I haven't been focusing on my home state's rap scene as much as I would like, so I spent this weekend checking out videos from some of the Garden State's up-and-comers. Here's the best of the bunch:
Phitted - ALLright
There's no doubt that Phitted is blatantly pandering to the 70's and 80's babies by opening the video up with a T.R.O.Y. sample and an analog iPod (aka cassette walkman). Too many young rappers throw in references to the "golden age" of hip hop, as if doing so automatically lends some authenticity to their own music. In Phitted's case, however, it's forgiveable as the Willingboro native delivers a pretty solid effort here.
Neako - Three Fingers To The Sun
A lot of the initial reaction to Newark rapper Neako seems to be that he's some sort of Drake clone. I don't really hear it, but I'll have to confess that I'm not really checking for Drake so it's hard for me to compare the two. Regardless, this song is kind of dope if you don't mind the 80's synths. Three Fingers to the Sun is off of Neako's new mixtape, Junk Food, which you can download here.
Solo for Dolo - You Can't Say This on Demo Tapes
I meant to put this video up when it first came out about a year ago, when Solo released the single to promote his album The Truth for the Youth. From what I remember, he was trying to start up a beef with Asher Roth (who also dropped an album the same month) at the time. White on white crime in hip hop is a little played out, though, so I held off on posting it. That aside, this kid from Jersey Shore is one of the most lyrical emcees in the state.
Drift, Big Nuttee & Heatah - Live from Park Ave, East Orange
I've never heard of any of these guys, but they live just a few minutes away from me in East Orange aka Illtown. I don't know if the mainstream is still checking for thugged out rap like this, but I'm not mad at this one at all.
In the sports world, only the IOC surpasses the NFL when it comes to the number of copyright lawsuits filed against its fanbase. It was no surprise, then, to hear last week that the NFL had threatened legal action against t-shirt makers in New Orleans who were selling merchandise with the Super Bowl-bound Saints' catchphrase of "Who Dat." The NFL claimed that they owned the rights to "Who Dat," a phrase that gained mainstream recognition in 2006 after Hurricane Katrina had the whole nation focusing on New Orleans, and football fans in particular focused on the city's legion of Saints fans who referred to themselves as "Who Dat Nation."
The absurd state of copyright law that allows any entity to legally own the rights to a phrase as generic as "Who Dat" (or Cincinatti's similar "Who Dey") aside, I still thought there was no way the NFL or New Orleans had any grounds for the claim as the above JT Money song came out in 2000, several years before I had heard "Who Dat" used in reference to the Saints. Little did I know just how much history - quite a bit of which was wrapped up in cringe worthy minstrel performances - there was behind the phrase.
According to Wikipedia:
The chant of "Who Dat?" originated in minstrel shows and vaudeville acts of the late 1800s and early 1900s, and was then taken up by jazz and big band performers in the 1920s and 30s.
The first reference to "Who Dat?" can be found in the 19th Century. A featured song in E.E. Rice's "Summer Nights" is the song "Who Dat Say Chicken In dis Crowd", with lyrics by poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. A common tag line in the days of Negro minstrel shows was: "Who dat?" answered by "Who dat say who dat?" Many different blackfaced gags played off that opening. Vaudeville performer Mantan Moreland was known for the routine. Another example is "Swing Wedding," a rarely shown 1930s Harman-Ising cartoon musical, which caricatured Fats Waller, Cab Calloway, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Ethel Waters, and the Mills Brothers as frogs in a swamp performing minstrel show jokes and jazz tunes. The frogs repeatedly used the phrase "who dat?"
Keeping with the theme of this post and the screwed up state of copyright law in this country, the Swing Wedding cartoon referenced in the above quote, which came out almost 80 years ago, is still not in the public domain and is nowhere to be found on youtube or any other video sharing site. In fact, companies like MGM continue to hide their early 20th century cartoons behind the protection of copyright due to the objectionable nature of much of their content. The best I could come up with is this blog post which has screen captures of the cartoon, built around a "gag" of one of the jazz musicians turning his trumpet into a syringe to inject himself with heroin. Certainly not the first cartoon to engage in racial stereotypes, but hardly an auspicious start for the "Who Dat" phenomenon nonetheless.
An apparently common scene in the minstrel skits of the '30s featured the sudden appearance of a ghost, with the terrified black characters calling out "Who dat?" The earliest clip I could find online of the phrase being used in musical form is from the Marx brothers' 1937 film A Day at the Races, which featured Whitey's Lindy Hoppers dancing to chants of "Who Dat":
The phrase was then allegedly picked up during World War 2 by American fighter pilots, who would say "Who dat say who dat?" to break radio silence. I say allegedly, as the only references I could find to that were in the Wikipedia article itself and a few message board threads referencing the Wikipedia article. From there, the phrase entered the sports lexicon:
[S]ome claim it began with Southern University fans either in the late 1960s or early 1970s and went "Who dat say dey gonna beat dem Jags" - Southern University being nicknamed the Jaguars. Another claim is that around the same time it began at St. Augustine High School, a historically African-American all boys Catholic high school in New Orleans, and then spread to the New Orleans Public Schools. Another claim is that the cheer originated at Patterson High School in Patterson, Louisiana (home of Saints running back Dalton Hilliard). In the late 1970s fans at Alcorn State University and Louisiana State University picked up on the cheer.
By 1983, the New Orleans Saints organization officially adopted it during the tenure of coach Bum Phillips, and Aaron Neville (along with local musicians Sal and Steve Monistere and Carlo Nuccio) recorded a version of "When the Saints Go Marching In" that incorporated the chant (performed by a group of Saints players) that became a major local hit, due in part to the support of sportscaster Ron Swoboda and the fact that Saints fans had been using the chant already.
Here is the Aaron Neville version of "Who Dat" with the 1983 New Orleans Saints:
In more recent years, the phrase has appeared on the occasional hip hop song. Both Juvenile ("I'm a Saints fan that's why I say Who Dat") and Lil Wayne ("Who Dat say they gon' beat Lil Wayne") have used it in their lyrics, while Jeezy devoted an entire song to the phrase:
Not surprisingly, with the Saints just a few days away from their first ever appearance in the Super Bowl, several local musicians have put together their own versions of the Who Dat theme. Easily the best of the bunch comes from New Orleans emcee K. Gates:
It's worth noting that earlier today the NFL announced that they were easing up on their legal threats and New Orleans merchants will now be able to sell shirts with the phrase "Who Dat" as long as they do not also include the Saints or NFL logo on them. If you really need to have a golden Fleur de Lis as the background to your "Who Dat" t-shirt, however, you'll have to shell out $35 for the officially licensed version.
In light of the man's recent passing, I was digging through youtube this weekend looking for old Apache videos when I came across the above Anti-Bootlegging PSA from Yo! MTV Raps featuring Tupac, Stretch of the Live Squad, Apache and Nikki D. It captures an interesting moment in time that must look like it came from an alternate universe to the 90's babies in the crowd, as it must be unbelievable to anyone that grew up in this age of broadband and zShare that there was a point in time when people would actually go out and pay for a bootleg copy of an album (let alone a cassette version). What I like most about this video is that, despite the fact that the whole point of the clip is to speak out against bootleggers, Apache can't help but keep it real and give props to their hustle. But ultimately it's hard to watch this without feeling a bit sad; when this video first came out, who could have guessed that two of them would be murdered within four years and a third would be dead before his 40th birthday?
While most of the tributes to Apache that I saw on the internet in the wake of his passing understandably focused on Gangsta Bitch, by far his biggest hit, my favorite song of his has always been 5 Deadly Venoms. The song appeared on Tupac's album Strictly 4 My... and featured Treach, Stretch and Stretch's brother Majesty. Peep:
I'm way late on this, but above is footage of my dude Charlie Carvalho a.k.a. Chachi performing his take on Jay's Roc Boys during the opening night of Providence College's basketball season, with Ze killing it on the saxaphone. I appreciate the need to play to the crowd, so I'll forgive Charlie for betraying his Boston College roots by shouting out the Friars on this one.
Speaking of Chachi, it looks like B.E.T. has finally allowed the footage from 106 and Park to stay up on Youtube. For those of you who still haven't seen it, here's Chachi's winning performance during 106's Wild Out Wednesday's All Star competition:
I was digging through some of my old mixtapes earlier today when I came across a Kanye freestyle over Jay-Z's Million and One Questions. I had heard the freestyle a few times before, but I had never really paid attention to the lyrics. It's mostly just the usual 'Ye trash talk, with a little bit of unbelievable gun talk thrown in for good measure ("bring guns to the arraignment/let one up out the chamber"). There was one part of the verse that caught my attention today, though:
For the millionth time asking me
Questions like Toni Braxton, harassing me
Like, 'You don't care about my son's feelings?'
Can I get a minute, you wack bitch? I ain't gotta jack shit
You heard "Takeover", who running this rap shit?
Uggh, fake tits, shut up and make hits
Can't we all just get along, spread love like "Take Six"?
Hold up, Kanye was beefing with Toni Braxton? I had to look up the details as I had no recollection of such a thing, and it turns out that, yup, things got a little heated between the two back in 2002. The dispute was rather convoluted, with Irv Gotti, Murder Inc, Jay-Z, Nas and even Tupac getting dragged into it. It all started with a song that Irv Gotti produced for Braxton, without the permission of Braxton's label Arista, that sampled Tupac's Me and My Girlfriend:
Before Braxton had a chance to clear the sample with her label, Irv leaked a version of the song to Hot 97 complete with a "dirty" bonus verse featuring Gotti himself. The execs at Arista had spent years carefully building up Braxton's squeaky clean image and were less than thrilled at the prospect of that image being tarnished by a duet featuring a half-assed mafioso-inspired verse from Irv Gotti. The P.R. department at Arista did their best to pull the song from the airwaves (unfortunately, eight years later Arista still won't allow the version with Gotti's verse to see the light of day, hence the neutered youtube clip above), planning to release a "clean" version at a later date with a proper promotional push behind the record.
Jay-Z, who had also been working on a remake of Pac's song over a beat produced by Kanye and who, through the six degrees of separation of his beef with Nas, had his own beef with Gotti, heard Braxton's song and rushed to put it out before her official version of the single was properly released. A week before Braxton's album came out, Jay released this:
Braxton, not surprisingly, didn't react well to Jay's new single and went onto Hot 97 to declare that, "Jay-Z and Beyonce are messing with my money. They're trying to steal my mojo." She then went on to say that Kanye, by flipping the same sample, had taken "money out of her child's college fund." Hence the line from Kanye's freestyle, which came two years after the initial dustup over Bonnie and Clyde.
Jay's version is far superior to Braxton's, though neither can touch the original:
About two years ago, the homie Bless 1 passed along one of his instrumentals, Crawling II. Bless has a habit of emailing me amazing beats out of the blue and casually dismissing them as "just something I had lying around." Like most great producers he's a perfectionist, however as a result of his insistence on perfecting every beat before releasing it to the masses he rarely allows me to share much of the work I'm fortunate enough to get in my inbox. Who knows how many other great instrumentals he's got stashed away on his computer, but thankfully Rafi and Dallas managed to liberate Crawling and put it to good use on their latest Internets Celebrities video, featuring a trip out to the legendary Di Fara pizzeria in Brooklyn.
Oh, and $35 for a pie? Just one more reason why North Jersey's pizza stays winning over New York's.
As we get closer to its official release I'll have more details on the project, but for now all you need to know is this: Zilla and Nico have been in the studio for the past five months cooking up a new mixtape that will feature the Clean Guns duo rapping over a bunch of classic Wu-Tang beats that have been reinterpreted by some of the best underground producers in the business. The current plan is to put it out within a month over on thirtythreejones.com - date subject to change, as always - and the early returns thus far have been amazing (no joke, I've played Small Pro's remake of Criminology to four different people, and it elicited the exact same response each time: Oh Shit!). To whet your appetite, here's a freestyle of Nico rapping over the original Triumph beat:
And for those of you who prefer your freestyles acapella, a film crew was able to capture The Beast in his native habitat, the streets of Philly, performing the song:
I've been feeling a little nostalgic lately, spending far more time than I should digging through Youtube to find some of my favorite joints from the '90s. I hadn't heard this track in almost a decade, but it still holds up well. One of my favorite remixes of all time.
Combination of Mr. Cheeks, Canibus and Kurupt is enough to make the wheels on cassette tapes bust.
I always struggle with just how much personal information I should reveal about an artist whenever I put up their music. Do you, the reader, care about their "story," the motivations and inspirations behind their music, or do you just want me to keep things moving and get right to the songs? It's an even harder decision for me to make when it comes to artists that I happen to be cool with, artists that I've had some sort of interaction with outside of the internet. Such is the case with Clean Guns emcee Nico the Beast, who I've long believed to be one of the most technically skilled emcees yet to sign a label deal.
To put the following song from Nico in context, I think it's worth discussing what he had to endure in 2009. This past spring, Nico was briefly hospitalized after being involved in a fatal car accident that left one of his friends dead. Shortly after that, Nico's newborn son Domenic, Jr. passed away from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. At the time there were really no words for me to say in regards to that without it sounding trite, so I never mentioned it on here. I still haven't found a way to address it without trivializing the matter - I'm not particularly adept at dealing with personal tragedy - so we'll just move directly onto this joint from Nico in which he addresses the events of the past year and, not surprisingly, questions his own faith.
Congratulations are also in order for Nico, as he recently announced that he and his wife are expecting another child. 2010 seems to be starting out on a much better note, and I imagine it will only get better from here on out.
Zilla has a few more new songs from Nico over at Clap Cowards. They're all tremendous, but here's my favorite of the bunch:
Be sure to grab the rest of the songs. And expect to hear quite a bit more from Nico (and Zilla) in the very near future, as we'll be having a pretty big announcement coming before the end of the month.
Mere hours before the first decade of this new millenium came to an end, Raekwon managed to drop a new mixtape just before the deadline in a successful bid to lay claim to the titles of both Best Album and Best Mixtape of 2009. There's not a whole lot that needs to be said about Coke Up In Da Dollar Bill, Rae's semi-official followup to Only Built For Cuban Linx II. It's hosted by DJ Whoo Kid, with all of the annoying drops and sound effects that have long been a prerequisite of any Whoo Kid mixtape. The songs themselves aren't entirely "new," merely a collection of freestyles and guest verses that The Chef has cooked up and released over the course of the previous year, though much of the tracklisting likely will be unfamiliar to any but the most diehard of Wu and rap blog fans.
Aside from those minor quibbles, however, fans of Raekwon's mafioso style rap should find everything else about this tape to be as pure as the gleaming pile of coke that sits on the cover of the tape. Virtually every cut on here is dope, most notably Rae's brief verse over Grand Master Flash's O.G. ode to cocaine, White Lines. Much like OB4CL2, the selection of sample-heavy beats and throwback lyricism of Coke Up... stands in stark contrast to that of the 21st Century edition of cocaine rap, the "New Coke" formula if you will, that's been championed by the Clipse with the help of the Neptunes' futuristic approach to production. Which is the better of the two is a matter of taste, I suppose - uncut raw vs. a more refined product, Don Vito vs. Michael - though with the Clipse currently busy discussing clothing lines and apartment hunting with New York Magazine editors in tow, it would seem that, if nothing else, Rae has at least stayed truer to the game for the last nine innings than most of these new jacks.
