the show it's the afterparty, then after the afterparty it's the hotel lobby, after the Til My Casket Drops appearances then it's the C-Bo's Mob Figaz shit, and after AP.9's Headshotz album it's the second Mob Figaz solo album with this. AP.9 emerged fully-fledged and playing to his strengths on his own debut, but Jacka's self titled album saw him struggling to find a comfortable zone which suited his melodious delivery and world-weary, introspective persona, and, thus, this RobLo (then Rob Low) produced cut is the only real essential Jack' moment on there because it sounds like nothing else in the Mob's catalogue at the time and it hints at the way he'd break free from the traditional Bay area mobb shit orbit to take up his own trajectory, with Husalah following suit. I dunno where that strange crying Dolphin sounding noise sample comes from, but I was suitably impressed when it reappeared on Lil B's Pull Ya Pants Up last year because Husalah is so obviously a key influence on the Based God.

Speaking of Lilliputian Brandon, why isn't the video to Choppa & Curren$y's 2003 No Limit single Shake It Like That on Youtube when the fashion gawd Choppa apparently invented the cooking dance in it according to Lil B in his Nardwuar interview? Plz tell me that shit wasn't forever lost from the No Limit vaults when Katrina laid waste to Percy's mansion.

Royce Da 5'9" was not a singer of the Nate Dogg caliber

It pains me to return to the now totally passé subject of Nate Dogg, but in all the tributes I read I didn't come across any specific Before & After posts to demonstrate the transformative qualities a Nathaniel appearance could have on a song, which is a pity when we have a real humdinger of an example with the original version of Xxplosive AKA The Way I Be Pimpin' AKA one of the Royce Da 5'9"-featuring songs from Dr Dre's 2001 that ended up scrapped after he was disgorged from the Aftermath camp for casually blowing up the spot about ghostwriting for Dre in a magazine interview back in 1999 :

Dr Dre ft. Royce Da 5'9" - The Way I Be Pimpin' (1999)



Xxplosive is a song it seems like the sun was created solely to be able to shed light upon as it thumps from a car stereo on a summer afternoon; The Way I Be pimpin', ummmm, not so much. It isn't that it's a turkey, per se, but, with the exception of The Next Episode, 2001 was all about the album-cuts rather than the singles, so The Way I Be Pimpin' is less of an Xxplosive or a Fuck You, and more of a Big Ego's or a The Message. Admittedly, it does contain a few nice lines, but you'd have to be the spawn of a plebeian to possibly prefer Dre's uncomfortable autocue delivery of Royce's lyrics and Royce himself awkwardly intoning a chorus which is flatter than Nas's pockets after Kelis fleeced him in their divorce settlement over the song it eventually became on 2011 where Nate slides in for an extended crooning session in the vein of Ain't No Fun and Kurupt and Six-Two take a scenic stroll down misogyny lane either side of him.

Imagine if Royce hadn't incurred the wrath of Dre after opening up his big gob about what was rap's mostly poorly kept secret and The Way I Be Pimpin' did appear on 2001, we could now be living in a Bizarro world where Royce somehow went on to become the hooksmith du jour of the early noughties with a wall full of platinum plaques for the likes of Area Codes and 21 Questions, and Nate ended up unemployed but still alive today due to not being able to gorge himself on the junkfood, booze, and blunts which led to his two strokes. I 'unno, man, it's probably preferable alternative to having to listen to the Slaughtahouse album for the Royce verses, right?

Dre can make up for the debacle that Detox is bound to be by finally leaking the pre-The Way I Be Pimpin' version of the song King Tee is rumoured to have rapped on for his shelved 1998 Aftermath album Kingdom Come which was one of the few songs from those sessions to elude the clutches of the dudes who bootlegged the album back in 2002.

I miss my dogg

:-(

Yup, it's the generic R.I.P Nate Dogg, yo post.

Nate Dogg - I Got Love (2001)



Nate Dogg - One More Day (1994)



We all know Nathaniel's classic hooks for other people, but contrary to belief, he did have some solo jams of his own too with I Got Love and One More Day being the best examples of the o.g 'Rother's unassisted mellifluous timbre in full flight and two of my favourite singles from their respective years to boot. I guess this means the likelihood of there being anything worthwhile on Detox is now nigh on nonexistent.

Nate Dogg ft. Warren G - Nobody Does It Better (1998)



And no rapper wore a bowler hat better; not even Mello-T.

Word to the Wise Intelligent

Wise Intelligent - UndergroundSpiritualGame (2011)



I'm doing my damnedest to try and parse the concept behind the Wise Intelligent Iz The Unconkable Djezuz Djonez album after copping it off Amazon a couple of evenings ago (thanks for the tip-off CritiQ) but I can't help feeling like Nas did the time he hung up on Krs One as the T-Cha was trying to persuade him to talk to astronauts at NASA. Maybe it's less impenetrable for black ppl than a peckerwood like me, and, yeah, I've deduced that Wise is presenting himself as a demigod delivering gospels to the needy, but wtf does ‘unconkable’ mean and would a true divine being really use the poor man's EMF as his namesake?

A delusional martyr-complex, cliched political sloganeering, erroneous theories bordering on sheer codswallop, and displaying seemingly conflicting viewpoints within the same bar are the bread & butter of such personal bete noire rappers as Immortal Technique and Saigon (or, at least, 90% of Saigon's output), but Wise has always managed to deploy the same tactics successfully without tumbling into into the po-faced conscious-rapper trap. This is because Wise was borne out of the era which gave us Brand Nubian's One For All as the blueprint for what the next wave of Five Percenter conscious-rappers should adhere to : you can be a great righteous rapper, you just have to teach the lessons of The Nation of Gods and Earths with eccentric panache in a variety of acrobatic voices which range from your own dulcet tones to cod-Jamaican rudeboy to Dickensian chimney-sweep, and spray a little arrogance like Rick "The Model" Martel as you're doing so.

Wise Intelligent - Water Walker (2010)



After four front-to-back plays I'm still at a loss whether I even like the album, let alone if it's a worthy follow up to his underrated 2006 sophomore effort The Talented Timothy Taylor. For now, the only definite conclusions I can draw are that it's his most brash work to date in every department with the production ranging from bombastic to almost trunk-rattling, and that I'm happy to finally have an MP3 of last year's viral video single Water Walker so I no longer have to watch its promo clip with dudes spraypainting walls in it any time I wanna jam it and marvel that Wise is making the exact sort of rap he should be in 2011, that's thankfully closer to recent Witchdoctor than the Nas & Damian Marley album of Glastonbury dance tent fare. What's the point in graffiti anyway if it's not by Kase 2 or it's not obscene toilet wall scrawlings about the barmaid from your local pub?