Hyphy Thizz Go

Holdin' the weight of the Bay -- Mistah F.A.B.

2007-05-28T20:10:00.000-07:00

By Garrett Caples
San Franciso Bay Guardian May23, 2007

The rapper all rapers want on their album, and the first pure product of the hyphy movement. Mistah FAB works around Atlantic's delay of his major-label debut, walks out the independent Da Baydestrian...

Still looks like slavery

But it's the black legacy

--Mistah FAB, "100 Bars"

One night last September, I hitch a ride with G-Stack of the Delinquents and Dotrix of Tha Mekanix to Dem Hoodstarz's album release party in San Francisco. As we park outside the club, Mistah FAB rolls up with a modest posse. In contrast to his usual iced-out Technicolor clubwear, the man also known as Fabby Davis Jr. is low-key, dressed all in black, a pair of designer stunna shades supplying the main clue to his identity. He hops in Stack's car to hear a newly laid track for the latter's upcoming Purple Hood, then we set out for the club, a less than half block journey whose distance is lengthened interminably by a series of well-wishers and business consultations. It's like following two CEOs across the floor of the stock exchange: Stack is on two cell phones, trying to shake hands with someone. FAB, meanwhile, handles minor transactions, poses for a photo, and takes a call, all while briefing me on the deal he had just signed with Atlantic Records for Da Yellow Bus Rydah, the much-anticipated follow-up to his 2005 disc, Son of a Pimp (Thizz Ent.).

Near the door, a man takes FAB aside. "FAB, you gotta do something about the violence," he says, meaning specifically the 141 homicides in Oakland in 2006 under former mayor and present attorney general Jerry Brown. FAB nods at what is clearly an unreasonable request, albeit one that reflects the disproportionate political burden borne by black entertainers in America. No one would turn to, say, Justin Timberlake to stop violence. Then again, I imagine no one asks Keak Da Sneak either. FAB's position, in other words, is unique.

Though he made his early reputation as a freestyle battle rhymer and owes his success to hyphy hits like "Super Sic Wit It," FAB's lyrics seldom stray into gangsta or pimp terrain — the title of his last album is simply literal. Yet he can get down on a track with the most thugged-out MCs. Aside from the giants Too Short and E-40 and on par with the perpetually hot Keak, FAB is the rapper all Bay Area rappers want on their albums, because he has the biggest buzz on the radio and in the streets. His popularity gives him influence, but FAB commands respect in the hood because he's from the hood: his compass-based hit "N.E.W. Oakland" was the first major rap recognition of his native North Oakland as a hood. This rapport with the alienated and isolated ghetto youth who constitute hyphy's core audience separates him from the vast majority of MCs to whom the label "conscious" may be applied.

"You go up to someone in the hood and be, like, 'Dick Cheney had a heart attack,' they be, like, 'Who the fuck is Dick Cheney?'" FAB says later. "But you tell him, 'Jay-Z donated a million dollars to improve water in Africa,' they be, like, 'For real?' That's something of their world. Being a Bay Area artist, I'm of their world. So you have the opportunity to teach without them knowing."

"People who have influence," FAB continues, "have an obligation to tell people, 'Preserve life. Save lives. Help lives.' But it's hard to reach people if you're not giving them something they relate to. The hyphy movement is something they relate to. Hyphy gets you in the door, to open their ears to what I'm saying. It's up to them to digest it."

That night at the club, FAB exerts his influence. When things get salty between security and Dem Hoodstarz's East Palo Alto associates, the group calls FAB to the stage to perform their collaboration "Ugh." Things chill out. FAB issues an impromptu plea against violence and murders. These are problems no single person can solve, but FAB is doing his part. Yet by the show's finale — the "Getz Ya Grown Man On" remix, on which he has a verse — Fabby Davis has left the building. Being Mistah FAB, I realize, can be exhausting.

FOLLOW THE YELLOW BUS ROAD

Mistah FAB's deal with Atlantic is a landmark in a scene long neglected by the majors. Along with Clyde Carson's signing with Capitol, FAB's arrangement — including distribution for his Faeva Afta Entertainment — is the first serious acknowledgment of the renaissance Bay Area rap has undergone in the past three years. Unlike E-40, a regional star who'd already achieved platinum sales on Jive before his push last year by Warner Bros., FAB's an unknown quantity outside the Bay. And in contrast to Frontline or the Federation — whose deals came through the respective backing of nationally known producers E-A-Ski and Rick Rock — FAB is the first evidence for a new generation of local rappers that enough talent and dedication can get you signed. It's another weight on the shoulders of the man born Stanley Cox Jr.

"Lots of people are putting their hopes into the album," he acknowledges. "They're, like, 'I hope FAB do it, because it'll kick in the door for all of us.' I realized when I was creating this album it's not just something I want to do. It's something my whole region depends on."

Da Yellow Bus Rydah's journey has been anything but smooth, however. Bottom line: Atlantic has postponed the album's tentatively scheduled spring release, due to controversy surrounding the Ghostbusters-themed advance single, "Ghost Ride It." A tribute to the hood-invented practice of throwing your car in neutral as you walk alongside and steer, "Ghost Ride It" was generating a buzz through its a video on YouTube and the minor-league MTVs when a Dec. 29, 2006, Associated Press story ("Hip-Hop Car Stunt Leaves 2 Dead") linked the song with a pair of unrelated deaths: Davender Gulley, 18, of Stockton, who "died after his head slammed into a parked car while he was hanging out the window of an SUV," and an unnamed "36-year-old man dancing on top of a moving car [who] fell off, hit his head and died in what authorities said was Canada's first ghost riding fatality." While the scant details obscure whether these incidents stemmed from ghost riding or more traditional automotive horseplay, Fox News's Hannity and Colmes found the trend alarming enough to call FAB on the carpet in January.

"You understand that a lot of kids look up to you?" Sean Hannity accused rather than asked FAB. "They sing your songs. They dress like you. They talk like you — they wanna be you!" Aside from displaying an oversimplified sense of the relationship between artist and audience, Hannity's remark reveals a comic lack of familiarity with hip-hop and their guest in particular: what part of "Super Sic Wit It" do you sing? Moreover, while rap fans undoubtedly draw from the same well of slang, the idea that they all talk the same — or even like FAB, for that matter — is a stereotype.

"I don't think they expected me to be so articulate," FAB recalls with a laugh. Yet among MCs, FAB is singular interview subject. While he has a clear sense of his talent and importance, he's more apt to discuss his personal relationship with God or how his lonely childhood as a latchkey kid inspired him to create rather than brag about how real he is. His power to articulate the struggle of urban youth — to explain the rage that motivates, say, ghost riding — is the very reason he's often labeled the spokesperson for a hyphy movement otherwise devoted to "going dumb."

Hannity treated FAB like he's dumb, but FAB turned the tables. Hannity's denunciation of his effect on the "kids" prompted the rapper to question whether his influence rightly extends to a Canadian 11 years his senior, which Hannity countered by accusing FAB of wanting as much "money and controversy" as he can get. When FAB speculated on the influence of turning on the TV and seeing 3,000 soldiers die in Iraq, Alan Colmes was sent in as a balm, ending the segment.

"Both those people were adults," FAB says later of the ghost-riding deaths. "I feel bad for the families, but at the end of the day, an adult has to take responsibility for his actions."

GHOSTBUSTED

The next pothole for Yellow Bus was a late March cease and desist letter from Columbia Pictures for copyright infringement in the "Ghost Ride It" video — just as it was about to debut on MTV's 106 and Park. "We had permission [to use the Ghostbusters van] from the man who built it and owns it," FAB explains. "But Columbia owns the logo." The video was immediately pulled from all media outlets, impairing Atlantic's ability to market the single nationally. As a result, the Yellow Bus has been parked. The official explanation, from Atlantic VP Mike Carin, is that the label is focusing on FAB's "artistic development." Despite the inevitable rumor that the rapper was dropped, Carin confirms that "the deal is still in place."

Still, such delays have silenced many MCs' buzz: witness how the delay of Raekwon's album on Aftermath has converted excitement into skepticism, or how the Team's World Premiere (Moedoe/Koch, 2006) dropped too long after its singles had peaked, leading to lower-than-expected sales. Fortunately, the structure of FAB's distribution deal allows him an unusual degree of freedom.

"They were willing to sacrifice certain things," he says of his initial decision to sign with Atlantic among competing offers. "They allowed me to do what I want to do — if I want to drop an independent album, I can."

ENTER DA BAYDESTRIAN

This flexibility has allowed the prolific FAB to immediately walk out another new album, Da Baydestrian, on May 15, through SMC/Fontana. Although, according to SMC cofounder Will Bronson, Atlantic has options to include as many as five of its songs on Yellow Bus, Baydestrian is an otherwise distinct project intended to satisfy the demand for a follow-up to Son of a Pimp. FAB's also preparing a series of summer releases, including a second installment of the all-freestyle Tonite Show with DJ Fresh. (Fresh, incidentally, edited FAB's 2005 DVD, The Freestyle King, now packaged with Baydestrian as a bonus.) With Beeda Weeda and J-Stalin, representing the East and West respectively, FAB's formed the multihood group N.E.W. Oakland, whose mixtape is nearing completion. Prince of Da Bay (In Yo Face/Hooker Boy Filmz), a documentary on FAB by local hip-hop director Dame Hooker, should be out by press time, while FAB's next DVD, Shoobalaboobie TV, is in the works.

"You do what you have to do to keep the buzz going," FAB says. "Also sales — on the independent level, your numbers are what's important [to major labels]." Da Baydestrian thus has Atlantic's blessing, but its commercial success will determine the fate of his deal.

Yet the need to appeal to the marketplace hasn't inhibited FAB's creativity, and Da Baydestrian refuses to play it safe. Rather than exploit the hyphy sound he helped establish, FAB only sprinkles it in, most obviously on the remix of the Traxamillion-produced "Sideshow" and the opening title track, one of six bangers produced by FAB protégé Rob-E. The young Martinez-born producer proves his versatility on tracks like the triumphant "Get This Together" and the melancholy "Life on Track," featuring Faeva Afta vocalist J-Nash, whose Hyphy Love drops in August. Another four productions by Son of a Pimp collaborator Genessee contribute to Baydestrian's in-house feel even as the family breaks new ground: "Can't Wait," say, evokes Andre 3000's explorations of go-go, filtered through FAB's hyphy sensibility, while "Shorty Tryin' 2 Get By" is a contemporary "Keep Ya Head Up" spiced with Bay Area R&B. The album is refreshingly free of skits, and guest stars are kept to a minimum, but Too Short blesses the disc three times, an unambiguous stamp of approval from Bay rap's founder.

What makes Da Baydestrian one of the most extraordinary albums since hyphy's inception, however, is its social consciousness. "Deepest Thoughts," for example, hits out at President George W. Bush, but even more pointedly at Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for expanding the prison system instead of aiding the poor. The Sean T–produced "Crack Baby Anthem" addresses teen dope dealers, seeking to uplift without castigating or glorifying their activities — for the nonghetto audience, the song connects the dots between poverty, crime, and the present political climate. FAB describes his approach as "hip-hyphy," presenting an alternative to hip-hop fans who consider hyphy juvenile or incomprehensible. Granted, the disc's school bus and helmet imagery — referring to the hyphy concept of acting "retarded" — is hardly p.c. Nonetheless, FAB's lunchbox-wielding Baydestrian is a welcome change from the exaltation of guns and dope adorning your average rap album.

"In no way am I trying to say I'm like Martin Luther King or Malcolm X," FAB explains. "But I realized I could create nonsense and seem to support ignorance, or I can get people to start looking at the reality of it, and the reality of it is that young blacks are dying, not only in the Bay; they're dying everywhere. We've been raised in a warlike civilization. We've been brainwashed to accept war as the proper thing to do when things don't go right."

"Tupac [Shakur] said it himself," FAB concludes. "He said, 'I'm not going to be the one to change the world. But I guarantee I'll plant a seed in the mind of someone who does.' We're all the Tupac generation. Pac was hyphy."

While I don't think it's my place to declare FAB the next Tupac, I can't fail to be struck by his invocation of the Bay Area icon. On a superficial level, of course, with all his non-thugged-out, cartoonish imagery, FAB is nothing like Pac, just as the hyphy movement differs from the Bay's mid-'90s sound. Yet locally, if not nationally, the two rappers occupy the same position on the map of hip-hop: like Pac, FAB has cred with nearly everyone, he has a positive message within an utterly street aesthetic, and he makes tunes everyone wants to hear.

No rapper has embodied all three attributes since Pac, and that combination makes FAB extraordinary.

www.myspace.com/mistahfab

"Dream" -- Graffiti artist Mike Dream

2007-05-28T20:00:00.000-07:00

By Garrett Caples
San Franciso Bay Guardian May 2, 2007

Graffiti writer Michael Francisco, a.k.a. Mike Dream (1969-2000), was already a legend when he was murdered during a robbery. "They wouldn't have shot him if they knew who he was," his younger brother and fellow Those Damn Kids crew member Lil John says. And no doubt, this is true. Like Too Short, the Filipino American spray can artist claimed 1983 as his debut year and Oakland as his turf, and he is likewise cited as a founder, albeit visual, of Bay Area hip-hop.

The group show "Dream" highlights the artist's work alongside tributes by TDK and various other crews. Given the ephemeral, site-specific nature of graffiti, many of Dream's works are present only in photographs or re-creations by his colleagues. Yet this hardly diminishes their power. Tax Dollars Kill (1995) - designed by Dream and executed with the TDK crew - exemplifies the formal sophistication of his work: the top suggests pop art in its reproduction of the US dollar font, at once faithful and distorted, though it surrounds an image of protest quite foreign to Warhol world.

Graf writers often reserve their greatest eloquence for their signatures, and the bottom half - contributors' tags in nearly indecipherable lettering known as wildstyle - evokes abstract expressionism in a manic confusion of figure and ground. There's even a hint of surrealism in the hypnagogic face with dollar-bill eyes, seemingly emerging in the center to unite the upper and lower halves. This is art of rare complexity and outsider imagination.

DREAM Through May 15. Open during events and by appointment. Rx Gallery, 132 Eddy, SF. (415) 756-8825, www.rxgallery.com, www.dreamtdk.com

Naté

2007-05-28T19:45:00.000-07:00

By Garrett Caples
San Franciso Bay Guardian April 18, 2007

Q's Lounge, the musical venue of Everett and Jones BBQ in Jack London Square, relaunches its normally $10 music series with a free show: three 45-minute sets by Oakland's premier chanteuse, Naté.

Naté is well known in the Bay Area's hip-hop community, having laid hooks for luminaries such as Mac Dre, B-Legit, and Bavgate, among many others. Yet she's a genuine artist in her own right, with a voice that ranges from low-down and grimy to soaring and crystal clear.

A veteran live performer, Naté belts it out at Q's with her three-piece R&B combo. And it's free — but your date will still think you're big ballin'!

Q's Lounge / 126 Broadway, Oakland / (510) 663-2350 / www.eandjbbq.com

Purple Reign

2007-05-28T19:29:00.000-07:00

G-Stack and V-White of East Oakland's Delinquents drop some very unhyphy solo projects as they contemplate a final album together

By Garrett Caples
San Franciso Bay Guardian February 14, 2007

I first heard the Delinquents in 1999, when "That Man!" was in heavy rotation on KMEL. Its subject matter — caring for the kids while the wifey's out cheating — was unique in gangsta rap. "We came from the left with that," G-Stack says, yet the freshness of the concept, combined with a funky Mike D beat and memorable Harm hook, made it an instant classic. By then their 1999 album, Bosses Will Be Bosses (Dank or Die) was six months old, and they already had a storied past.

Part of the Bay's early '90s independent scene, building a buzz from the ground up, G-Stack and V-White dropped their debut, the cassette-only Insane, circa 1993, on their label, Dank or Die. After a pair of 1995 EPs — The Alleyway and Outta Control (both Dank or Die) — the Delinquents signed to Priority at the same time the imprint inked its distribution deal with Master P's then-Richmond-based No Limit Records. Yet during the promotional campaign for the 1997 full-length Big Moves, the duo learned the difference between being on Priority and being a priority.

"This was when 'I'm 'bout It, 'bout It' blew up for Master P," a relaxed Stack recalls at the East Oakland studio where he's completing G-Stack Presents: Welcome 2 Purple City (4TheStreets), due March 27. "We promoting our album down south, West Coast, Midwest. Down south everything halted. We going into stores, they got huge Master P displays, and they didn't even know we was coming out." The effect of this tepid label support, moreover, was compounded by backlash from their home audience, who equated independence with authenticity.

"At that time," Stack explains, "if you signed to a big label, people thought you weren't real anymore. That affected our underground fan base. Then Priority didn't support us. So we went back independent with Bosses, and our fans started messing with us again."

"Now we got a record buzzin' on the streets. And radio wouldn't support us, so a lot of local rappers started meeting, and everybody went up to KMEL. Nobody had a record at the time, and ours was doing good, so everybody pushed our record." He reviews the memory with satisfaction. "We kinda forced them to play it."

While the success of "That Man!" helped move 65,000 copies of Bosses, radio play was short-lived, because Clear Channel–owned KMEL had stopped playing local music. Yet even during the Bay's leanest hip-hop years from 2000 to '03, the Delinquents maintained a loyal following, selling out shows, moving units, and putting new talent on, as well as throwing the free Lake Berryessa Bash — something like a sideshow on Jet Skis — for thousands of fans every couple years. "They were the crazy glue of the town," says Dotrix 4000, who, as half of Tha Mekanix, produced several hot tracks on Purple City. "They held the scene together when it could've fell apart."

While the Delinquents have never lost their iconic status in the Bay — witness Stack's representation of East Oakland on Mistah FAB's geographical hit "N.E.W. Oakland" — they have strikingly chosen to pursue solo careers right as the region's commercial fortunes are on the rise. Both rappers insist the decision has nothing to do with aesthetics or personal differences, and this is apparent from the warm vibe when V-White arrives for the photo shoot. Promoting his just-released Perfect Timin' (V-White Ent./SMC), V explains the move as a way to stay original in what they see as an increasingly contentless hyphy movement.

"Chuck E. Cheese music," V says. "When I came up, the Bay was about game-spitters, cats with swagger. Now it's, like, make up a word — do something stupid. That ain't where I'm coming from. I'm with the reality rap, from them days when you rapped about what you was going through."

Stack is similarly defiant: "Our machine wasn't built on what radio did for us. Now it's hella different. If you independent, people think you're weak. You need the radio to support you. I don't like how it is now — I don't kiss ass."

"I don't have to make music the radio gotta play," V concludes. "I'm making music from my heart." Judging from Timin' — a 27-track opus largely produced by protégé Big Zeke, spiked with hitworthy tracks by E-A-SKI and an intriguingly nonhyphy Traxamillion — V has a big heart, punctuating his tales of street crime with more personal memories, such as his daughter catching her first fish.

Stack meanwhile is using Purple City to introduce his own young crew, the Heem Team, as well as his alter ego, Purple Mane, who's something like a dope-slinging superhero. A warm-up for Purple Hood, Stack's proper solo debut, slated for July, Purple City began as a mixtape but morphed into a formidable album, including all-original beats by the likes of Tone Capone, FAB associate Rob-E, and Stack's in-house team Sir Rich and Q. (For the record, the Delinquents were on the purple aesthetic — stemming from a variety of weed popular in Oakland — by the time of their 2003 mixtape, The Purple Project, a year before Big Boi and Dipset adopted it.)

The solo careers of V and Stack raise the question of what will happen to the Delinquents as a group. Both confirm a new album is on the table — most likely the final Delinquents project.

"We've been rapping since '93," V says. "If I'm doing the same thing I was doing in '93, that means I ain't grew none. We're just getting older."

"I feel very comfortable doing the last Delinquents album," Stack adds. "I can actually feel like I've completed it."

Alias John Brown -- For the Non-Believers (Wildlife/I-Khan Distribution)

2007-05-28T19:19:00.000-07:00

Album Review by Garrett Caples
San Francisco Bay Guardian February 28, 2007

After grinding in the Bay for the past three years, Chicago native Alias John Brown has cranked up his buzz due to a recent tour with André Nickatina and this 24-track anthology of new songs, singles, and freestyles.

Combining gravelly vocals with smooth, rapid-fire flows, AJB defies characterization: he's "an educated thug," he suggests on "Certified Mobsters," at ease among gangstas Amp Pachino and the Jacka though perhaps more at home dropping lines such as "We done put in more work than a sharecropper / But we ain't gettin' our fair share of the proper" alongside Planet Asia on "State to State."

AJB charts an independent course, eschewing brand-name filler and dull bling in favor of timeless hip-hop themes, from partying ("Tear the Club Up") to a friend's violent death ("Dante"). Instead of jumping on the yellow bus for local cred, AJB never once cries "hyphy," though the uptempo bounce of "Catch Yo Breath" would fit in nicely alongside recent hits by, say, Mistah FAB.

With much of its production divided between local phenom Aristotle and Chicago legend No I.D., For the Non-Believers is authentically Bay even as its heavy Chi flavor makes it unique in a trend-chasing time.

ALIAS JOHN BROWN With the Jacka, Big Rich, Equipto, and DJ Juice. Sat/3, 8 p.m., $20. Fat City (formerly Studio Z), 314 11th St., SF. (415) 252-7666

DJ Fresh -- So fresh and so clean

2007-05-28T16:12:00.000-07:00

By Garrett Caples
San Franciso Bay Guardian February 14, 2007

Some weeks ago I ran by Melrose Middle School in East Oakland to catch DJ Fresh in action. Voted third-best DJ in the United States at the International Turntablist Federation finals in 1999, the 26-year-old veteran is a nationwide presence in hip-hop and handled the 1s and 2s behind figures such as Nas and Common before going on to produce a series of album-length projects during the past two years with Bay Area luminaries such as Mistah FAB, J-Stalin, and Sac-Town kingpin Smigg Dirtee. But the gig at Melrose was a little different...

... an afternoon class in rap and production for a bunch of mildly rambunctious middle schoolers. (He teaches two groups there, in addition to an adult education course at Eastside Alliance in Oakland.)

"This is my good class," he said with a wry smile, and in a way his performance managing the kids is more impressive to me than his two national tours as Nas's DJ for Stillmatic and God's Son (Sony, 2001 and 2002 respectively). Laid-back, allowing the students to address him as DJ Fresh, he can still rock the don't-mess-with-me teacher mode when necessary, commanding respect and obedience. It's something you need a knack for.

Fresh was born in Baltimore and moved with his mother to San Jose at age nine. He spent his teens going back and forth between the coasts, developing his talents on piano as well as turntables. "I tell people I started DJing when I was nine," he said, "because I was on them things, fucking with it every day." Inspired by older brothers DJ LS1 and DJ Dummy, who remained back East, the teenage Fresh joined 12-Inch Assassins, a clique of battle DJs featuring his siblings and DJ Chaps.

LS1 went on to DJ for DMX and more recently G-Unit, while Dummy worked with Onyx and currently DJs for Common. Through Dummy, Fresh got to perform at his first major rap shows, spinning at a number of Common gigs. By 18, Fresh was back in the Bay Area, only to be recruited by Nas, whose tours really put him on the map.

"The nigga just called me up one morning," Fresh recalled. "I knew it was going to happen, but I'm the kind of person, I'll believe it when I see it. He was, like, 'Have you done any major shows?' I kinda lied. My brother told me, 'Before you tell him what you want, tell him to make you an offer.' So he made me an offer I couldn't refuse. His manager called me back the next day, and it's been on since then."

"After my second tour with him, I went to school," Fresh continued. "I took that money and used it for my schooling over at Expression in Emeryville. The tour shit is cool, but I didn't want my eggs in one basket. I went for sound engineering — I learned a lot of shit there." Though many rap producers eschew such formal training for fear of losing their autodidactic uniqueness, Fresh is a prime example of someone whose education has only enhanced his natural talent. Check, for example, the mix on his 2006 collaboration with J-Stalin, The Real World: West Oakland (FreshInTheFlesh). The sound is spacious — huge — clean and clear as a bell, requiring technical virtuosity behind the boards. Combined with his knowledge of '70s and '80s R&B — "What I See," for example, interpolates "Strawberry Letter 22" — Fresh's beats immediately stand out.

"When I make my beats, I still got the DJ mentality," Fresh said. "Right when you hear it, it's catchy. When you doing a party, you trying to keep it cracking, keep it off the hook. I take a lot of old shit and re-create it and reflip it. Bring it back with 808s and claps and all that good stuff." While such music could hardly be described as hyphy, it was, in fact, Mistah FAB who first put Fresh on the map in the Bay, freestyling on a 2005 full-length in Fresh's main series, The Tonite Show (FreshInTheFlesh).

"It was before FAB had blew up," Fresh pointed out. "We had a song called 'We Go Stupid in the Bay.' It had a buzz, so that was my first establishment. Then he needed his DVD made — The Freestyle King. So we swapped. I edited the whole shit. That put me on blast more too."

Both the DVD and The Tonite Show helped fuel the increasing buzz around FAB's main album, Son of a Pimp (Thizz, 2005), a process Fresh hopes to replicate for FAB's upcoming Sony disc, The Yellow Bus Rider. A second FAB-hosted Tonite Show is projected for a March release.

This year promises to be a big one for Fresh: His gang of impending Tonite Show releases includes a compilation with his frequent collaborators due Feb. 23, as well as The Tonite Show with DJ Fresh, a mixtape-style installment of Fresh DJing his own music, slated for late February on Koch Records. He's also shooting beats at his previous big-name associates — soon to drop are Tonite Shows starring Beeda Weeda and J-Stalin, Nump of "I Got Grapes" fame, the Acorn neighborhood phenom Shady Nate, and even Nas himself — and he intends to start a production team, the Whole Shebang, with Jamon Dru, 10AK, and Tower, an extraordinarily deep-voiced rapper who's a cousin of Richie Rich. To top a furious schedule, Fresh has a radio show, running Mondays through Fridays on the first and third weeks of every month on Rapbay.com, called The World's Freshest Hour.

"He's just a hustlin' dude," FAB remarked. "He's always on his grind, and I respect that. He's very humble, and that's what makes working with him so easy."

myspace.com/thetoniteshow

myspace.com/djfreshh

myspace.com/thewholeshebang2

J-Stalin -- On Behalf of the Streets (Livewire Records/Zoo Entertainment)

2007-05-28T16:01:00.000-07:00

Album Review by Garrett Caples
San Francisco Bay Guardian January 3, 2007

Following two superb, albumlike mixtapes — Early Morning Shift with the Demolition Men and The Real World: West Oakland with DJ Fresh — On Behalf of the Streets is J-Stalin's so-called official debut, produced by Tha Mekanix, a.k.a. Dotrix4000 and Kenny Tweed. While the East Oakland producers have dropped album-length bombs in the past, Streets is the first release over which they've had total control, and the result is one of the most individual Bay Area rap albums since the region got hot again. With their ultrasynthetic sonic palette and penchant for minor chord filigree, Tha Mekanix are among the most distinctive producers in the area, making music that works with hyphy (check "The Function") but also is its own thing.

Much credit, of course, goes to the pint-size rapper with the gravelly voice whose self-harmonized hooks lend real poignancy to semiautobiographical tales of life as a young d-boy in West Oakland's Cypress Village: "A long time ago, man, I was told / If you got money, man, crack you sold," Stalin warbles on "I Was Told." Stalin is most surprising with his unabashed flair for R&B, evident on "Party Jumpin' " and the sensuous "Fuck U," on which the young playa engages in Prince-like seduction over the fattest, roundest bass thump in recent memory. With the right mix of local dons (Keak Da Sneak, Mistah FAB) and Stalin's own formidable crew (Shady, Jonah, Maybeck), Streets is state-of-the-art Oakland hip-hop from a rapper who's only just begun.

Hyphy Holidays

2006-12-20T22:38:00.000-08:00

Bay Area lays down the top 10 albums of 2006
Plus: What really happened at the BARS Awards?

Hyphy Holidays

by Garrett Caples
San Francisco Bay Guardian December 12, 2006

A few weeks ago while writing a story about Fillmore rap, I called JT the Bigga Figga, only to be greeted by a long outgoing message informing callers he was in Nigeria on his Mandatory Hyphy tour with Snoop Dogg "for the next 48 to 72 hours." Though the message was largely a public self-congratulation delivered in the veteran rapper-producer's bigger-than-thou banter, even JT sounded surprised, as if the content of his boast for once exceeded his formidable powers of expression.

And in truth, it was big: as recently as last year, such a feat would have seemed impossible. But JT's association with Snoop — forged by the pair's recent DVD, Mandatory Business (Get Low) — and the idea of so ambitious a tour under the rubric of hyphy indicate just how far Bay Area rap has come over the course of 2006. Perhaps encouraged by Lil Jon's example, big names have begun to stick their toes in the Bay, though whether Diddy found any rappers during his largely restaurant-based visit is unknown. MTV stirred the waters with video hits by the likes of E-40 ("Tell Me When to Go," "U and Dat"), Big Rich ("That's the Business"), and Bailey ("U-C-It"), while the Bay sent three Best West Coast DJ nominees to the Justo Mixtape Awards: Demolition Men, DJ Juice, and 40's DJ E-Rock. Upcoming major-label releases by Mistah FAB (Atlantic), the Team's Clyde Carson (Capitol), and the Pack (Jive) promise 2007 will continue to build on the momentum of the past couple years.

The best thing about the past 12 months has been the sheer amount of world-class music released. The signal event of the first quarter was, of course, the March release of E-40's My Ghetto Report Card (BME/Reprise), which generated national curiosity about the hyphy movement and set the stage for much that ensued. April through June saw a flood of amazing discs that resumed in late August and hasn't abated since. These periods of activity were symbolically separated by the entrance of Mob Figaz's Husalah, who was given 53 months in federal prison for possession with intent to distribute more than five kilos of cocaine. The loss of this Mac Dre–level talent is a definite blow to local rap. But given six months of freedom after his sentencing to put his affairs in order, Hus recorded several albums' worth of material, two of which — Shower Posse, a duo album with the Jacka, and Explosive Mode III, a quartet with Jacka, San Quinn, and Messy Marv — have just appeared from FriscoStreetShow.com and rank with his finest work.

This year's activity was set to culminate in the second annual Bay Area Rap Scene (BARS) Awards on Dec. 2 at the San Mateo Event Center. Every rapper I spoke to was excited about the event: those who had money bought suits, those who didn't rented, and even those who clung to white T's — or T's with massive airbrushed representations of themselves — approached the affair with respectful seriousness. "The idea was great," said Mistah FAB, who brought his mom to the event. "But the ordeal was a mess."

Despite a stiff cover charge of $50 to $250, the attendance of national press and industry figures, and the promise of performances and presentations by many of the Bay's finest, the show was shut down after short sets by San Quinn and Messy Marv, two impromptu songs by E-40 and Keak Da Sneak, and roughly four awards. Fans were angry, the national press was unimpressed, and Bay Area rap was embarrassed at a delicate moment in its resurgence.

Vibe, for example, posted its online coverage under the headline "BARS Awards Shut Down after Crowd Gets Too Hyphy," a misleading statement immediately contradicted by the story's first paragraph, which blames the event's premature end on "lack of security and poor planning on the part of promoters." The latter assessment is much more accurate. The allegedly "too hyphy" crowd consisted of the accumulated entourages of rappers who refused to leave the stage. Yet with the possible exception of Numskull and the Caliban (who briefly hijacked the show to perform one song), artists' behavior could hardly be called "hyphy" — it was more a sullen milling around brought on by boredom with the show's slack execution.

"If there's a big pause in something that's supposed to be entertaining, of course there's going to be problems, because no one is paying attention," said the Jacka, whose much-deserved Underground Artist of the Year Award was announced to a near-empty hall. "It's like, 'Let's walk around. Fire up some weed. Let's get onstage. They're letting everyone else on.’”

"Last year it was better," he concluded. "They had the kind of security people respected."

It's difficult not to agree with this assessment. Google's cache of a Dec. 1 Craigslist ad page seeking security guards for the next-day event hardly inspires confidence, and the responsibility of securing the stage and choreographing a smooth sequence of events surely lies with the organizers, not the participants. Despite vigorous rebuttals posted by awards staff and promoters on Vibe.com and other sites, the overwhelming impression was that a lack of preparation to deal with what was admittedly stubborn but ultimately nonviolent behavior contributed to the blurry line between performers and spectators so typical of rap events.

"If you're organizing a thousand personalities with a million egos, you've got to give yourself room to deal with things you didn't plan for," said FAB, whose scheduled appearance with Too Short was among the evening's casualties. This was particularly unfortunate as Short has done all he can for hyphy of late, including his single, "Keep Bouncin'," on which Snoop name-checks the movement. Now based in Atlanta, on a major label, and still highly successful, $hort doesn't need the hyphy movement but has taken it under his wing, seemingly out of love for the hip-hop scene of which he is universally acknowledged as the founder.

"Short's a visionary," FAB said. "His sponsorship and persona allow us to get into certain spots. But it's up to us to be accountable for what we're doing."

In any case, it would be a mistake to blame the artists for the collapse of the awards. There were no arrests and no incidents of parking-lot mayhem among cheated fans — just disappointment. The entire scene has worked hard to get to its present level of success and has conducted itself with infinitely less violence since Mac Dre's death.

The rappers deserve a celebration, because whether or not the scene explodes in 2007 on the national level, the impressive collective output of Bay Area rap over the past two years already represents an extraordinary artistic achievement. The following is a strictly chronological list of personal favorites of 2006, culled from a huge stack of worthy contenders.

TOP 10
(1) Demolition Men, The Animal Planet Mixtape (starring Husalah and the Jacka of the Mob Figaz) (Mob Figaz)

(2) E-40, My Ghetto Report Card (Reprise/WEA)
(3) The Team, World Premiere (Rex)
(4) Bullys Wit Fullys, The Infrastructure (SMC)
(5) Husalah, Guns, Dope, and Religion (Sumo)
(6) Beeda Weeda, Turfology (Hieroglyphics)
(7) Traxamillion, The Slapp Addict (Slapp Addict)
(8) Dem Hood Starz, Band-Aide and Scoot (SMC)
(9) Big Rich, Block Tested Hood Approved (Koch)
(10) J-Stalin, On Behalf of the Streets (Livewire)

Shock G corrects the record

2006-12-20T22:37:00.000-08:00

[update coming soon]

The 'Moe Show -- San Quinn, Messy Marv, Big Rich, Will Hen leading out from the Fillmore

2006-12-02T15:14:00.000-08:00

by Garrett Caples
San Franciso Bay Guardian November 22, 2006

If you don't know about the Filthy ’Moe

It's time I let real game unfold....

Messy Marv, "True to the Game"

I meet Big Rich on the corner of Laguna and Grove streets, near the heart of the Fillmore District according to its traditional boundaries of Van Ness and Fillmore, although the hood actually extends as far west as Divisadero. "Me personally," the 24-year-old rapper and lifelong ’Moe resident confesses, "I don't be sticking my head out too much. But I make sure I bring every photo session or interview right here."

At the moment he's taping a segment for an upcoming DVD by the Demolition Men, who released his mixtape Block Tested Hood Approved in April. Since then, the former member of the San Quinn–affiliated group Fully Loaded has created a major buzz thanks in part to the snazzy video for "That's the Business," his E-A-Ski- and CMT-produced single. It was the Jam of the Week in August on MTV2 and added to straight-up MTV in time for the Oct. 3 release of the Koch full-length Block Tested Hood Approved. (Originally titled Fillmore Rich, the album was renamed to capitalize on the mixtape-generated hype.)

Presented by E-40 and featuring Rich's dope in-house producer Mal Amazin in addition to heavyweights such as Sean-T, Rick Rock, and Droop-E, BTHA is a deep contribution to the rising tide of Bay Area hip-hop. While Big Rich's gruff baritone delivery and gritty street tales make his music more mobster than hyphy, the album is not unaffected by the latter style's up-tempo bounce, helping the movement hold national attention during this season of anticipation before Mistah FAB's major-label debut on Atlantic. "I don't necessarily make hyphy music," Rich says. "But I definitely condone it. As long as the spotlight is on the Bay, I'm cool with it." Coming near the end of a year that has seen landmark albums from San Quinn, Messy Marv, Will Hen, and fellow Fully Loaded member Bailey — not to mention JT the Bigga Figga's high-profile tour with Snoop Dogg, which has taken hyphy all the way to Africa — Rich's solo debut is one more indication of the historic district's importance to the vitality of local hip-hop and Bay Area culture in general.

THE EDGE OF PACIFIC HEIGHTS

The Fillmore is a community under siege, facing external and internal pressures. On the one hand, gentrification — in the form of high-end shops and restaurants serving tourists, Pacific Heights residents, and an increasingly affluent demographic creeping into the area — continues to erode the neighborhood's edges. "If you grew up in the Fillmore, you can see Pacific Heights has crept down the hill, closer to the ghetto," says Hen, who as a member of multiregional group the Product (assembled by Houston legend Scarface) moved more than 60,000 copies of its recent "thug conscious" debut, One Hunid (Koch). "Ten years ago there were more boundaries. But the Fillmore's prime location, and I'm not asleep to this fact. We're five minutes away from everything in the city. That has to play a role in the way the district is represented in a city that makes so much off tourism. You might not want your city portrayed as gangsta, even though it is."

Hen has a point. The notion of San Francisco as gangsta is somewhat at odds with the way the city perceives itself. As an Oakland writer, I can attest to this, for even in San Francisco's progressive artistic and intellectual circles, Oakland is usually understood to be beyond the pale in terms of danger and violence. Yet none of the Oakland rappers I've met talk about their hoods in quite the same way Fillmore rappers do, at least when it comes to their personal safety. As Big Rich films his section of the DVD, for example, he remarks on the continual stream of police cruisers circling the block.

"They slowed it down," he says. "Now they only come every 90 seconds. Right around here is murder central — people be shooting each other every night. By 7 o'clock, we all gotta disperse, unless you want to get caught in the cross fire." He waves his hands in mock terror. "I ain't trying to die tonight!"

“BUSTING HEADS”

Though Rich is clowning, his statement is perfectly serious — indiscriminate gunfire among gang members, often in their early teens, makes nocturnal loitering a risky proposition at best. As of September, according to the San Francisco Police Department's Web site, the Northern Police District, which includes the Fillmore, had the city's second highest number of murders this year, 11, ceding first place only to the much larger Bayview's 22. For overall criminal incidents, the Northern District led the city, at more than 10,000 so far.

Though Fillmore rappers might be given to stressing the danger of their hood, insofar as such themes constitute much of hip-hop's subject matter and they feel the need to refute the city's nongangsta image, no one I spoke to seemed to be boasting. They sounded sad. Hen, for example, reported that he'd been to three funerals in October, saying, "You hardly have time to mourn for one person before you have to mourn for the next person." While the SFPD's Public Affairs Office didn't return phone calls seeking corroboration, both Rich and Hen indicate the neighborhood is suffering from an alarming amount of black-on-black violence.

"Basically, it's genocide. We're going to destroy each other," Hen says. "It used to be crosstown rivalries rather than in your backyard. Now there's more of that going on. If you get into it at age 15, the funk is already there. Whoever your crew is funking with, you're in on it." The ongoing cycle of drug-related violence — the Fillmore's chief internal pressure — has only ramped up under the Bush administration's regressive economic policies. It's a fact not lost on these rappers: as Rich puts it succinctly on BTHA, "Bush don't give a fuck about a nigga from the hood."

"Everybody's broke. That's why everybody's busting each other's heads," explains Rich, who lost his older brother to gun violence several years ago. "If you don't know where your next dollar's coming from ..."

To be sure, the rappers give back to the Fillmore. They support large crews of often otherwise unemployable youth, and Messy Marv, for example, has been known to hand out turkeys for Thanksgiving and bikes for Christmas. But Bay Area rap is only just getting back on its feet, and while the rappers can ameliorate life in the Fillmore's housing projects, they don't have the means to dispel the climate of desperation in a hood surrounded by one of the most expensive cities on earth. Moreover, they are acutely aware of the disconnect between their community and the rest of the city, which trades on its cultural cachet.

"It's like two different worlds," Hen muses. "You have people sitting outside drinking coffee right in the middle of the killing fields. They're totally safe, but if I walk over there, I might get shot at. But the neighborhood is too proud for us to be dying at the hands of each other."

HOOD PRIDE

The neighborhood pride Will Hen invokes is palpable among Fillmore rappers. "I get a warm feeling when I'm here," Messy Marv says. "The killing, you can't just say that's Fillmore. That's everywhere. When you talk about Fillmore, you got to go back to the roots. Fillmore was a warm, jazzy African American place where you could come and dance, drink, have fun, and be you."

Mess is right on all counts. Lest anyone think I misrepresent Oaktown: the citywide number of murders in Oakland has already topped 120 this year. But my concern here is with the perceived lack of continuity Mess suggests between the culture of the Fillmore then and now. By the early 1940s, the Fillmore had developed into a multicultural neighborhood including the then-largest Japanese population in the United States. In 1942, when FDR sent West Coast citizens of Japanese origin to internment camps, their vacated homes were largely filled by African Americans from the South, attracted by work in the shipyards. While the district had its first black nightclub by 1933, the wartime boom transformed the Fillmore into a major music center.

"In less than a decade, San Francisco's African American population went from under 5,000 to almost 50,000," according to Elizabeth Pepin, coauthor of the recent history of Fillmore jazz Harlem of the West (Chronicle). "The sheer increase in number of African Americans in the neighborhood made the music scene explode."

Though known as a black neighborhood, Pepin says, the Fillmore "was still pretty diverse" and even now retains vestiges of its multicultural history. Japantown persists, though much diminished, and Big Rich himself is half Chinese, making him the second Chinese American rapper of note. "My mother's parents couldn't speak a lick of English," he says. "But she was real urban, real street. I wasn't brought up in a traditional Chinese family, but I embrace it and I get along with my other side." Nonetheless, Pepin notes, the massive urban renewal project that destroyed the Fillmore's iconic jazz scene by the late ’60s effectively curtailed its diversity, as did the introduction of barrackslike public housing projects.

The postwar jazz scene, of course, is the main source of nostalgia tapped by the Fillmore Merchants Association (FMA). Talk of a musical revival refers solely to the establishment of upscale clubs — Yoshi's, for example, is scheduled to open next year at Fillmore and Eddy — offering music that arguably is no longer organically connected to the neighborhood. In a brief phone interview, Gus Harput, president of the FMA's Jazz Preservation District, insisted the organization would "love" to open a hip-hop venue, although he sidestepped further inquiries. (Known for its hip-hop shows, Justice League at 628 Divisadero closed around 2003 following a 2001 shooting death at a San Quinn performance and was later replaced by the Independent, which occasionally books rap.) The hood's hip-hop activity might be too recent and fall outside the bounds of jazz, yet nowhere in the organization's online Fillmore history (fillmorestreetsf.com) is there an acknowledgement of the MTV-level rap scene down the street.

Yet the raucous 1949 Fillmore that Jack Kerouac depicts in his 1957 book, On the Road — replete with protohyphy blues shouters like Lampshade bellowing such advice as “Don’t die to go to heaven, start in on Doctor Pepper and end up on whisky!” — sounds less like the area's simulated jazz revival and more like the community’s present-day hip-hop descendants.

How could it be otherwise? The aesthetics have changed, but the Fillmore’s musical genius has clearly resided in rap since Rappin’ 4Tay debuted on Too $hort’s Life Is ... Too $hort (Jive, 1989), producer-MC JT the Bigga Figga brought out the Get Low Playaz, and a teenage San Quinn dropped his classic debut, Don’t Cross Me (Get Low, 1993). While there may not be one definitive Fillmore hip-hop style, given that successful rappers tend to work with successful producers across the Bay regardless of hood, Messy Marv asserts the ’Moe was crucial to the development of the hyphy movement: “JT the Bigga Figga was the first dude who came with the high-energy sound. He was ahead of his time. I’m not taking nothing away from Oakland, Vallejo, or Richmond. I’m just letting you know what I know.”

In many ways the don of the ’Moe, San Quinn — reaffirming his status earlier this year with The Rock (SMC), featuring his own Ski- and CMT-produced smash, “Hell Ya” — could be said to typify a specifically Fillmore rap style, in which the flow is disguised as a strident holler reminiscent of blues shouting. While both Messy Marv and Big Rich share affinities with this delivery, Will Hen, for instance, and Quinn’s brother Bailey — whose Champ Bailey (City Boyz, 2006) yielded the MTV and radio success “U C It” — favor a smoother, more rapid-fire patter.

What is most striking here is that, with the exception of fellow traveler Messy Marv (see sidebar), all of these artists, as well as recent signee to the Game’s Black Wall Street label, Ya Boy, came up in the ’90s on San Quinn’s influential Done Deal Entertainment. Until roughly two years ago, they were all one crew. While working on his upcoming eighth solo album, From a Boy to a Man, for his revamped imprint, Done Deal, Quinn paused for a moment to take justifiable pride in his protégés, who now constitute the Fillmore’s hottest acts.

“I create monsters, know what I’m saying?” Quinn says. “Done Deal feeds off each other; that’s why I’m so proud of Bailey and Rich. We all come out the same house. There’s a real level of excellence, and the world has yet to see it. Right now it seems like we’re separate, but we’re not. We’re just pulling from different angles for the same common goal.”

“We all one,” Quinn concludes, in a statement that could serve as a motto for neighborhood unity. “Fillmoe business is Fillmoe business.”

myspace.com/bigrich

myspace.com/williehen

myspace.com/sanquinn

Making Messy Marv

One of the most extraordinary products of recent Fillmore history is Messy Marv, a rapper whose life reflects the neighborhood's struggle with a half century of urban renewal and the ’80s-era introduction of crack into America's ghettos. In 1996, when he was still in 10th grade, he released his first album, Messy Situations (Ammo). Though it sold around 15,000 units, Mess admits he didn't take music seriously at first.

"I dropped out of high school due to family issues," he says. "I had to grow up real fast and do the man thing, but I started doin' the street thing."

Nonetheless, Mess's rap reputation grew, and in 1997 he hooked up with San Quinn to record Explosive Mode (Presidential, 1998), which has sold more than 50,000 copies. "There was a lot of hype around the hood about how he was better than me or I was better than him," Mess says. "We decided to come together, and we made a classic."

"At that time, I was really on the street, living outta cars, doing real bad things," he recalls. "So Quinn and his mom took me in."

Despite his success when few in the Bay were moving many units, Mess was unable to leave the dope game, partly due to his own addiction. "I inherited a cocaine habit," the rapper says. "I been clean for a while, but I had a really bad habit. All I can say is 'Say no to drugs.’” Though he won't go into details, Mess confirms his triple life as rapper, dealer, and user came to a head one night at an out-of-state show in 2001, when he was forced to jump out a fourth-floor window. "I broke both of my legs, crushed my left foot, lost a lot of blood," Mess says. "I was in a wheelchair for six months. The doctors said I'd never walk again."

"It gave me a whole new respect for handicapped people. I was doing shows in my wheelchair, and I rocked the whole crowd. It was a hell of a feeling that they still accepted me," he says. "That gave me the strength to get up and walk. I learned how to walk all over again, by myself, in four months. After that I decided it was time to go somewhere else with my life."

As if to atone for time lost, Messy Marv has since pursued his talent with a vengeance, recording a slew of projects for his own label, Scalen LLC, and labels such as Frisco Street Show, which released a reunion with Quinn, Explosive Mode 2: "Back in Business" (2006), and just dropped Explosive Mode 3 with Husalah and Jacka. In 2004, Mess inked a distribution deal for Scalen through Universal/Fontana, helping him move more than 20,000 copies each of Disobayish (2004) and Bandannas, Tattoos and Tongue Rings (2005). While he spent much of 2005 in county jail on a weapons violation, he still managed to score one of the big radio hits of the hyphy movement, "Get on My Hype," produced by Droop-E. Most recently, he's been on MTV and other airwaves with the E-A-Ski- and CMT-produced "So Hood," from The Infrastructure (SMC), his album with Hunters Point rapper Guce, released under the name Bullys Wit Fullys. A self-conscious bid to end hood rivalry between the ’Moe and HP, the Infrastructure project shows Mess's awareness of the power of his position as a role model even as he continues to spit with the most defiant swagger of any rapper in the Bay.

While Mess admits he has major deals on the table and plans to release the first of a two-volume opus titled What You Know about Me? in December, he also intends to retire thereafter in a nonbinding Jay-Z sort of way in order to concentrate on the younger acts on his label. This intention seems characteristic of the true spirit of the Fillmore as well as an acknowledgment that despite his youth, Messy Marv has already written a chapter in the district's history.

myspace.com/messymarvonline

Traxamillion wins a Goldie

2006-12-02T14:54:00.000-08:00

All eyes on Bay Area producer of "Getz Ya Grown Man On," "Super Hyphy," and more

Goldies Music winner Traxamillion
by Garrett Caples
San Franciso Bay Guardian November 8, 2006

[pics coming soon]

When I met Traxamillion, the young producer-rapper was in the lab with Balance, recording a faithful cover of EPMD's "You're a Customer" for a Mind Motion mixtape. Naturally, I would have preferred seeing Trax record an original, but watching him vibe to a classic was perhaps more revelatory. Where many producers insist on their isolation from outside influences, Trax is an unapologetic lover of music.

"Everybody's a fan," the musician, born in East Orange, NJ, and raised in San Jose, points out. "Somebody inspired somebody to make a beat, to rap. That's how I go about my beats. I listen to shit. I get inspired. I appreciate it and harness and learn from it. I've always tried to mimic what's going on, on the radio."

Despite this unpretentious attitude toward his art, Traxamillion has developed a highly original sound of his own — bright, downright cheerful noises animate his eminently danceable grooves — and he's already earned a place in Bay Area rap history. In June 2005 he topped the local rap charts as producer of Keak Da Sneak's infectious independent single "Super Hyphy" (Rah), proving the Yay could hang in the mix with big-label megastars while opening up the airwaves to a long-suppressed flood of local talent.

"The beat was inspired by the youngstas," Traxamillion says. "My little cousins came through drunk, wildin' out on a birthday, and started dancin'. I was paying attention to their movements, thinking, 'I gotta make some music for these cats,' because the youngstas are really the hyphy movement. When I was making the beat, I was replaying their dancin' in my head, and 'Super Hyphy' came out an hour and a half later."

Knowing he had a hit on his hands, Trax shot the beat at Keak, who reportedly wrote the song in one session during a drive home from Tahoe. Within a few weeks "Super Hyphy" was all over the radio.

"It took two months to get to number one [on KMEL's list of most requested tracks in June 2005]," Trax recalls. "But it was fresh, and Keak's so abstract when he comes with something — people are fiendin' for it. People loved it, and it still slaps to this day. It's a big club anthem in the Bay."

"It was weird because it was my first time on the radio, period, as a producer," Trax says. "I was, like, 'Man, this is crazy — all these people are going crazy to my song. This is my shit I made in my mother's bedroom.' I be at the club, watching everybody at the peak of the song when they would run it back like three or four times, going, 'God-damn!' Nobody knew it was me."

If Traxamillion's name wasn't ringing bells, "Super Hyphy" was, and in short order he was working with the Team, whose "Just Go" earned the producer further spins. But when he returned to the local number one slot on KMEL's most requested tracks in December 2005, producing "Getz Ya Grown Man On" for East Palo Alto's then-unknown Dem Hoodstarz, Trax proved his success with Keak was no fluke. The remix — with guests Mistah FAB, San Quinn, Clyde Carson, and Turf Talk — has even picked up national airplay and features prominently on Dem Hoodstarz's Band-Aide and Scoot (SMC) as well as Trax's own The Slapp Addict (Slapp Addict). "The Slapp Addict is the soundtrack to the hyphy movement," Trax says of the album. Its single-producer, multirapper format has earned it a reputation as a Bay Area Chronic. "It's basically a Who's Who of the Bay, produced by me. After 'Grown Man,' I was superhot. People were, like, 'I want to work with you.' In turn, everybody did songs for me, ’cause game recognize game. Damn near a year's worth of creativity went into that album."

In addition to spawning singles like "The Sideshow" (Too Short and FAB) and "Wakin' ’Em Up" (Turf Talk and Hoodstarz), Slapp Addict has spun off another huge hit collaboration with Keak. "On Citas" demonstrates the producer's special rapport with the Bay's hottest rapper.

"When me and Keak get together, we make hits," Trax says. "When I first met Keak, he told me, 'Man, your beats and my voice — it's a marriage.' Ain't nothin' I'm doin' or nothin' he doin' — it's just his shit plus my shit equals hits."

Method Man at the crossroads

2006-11-08T21:30:00.000-08:00

by Garrett Caples
San Francisco Bay Guardian online exclusive October 18, 2006

When a bumped phone interview with hip-hop legend and platinum artist Method Man mushroomed into a proposed backstage post-show encounter, I naturally jumped at the chance.

Being a devotee of the ultimately more funk-based grooves of Bay Area hip-hop, I tend not to pay attention to the doings of NYC, and I can’t claim to have ever followed the Wu-Tang Clan in general or Meth in particular, though I have always admired both from afar. Yet one needn’t follow the Big Apple's scene in great detail to appreciate its impact, and with Meth’s successful film and TV career, most recently as a recurring character in this season of HBO’s cop drama The Wire, one needn’t even listen to hip-hop anymore to appreciate his.

This situation is exactly what’s troubling Method Man. His very success in the cultural mainstream, he feels, has been held against him by the hip hop-industry, a curious situation considering mainstream success is the perceived goal and direct subject matter of most raps these days. Unlike the recent fashion among rappers like Andre3000 to pooh-pooh their interest in music in favor of their “acting career,” Meth wants to be known primarily as an MC. But Hollywood success has proved to be a slippery slope, paved by Ice-T and Ice Cube -- each in his turn the most terrifying, authentic street rapper imaginable -- to the end of your hit-making potential in hip-hop.

Couple this perception with Meth’s vocal challenges of the effect of corporate media consolidation, and it’s not difficult to imagine why Def Jam released his fourth solo album, 4:21: The Day After, without a peep at the end of August, as if the label had written him off despite his track record of one gold and two platinum plaques.

Still, no one who’s heard the angry, defiantly shitkicking 4:21 (executive produced by the RZA, Erick Sermon, and Meth himself) or saw the show Meth put on that evening (leaping from the stage to the bar and running across it by way of introduction, later executing a backwards handspring from the stage into the crowd by way of ending) could possibly doubt his vitality as an MC. He put on a long, exhausting show, heavy with new material, that utterly rocked the packed house.

Shortly after the show ended, I was brought backstage by Meth’s road manager, 7, to a tiny corridor of a dressing room crammed with various hangers on. A man in a warm-up suit with a towel over his head was sitting alone on a short flight of steps in the center of the room.

“That’s him,” 7 said, before disappearing to take care of other business.

It was like being sent to introduce yourself to a boxer who’d just finished a successful but punishing brawl. The face that looked up at my inquiry was that of a man who’d retreated somewhere far away into himself, requiring a momentary effort to swim to the surface. Quite suddenly I found myself face to face with Method Man, whose presence immediately turned all heads in the room our way as he invited me to sit down for a brief discussion of his new album and his dissatisfaction with his treatment by the music industry.

SAN FRANCISCO BAY GUARDIAN: I read the statement on your Web site [www.method-man.com] in which you discuss your problems with the industry. Could you describe the problems you’ve been having?

METHOD MAN: My big problem with the industry is the way they treat hip-hop artists as opposed to artists in other genres. Hip-hop music, they treat it like it's fast food. You get about two weeks of promotion before your album. Then you get the week of your album, then you get the week after, then they just leave you to the dogs.

Whereas back in the day, you had artists in development, a month ahead of time before you even started your campaign, to make sure that you got off on the right foot.

Nowadays it’s like there’s nobody in your corner anymore. Everybody’s trying to go into their own little club, for lack of a better word. Everybody has their own little cliques now. Ain’t no money being generated so the labels are taking on a lot of artists because of this at once that they don’t even have enough staff members to take care of every artist, as an individual. Their attention is elsewhere, or only with certain people.

SFBG: Your new single [“Say,” featuring Lauryn Hill] suggests you’ve had problems with the way critics have received your recent work and even with the radio playing your records. How can someone of your status be having trouble getting spins?

MM: You know what it is, man? A lot of people have come around acting like I’m the worst thing that ever happened to hip-hop, as good as I am.

Hating is hating. I’ve been hated on, but just by the industry, not in the streets. They never liked my crew [the Wu-Tang Clan] anyway. They think we ain’t together anymore and they try to pick at each and every individual. Some motherfuckers they pick up. Other people they just shit on. I guess I’m just the shittee right now, you know what I mean?

SFBG: Do you think it has to do with the age bias in hip-hop? The idea an MC is supposed to be 18 or 20?

MM: You know what I think it is? As our contracts go on, we have stipulations where, if we sell a certain amount of albums, [the labels] have to raise our stock. A lot of times dudes just want to get out their contracts so they can go independent and make more money by themselves. There’s a lot of factors that play into it.

SFBG: Are you not getting enough label support?

MM: A label only does so much anyway. It’s your team inside your team that makes sure that you got a video. Or that you got that single out there, or that your tour dates are put together correctly. The labels, they basically just do product placement. They make sure that all your stuff is in the proper place where it’s supposed to be at. They’re gonna make sure your posters are up. They’re going to make sure that they’re giving out samples of other artists that are coming out also. [But i]t’s really up to us [the artists] to make sure our music is going where it’s supposed to.

Right now there’s so many artists people can pick and choose from, don’t nobody like shit no more.

SFBG: Do you think you’re getting squeezed out of radio play as a result of corporate media conslidation?

MM: Absolutely; this shit ain’t nothing new. It isn’t just happening to me. It’s been going on since dudes have been doing this hip-hop music. They bleed you dry and then they push you the fuck out.

That’s why I always stress to the fans to take your power back. I always hear people talking about things like, “Damn, what happened to these dudes? What happened to these guys? I always liked their shit.”

But the fans, not just the industry, tend to turn their backs on dudes. They get fed so much bullshit, they be like, “Fuck it; I’m not dealing with that shit. I’m going to listen to this.”

SFBG: So what about your acting career? Do you feel like you’ve been overexposed as an actor or that you’ve been spread too thin and are readjusting your focus?

MM: Fuck Hollywood, B.

SFBG: But I heard you say on the radio today you wanted to play a crackhead and get an Oscar....

MM: I do want to play a crackhead in a movie. I’m going to be a crackhead who dies of an overdose at the end of the movie, and people cry, and I’m going to get me an Oscar. But fuck Hollywood; tell ‘em to come see me. Tell ‘em to come to my door.

SFBG: Obviously, from what you said during the show and the lyrics on 4:21: The Day After you haven’t renounced smoking marijuana, so could you discuss the concept behind “4:21”? Is it about the difficulties of living the hard-partying lifestyle of the rap artist?

MM: It was just symbolic of a moment of clarity for me. I made a symbol for myself of a moment of clarity. You know I’ve always been an avid 4:20 person. I like to get out there and smoke with the best of them. But I picked “4:21” as like, the day after. I got tired of people running up on me and being like, “You was funny in that movie,” because I was an MC first and foremost. It used to be like, “Yo, that fuckin’ verse you did on that song, that was hot.” Now it’s like, “My kids love you; they love that movie, How High.”

It gets to the point when even when I’m having a serious moment, or a serious conversation, people laugh at the shit like it’s funny. But they laugh cause they thinking of the movie; they thinking of some sitcom shit.

SFBG: Besides yourself and RZA, Erick Sermon executive produced the album. Can you talk about your connection with him?

MM: I’ve been fuckin’ with E ever since I’ve been fuckin’ with Redman. E knows what I like, you know what I’m saying? The same way he knows what Redman likes. And RZA, that’s a given right there. I’ve been down with RZA’s shit A1 since day one.

SFBG: 4:21 also features a collaboration with Ol’ Dirty Bastard. When did you guys record this track?

MM: “Dirty Meth” -- that’s a posthumous joint with O.D.B. It was after he was gone already. I tell everyone that so they know.

SFBG: But he seems to permeate the new album.

MM: He does. Good word, too. He permeates it.

Too Short -- Blow the Whistle (Short/Jive)

2006-11-08T21:08:00.000-08:00

Album Review by Garrett Caples
San Francisco Bay Guardian October 11, 2006

Although largely recorded in Atlanta with production by Jazze Pha and coexecutive producer Lil Jon, Blow the Whistle is Too Short's most Bay-sounding album in years and certainly his best disc since 2000's You Nasty (Jive). Having rapped professionally since 1983, Short might not bring his utmost to every recording, but Whistle sounds as hungry as the most hyphy debut imaginable. His subject matter has not changed significantly — shouts of “beeyatch!” still abound — but he brings a fresh intensity to his raps, as though reenergized by the youthful Bay Area movement.

Songs like the title track and the Droop-E-produced "I Want Your Girl" (featuring E-40 and Mistah FAB) find Short Dogg perfectly at home with the latest Bay sound, while on "Keep Bouncing" he even gets Snoop Dogg "ghostridin’ the whip." While it may be true that Short's wordplay tends toward the misogynistic, it's equally the case that he receives no credit for his gestures in the opposite direction. Witness his support rap on Kelis's girl-power anthem "Bossy" and the following lines from Whistle's "Sophisticated":

Y'all thought Too Short was all about pimpin'
Foul-mouthed mack just talkin’ bad about women
You heard bitch and cut it off
You ain't even listenin’
All I said was, if the shoe fits wear it
And if it don't apply, act like you didn't hear it.

No one has the right to take away from Short the word that made him famous. And nobody is obliged to take it seriously either.

E-40 on cover of Modern Luxury's mag, San Francisco

2006-11-08T20:53:00.000-08:00

Big glossy E-40 gazing out from the fanciest magazine racks of the Bay this month. The high fashion mag tapped him to lead for the "70 hottest stars, sounds, scenes..."

[pic coming]

Regaining consciousness --East Oakland rapper Ise Lyfe spreads the word, makes his mark

2006-11-08T20:43:00.000-08:00

"I think the only way to do it harder than Jay-Z is to have a real movement... I'd like to be that big but at the same time put a dent in the Earth."

When this article came out, you made Ise Lyfe's album #1 at Rasputin's SF. Your power is recognized!

by Garrett Caples
San Francisco Bay Guardian August 23, 2006

"I want to be a mainstream artist," says East Oakland rapper and spoken word poet Ise Lyfe, discussing his rejection of the label "conscious rap." "I'm not trying to be some backpack cat performing in Davis. I want to be ..."

The 23-year-old trails off thoughtfully. "I think the only way to do it harder than Jay-Z is to have a real movement, something tangible that will effect change in the world through music. I'd like to be that big but at the same time put a dent in the Earth."

At first glance, it's hard to imagine a rapper less like Jay-Z than Ise Lyfe, whose 2004 self-released debut, SpreadtheWord, is devoid of the big pimpin', cheese-spending exploits that have endeared Jiggaman to millions. But like James Baldwin — who once said he didn't want to be the best black novelist in America, he wanted to be Henry James — Ise isn't talking about betraying his identity for success. He's simply saying he wants to be the best, period. If there's anything common to all four of these artists, it's the awareness that in order to be the best you must change the game. With the rerelease of SpreadtheWord, complete with new artwork, a bonus DVD, and a mildly retooled track list, on fledgling independent Hard Knock Records, in addition to his recently concluded nationwide tour with the Coup, Ise Lyfe is hoping to do just that.

Born in 1982, Ise was raised in Brookfield, deep in East Oakland next to the notorious Sobrante Park. "I grew up as a young kid right when the crack epidemic was flourishing and having a real effect on our families," he says. "My father had been affected by drugs. For me, growing up in a single-parent home was the manifestation of that existing in our community. But I also came up amongst a large level of social justice activity and youth organizing. That influences my music. I think Oakland has a history that unconsciously bleeds into everyone from here."

The legacy of this history — which includes a spoken word scene at least as old as Gil Scott Heron's mid-’70s albums for underground label Strata East — endures in Oakland, where Ise first made a name for himself as a teen slam poet. "I would be three years deep into performing spoken word before there was any place I could go and perform hip-hop," he says. "Hip-hop was all 21-and-up venues, where I was the number one slam poet in the country when I was 19." Repping the Bay in 2001 at the Youth Speaks National Poetry Slam, Ise would achieve a modicum of fame through appearances on HBO's Def Poetry Jam.

"When I started recording," he confesses, "folks didn't even know I was making a hip-hop record. They thought it was a spoken word record, but I fused both in there." The success of this fusion of art forms is all the more apparent on the rereleased SpreadtheWord, the continuity of which has been improved by a few judicious edits. Ise's flow is so dexterous that the moments of purely a cappella poetry enhance rather than disrupt the musical experience. In fact, musicality underscores an important difference between SpreadtheWord and most conscious hip-hop recordings, for most of the beats on even otherwise impressive efforts sound like they were made sometime in 1993. The lack of curiosity about the sound of contemporary hip-hop gives such music a perfunctory air, while the tracks on SpreadtheWord are infinitely fresher even after two years. While it's not exactly hyphy, a tune like "Reasons" still sounds like a Bay Area slap that would work on a mixtape with other new tunes.

"My fan base is predominantly young people of color," Ise says, articulating his other major difference from most rappers who fall under the conscious rubric. "I think it's all good. The music is for everybody. But I'm proud of seeing the music connect with who it's really written to, directly from, and for. I don't want to be distant from the community." In the face of the failure of so many conscious rappers to continue to appeal to their original listeners, it's hard not to attribute Ise's own success to his closeness to both his audience and hip-hop.

"It's important for me to have real community work behind what I say," he explains, commenting on a busy schedule that includes everything from teaching classes to street sweeping to performing at the Youth UpRising community center on the bill with Keak Da Sneak on Aug. 25.

Moreover, his refusal to place himself in opposition to the hyphy movement despite his very different approach to hip-hop lends him a credibility unavailable to others.

"I consider myself just the other side of hyphy," he concludes. "I don't think there's anything different in what I'm saying than what they're saying. Those cats is positive — they're talking about uniting the Bay. I just think it's important that we set a standard for what's acceptable. When we calling a 13-year-old girl a ripper, it's just abusive music. But even in its industrial prepackaged form hip-hop comes from the hood, and I think that going dumb or getting hyphy is revolutionary in principle. I'm-a jump on this car, I'm-a shake these dreads, I'm-a be me. I think that it's a positive energy."

ISE LYFE
Youth UpRising’s "Lyrical Warfare"
with Keak Da Sneak
Fri/25, 4–7 p.m.
8711 MacArthur, Oakl.
(510) 777-9909
Free
www.youthuprising.org

Confessions of a Gofessional

2006-11-08T20:31:00.000-08:00

Free mixtape by Team member Kaz Kyzah scores 7,000 downloads in first week

Things move fast in rap. ...I've been summoned by Kaz Kyzah to discuss The Gofessional...

by Garrett Caples
San Francisco Bay Guardian August 16, 2006

Things move fast in rap. By the time their second album, World Premiere (Moedoe/Koch), dropped in April, the Team already had a new single, the "Hyphy Juice" remix, which now rivals "It's Getting Hot" as their biggest radio hit. Since then, Moedoe label head K.O.A.B. has inked a deal for Hyphy Juice, the energy drink he co-owns with the group, to be sold at 7-11 stores nationwide, while Team member Clyde Carson just signed as a solo act to Capitol Records. Carson’s ambitious project, Theater Music — consisting of one multisong, album-length track à la Prince's Lovesexy (Warner, 1988) — will appear next year, cobranded by Moedoe as well as the Game's Black Wall Street.

Yet my appearance at the Team's condo concerns none of these matters. Instead, I've been summoned by Kaz Kyzah to discuss The Gofessional, his new mixtape with KMEL managing director DJ Big Von Johnson. Consisting of 19 tracks of mostly original material, The Gofessional is part of a growing trend in the Bay Area mix scene — like Husalah and Jacka's Animal Planet and Beeda Weeda's Homework — of blurring the distinction between the carefully crafted album and the "anything goes" approach of mixtapes. What makes The Gofessional unique, however, is its method of distribution: it's available for free at bigvon.com.

In the first week alone, the mixtape was downloaded 7,000 times on the strength of two singles currently spinning on KMEL: "Cocaine," a soulful love-as-addiction metaphor over a 9th Wonder beat, and the LT-produced original "Love" (featuring Jimmie Reign), an R&B-infused investigation of more serious subjects often neglected by the Bay's current "go dumb" ethos.

STALLED PREMIERE?

Before beginning, however, Kaz clears up the lingering mystery around World Premiere's release, not, as anticipated, through major label Universal but rather through independent powerhouse Koch.

"We were on a label of a Mexican artist, Lil Rob, and it wasn't the place for us," Kaz says, referring to the Universal-distributed Upstairs imprint, which caters primarily to Latino rap. "When we got over there, it wasn't what we wanted. But it worked out where we could use it to get the album done and move on. We didn't have to pay any bread. We actually came out winning."

"At the same time, I was going through legal trouble," he continues, describing continuing fallout from a robbery charge he caught at age 18. "I was worried about going to jail and house arrest. I did end up spending a couple of months in jail, so it was a real hectic time."

While the delays of label jumping and legal woes may have muted World Premiere's impact, the period of house arrest last year proved productive for Kaz, who with West Oakland rapper J-Stalin and East Oakland producers Tha Mekanix formed a side group called the Go Boyz and recorded an album at the condo. These late-night sessions featuring an ankle-braceleted Kaz were the genesis of the current Go Movement, which already constitutes a third front in the Bay's hyphy and thizz campaigns.

"What I want people to understand about the Go Movement," the Hyphy Juice shareholder stresses, "is it's not not about getting hyphy, going dumb. But it encompasses a whole lot more and that's what makes it so powerful. Like when I talk to Dotrix [of Tha Mekanix], we'll use go 1,500 times and have an in-depth conversation.

"It was Dot who said, 'You the Gofessional, man.' And that was one of my favorite movies, The Professional, so I used it for my mixtape. I didn't want to come out with the Go Boyz, and nobody know what Go is all about. I was talking to some people from Marin, they never even heard of the Go Movement. To us it's old, but a lot of people are still catching on."

GOING FOR THE STREETS

The free download format of The Gofessional is proving to be an effective means of spreading the word. (Another 5,000 hard copies have already been distributed for the benefit of those not online, and more are on the way.) For Johnson, who apart from Kaz is the author of this largess, the free mixtape is designed to boost record sales as well as keep the Bay's current buzz alive.

"I got 7,000 downloads in a week, when I know artists who put out records that took seven months to reach that in sales," Johnson says later that day at KMEL. "There are a lot of big artists, a lot of songs on the radio, but sales aren't adding up. So I feel like, give some away. Instead of trying to break a song, I'm trying to break an artist in the streets. I definitely think this will stimulate album sales."

It's refreshing to hear such a statement these days, when the "free download" has been blamed for bringing the recording industry to its knees. To me, Johnson's logic is irrefutable; I'm more likely to check out something for free than for $15, and I'm way more likely to buy a $15 album from someone whose previous work I have and like. As The Gofessional is easily better than dozens of albums I've actually purchased, the odds of me buying an eventual Kaz Kyzah solo album are extremely high. Given the current excitement in Bay rap and Carson's deal with Capitol, the interest in Kaz's mixtape hasn't failed to attract the attention of majors as well.

"I got a lot of labels looking at me," Kaz confesses. "I ain't put out an album. They're checking for me off of mixtapes, which is weird, but it's a beautiful thing. People be, like, this is hotter than people's albums. But I'm a perfectionist, so doing a solo album is going to take a minute, really sitting down and figuring out what I want to do with it. And not being too quick to jump on the wrong deal."

Dope, rap, and religion

2006-11-04T21:03:00.000-08:00

With two hot collaborations, one new solo joint, and an upcoming reunion with Mob Figaz in the works, Husalah should be on top of the world. Instead, he's spending the next four and a half years behind bars

by Garrett Caples
San Francisco Bay Guardian July 12, 2006

I'm on the set of the video for "Never Blink," a song off Mob Figaz member the Jacka's 2005 solo disc, The Jack Artist (Artist), featuring Dubb 20 and J-Stalin. The "set" in West Oakland where 10th Street meets Mandela is not sanctioned by a film commission but monitored from a distance by a slowly circling caravan of three police cruisers. A Mercedes SL500 creeps through the crowd and parks in the middle of the road, retracting its hard top with the slow-motion elegance of a moon landing before a familiar 6-foot-3-inch frame unfolds from the low roadster and begins the usual round of hand slaps and hugs. Husalah is on the set.

"I represent the Iraqi Space Program," he announces, then immediately reconsiders. "The Nigga Spaceship Association." He has the air of one whose wit is so fertile he must double-stack its results.

Though Hus doesn't perform on "Never Blink," he has turned up on behalf of his fellow Mob Figa for some whoridin' — that art of dancing, lyric miming, and tough posturing behind the rapper — and for the next several takes nearly steals the show. He can't help it. Combined with his athletic build and strikingly handsome face, his height makes him conspicuous in any crowd, while his desire to "take it further," evident in his innovative, melodic flows and ever-evolving gangsta argot, also animates his appearance. Instead of imaginary bills, Husalah pulls out a stack of new hundreds, fans it to show it's all hundreds, shuts the fan, and begins to count, licking the bills instead of his thumb as he goes while bobbing to the mournful yet light-as-air RobLo production. Fielding an imaginary call, Hus shoulders his phone as he continues to count and dance, gazing off abstractedly as though processing information. It's a performance worthy of a Mac Dre or an André, though more thugged out and unmistakably Husalah's own.

Husalah's been recording for eight years, debuting as a teen with the other Mob Figaz — Jacka, Fed-X, AP9, and Rydah J. Klyde — on "Ride til We Die," the opening cut on C-Bo's Til My Casket Drops (Awol, 1998). Now, at 25 he is hitting his creative stride just as Bay Area rap is making itself felt on a national level. Three hot Husalah projects are currently in stores: 3 da Hard Way (FriscoStreetShow, 2005), a trio with Jacka and hard-spitting MC Marvaless; Animal Planet (2006), a Demolition Men mixtape cohosted with Jacka; and Dope, Guns and Religion (Sumo, 2006), a solo debut drawing on new and unreleased material. With a Mob Figaz reunion on the horizon, the timing couldn't be better, except for one small catch.

In February, Husalah was sentenced to four and a half years in federal prison for possession with intent to distribute "more than five kilos" of cocaine, a charge dating from 2001, when the rapper was 20. At press time, he was set to turn himself in July 10.

BLACK DIAMOND

"Where I come from," Husalah says several days before the video shoot, at the Mob Figaz's studio, hidden away in an upper-middle-class chunk of Antioch, "it's all about getting money, staying fly, being the coolest dude." Born in 1981 in nearby Pittsburg, the young Tito Alston grew up in el Pueblo Housing Project, notorious for its colorful "hood rich" hustlers, who made small fortunes dealing dope and pimping. It's exactly the sort of "subculture that glorifies swagger over work," according to a March 20 New York Times article and "causes the deepening ruin of black youth." Such preferences likely are also the effect of poor education and few opportunities for low-income inner-city families. Pittsburg may not be your classic inner city, but it's certainly no exurban paradise. An inland port first known as New York Landing, it was rechristened Black Diamond following the 1903 discovery of coal in the hills and received its present name in 1911 to honor the arrival of the steel industry. The low-paying jobs available to unskilled laborers (in chemical and power plants and oil refineries and distribution centers) are ones few would wish to take or even consider safe.

As a teen Husalah rapped in talent shows, but his first love was sports. He played basketball and football and even boxed. His hoop dreams were quashed, however, when he was expelled from Pittsburg High in 10th grade after being caught with crack he intended to sell. Following a brief stint at the alternative Riverside High, where he was again busted with his stash, he was expelled for good and sentenced to a year of house arrest. "I used to sneak out at 10 every night, until 8 in the morning [to sell crack]," he recalls. "That was my shift." By 16, Hus was "heavy into the streets. I didn't care about music no more."

"Then one day I was playing basketball in the gym," he continues. "Jacka, AP9, and RobLo came and got me. They was, like, 'C-Bo at the record store — he want to hear y'all rap.' I was, like, 'I don't care about this shit no more.' I got $4,000 in my pocket. To a young ’un that's big." Fortunately his friends managed to persuade the young Husalah to have his date with destiny.

"We weren't even a group," he says. "We were just the tightest dudes in the area. But C-Bo was fresh off 2Pac's All Eyez on Me [Polygram, 1996], selling 300- or 400,000 units consistently. We went into the studio that day and did 'Ride til We Die.' After that, Bo's, like, 'We fittin' to do an album.' We went on tour, dropped the album [C-Bo's Mob Figaz (Git Paid, 1999)], and sold 140,000."

If the number seems small to platinum-conscious readers, consider that this occurred in the middle of Bay Area rap's long commercial decline, when even an album with a radio hit — such as the Delinquents' Bosses Will Be Bosses (Dank or Die, 1999), featuring "That Man!" — only moved 50,000 units. Or that the stir caused two years ago by Frontline's Who R U? (IMG) was based on sales of 10,000. For an independent debut in the Bay, 140,000 would still be huge. The figure was more than sufficient to establish the Figaz as a force in Bay Area rap.

“THIS IS MONEY”

For a couple of years, Husalah says, "I was, like, 'OK, this is money.' But then Bo went to jail and it got stagnated." The loss of C-Bo's leadership coupled with the Bay's commercial misfortunes slowed the group's momentum. "I fell back into [dope dealing] because it was lucrative," Hus confesses. "I've always been the nigga to wear the flyest kicks, the best fits, the best chick, so I gotta keep that standard going." Work on an attempted follow-up album, Mob Figaz, languished so long that the exasperated Warlock Records would eventually release it unfinished in 2003.

As he returned to the streets, however, Husalah began to develop a spiritual consciousness. E-40's remark on In a Major Way (Jive, 1995) advising the listener to "read Proverbs" in times of stress got Husalah perusing the Bible, and from there he moved to the Koran. It was the Koran that spoke to his struggles and sensibility. "It's all about God first," he says. "It ain't about preaching. It's about knowing what's real." His conversion to Islam led him to wrestle seriously for the first time with the implications of selling crack to his community.

"Allah says you can't be judged for what you weren't aware of," Hus comments. "I thought I was doing right as a youth. That's what all the older people I came up under did to make money. You get dope at hoop or be catching long bombs or sell dope. There's not a lot of opportunity here. But once you become a man, you get aware of what you doing. It's not an excuse now that you're aware of it."

The ambivalence Hus developed toward his primary source of income is documented on Dope, Guns and Religion, which despite its celebration of the hustling lifestyle is threaded with contradictory feelings born of his spiritual awakening: "But at the same time I barely touch packages/ ’Cause I believe pushing poison is for savages/ But then again, this shit got advantages/ How could I live if my pockets is Somalian?" As these lines from "Rainman" illustrate, Husalah has tapped into Bay Area rap's 2Pac-inspired tradition of the "conscious thug," using the dope dealer or pimp persona to articulate the dilemmas faced by black high school dropouts — more of whom, by their late 20s, are incarcerated (34 percent) than employed (30 percent), according to the same New York Times article. But where 2Pac was a conscious rapper who adopted the thug persona, partly from his on-screen success in Juice, partly as a way to get his message across, Husalah is a thug rapper who achieved consciousness, seeking a way out of the dope game even as he remained ensnared by its financial rewards.

COKE ADDS LIFE?

Though he scaled back his activities, Husalah was unable to resist what seemed like a quick job for a big payoff in 2001 and arranged to help ferry "a large amount of cocaine" from Chicago to Cali. "That was a decision I made," he explains today. "It wasn't out of ignorance. It was out of a sense of desperation or hopelessness. I felt like I had no other choice."

"Some dude ratted me out; we were being watched the whole time," he continues. "I caught a federal conspiracy charge in Chicago. There was another guy driving the car, but they said I was the one who coordinated, flew him out there to pick something up, to take something around. With the feds, you got to take the charge and do your time. You can't win."

Nonetheless, after posting bail Hus returned to the Bay, hiding out for the next 18 months. "I wasn't really on the run because it was an out-of-state case and they didn't know where I was," he explains. "I'm, like, 'I'm not surrendering until they pick me up.' In the meantime, the grand jury indicted me, and I was snatched up by the task force in Pittsburg.

"I didn't have no criminal record. I'd been to juvenile hall, but this was my first time going to jail and I'm looking at 10 years."

Bailed out again, Hus would spend another three years fighting the case in court before eventually agreeing to plead guilty to possession and intent in exchange for the feds dropping the weightier conspiracy charge. Sentencing him to 53 months in February, the judge granted Husalah a six-month stay to get his musical affairs in order before entering the Federal Correctional Institute in Sheridan, Ore.

"My whole thing now is making music," says Husalah, who, in addition to completing his parts for the upcoming Mob Figaz album, has been hard at work finishing a half dozen projects, including a rock album, The Unusual Suspects; a dancehall disc with Jacka as the Shower Posse; and Harsh Reality, the full-length he was making when his legal woes began. "Plus, I figure I'll still be able to work in there, because in the federal system it's a lot more open. I'm pretty sure I'll have a mini ADAT recorder. There'll be new product." With the group’s business partnership, MobFigaz, LLC, continuing in his absence, Husalah has no fear of losing his musical profits. “I know they’re gonna keep it rockin',” he says. “We gonna make sure our check is in the mail.”

“Husalah is a phenomenal artist,” says Mistah F.A.B., who featured a farewell interview with Hus on the most recent installment of his new WILD 94 show. “He’s very intelligent and his character and charisma leave an impression on people. It’s unfortunate he has to go to jail for his past mistakes, but his stock will rise for doing his time and we’ll be waiting for him when he gets back. It’s going to be a learning experience.”

Husalah, it seems, agrees. “If Allah made me go through what I had to go through, there's a reason. I'm a better person. I learned what not to do. The statistics show it's death or jail for a street nigga, so for me it happened to be jail. I feel like it's a blessing that I'm breathing, I'm healthy."

"When you look at the whole situation, I had a lot of fun," he concludes philosophically. "I rocked a lot of models, rode a lot of rims, dropped a lot of tops, popped a lot of bottles, all that bullshit, so I'm trying to see what I'll evolve into now. I might be heavily religious. I might be into different types of music. Whatever it is, I'm gonna stay a real nigga, keeping this mob shit rocking. I'm gonna lay down and do my time. Then get right back and make money like I never left."

www.myspace.com/husalahofthemobfigaz

Busta Rhymes -- The Big Bang (Aftermath/Interscope)

2006-11-04T20:51:00.000-08:00

Album Review by Garrett Caples
San Francisco Bay Guardian June 28, 2006

It's hard not to compare The Big Bang to E-40's recent My Ghetto Report Card (BME/Warner): Both are "relaunches" of rappers who never really fell off, and have many more albums left in them. But where 40's hookup with Lil Jon seemed like a stroke of brilliance, the teaming of Busta with Dr. Dre has a slight air of corporate reshuffling, like Clive Davis handing Jimmy Iovine the keys and saying, "See what you can do." Trouble is, Dre isn't as interested in Busta as Lil Jon is in 40. Dre produces five tracks, tweaks half a dozen more, and mixes all, yet he feels fairly remote. Of his tracks, only the Missy Elliot feature, "How We Do It Over Here," is single-worthy, though it sounds like Dre biting hyphy, an impression reinforced by Missy's "Pop ya colla like this/Bottles up like this" chant.

If Dre isn't putting up his best, you can be sure everyone else is. The Swizz Beatz–produced single, "Touch It," is old but retains its charms, although the same can't be said for Swizz's vocalizations on the otherwise fine DJ Scratch track, "New York Shit." Probably the two best numbers are J-Dilla's fat, soulful Fender Rhodes groove, "You Can't Hold a Torch," and Timbaland's frenetically minimalist, quasi-African "Get Down," which makes you wonder what kind of album he would cook up if he had Busta at his disposal. As a whole, The Big Bang isn't disappointing, but it doesn't quite live up to expectations.

The Team -- World Premiere (Moedoe/Rex/Koch)

2006-11-04T20:17:00.000-08:00

Album Review by Garrett Caples
San Francisco Bay Guardian June 21, 2006

After months of delay, the Team's World Premiere has dropped, not on Universal as expected, but rather on large independent Koch. Whether this label jockeying had anything to do with the disc's belated appearance is unclear, yet the finished product is unquestionably one of the best, if most curiously assembled, albums to emerge under the banner of the hyphy movement.

While not a redo of the Bay Area group's 2004 debut, The Negro League (Moedoe), Premiere nonetheless lifts a pair of tracks, including the ShoNuff-produced hit "It's Getting Hot." The album also raids last year's Team mixtape, Go Music (Siccness.net), for the single "Patron," as well as the star-studded remix of "It's Getting Hot," which amusingly resuscitates MC Hammer. Two other singles from last year, "Just Go" and "Hyphy Juice," round out the familiar material, whereas their current single, the "Hyphy Juice" remix, is nowhere to be found.

All this sounds like a recipe for disaster, the same combination of ill timing and hit recycling that blunted the impact of Keak da Sneak's Kunta Kinte (Moedoe, 2006). Yet amazingly enough, Premiere overcomes its checkered origins and bangs from start to finish. The older material sounds fresh and is even heightened in the context of new tunes like "Top of the World" and "Good Girl," which add an almost psychedelic R&B dimension to the hyphy tonal palette. The innovative qualities of the music make any protest against its lyrical limitations — geared almost exclusively toward the club — beside the point, and the group's lack of gangsta posturing is refreshing in itself.

The Product -- One Hunid (Underground Railroad/Koch)

2006-11-04T19:56:00.000-08:00

Album Review by Garrett Caples
San Francisco Bay Guardian June 14, 2006

A multiregional force composed of Houston legend Scarface, Young Malice of Jackson, Miss., and the Fillmore District's own Will Hen, the Product is one of the more intriguing new groups in hip-hop. One Hunid is that ultimate rarity: a conscious album made by hood rappers for hood consumption, rather than for the backpack circuit. ’Face's list of thug credentials is as long as anyone's — stretching back to the Geto Boys — so his commitment to such a project is of genuine worth; he reaches a vast segment of inner-city youth who are deaf to the more substantial critiques of, say, the Coup.

Perhaps inevitably, the consciousness on One Hunid is limited to a sense of consequences: "I wasn't trying to kill that man; he was in my way/And now I'll never see the light of day," intones Hen, suggesting fear of prison more than a realignment of values. Consciousness is also apparently for men, as little distinguishes the Product's talk of "bitches" from your average thug's. I've been told by rappers who know that this approach is a necessary exercise in spoon-feeding, but it's hard to recall 2Pac songs like "Keep Ya Head Up" and not wonder if there isn't another way.

Ultimately a record stands or falls on musical merit, and One Hunid doesn't disappoint. The rappers have heat — Hen arguably outshines Scarface himself. Oakland producer and longtime ’Face collaborator Tone Capone, who had a hand in the group's development, contributes five modern-day mob tracks, which serve as a useful reminder that there's more to Bay Area rap than just hyphy.

Ruling party -- Rising hip-hop star J-Stalin morphs from d-boy to Go Boy

2006-10-29T16:35:00.000-08:00

by Garrett Caples
San Francisco Bay Guardian April 26, 2006

J-Stalin knows how to make an entrance.

The first time we meet, in November 2004 at the Mekanix's recording studio in East Oakland, he enters nonchalantly, sporting an embroidered eye mask as though it were everyday wear. He walks up to me and shakes my hand. "I'm J-Stalin. I write and record two songs a day," he says with boyish pride.

I had a hard time retaining the notion the rapper wasn't a boy, for though he'd recently turned 21, his five-foot frame and preternatural baby face gave the impression of a raspy-voiced, blunt-puffing, Henny-swilling 14-year-old.

Yet he already had a storied past. A teen crack dealer, or "d-boy," from West Oakland's Cypress Village, Stalin was busted at age 17, spending the next 11 months on parole with weekends in juvenile hall. During this period, to both stave off boredom and possibly escape the multigenerational cycle of dope-dealing in his family, the young Jovan Smith began writing raps, finding out about the other Stalin in 11th-grade history class, and soaking up game at the Grill in Emeryville, where family friend DJ Daryl had a recording studio.

After letting him watch for a year, Daryl put Stalin on a track — the result so impressed Daryl's frequent collaborator, Bay Area legend Richie Rich, he immediately commissioned a hook. Stalin would end up on three cuts on Rich's Nixon Pryor Roundtree (Ten-Six, 2002) and on two as a member of the Replacement Killers, a group that included Rich and Crestside Vallejo's PSD. Several more songs from this period had just surfaced on Rich's 2004 compilation, Snatches, Grabs, and Takes (Ten-Six), though Stalin had since defected to the Mekanix's production company, Zoo Entertainment. By the time we met, the highly productive crew had recorded most of Stalin's upcoming debut, On Behalf of Tha Streets.

He's next

During the next 18 months, J-Stalin would generate no small amount of buzz, thanks in part to high-profile guest shots on projects like the Jacka's The Jack Artist (Artist, 2005) and the Delinquents' Have Money Have Heart (Dank or Die, 2005). Three advance tracks from On Behalf — "Party Jumpin’," featuring Jacka; a clean version of "Fuck You"; and an homage to the classic drum machine, "My 808" — have accumulated spins on KMEL, while the video for "My 808" has more than 20,000 plays on Youtube.com. Too $hort says he's "next," E-40's dubbed him "the future," and major labels like Capitol and Universal are checking him hard.

To crown these achievements, Stalin's copped a coveted spot hosting an upcoming project for the Bay Area's mix-tape kings, DJ Devro and Impereal, alias the Demolition Men (see sidebar).
Named after Stalin's penchant for calling the DJs at 7 a.m., ready to lay verses, The Early Morning Shift is a potent fusion of mix tape beats and Mekanix originals, laced with Stalin's melodic raps and distinctively raw, R&B-style vocals. Taking advantage of the industry's current structure, whereby you can drop a mix tape or two without compromising your "debut" album marketability, The Early Morning Shift will be most listeners' first chance to hear the prolific J-Stalin at length, in the company of stars like Keak, F.A.B., and the Team, as well as Stalin's Cypress Village crew, Livewire. Having generated some 60 tracks in the scant two weeks devoted to recording the disc, Stalin has literally given the Demolition Men more than they can handle: Talk of a "part two" is already in the air, though the DJs are still rushing to finish the first for an early-May release.

The Early Morning Shift comes at a pivotal time in J-Stalin's career. At the very least, the mix tape will warm up the Bay for On Behalf, which Zoo Entertainment plans to release independently in the next few months. With everywhere from Rolling Stone to USA Today catching on to the Bay's hyphy/thizz culture, and major labels lurking in the wings, it's probably only a matter of time before Stalin gets a deal. But the rapper is adamant on signing only as part of the Mekanix's Zoo.

"We don't want an artist deal," he says. "If they give us a label deal, it'll work, because I ain't fittin' to sign no artist deal."

If this sounds a tad dictatorial in the mouth of so young a playa, consider that Stalin left a famous rapper's camp to work with a then-unknown production duo, a decision fraught with risk. But Stalin's instincts regarding his own artistic strengths are sound. He thrives on quantity, and the Mekanix's intense productivity suits Stalin's seemingly endless supply of rhymes and hooks. The duo's ominous, minor-key soundscapes provide perfect vehicles for the rapper's exuberant tales of West Oakland street hustle and melancholy, often poignant reflections on d-boy life.

"I used to listen to their beats," Stalin recalls, "and be like, 'Damn, them niggas got heat!' Plus they ain't no haters. I mean, I'm a leader; I ain't no follower. They allow me to still be me and fuck with them at the same time."

A few months ago I had a chance to watch this process in action, dropping by the studio as Dot and Tweed were putting the finishing touches on a hot new beat, one in tune with current hyphy trends yet retaining the dark urgency characteristic of the Mekanix sound.

"Let me get on it," Stalin says, as he usually does when he hears something he likes.

Sometimes Dot says yes, sometimes no, depending on their plans for a particular session. With a beat this fresh and radio-ready, one they could easily sell, Dot is noncommittal: "What you got for it?"

Without a pause Stalin breaks into a melody, accompanied by an impromptu dance: "That's my name / Don't wear it out, wear it out, wear it out ..." Simple, catchy, the phrase totally works, and in less time than it takes to tell, he's in the booth laying down what promises to be the main single from On Behalf: "That's My Name."

Sitting behind the mixing board, Dot shoots me a smile, as if to say, "See why we work with this guy?"

On the Go Movement

With The Early Morning Shift about to drop, and On Behalf on the way, the only thing Stalin needs is his own catchword, à la hyphy or thizz. Enter the Go movement. Among recent innovations in Bay Area hip-hop slang is a certain use of the word go to indicate a kind of dynamic state of being, widely attributed to Stalin.

"I ain't sayin' I made it up, but somebody from West Oakland did," Stalin says. "Even before there was hella songs talkin' about Go and shit, that shit came from ecstasy pills. We used to say, 'Goddamn, you motherfuckers go.' And then you refer to a female like, 'She go.' I swear it used to just be me and my niggas in the hood. I started fuckin' with the Mekanix and sayin' it at they place. Then, before I knew it, everybody was talking about Go."

Like thizz, Go quickly expanded beyond its drug-related origins, partly because it epitomizes so well the fast-paced environment of rappers' lifestyles. Among the early cosigners of the Go movement is the Team, whose album World Premiere (Moedoe) dropped at the beginning of April. Not only did the group release a between-album mix tape and DVD called Go Music (Siccness.net, 2005), but Team member Kaz Kyzah has hooked up with Stalin and the Mekanix for a side project called the Go Boyz. First previewed on Go Music, on a track also featuring Mistah F.A.B., the Go Boyz have already recorded their self-titled debut, and Zoo is in talks with Moedoe about an eventual corelease.

"Where I'm from, we don't say, 'Go stupid.' 'Go dumb.' We just go," Kaz Kyzah says, explaining the term's appeal.

"Really, it's a way of life for us," he continues. "Me, Stalin, Dot, and Tweed, we'd be up all night just goin'. Every song was recorded at like four in the morning. Listening to some of the stuff now, you can feel it in the music."

Getting in early

Since I began this piece, Stalin, it seems, has gotten even bigger, as word of The Early Morning Shift and the Go Boyz has spread through the scene. People are suddenly lining up to work with him, and he's already committed to new projects with DJ Fresh, Beeda Weeda, the Gorilla Pits, and J-Nash, an R&B singer featured on Mistah F.A.B.'s upcoming Yellow Bus Driver. In a late-breaking development, E-40 confirms he intends to sign the Stalin/Beeda Weeda duo project to Sick Wid It Records.

During our interview, Stalin and I run by DJ Fresh's studio so J can lay a rhyme for an upcoming installment of Fresh's mix tape series, The Tonite Show. Another rapper, watching Stalin pull a verse out of thin air four bars at a time, is clearly awed: "He's amazing. I mean, he's on the records I buy."

Stalin takes it all in stride, though; aside from when I've watched him perform live, this is the first time I've ever seen someone react to him like he was a star. I get the feeling, however, it's far from the last.

J-Stalin
Fri/28, 10 p.m. doors
Club Rawhide
280 Seventh St., SF
$20
(415) 621-1197
myspace.com/jstalinofficialpage

Bring on the Demolition Men

2006-10-29T16:26:00.000-08:00

by Garrett Caples
San Francisco Bay Guardian April 26, 2006

The Demolition Men, Impereal and DJ Devro, definitely didn't earn their reputation as the Bay Area's mix-tape kings by staying at home. As DJs the duo has performed together and separately at clubs all over the world, from China and Japan to South America and Europe. Native Spanish speakers — Impereal hails from the Colombian community in Queens, NY, while Devro is Southern California Creole — the pair also hosts Demolition Men Radio, broadcast Thursdays from 6 to 7 p.m. on Azul 1063, a hip-hop station in Colombia's Medellin. Yet if you live in the Bay, you're most liable to see them on the street, selling mix tapes out of their backpacks.

"We're like a walking promotional retail machine," Impereal jokes. "If you don't buy a mix tape, you going home with a flyer."

Such determination, coupled with the DJs' high output (more than 30 releases since late 2003, including three volumes each of R&B and reggaeton) and elaborate graphics, has finally kick-started the Bay's once lackadaisical mix tape scene.

An integral component of hip-hop in New York and the South, enabling new talents to be heard alongside vets and vets to issue bulletins with an immediacy unavailable to corporate labels, DJ-assembled mix tapes at their best are the ultimate in no-holds-barred hip-hop. Considered "promotional material" and usually printed in limited quantities, the discs are generally unencumbered by legal requirements like sample clearance.

Until recently, however, mix tapes weren't much of a factor here. While the Demolition Men are quick to pay homage to their local predecessors — like Mad Idiot, DJ Natural, and DJ Supreme — Natural acknowledges the mix tape scene was a bit dead before the Demolition Men began shaking it up.

"Out here DJs were concentrating on clubs," Natural says. "Then they started putting stuff out constantly." Now there's sufficient trade in mix tapes for Natural to move his formerly virtual business, Urban Era, to brick-and-mortar digs at 5088 Mission, making it the Bay's only all–mix tape music store. Yet even with increased competition, he notes, the Demolition Men still routinely sell out.

In addition to their up-tempo release schedule, the success of the Demolition Men's mixes might be attributed to the conceptual coherence they bring to their projects. While they do put together general mixes featuring more mainstream fare — such as the Out the Trunk series, which boasts exclusives from Ludacris — the duo's hottest projects tend to tap into the Bay's reservoir of talent. Aside from their multifaceted Best of the Bay series, the Demolition Men have released mix tapes hosted by Bay Area artists like Balance, Cellski, El Dorado Red, and the Team.

Currently the Demolition Men's most successful disc has been their most ambitious: Animal Planet, not so much a mix tape as music cinema, starring the Mob Figaz' Husalah and Jacka. A mighty 34 tracks — featuring production by Rob Lo, Traxamillion, and the Mekanix, and appearances by F.A.B., Keak, and Pretty Black — Animal Planet is an incredible collection of almost entirely exclusive, original material, seriously blurring the boundary between mix tape and album. Its success has encouraged bold undertakings, like The Early Morning Shift with J-Stalin and Block Tested, Hood Approved, a mix tape/DVD starring Fillmore rapper Big Rich. "I guess we're taking the mix tape to the next level," Devro says.

Demolition Men DJ
Thurs/27 and the last Thursday of every month, 9 p.m. doors
Vault
81 W. Santa Clara, San Jose
$10
(408) 298-1112
myspace.com/demolitionmenmusic

Prince -- 3121 (NPG/Universal)

2006-10-29T15:55:00.000-08:00

Album Review by Garrett Caples
San Francisco Bay Guardian April 5, 2006

Following his massive Musicology (NPG/Sony, 2004) campaign, Prince was uncharacteristically silent for ’05, though clearly he spent a lot of time working on 3121, named after his new residence-complex in LA. The contrast between the albums is instructive, for where Musicology sounds like something Prince tossed off in a month, 3121 feels polished and composed.

Sony's publicity machine may have heavily exploited the nostalgia value of Purple Rain's 20th anniversary, but the current album is far more evocative of classic Prince.

"Love" directly quotes "Glam Slam." The cheese synth–driven "Lolita" by turns conjures "Soft and Wet," "Raspberry Beret," and the Time, far outshining its Musicology equivalent, "Illusion, Coma, Pimp and Circumstance." "Black Sweat," the hottest track, is like a combination of "Kiss" and "Housequake" — yet its freshness shows how ahead of their time such songs were. Derived from his own past rather than hip-hop's present, "Black Sweat" nonetheless sounds positively hyphy.

Having appeased fans with this high-gloss coat of purple paint, Prince proceeds to go about his business, largely devoted to his faith as a Jehovah's Witness and his desire to launch his new protégé, Tamar. Her slightly raspy, tremulous R&B vocals spice up several songs, including the bluesy title track, which, judging by the other personnel, is a souped-up outtake from The Undertaker (Warner, 1994), a live-in-the-studio power-trio album released only in Japan.

Exactly where 3121 ranks in the pantheon of Prince albums is uncertain, but even a cursory listen reveals a more substantial disc than Musicology.

MTV2 My Block Bay Area

2006-10-29T15:42:00.000-08:00

MTV2 came by the Yay to learn a little more on all that's going on....

click to watch full video

click to read cover story

Super size me -- E-40's Ghetto Report Card

2006-10-29T15:03:00.000-08:00

By Garrett Caples
San Francisco Bay Guardian March 1, 2006

The suburban sprawl of Pleasant Hill is so generic it looks like it was squeezed from a tube — an unlikely setting for anything more exciting than an ATM transaction. Yet here at the Bay Area's first Fatburger franchise, at four p.m. on a Thursday, there's a throb of expectation beneath the din of its middle-school patrons and its digital jukebox that anticipates the arrival of the restaurant's owner. Reporters and photographers have begun to pile up due to a delay in his schedule, as the owner in question, Vallejo rap legend E-40, is in the midst of a full-blown press junket in preparation for the March 14 release of My Ghetto Report Card, the first album under his new deal with Lil Jon's BME imprint, on Warner Bros.

Following a prolific decade on Jive Records, with whom he released nine solo discs in addition to three with his family-based crew, the Click, and one retrospective, Best of E-40: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (2004), 40's move to the ultrahot king of crunk's label is both a testament to his enduring preeminence in a notoriously fickle industry and an opportunity to reach that upper echelon of rap superstardom inhabited by the likes of Jay-Z and Snoop, Puffy and Eminem.

Not that he isn't already a star, as is immediately apparent from his entrance with a small entourage, which includes his 18-year-old rapper-producer son, Droop-E, his longtime manager, Chaz Hayes, a bodyguard, and a documentary film crew. Visibly exhausted after a two-week promotional blitz of New York City and Los Angeles, not to mention a morning of radio interviews, 40 still radiates charisma, transforming his immediate surroundings through his larger-than-life presence. Unfailingly polite, patient with the steady stream of fans, and acquainted with his restaurant employees down to the busboys, the man born Earl Stevens provides a marked contrast to the crack-slinging, gun-toting, "let-you-have-it-in-the-bladder"-style exploits of his rap alter-ego.

He apologizes for the scheduling conflict. "Just let me knock out this other interview real quick," he says — and he does, with the brisk efficiency of Babe Ruth pointing out where he's about to hit a home run, combined with the Babe's air of infinite leisure in performing such feats.

"I ain't had time to eat a fortune cookie," he says, settling down to a bunless Fatburger with the works and, in an off-menu innovation, a small Gatorade bottle half-filled with burgundy. He touts its antioxidant properties. Newly health conscious after a dentist visit revealed he had dangerously high blood pressure, the inventor of exotic ghetto cocktails with names like "Num Num Juice" sticks to red wine and rarely touches weed these days. After shedding some 50 pounds, and gaining some back, the tall, burly MC looks positively svelte at his current 333. He even works out, though hectic road life can make it impossible.

"Out in New York I did Direct Effect, MTV radio, Music Choice, a bunch of local video shows. LA was all interviews like this. When I'm not doing regular interviews, I'm doing phoners from 10 a.m. to 7 at night. But I'm not pitching a bitch, because it's part of the game."

GAME RELATED

E-40 speaks of the "game" with authority, for he rewrote many of its rules. Judged "too eccentric" by early-'90s record executives for his high-pitched, high-speed delivery and his compulsive coinage of slang — the very qualities defining his appeal — 40 began his own label, Sick Wid It, selling albums from the trunk of his car; after the label's third release, an EP titled The Mailman (1993), debuted at number 13 on Billboard's R&B chart, deals came to him. Signed through Sick Wid It by Jive in 1994, 40 pioneered the rapper-as-independent-label-head methodology that's since become industry standard.

Clearly the arrangement netted him a lot more money than many a rapper who's moved more units under direct contract with a major label. 40's got the gouda — his current currency euphemism — to invest in things like the Fatburger franchise or the Ambassador Lounge in San Jose, yet he readily acknowledges that the relationship between independent and major labels lends itself to the familiar corporate vice of outsourcing work as a means of cutting costs.

"A lot of A and Rs don't go to the hood like they used to and look for talent," he says. "They know all the rappers is connected, so they don't mind giving a big-name rapper a label deal. It's the smart thing to do. They're watching their money more than ever. They're not shipping as much as they used to. You're not going gold out the box any more."

E-40 himself has felt the pinch. Including the Click's Game Related (1995), 40 scored four gold albums between 1995 and 1998, one of which, In a Major Way (1995), was eventually certified platinum in 2002 by the Recording Industry Association of America. While his numbers, like everyone's, took a hit with the proliferation of Internet file-sharing and the general economic downturn under Bush, his albums continued to debut in Billboard's top-20 R&B chart, and aside from his own childhood idol, Too $hort, who has long since relocated to Atlanta, E-40 was the only Bay Area rapper signed to a major for the duration of the region's turn-of-the-century commercial drought.

"For anybody from the early '90s to still be here, they're keeping in touch with the kids on the street," Oakland rapper-producer E-A-Ski says. "40 don't get caught up in what he's done. He reaches out to what's going on now."

JIVE DEAL

Yet 40 also feels Jive underpromoted his more recent work. "Jive was a good label when they wanted to be," he says. "The first three or four years of the deal, it was excellent. Later, when the pop music started kicking in — no disrespect to Britney, *NSYNC; they made Jive a lot of money — that took the focus away from rap, from people who helped build the label.

"Don't get it twisted: I made a lot of money with Jive," he concludes diplomatically. "But the last few years, I think they dropped the ball on a few hits, a few videos they shoulda did."

Case in point: One of Lil Jon's earliest hits outside the Dirty South was "Rep Yo City," from 40's 2002 album, Grit and Grind. "BET wanted a video, and Jive lagged on it. They said, 'You need to get up to 800,000 spins,' and we was there. It would've been smart because you got E-40, Bun B, Petey Pablo. All three of us were on Jive, so why not do a video? That's what made me think, they ain't even interested.

"Lil Jon used to be signed to Too $hort's label [the Jive-distributed $hort Records]," 40 recalls. "$hort and Jon had a group together, a whole album ready to go, and Jive didn't want to do it. Me and $hort had an album, The History Channel, ready to go. They didn't want to do it. We had someone ready to put money in our pockets. Jive coulda got points, put their logo on it. They just didn't see the big picture. So I turned in my greatest hits and left."

Granted, crunk was so startlingly new — immediately becoming its own subgenre — that Jive's failure to predict Lil Jon's immanent explosion in popularity is perhaps understandable. But the label's inability to capitalize on a collaboration between two popular artists on its own roster, or even to let someone else do it and simply make money without spending any, is incomprehensible. (At press time a publicist for Jive was still tracking down who made that particular call.) Judging from their already classic collaborations like 1996's "Rapper's Ball" and 1999's "Pervin'" (a 40ism for intoxication that's passed into wider usage), a whole album of E-40 and Too $hort would have been a signal artistic event and wouldn't have failed to turn a profit, even if sales were restricted to their own overlapping fan bases.

HISTORY IN THE MAKING: DROOP-E

Jive's decision not to put out the still unreleased The History Channel, if not an act of outright incompetence, at the very least doesn't reflect the best interests of either artist, and one can hardly blame 40 for leaving. Yet, in an undeniably cruel twist of fate, 40's voluntary abdication from his deal came at a time when Bay Area hip-hop began to recover its shine. The transition between labels meant that 2005, the hottest year in the Bay since the mid-'90s, was also the first year since '97 that 40 didn't release an album.

Still, he made his presence felt through guest appearances, most notably on Mistah F.A.B.'s hit "Super Sic Wid It," produced by Droop-E. E-40's oldest son, the young Earl Stevens Jr., made his recording debut, at age three, on his father's 1991 debut, Federal (Sick Wid It, reissued by Jive, 1995), before dropping his first rhyme, at age seven, on In a Major Way. "I didn't force him into none of this," 40 insists, though he does cop to making Earl Jr. take five years of piano lessons. "Just in case he did want to go into it, so he'd know where all the notes are."

Such precautions, coupled with Droop-E's own inclinations, have paid off, as these days he's better known for his production work behind F.A.B., Turf Talk, and Messy Marv. The all-Droop-E-produced Bay Bridges Compilation (Sick Wid It/Navarro, 2005) — one of the best hip-hop albums of last year, period — also yielded a hit by Oakland's BavGate, "On the Radio," which literally exhorted KMEL-FM to "play the Gate on the radio." Such gimmickry aside, Droop-E's success is no joke: Having grown up in rap, yet still a teen, he brings an astonishing freshness to the music that's difficult to summarize but whose unifying characteristic might be a greater emphasis on sounding fun than on sounding hard, beeping or whistling where others simply slam. Yet his beats have no shortage of knock, and the hardest street-rappers — Marv, Keak Da Sneak, Little Bruce — sound perfect over them. Being 40's son may have gotten Droop-E a hearing, but his own abilities have placed him in the front rank of Bay Area producers.

STILL BREADED

While 40 is clearly proud of his son's success and was otherwise occupied with his club and restaurant, an albumless year must nonetheless have been agonizing for a rapper who, on the 1999 track "Get Breaded," claimed to be "like a pregnant lady, [coming] wit a album every eight or nine months." It's not that 40 lacked offers to leave Jive but rather that he wanted to make the right move. "I kept recording, marinated around for about a year. I prayed on it," he explains. "Baby from Cash Money was ready to sign me. Puffy was on deck, wanting me to sign. But when I went with Lil Jon, they was like, whatever your situation is, it's all love.

"Lil Jon and I powwowed. We knew our chemistry was there. I was, like, 'This might be a good look.' He hollered at his folk, hollered at Warner. They were like, 'Let's go.' We put the paperwork in motion, and there we is right now."

BME was an inspired choice for 40 not simply because it entailed joining forces with Lil Jon, America's favorite rapper since Snoop, nor because the label obviously intends to give the Vallejo vet the major push Jive never quite managed to deliver. But of all of 40's options — significantly, from labels run by rappers rather than by executives — Lil Jon and BME are the most organically connected to his music. E-40 was probably the first Bay Area artist to try his hand at crunk. Having long enjoyed a Southern following, he was only too ready to tackle its homegrown variety of hip-hop.

But on a deeper level, crunk and the current Bay Area sound known as hyphy are intimately related: "cousins," as 40 puts it. The production style of crunk could be said to have evolved from the classic Bay Area mob sound — from producers like Studio Ton, Bosko, Mike Mosley, and Tone Capone — that powered E-40's earlier releases and was immensely popular in the pre–Dirty South. "Everyone in the South was influenced by E-40," Murder Dog editor Black Dog Bone affirms. Hyphy, exemplified by longtime 40 associate Rick Rock, not to mention Droop-E himself, evolved as a Bay Area response to the crunk dominating the airwaves earlier this decade, when KMEL wasn't playing local music. The most obvious stylistic distinction is, of course, vocal, as Bay Area producers stripped away the screaming chants of crunk and replaced them with raps more in tune with local mob music traditions.

E-40's ability to navigate between crunk and hyphy is well documented on My Ghetto Report Card. First conceived as a dozen tracks, half by crunk king Lil Jon, half by hyphy maestro Rick Rock, the project gradually expanded to include tracks by original mob-music makers Bosko and Studio Ton, as well as Droop-E, who has more than proved his ability to hold his own in such company. With the first single, the Lil Jon–produced "Tell Me When to Go," featuring Keak Da Sneak, already creating a buzz, My Ghetto Report Card seems poised to bring 40 to the wider audience his talents deserve. At the very least, as 40 is aware, the new album is sure to extend the present hot streak in Bay rap through 2006.

"I'm the quarterback," he concludes. "I'm the billboard of the Bay, and I'm here to let the world know that we back like hockey."

My Ghetto Report Card will be released March 14. Watch the video for "Tell Me When to Go" at myspace.com/e40.

The Mob Figaz Meet Marvaless -- 3 Da Hard Way (FriscoStreetShow.com)

2006-10-28T23:07:00.000-07:00

Album Review by Garrett Caples
San Francisco Bay Guardian January 25, 2006

Except for a retrospective Best of (Thizz), Pittsburg's own Mob Figaz spent 2005 in divide-and-conquer mode. Particularly hot were Rydah J. Klyde – who dropped two duo discs (El Pueblo Children with Freako and Bang Fo Bread with Johnny Cash as Money Gang) and a solo What's Really Thizzin? (all on Thizz) – and Jacka, whose solo debut, The Jack Artist (Artist), generated a huge buzz in the early part of the year. The present disc, teaming Jacka and fellow Figa Husalah with tough-talkin' Sac Town female rapper Marvaless, is one of the tightest side-projects in hip-hop history. If this were a full-time trio, they'd be a hardcore Fugees. It doesn't hurt that most of the tracks are produced by Rob-Lo, who provides ample evidence of why people speak of him in the hushed tones reserved for Rick Rock or E-A-Ski. He cooks up tracks in every style, yet everything he does is his own.

With all eyes on Klyde and Jacka, picking Husalah as your favorite Mob Figa is a bit like claiming George as your favorite Beatle, but I'm convinced that, like George, whose interest in India added unexpected depth to the band's psychedelia, Husalah is the Mob's special ingredient, bringing a sublime ridiculousness to every track. Witness "Shower Posse," a faux-dancehall gem that Husalah handles in a patois of Jamaican slang and invented nonsense, or "Moblife," where he phones in some vocals from the freeway. This willingness to go the extra creative mile is what distinguishes the Mob from every other thugged-out crew out there.

B-Legit -- Block Movement (SMC/Sick Wid It)

2006-10-24T21:24:00.000-07:00

Album Review by Garrett Caples
San Francisco Bay Guardian January 11, 2006

Apart from cousin E-40, B-Legit is the most accomplished rapper from Vallejo's Sick Wid It camp, his danked-out baritone providing the ideal complement to 40's high-pitched, hyperspeed delivery. With two mid-'90s discs for Jive, and two on Koch earlier this century, Block Movement is B-La's fifth solo album, and it shows just how far the Bay Area's original Savage has evolved since his most popular release, The Hemp Museum (Jive, 1996). Where that album relied heavily on 40's early blueprint – a solid mob foundation by the likes of Studio Ton and Mike Mosley – Block Movement shows B-La cultivating a distinct artistic sensibility. Other than 40's guest spot on "Guess Who's Back," produced by longtime associate Rick Rock, the album's best tracks – "Sick Wid It" (Damon Todd), "Trap Game" (Bedrock and Clyde Carson), "Get High" (One Drop Scott) – have little resemblance to 40's recent hyphy phase, taking advantage instead of the sheer depth of B's voice to explore more atmospheric vocal effects. This tendency is heightened by appearances from vocalists Harm and Naté on a trio of tracks produced by LJ, recalling his work on BavGate's The InstaGator (Black Mafia/Thizz, 2004).

The only missteps on Block Movement result from the few obvious attempts to ensure regional crossover success: "Block 4 Life," with Jadakiss and Styles P; "Where Dem Hoes At," with Paul Wall; and the crunk snoozefest "Handle Up." That's part of the game these days, but the album gains immeasurably by excluding these. Otherwise, Block Movement shows B-Legit has fully come into his own.

Don't hate the playa ... Hate the game: Mac Dre's murder is still a mystery, but that doesn't mean he ought to be crucified

2006-10-22T20:43:00.000-07:00

By Garrett Caples
Mac Dre painting by Eustinove P. Smith
San Francisco Bay Guardian November 16, 2005

VALLEJO'S CRESTSIDE NEIGHBORHOOD occupies a tear-shaped square mile on the northeastern edge of town, wedged between a major thoroughfare and the freeways shuttling tourists to nearby Marine World. Centered on Crest Ranch Park, with bucolic street names like Miravista and Haviture Way, it was clearly designed as suburban space – modest homes with tidy lawns are laid out in traffic-impeding loops and dead ends, at once labyrinthine and insular. But far from being a commuter haven, Crestside is the toughest hood in Vallejo, home to a small, proud, extremely close-knit African American community that contributes a disproportionately large share of talent to Bay Area hip-hop.

The Mac may have been first, and Mac Mall may have been more famous due to his mid-'90s stint on Sony/Relativity, but the undisputed king of the Crest for more than a decade was Andre Hicks, better known as Mac Dre, a pioneer of Bay Area independent rap who scored his first underground hit in 1989 with "2 Hard 4 the Fuckin' Radio." A prolific artist with more than 20 releases – the vast majority released after 1996 on his own Thizz Entertainment/Romp Records label – the 34-year-old Mac Dre had already dropped three solo albums in 2004 and was more popular than ever when he was murdered on Nov. 1 that year, in a Kansas City highway shooting.

A year later, I'm in the Crest for a block party marking the anniversary of Dre's death. The Associated Press's subsequent characterization of the event as a "memorial service" attended by "150 people" fails to do it justice; there had to be a few hundred people in the street, mostly Crest residents of all ages who came together by word of mouth, without a permit, to celebrate Mac Dre in the most spontaneous manner possible.

"Dre loved his neighborhood," his friend and fellow Crestsider PSD told me earlier. "He loved people. As a result, people loved him."

The feeling is palpable in the Crest. I'm riding with another of Dre's friends, J-Diggs, in a van wrapped in an ad for his CD California Livin', Part Two, one of six new albums released that day on Thizz (see "Nation of Thizzlam," page 38). As we approach the block party, Diggs cranks Dre's "Boss Tycoon" and literally dances the van through the crowd, assisted by a half dozen dudes who jump on the running boards to rock us in time to the beat ("Dipped in sauce"–step–"I floss"–step–"I'm a boss"–step-step). People dance, or rather, parade, in front of the van as it struts around the block, and for a few moments I'm in the center of a communal outpouring of love, the kind usually reserved for folk heroes and saints. Dre's charisma had that effect on people, even his closest associates.

"He was the word of the Crest," affirms Dubee, a.k.a. Sugawolf, who started a neighborhood supergroup, the Cutthroat Committee, with Dre and PSD in the late '90s. "Just to get a response back from him was to know your existence in this turf shit was acknowledged."

The party rages on, rowdy but cordial, for a couple of hours: People drink, smoke, dance, and generally testify about Dre. At length, I return to the van, drunkenly devouring barbecue, when I hear two shots pop off. I quickly get acquainted with the floorboard.

Another volley – I count five shots – screams, and then another burst of gunfire. People are fleeing in all directions, by car and on foot.

Diggs packs his entourage into the van and sends us around the corner while he investigates. He immediately returns and pilots us out of Crestside's intricate maze. A 20-year-old Crest resident, Michael Clinton Banks, is dead of a gunshot wound. No one's sure who shot him or why – or even if it was intentional.

"I apologize for all the gunshots around your head today," Diggs later says. "But that's the neighborhood. That's what Dre rapped about. Some people who came to the Crest today was tourists, but tonight was living proof it's not a tourist attraction. To us in the neighborhood, that's routine."

Before the night is over, two other men – including Baygeen of the Crest Creepaz, whose CD The Thizzics Room also dropped that day – are shot near the crime scene. It's a bit much, even for Diggs: "Imagine getting shot the same day your album comes out!"

In the age of 50 Cent, in which being shot is fetishized as evidence of a rapper's street authenticity, being shot might help your career. But Diggs – who carries a bullet in his arm and one in his back, an inch away from his spine – knows it isn't a joke. It might kill you.

'They knew who they were after'

From the world-famous Tupac Shakur to local legends like Plan Bee of Hobo Junction, Rappin' Ron of Bad Influenz, and Eclipse of Cydal, the list of Bay Area rappers to die from gunshot wounds is as distinguished as it is long. The Crest itself had already suffered losses. The first rapper in Crestside, if not all Vallejo, Michael "the Mac" Robinson was fatally shot in 1991. Cecil "DJ Cee" Allison – a local mainstay who worked with both Macs – was killed in a drive-by shooting in 1995. Both incidents occurred in Vallejo, and both were reportedly cases of mistaken identity. In fact, with the exception of Shakur, none of the rappers mentioned above was an actual target – they were instead victims of proximity or misidentification, and the availability of firearms.

Dre's murder is different, however, as he was definitely the intended target of a hit, according to Kansas City police detective Everett Babcock, lead investigator in the case. "They knew who they were after," he says in a phone interview from Kansas City. Over the past year, Babcock has been piecing together a picture of the crime in terms of suspects and motives, though he cautioned it could take years before conclusive evidence comes to light. While he couldn't divulge details due to the ongoing nature of the case, he would confirm that his investigation turned up no evidence of any criminal activity on Mac Dre's part.

This is a detail worthy of emphasis, for the overwhelming impression left by media coverage of Dre's death was that he was a gangster whose criminal past had finally caught up with him. Most reports were based on a single Nov. 1, 2004, AP story, "Underground Rapper from Bay Area Killed in Shooting in Kansas City," which introduces Dre as a "rap star, who police say was also a member of a gang of robbers," before even printing his name. Only eight paragraphs later do we learn that this alleged gang membership was in "the early 1990s," and the story imperfectly distinguishes Kansas City from Vallejo police throughout, making his death seem connected to 15-years-old events.

Granted it'd be unrealistic to expect nuanced coverage of Dre's death on what happened to be the day before the most contentious presidential election in US history. But the way his death was reported not only denigrates Dre's artistic achievements, but also relies on the crudest of stereotypes (black male = rapper = criminal).

Rapper gone bad?

This is not to deny Dre's criminal record. Like many aspiring MCs, Dre began writing raps to stave off boredom in juvenile hall. After his release in 1988, he hooked up with the Mac and producer Khayree, who'd already put out the Mac's The Game Is Thick. (The last album Dre released, 2004's The Game Is Thick, Part 2, on Sumo, is a sequel/homage to his friend and mentor's underground classic.) Building a buzz with songs like "2 Hard for the Fuckin' Radio" and "California Livin' " (1991), Dre was clearly on his way to the majors when his career was derailed by an arrest for "conspiracy to commit bank robbery." Accused of being a member of the Romper Room Gang, responsible for a string of old-fashioned bank holdups in the Vallejo area in the early '90s, Dre wound up doing four years and four months in federal prison. But he maintained he was framed by Vallejo police, whose inability to catch the robbers he had mocked in the 1992 song "Punk Police."

According to J-Diggs, Dre's codefendant, who served eight years on the weightier charge of conspiracy to commit armed bank robbery, "the Romper Room crew was a group of youngsters growing up together – the name 'gang' was attached to us by the media. Our crew was only 11 deep and 9 of us went to the feds."

"I was into the bank robbery game," J-Diggs freely admits. "But not Dre. We was going to Fresno to rob a bank – me, my cousin, and another guy who was an informant wearing a wire. Dre ended up coming down there with us, to go mess with some girls. We had 32 FBI agents following us around for a couple of days.

"All they wanted out of Dre was to say, 'Yeah, I knew they was going to rob a bank. I didn't have nothing to do with it.' He could've went home, but he kept his mouth shut. Out of the crew, Dre is the only person I can say went to prison for nothing, for basically not telling on nobody."
What's really going on

Regardless of how you weigh such testimony – and Lt. Rick Nichelman, the Vallejo Police Department officer named by Dre on his recorded-over-the-phone-from-jail album, Back N Da Hood (Young Black Brotha 1993), maintains Dre was guilty as charged – one thing is certain: If Dre committed a crime, he'd done his time. Friends and collaborators describe the postprison Dre as completely focused on music, to the exclusion of extracurricular income.

"Dre wasn't a criminal," PSD insists. "He wouldn't know how to steal. I heard him denounce pimping, the whole getting supported from a female, three or four Gs every night. He said, 'Man, I just want to rap.' He was dedicated."

Dubee similarly recalls Dre's encouragement to concentrate strictly on music: "I'm a street rapper. He used to get mad at me because I'm so street. 'Dubee, you got to leave this street shit alone sometimes.' We didn't know it, but Dre had stopped looking at us as 'the little cuddies.' He was like, 'Y'all with me now.' "

"He gave a lot of people the opportunity to do music," says North Oakland rapper Mistah F.A.B., who became tight with Dre in the last year and a half of his life. "He was a good dude, a philanthropist. He didn't base a lot of things on the materialist ideology a lot of rappers have. I've never heard anyone say anything bad about Dre."

Such universal goodwill in the notoriously factional world of Bay Area hip-hop is rare, but stories of Dre's own generosity to his fellow artists are legion. Perhaps the most illustrative comes from producer One Drop Scott, who himself was brutally beaten and left for dead in an incident at the Berkeley Marina a couple of years ago.

"When I got out the hospital, I was at Harm's studio at the Soundwave. I ran into Mac Dre. He listened to what I'd been doing since I got back. He was loving that I was still doing my thing. He came back the next day, handed me a fat-ass check. 'Drop, I need you, bro.' He was the first to chisel me off and make sure that I was cool."

Clearly Dre appreciated defiance in the face of overwhelming odds and appalling setbacks. When he was about to blow up, he was sent to prison for what would be considered his prime in an age-conscious industry like hip-hop. When he got out, he had to start over at a time when the Bay was ice cold; even then, he consistently moved around 30,000 units, with the occasional disc selling more than 60,000 copies, according to SoundScan reports. When he started getting hot again after the Treal T.V. (2003) DVD, he warmed up the Bay with him. When he was about to blow up again, he was murdered.

When all is said and done, Dre was the one who was robbed.

Nation of Thizzlam: The Rebirth of Thizz Entertainment

2006-10-22T20:29:00.000-07:00

by Garrett Caples
San Francisco Bay Guardian November 16, 2005

The real legacy of Mac Dre is not his criminal record but rather the music he made and the label he started as Romp Records after his release from prison in 1996. In a characteristically generous move, Dre’s first project was a Rompalation featuring the new generation of Crestside rappers who’d begun to establish themselves in his absence. In 2001, continuing friction with the Vallejo Police convinced Dre to relocate to Sacramento and rename his company Thizz Entertainment, downplaying the association with “Romper Room Gang” (see main article). Originally slang for an ecstasy high, “thizzin’” grew to be an extremely elastic concept in Dre’s hands, encompassing a wide range of hedonistic associations.

While Thizz long boasted an impressive roster of largely Crestside-bred talent, the death of its charismatic leader and best-seller obviously threatened the company’s existence. But Thizz wouldn’t die. Dre’s business partners, Miami Tha Most and Kilo Curt, instead brought in Crestside native Mac Mall as co-owner, flagship artist, and public face of the organization. Though Mall and Dre had fallen out in the mid-’90s, they’d recently reunited to record Da U.S. Open (Thizz 2005), the last project Dre completed, down to its tennis-themed cover art.

“We started doing a lot of shows on the road and bonded our friendship first,” Mall recalls. “Then that record was the easiest I ever made in my life. It was so organic. Me and Dre was getting ready to take over the world, doing projects together and then solos, along with the rest of Thizz. So we already had this in mind.”

“When dude passed, I made a vow; I’m not gonna let this story end. I gotta step up and keep Crestside music alive.”

Thizz has done more than keep alive. The period since Dre passed has been one of the hottest times for Bay Area rap in years, and no label has brought more heat than Thizz. In addition to maintaining Dre’s own vast catalogue, Thizz has dropped one underground banger after another, releasing new albums from its established core of Crestside artists like PSD (The Guru), Little Bruce (Base Rocks & Pimp Socks), and J-Diggs (California Livin’, Part 2), as well as more recent affiliates like former Steady Mobbin’ member BavGate (The InstaGator) and North Oakland’s Mistah F.A.B. (Son of a Pimp), whose Droop-E-produced single, “Super Sic Wid It” featuring Turf Talk and E-40, cracked the top 5 on KMEL, making it the label’s biggest radio success. (Dre’s own Sean-T-produced “Fellin’ Myself,” from his 2004 album Ronald Dregan, continues to play in heavy rotation.) Mob Figaz member Rydah J. Klyde, a friend of Dre from his Sacramento days, already had two big albums on Thizz this year—The Best of the Mob Figaz and a duo album, as Money Gang, with Johnny Cash of Da Hoodfellas, called Bang Fo’ Bread—when he dropped two more: one solo, What’s Really Thizzin?, one duo, with Freako, El Pueblo Children. This doesn’t even exhaust the list, which also includes four Thizz Nation compilations. Taken as a whole, it’s an unprecedented single-year output for a Bay Area independent hip hop label.

Dreganomics

The sheer volume of Thizz releases over the past year has been made possible by an increased level of collaboration within Bay Area hip hop’s notoriously cutthroat business environment. Dre’s goodwill extended far beyond Crestside, and the tragic circumstances of his death provided a sudden common ground on which a divided scene could unite.

“Thizz Nation, that’s everybody all put together, because that’s what Dre always wanted,” PSD says. “The Bay Area didn’t know how to come together. But with Thizz it’s starting to happen. A lot of neighborhoods that had problems squashed those problems in the name of Mac Dre and Thizz.”

“We’re trying to carry on what Dre had going on, to put the shine back on the Bay,” he continues. “This is a fire he started. It’s up to us to keep it lit. It’d not only be disrespectful not to; we’d be idiots.”

“Thizz isn’t just a label; it’s a movement,” says Mistah F.A.B. “Of course we want to do ourselves as our artists but really we want to keep Mac Dre’s legacy alive. He started a lot of things that’s taking place right now. We want to put the Bay Area back out front.”

This new spirit of cooperation involves more than just pooling creative resources, though this helps; in F.A.B.’s case he recorded his entire album, including guest shots and producers, for free. More radically, however, has been Thizz’s adaptation of the co-branding principle to local hip hop on an unprecedented scale, teaming with rappers like F.A.B. or BavGate, who often have their own labels and put their own albums together. “We do albums and we bring them to Kilo, who is the C.E.O.,” F.A.B. explains. “Each artist has their own different ways of completing his album. But if it’s an album Thizz feels is worth putting out, putting their stamp on, they’re gonna put it out.” In exchange for a cut of the profits, Thizz lends logistical support and promotional dollars, as well as the “Mac Dre Presents” logo. Ultimately such independent dollars only go so far; as is increasingly the case even with major labels, it’s ultimately the artist’s responsibility to break the record. But Thizz lends the power, infrastructure, and name-recognition of a corporation to artists who otherwise might not be able to push a record without it; it also exposes them to potential new fans through association with other Thizz artists.

“There comes a point of saturation,” F.A.B. admits. “You don’t want people to burn out on the whole movement before it even gets a chance to expand.” What is striking, however, is the sheer quality of the Thizz releases thus far. Obviously Dre’s death has lent an incredible urgency to this music. The effect might best be gauged by comparing PSD’s current The Guru to his 2003 U Ain’t Heard of Me???, both co-released by Thizz and his own Gateway Entertainment. While the earlier disc is an impressive if overpacked collection of a top-notch rapper, The Guru is a true masterpiece of an album, bluesy and soulful, tinged throughout with PSD’s Mississippi roots.

With the addition of Keak Da Sneak, who confirmed his much awaited upcoming album will be a Thizz co-release with his own AllNDaDoe label, Thizz continues to gain momentum. The one hold out thus far is Dre’s fellow Cutthroat Committee member Dubee. While he willingly helped PSD finish the group’s second album, Money Iz Motive, among the final projects Dre worked on, Dubee doesn’t feel ready to drop another album yet. “I put my game on pause,” he says, “out of respect for the cuddie.” While he may not agree, PSD understands his friend’s position; no one wants to exploit Dre even as they want to further his work.

“We could have used more songs with Dre,” PSD says, “But we were like no, save it for his kids. We have to eventually let go; we can’t just keep giving you Dre songs like Dre alive.”

The Luniz: 10 On It!

2006-10-22T20:06:00.000-07:00

by Garrett Caples
Luniz 10th Anniversary Special exclusive to hyphythizzgo.com

2005 marks the 10th anniversary of Operation Stackola (Noo Tribe/Virgin, 1995), the platinum debut of Oakland duo Jerold “Yukmouth” Ellis, Jr. and Garrick “Numskull” Husbands: the Luniz. Featuring fat tracks by the likes of Shock-G, DJ Fuze (both from Digital Underground), DJ Darryl, and E-A-Ski & CMT, Stackola is best known for the Tone Capone-produced “I Got 5 On It,” which a decade later remains the weed-smoking anthem of hip hop. The album also established the Luniz’s peculiar brand of outrageousness. At a time when the persona of the millionaire rapper became the norm, the Luniz portrayed themselves as small-time hustlers, usually broke, always on something. Their sense of humor, moreover, was bizarre and inimitable; who but the Luniz would begin their very first album depicting their own death, at the hands of a machine-gun-toting “playa hata” shouting “Fuck the Luniz!”? (About half-way through Stackola, on “5150,” the pair are killed again, floating up to heaven to encounter Jesus, Shock-G’zus, who promptly kicks them out, though in truth Shock would bring them into DU, both on stage and in the studio.)

But what defined the Luniz above all else was the chemistry between Yukmouth and Numskull. Friends since their early teens, the two forged a bond based on their determination to succeed in hip hop. “We was both sleeping on the park bench,” Num recalls, “because his grandma and my mom wanted us to get jobs, and we’re like ‘No, we want to be rappers.’” Such shared hardships infused the pair’s complementary vocal styles, for Yuk’s frenetic flow was a perfect match for Num’s almost talking style of rap. “In every great duo, one partner brings something the other lacks,” says Mekanix production team member Dotrix, who dj’ed for the Luniz on tour for their second album, Lunitik Muzik (1997). “Num’s flow sounds simple, though it’s actually complex, but with him it’s more what he says, rather than how. Yuk, on the other hand, is all style, like a NY rapper, more how he says it than what.” Such differences mirror the Luniz’s distinct personalities. Yukmouth, to invoke a song from his 2003 album Godzilla, is “stuntastic,” rocking jewels and platinum teeth, puffing high-grade weed, sipping Moet; Numskull, by contrast, is laid back and hood, sporting white tees with no ice, no longer smoking weed but still committed to Mickey’s malt liquor.

The history of the Luniz begins in the late ’80s when Yukmouth joined Numskull’s Brothaz Wit Potential as a non-rapping visual artist who quickly became one of the tightest rhymers in the crew. Forming a duo originally called Luni Tunz, their first break came in the early ’90s when they met Chris Hicks of C-Note Records, who was in the process of recording the debut of another Oakland sensation, Dru Down. Hicks put the Luniz in the studio with Dru, where they recorded “Rescue 911” and “Ice Cream Man,” a local underground hit. The Luniz also recorded “5 On It,” which was sufficient to land a deal with Noo Trybe, while Dru’s album, Explicit Game, was picked up by Relativity.

The international impact of “5 On It” should have paved the way for the Luniz’s future. Instead, as if presaged by their multiple deaths on Operation Stackola, the duo was dealt a series of setbacks of the career-killing kind. Hoping to replicate Stackola’s success, Noo Trybe chief Eric Brooks tried to steer the Luniz in a pop direction Yuk & Num stubbornly resisted. Lunitik Muzik thus ended up sounding like the biggest-budget street album ever recorded; lacking a pop hit, the album nonetheless went gold, though it fell short of the label’s expectations.

Industry pressures began to take their toll. Ensnared in bad deals with both Brooks and Hicks, as well as legal difficulties owing to wild behavior on tour, the Luniz began to grow apart, and when Yuk jumped at a solo offer from Rap-A-Lot, their days as a duo seemed over. Yet, though mostly leading seperate lives, the Luniz never really broke up, playing the occasional gig and making joint appearances on various projects, including each others’, as well as the West Coast Mix of P.Diddy’s “5 On It”-based “Satisfy You” (Bad Boy 2000). Gradually they renewed their bond and recorded what was to be their third album, Oakland Blaze. But new complications arose. Noo Trybe folded, leaving Hicks with the rights to the Luniz name, while Yukmouth remained under contract to Rap-A-Lot. Numskull, meanwhile, refused to do business with Rap-A-Lot, as he’d never been paid for his appearances on Yuk’s projects. As negotiations ensued, bootlegs of Blaze began selling all over Oakland, even spawning the underground hit “I’m a Raider.” After endless delays, the album was finally rushed out, with a slightly different track list, in the summer of 2002, as Silver & Black (Rap-A-Lot). Though previous bootlegging resulted in low sales, the buzz the project generated was undeniable proof fans were still hungry for the Luniz, and the Luniz could still deliver.

To celebrate the Luniz’s 10th anniversary in the industry, I touched down with both Yukmouth and Numskull. With 3 solo albums, 2 United Ghettos of America comps, and 1 duo disc with C-Bo as Thug Lordz already under his belt, Yuk is promoting All Out War, Vol. 2 (Smoke-A-Lot), the second mixtape by his crew the Regime. Num, meanwhile, is preparing his first “solo” release, Caliban, named after his own new group, who are featured on the album. While the music on each reflects their respective personalities, it’s hard not to notice that both the Regime and the Caliban have adopted camouflage and fatigues, as if, even at a distance, Yuk and Num are attuned to the same wavelength. Both are optimistic about an eventual 4th Luniz album, but only when the conditions are right. “I wanna do it for me,” Numskull says, “not because of the Luniz name.” Yukmouth agrees: “We gotta build that bond back because that bond ain’t there right now. Soon as we can vibe together as the Luniz, then we can do it.”

(part two: Yukmouth: The Regime Declares War
part three: The Mystery of Numskull)

Yukmouth: The Regime Declares War

2006-10-22T19:58:00.000-07:00

by Garrett Caples
Luniz 10th Anniversary Special exclusive to hyphythizzgo.com

You’ve got to hand it to Yukmouth; during the Bay Area’s long post-2pac commercial drought—when E-40 and the by-then-Atlanta-based Too Short were the region’s only major-label platinum acts—Yuk routinely moved several hundred thousand units for Houston, TX independent Rap-A-Lot Records, maintaining a nationwide reputation without radio play, videos, or big-budget promotion. His success is partly due to sheer talent. Yukmouth’s flow is fierce, and while some fans were disgruntled when he smoothed out his voice on his solo albums, it soon became apparent that he was merely expanding his arsenal. His Luniz voice continues to crop up, but as one of many weapons at his disposal, and his continually-evolving technique keeps him current in an industry where styles quickly become dated.

Besides talent, Yuk’s success stems from sheer relentlessness. Having taken it upon himself to don the Thug mantle left vacant by the death of 2pac, Yukmouth has remained faithful to the role. Like Pac, he refuses to be politic, calling the game how he sees it, never backing down regardless of the opponent. As a result, he’s been involved in some legendary beefs: Master P; Scarface; Daz; Snoop (to name just a few). Most recently, Yuk’s been waging a two-front campaign against G-Unit and its erstwhile associate The Game. When we spoke he’d just released All Out War, Vol. 2, on his new Rap-A-Lot/Asylum-distributed label, Smoke-A-Lot. A 2-CD monument to spleen, War is the second mixtape by his multi-region crew, The Regime.

“Our click is from the East, Midwest, South, and the West, so we represent everybody,” Yuk says. “The Regime is Yukmouth, Tech N9ne, Gonzoe, Poppa LQ, Monster Gunjah, Menace, E-Blak, Dru Down, Young Dru, Young Skrilla, Ampichino, Nate Da Nut, Messy Marv, Mark Shyst. It’s the veterans and the young people I’ve discovered throughout my career. A lot of people come to you with CDs, rapping after shows; I happen to be one of the dudes who listens. I picked the best apples outta the bunch and formed the Regime.”

“We’re warming the streets up before we drop an album.. People heard about us from the song on my album Godzilla (Rap-A-Lot 2003), but I want people to feel us as a group; you can’t really see our diversity, our range of music, from just one song. On this new mixtape, we’re giving damn near 50 songs. We mean business.”

Indeed, and in more ways than one. While Yuk’s beefs are unquestionably sincere—fresh anger rises in his voice while discussing them—the budding label tycoon isn’t blind to the marketability of his battle with the whole G-Unit/Shady/Aftermath/Interscope juggernaut, currently the dominant commercial force in hip hop. 50 Cent and Game are even listed on the cover of War, along with more willing non-Regime participants like E-40, Jacka from Mob Figaz, and Guce of Bullys Wit Fullys fame.

“Game’s on the mixtape,” Yuk confirms. “It’s a skit where a girl clowns the shit out of him on the radio. There’s a lot of exclusive shit the average consumer couldn’t get unless you heard it that night. I got the actual shit, where 50 Cent dropped a nigga on Hot 97, the Fat Joe interview where he found out 50 did the song and he’s challenging him to a fight. I got Jay-Z on there when he dissed Game. It’s not only us; it’s a combination of everybody.”

Yuk has a point, for the sheer size of his coalition of the willing, not to mention its geographical diversity, suggests a growing backlash within hip hop against the corporate-funded hype machine that launched both 50 and Game in quick succession. The situation is extremely fluid, however. Game, for instance, takes his share of lumps on War, which features titles like “Playin Gaymez” and “It’s Not a Gayme,” as well as a surrogate, “The Lame,” portrayed with comedic panache by young San Diego rapper/producer Fifth. Yet surprisingly enough, according to Yukmouth, these portions of the mixtape are strictly historical.

“Right now, me and Game squashed the beef. He called me, after I pressed up the mixtape, and I’m like, ‘Yo, shit’s pressed up.’ And he’s like, ‘Ok, I understand. But from now on let’s not get at each other.’ I’m like, ‘Cool.’ Because he used to do the ‘Fuck you, Yukmouth’ at the beginning of every set, but he stopped that. And I respect that, so I ain’t gonna do no more songs about the dude because he’s holding his word.”

Anyone familiar with Yukmouth’s ability to hold a grudge—he’s still dissing now-retired Master P for biting “Ice Cream Man” 10 years ago—might be surprised by this abrupt about-face, but it makes sense, for Game’s war with G-Unit has inadvertently landed him on Yuk’s side of the fence. Word on the street was their beef stemmed from an incident that didn’t even involve Yuk, during a Game appearance in an Oakland record store, and for all the vitrol that’s flown between them, a beef based on a misunderstanding probably isn’t worth the effort given changing conditions on the ground.

In terms of his beef with 50, however, Yuk’s enthusiasm remains undiminished. “I’m willing to do a song with Game shitting on G-Unit,” he says. “I’m about West Coast preservation right now.” Preservation, it seems, is the very issue behind the 50 Cent backlash within the industry; unlike his clash with Game, Yuk’s beef with 50 is a matter of principle.

“50 Cent did a lot of snitching,” Yuk says, reiterating a charge frequently leveled against the G-Unit leader. “I won’t say what he said but he did a lot of dry ratting that got the hip hop industry fucked up. Major underground independent labels getting hit by the Feds, ATF, know what I mean? When dude got on BET and said what he said, he’s fucking with people’s livelihood. He’s got the magnifying glass on everybody, like everybody’s racketeering, trying to launder money. What’s all this shit coming from? Shit some rapper said on TV? When shit like that happens, it’s beef.”

“Murder Inc. ain’t the only label that got hit like that,” Yuk insists, referring to the federal prosecution of label heads Irv and Chris Gotti on money laundering charges, of which they were acquitted in early December. “Go ahead diss the shit out of Jah Rule, that’s not a problem. But when you start fucking with niggas’ livelihood, their money, their labels, it’s like, damn, are you hating on all black entrepeneurs? If you’re doing that, I have something against you, because I’m a young black entrepeneur.”

The connections Yuk makes here are striking in light of how weak the prosecution’s case was, reportedly based on a handful of text messages. The ramifications of 50 taking his beef with The Inc. off wax and into the federal court system would indeed be chilling, given that the Gotti’s are self-made record moguls and 50 is merely the nominal head of a imprint created by white corporate dollars.

“Of course Interscope is behind every move,” Yuk insists. “When Benzino started fucking with Eminem in The Source, Jimmy Iovine instantly put his money into XXL. Now every month all you see is Interscope artists on the cover. Irv Gotti said he was in a meeting with Iovine, because they all have the same parent labels—Universal, Interscope, Def Jam—so they gotta have big meetings and luncheons together. Irv sees the dude [Iovine] at the luncheon, and the dude really don’t want to look at him, talk to him or nothing, like he’s really in the beef. They’re at a table where all the execs have to talk, and Jimmy Iovine won’t look at him, like he’s really down with this beef and shit. He’s got 50 and Eminem’s back on that shit.”

“That’s a crazy way to do it because could it lead to another 2pac/Biggie sort of incident,” Yuk says. “I mean, damn, labels don’t give us life insurance. They’re putting niggas in danger, then a nigga dies and shit, and they get all the money. Same as Pac; Pac died and they got all the money.”

Whether or not Yuk’s conspiracy theories seem plausible or paranoid, it became clear early last summer that G-Unit was feeling the heat, when recent signée Spider Loc—whom Yukmouth had never met—was dispatched to snatch Yuk’s chain. “I got jumped by 6 niggas and they pulled out a pistol. I was by myself. But the very next day, by the time he got to the jewelery store, he got a call to give that shit back. So he hurried up and took his little picture with it, and then gave that shit back. I had his OGs, the people he looked up to, calling. ‘Oh what did I do; I didn’t know!’ He pleading his case like that. I had niggas that if they called the shot he couldn’t walk off his fucking doorstep, them type of niggas calling him. Had his ass on the phone apologizing.”

“As far as money, they’ve got better backing, but gangstas run the streets, man. Not money; gangstas run the street,” Yuk says defiantly. “I ain’t said I’m gonna kill nobody, but they definitely gonna get beat up or their chain snatched. Those dudes think they’re invincible with their bulletproof vans and shit. You still gotta go to sleep. Are you going to sleep in a bulletproof room? Or you still gotta hop on flights. You can have a lot of money and still be touched, man.”

(part one: The Luniz: 10 On It!
part three: The Mystery of Numskull)

The Mystery of Numskull

2006-10-22T19:50:00.000-07:00

by Garrett Caples
Luniz 10th Anniversary Special exclusive to hyphythizzgo.com

Numskull is a hard man to pin down. When I first interviewed him in March, he was staying in Sacramento, shuttling back and forth to Reno to work on Caliban—his long-awaited first solo album—with producer C-Dash. Since then, we’ve periodically touched base by phone, at Digital Underground shows, or at the Garage in East Oakland, where former Luniz dj Dotrix and partner Kenny Tweed produce tracks as Tha Mekanix. One night in September in San Francisco, I bump into Num after a DU show, during which he brought down the house with a 3-song set from Caliban, backed by his group of the same name. Thizzing on a pill as well as on the crowd’s enthusiastic response, he gives me hug and tells me the album is done. Then he pulls me aside.

“This is important; you have to put this in the interview,” he says. “I was actually born in Mississippi; my mom moved to Oakland when I was a baby. And on my birth certificate, under race, its says ‘Negro.’”

He doesn’t elaborate further, but, only about a month after Hurricane Katrina, it was easy to catch his drift. Num was born in the ’70s, well after the peak of the civil rights movement when the term fell into disuse, but his birth certificate is evidence of the kind Katrina provided in abundance, that very little in fact had changed for certain black populations in America. If this seems like an atypical concern for the rapper who sometimes records under the name Drank-A-Lot, it does give a foretaste of what Caliban has in store for listeners.

“It’s gonna be Numskull’s solo album,” he says, “but I’m introducing the group so I got ‘em on a lot of songs. The Caliban is basically artists who don’t see the world like everybody else see it. We’re not worried about this club shit. Caliban—we took it from the Taliban, so we bitter about hella shit that’s going on. In the United States and overseas, all the shit. We hate Bush. It’s a Num album. And Num don’t really give a fuck about shit.”

The logistical details behind Caliban are still in flux. One minute Num is in talks with basketball players starting labels, next it’s supposed to be Koch, next he’s releasing it himself on the internet. Even the line-up of the Caliban seems to periodically undergo reassessment, though the core seems to be former No Limit soldier Don P; former Dangerous Crew member F.M. Blue, whose own long-delayed first album, The World Is Blue (FastLife 2004), is largely produced by the Mekanix; Blue’s younger brother Cheese Whosain; and DU member Esinchill, who just dropped his own C-Dash-produced project, a duo disc with King Beef called Choice Cuts (RCeason).

One thing, however, I can say for sure: the music Num played for me during our interview in Sacramento was some of the most advanced hip hop I’ve ever heard. Both Numskull and Esinchill hooked up with the newly-thriving Reno scene through Element, a trio who spent 5 years on the road as DU’s support crew and appear on Shock-G’s solo album, Fear of a Mixed Planet (33rd Street 2004). The beats coming out of Reno these days are wildly futuristic blends of the synthetic and the organic that sound truly like nothing else in rap. Clearly they inspired Num to take his own experimental approach to the vocals; the group tracks feature incredibly tight interplay between the rappers, as opposed to the usual structure of simply trading verses. As half of one of the greatest hip hop duos of all time, Num appreciates the power of group dynamics.

“I don’t like to be alone,” he confesses. “On stage, at home, anything. So I always bring people with me wherever I go. And these cats have talent, so why not put ‘em on?”

Such an attitude goes a long way towards explaining Num’s career in the years since Lunitik Muzik, for while Yukmouth has remained highly visible and productive—preparing to release his fourth solo album, Million Dollar Mouthpiece, in 2006—Num has kept a much lower profile. This has been partly due to circumstance; though he recorded a solo album in the late ’90s for NY-based K-Tel Records, the company folded before releasing it. Yet he also freely admits, “I didn’t think I was ready to do a solo album, at all. I was still into that Luniz shit. When I came out with my own album, I wanted it to be me, not people thinking he gotta make shit like the Luniz.”

Instead of pursuing a solo career, Num spent much of the period between Muzik and 2002’s Silver & Black on the road with the steadily-touring DU. “I was the animal on tour,” he admits. “I’m talking about drugs everywhere every night, drinking. And Shock was kinda coming along with me. But then he was like, we’re not going to take you and Clee on the next one. We understood. We were wild, acting a fool. I was still living out my Luniz fantasies. But Shock told me the reason we wasn’t making good music anymore was that we were partying too much. And I appreciated him for that.”

While the rest of DU embarked on tour, Num and Clee began hanging out in LA with producer Poli Pol, prior to his association with the Black-Eyed Peas. “The guy had a studio,” Num recalls. “We were just kicking it really cause we’d brought some other cats over to work with him. We were making songs that we wanted to hear. Shit that we were going through at that time. Like, you don’t have no pussy, so we made a jack off song. Shit like that. We weren’t even thinking about doing an album together at all. But then he’s like, fuck it; let’s do a whole album.” The result of these sessions was the brilliant but hard-to-find, label-less disc Good Laaawd That’s a Lot of Drank (1999), credited to Clee and Drank-A-Lot.

“That’s a classic album,” Num says proudly. “But we tried to put it out ourselves, and we didn’t know nothing about going independent. We pressed up 5,000 units and sold all 5,000 in stores. We would get the money back from the first sales, and we would try to put it into promotion. Then we’d have no money to press it up again when everybody’s asking for it. But I’ve never heard one person say that they didn’t like that album. I actually want to rerelease it.”

The duo eventually parted on friendly terms, but not before teaming with Money B for his Poli Pol-produced single “Putcha Thang on Me,” a Bay Area hit in 1999. Based on the chops displayed on his video for Good Laaawd’s single, “Knockdiesel,” Clee, now known as Cleetis Mack, went on to direct the successful Sex in the Studio adult hip hop dvd series (Metro Entertainment). Num, meanwhile, used Good Laaawd to help launch his proteges, Hittaz on tha Payroll, whose Mekanix-produced Ghetto Storm (Hitta) was one of the hottest albums in the Bay in 2003. The association continues, as Num co-hosts Sex in the Studio’s second episode (2004) and also features in the soundtrack single, “Drank-A-Lot,” with Money B and Eddi Projex of the Hittaz. Produced by the same Fifth who portrays “The Lame” on Yukmouth’s Regime mixtape, “Drank-A-Lot” generated a buzz earlier this year from numerous spins on BET’s late-night video show Uncut.

After years of crew-oriented endeavors, Num feels he’s finally “ready” to do a solo album, especially as he’s put together a powerful new crew to do it. The quality of the music on Caliban reveals the hidden perfectionism behind Num’s slow development into a solo artist

“Before I was just doing songs just to do them, and I don’t think that that’s my best work. A lot of those songs came from like me dealing with people and they’re like, ‘Num you should put this on your album.’ And I do hella songs by myself. None of it was worthy to me. That’s why I took so long. Out of 60 songs that I have, I’ll probably pick like 7 that I like.”

“I’m trying to make a classic album,” he concludes. “I don’t want an album with 2 good songs and 16 ok songs. I want an album that’s a classic all the way through, that you can just sit down and listen to. And I got something for everybody too. I have a song for this group, but other groups’ll want to listen to that song too. That’s the type of album I want to do.”

(part one: The Luniz: 10 On It!
part two: Yukmouth: The Regime Declares War)

Rick Rock Changes the Game

2006-10-19T20:51:00.000-07:00

by Garrett Caples
July 2005

After a prolonged eclipse following its mid-’90s commercial peak, Bay Area hip hop is once again starting to shine. Major labels long leery of the Bay’s reputation for violence off wax as well as on have begun to sign acts, from new groups like The Team (Universal) and The Frontline (Penalty/Ryko) to veterans like Sean T (Interscope) and E-A-Ski (Penalty/Ryko). Anticipation of E-40’s new album for Lil Jon’s Warner-distributed BME has only added fuel to the fire. But the man who perhaps sparked this major label flame is, appropriately enough, a Rock: Rick Rock, the innovative producer who laid the foundation for the Bay Area sound known as “hyphy.”

If the word “hyphy” means anything to you then you’re probably familiar with the Bay’s homegrown alternative to crunk: aggressively uptempo beats serving as vehicles for frenetic flows whose contrast to the more leisurely enunciations of the Dirty South’s chief export could hardly be more apparent. In the amount of time an Eastside Boy will spend stretching a single phoneme beyond recognition, a Bay rapper like Keak Da Sneak will deliver a brief dissertation on the fine art of ballin’. While the influence of crunk had been creeping into Bay Area club music for quite some time, it was the single “Hyphy” by the Fairfield, CA-based trio Federation, featuring a guest spot by 40 himself, that formalized the tendency. Produced by Rock and released on his own Southwest Federation label, “Hyphy” generated sufficient noise both in the club and on the radio to attract the attention of Virgin/EMI, who signed Rock’s label in time to release Federation’s 2004 debut, The Album. Emboldened by this example, or for fear of being left behind, other companies began to follow suit, leading to the present flurry of Bay Area deals.

Tucked away in a semi-rural corner of Sacramento, in a housing tract of relatively recent vintage, the home Rick Rock shares with his wife and baby daughter is a picture of domestic bliss, albeit one decorated with gold and platinum plaques. In person, Rock presents a marked contrast to the behavior suggested by Federation songs like “Go Dumb” and “Mayhem.” Laid back, soft spoken, able to disarm his toddler of a deafening musical Elmo toy without spoiling her sunny disposition, Rock displays throughout our interview an unfailing politeness more evocative of southern hospitality than elbow-throwing in the club.

“I was born in Montgomary, Alabama,” Rock says, “but raised in Suisun and Fairfield, California. Doonie Baby [of Federation] I met in Alabama. He was born in Mississippi. That’s how we came with the name Southwest Federation, because we’re a combination of both. I moved here when I was 15, then I moved back to Alabama until I was 25. Goldie Gold, he’s from Vallejo. And Stres is from Fairfield.”

“When I came here from Alabama,” he continues, “I was really doing East Coast music. SB-1200. I went into a store down there called the Fonkey Chicken, and my friend there said, ‘The type of music you’re doing, they’re not gonna feel it here;. you gotta switch up.’ And I was like, ‘I’m going to do me and have the game switch to me.’ And it’s weird because he brings that up, after what’s happened, and I listen to the radio, and now everyone’s trying to do me.”

Naturally such a change didn’t occur overnight, but rather resulted from patient toil and sacrifice; at this point, Rock has put a solid 10 years into the game.

“I began producing in 1995 with Conscious Daughters, a female group Paris had. Then I did one for 2pac. Most of these records were under the radar and I was just lucky to be on them at the time. I actually got on E-40’s Hall of Game (Jive, 1996). I did ‘Record Haters’ and ‘Circumstances.’ I didn’t charge money because at the time I didn’t have nowhere to live. I was sleeping on the floor, just trying to get my name out. That was two songs; his last three albums I did something like 9 songs on each.”

Though working with E-40 definitely put Rock in radar range, the Bay itself was just entering its lengthy turn-of-the-century drought, a time when many deserving artists languished without major label support or access to the airwaves. What saved Rock from a similar fate was a summons from Jay-Z to produce 4 songs for his Roc-A-Fella family album The Dynasty (2000), including the hit single “Change the Game.”

“When I did Jay-Z, things started heating up for me. Calls start coming in, ‘Who’s this guy? He’s got a different sound. West Coast-type of beat but not your typical West Coast beat, with East Coast rhyming on it.’ That’s when Fabolous came around.” Unlike Jay-Z, a proven star who could score a hit over polka, Fabolous was an unknown quantity, but the resulting single, “Can’t Deny It,” had no small role in making the rookie rapper a mispelled household word in 2001. “It just snowballed from there,” Rock says, continuing his winning streak over the next couple of years with hits like “Make it Clap” (Busta Rhymes), “Automatic” (E-40 and Fabolous), and “I Know What You Want” (Busta Rhymes and Mariah Carey), for which he won an ASCAP pop award.

While extensive collaborations with East Coast artists gave him a level of exposure he couldn’t have achieved in the Bay Area—including airplay on the region’s main hip hop station, Clear Channel-owned 106.1FM KMEL—Rock never abandoned his base in Sacramento. Indeed, his nationwide status as an A-list producer became a source of pride for the local hip hop community at a time when it desperately needed one.

“I love what I’m doing for the Bay Area,” Rock confirms, “for Northern Cali period, because there’s been a drought out here and I’ve been able to work with a lot of people and still represent Northern Cali. It gives people a hope, and me too. Working with different people from different places, like New York, or Atlanta, gives you another perspective and it translates into your music when you come home.” Nonetheless, he admits, being classed among elite hitmakers like Dre, Timbaland, and the Neptunes is “a different type of stress.”

“When you’re not on the radar, it’s cool; you’re getting a few dollars, you’re on the grind. The minute you got a couple of hits, you’re on the clock. Because then it’s like, when’s the next one? Right now, I got 2 or 3 singles in the pipe, and I can’t wait for them to come because my last record was ‘Breathe Stretch Shake’ [Mase featuring P.Diddy] and that’s like 6 months old now. If not longer. You get kinda nervous. And it’s something that new producers, they never feel that pressure.”

In the meantime, Rock hasn’t stood idle, throwing his energies into his own roster of artists. In addition to producing an album by Oakland group Kinsmoke, Rock has accumulated 18 tracks towards the next Federation album. “I’ve already started mixing the record,” he says with evident enthusiasm. What remains in question, however, is whether either album will be released through Virgin. In a textbook case of industry irony, the man who began the Bay’s new round of major label deals can’t wait to get out of his. For Rock was dissatisfied with Virgin’s handling of Federation’s The Album.

“It didn’t do well,” he sighs, like the ace pitcher whose team can’t score any runs for him. “It’s a classic Bay Area album. But what we did I can do independent and make way more.” Among his particular frustrations was Virgin’s decision not to make a video for “Hyphy,” cutting off one of the most likely routes for a regional hit to go national. “I really wanted to make these dudes stars, not just independent, around here stars. There was nothing out here and I wanted to make everything seem bigger than it is.”

“When I signed with Virgin, I was at Mister Chow’s in LA,” he continues, conjuring an image of the elite environment in which superproducers dwell. “Pharrell was there. He was complaining about how Virgin did N.E.R.D. and how they did Lenny Kravitz. And I’m sitting there listening, and it was just crazy that I ended up signing with Virgin.”

“I have to do a few more records for them unless they say we’re cool. They decide. We can’t drop them. I’m supposed to know what they want to do in a minute; hopefully they’ll be like, ‘We should sever ties,” because I’d really like to open another door.”

Fortunately, while Virgin makes up its mind, Rock is by no means in limbo; as a producer, he’s still a free agent. “I knew I couldn’t cross my production with Virgin because more than likely, we’d be off the label soon. I understood going into this that more times than not it doesn’t work.” Among his latest projects: splitting production chores with Lil Jon for the new E-40 album, proving that crunk and hyphy aren’t rivals but more like family.

“That’s gonna be a trip,” Rock says. “Lil Jon’s having the best 2-3 year run. I talk to 40, ‘What’s Lil Jon like in the studio?’ and 40 says, ‘Just like you. He comes from the ground up.’ Like some people, they don’t do nothing. Somebody else might do it and they put their name on it. So I always wonder, does he really turn knobs and hit keys and everything, and 40’s like, ‘Yeah, man. He’s doing it for real.’”

Esinchill cuts

2006-10-18T20:01:00.000-07:00

by Garrett Caples
San Francisco Bay Guardian October 26, 2005

Also performing with Digital Underground Oct. 28 at the Red Devil are Esinchill and King Beef. A relentless freestyler, inventive writer, and habitual stage-diver, Esinchill has one of the tightest flows in the Bay, and if he remains Oakland's best-kept secret, it's due to lack of exposure. After a show-stealing debut on DU's Who Got the Gravy? (Jake, 1998) and extensive touring with the group, E only made a handful of guest appearances, on discs by DJ Quik, the Delinquents, and so forth, before dropping the hard-to-find Everything to Lose! (Rceason, 2002). Displaying an unexpected metaphysical streak, as well as harrowing tales of a mysterious childhood illness, Everything is an astonishingly assured album showcasing E's versatility and eagerness to expand his range.

Having secured distribution for his Rceason label, Esinchill teamed up with childhood pal King Beef for Choice Cuts, Volume One, whose advance single – the Touré-produced "Hip Hop" – began generating a buzz with East Coast radio play earlier this year. Self-designated "hip-hop mood music," Choice Cuts is a frank genre workout of club/party songs that is less ambitious than its predecessor yet in many ways more accomplished. Much credit goes to the duo's main collaborator, Reno's C-Dash, who produced 11 of its 15 tracks, providing a unity of mood absent from so many rap albums. Dash's music is a dense mixture of synthetic and organic sounds with heavy R&B leanings – so crucial is he to the project that he warrants the rare hip-hop instrumental, which fits seamlessly into the album's flow.

As performers, Esinchill and King Beef display the deep rapport of classic rap duos, egging each other on to further audacity. Smooth-voiced and heavyset, Beef makes a perfect verbal and visual foil for E's rapid-fire staccato flow and compact frame. Sharing a disdain for rap's overreliance on guns, crack, hos, and bling, E and Beef concoct distinctive songs that should give less-adventurous lyricists pause. Their material is also untainted by the misogyny endemic to rap – they might joke about the perils of hooking up with the unattractive on a song like "Wing Man," but for the most part they adopt the Romeo approach, if only out of romantic self-interest. "It's just my attitude and gratitude and respect to a queen, and when respect exudes, then great sex ensues," E raps on "Mojo."

With a second single, "If You Want It," on the way, Esinchill and Beef are busy promoting Choice Cuts, as well as working in the studio on E's next solo album, Vigilantism, and Beef's first, The Swing Party, both tentatively slated for release next year on Rceason. Also look for Esinchill to appear on several cuts off Caliban, the long-awaited solo album from Numskull of the Luniz.

Make them party -- T.M.F., a.k.a. Tha Muthafuckaz, return to the Yay

2006-10-18T19:50:00.000-07:00

by Garrett Caples
San Francisco Bay Guardian October 26, 2005

GIVEN THE TURN -of-the-century commercial drought in Bay Area hip-hop, a whole generation of rappers disappeared under the radar. Among the crews to reemerge now that the scene is flourishing again is T.M.F. (Tha Muthafuckaz), a trio whose members include Cool Ass Cris, Smoke G Ryda, and Chilli D.O.G. Best known for the anthem "Planet 62nd," referring to their home street in East Oakland's "Avenues," T.M.F. were a live threat in the mid- to late-'90s, headlining their own small club dates as well as opening for artists like E-40, C-BO, and Digital Underground. Their upcoming appearance with DU, Oct. 28 at the Red Devil Lounge, in fact marks a reunion with a group who played an important role in T.M.F.'s past.

"Digital Underground brought us into this game," Chilli recalls. "They gave us shows at Geoffrey's Inner Circle, in Reno, LA, San Jose. Now we're on our own. The parents have raised the kids, and it's time for us to become the parents."

The history of T.M.F. begins in 1994, when then-DU DJ and current Mekanix producer Dotrix was seeking acts to develop. While Chilli and Cool Ass Cris had each separately worked with Smoke G, "Dot basically put us together," Chilli says. "He helped us format hooks, a lot of stuff for our first project."

Smoke G also remembers the discipline of this formative period under Dotrix's tutelage. "We constantly practiced," he says. "Before we got the music, we had the lyrics down. We don't just sit down separately and write verses – we write together. We'll come up with a concept, every time."

Indeed, though it may seem straightforward enough, the name T.M.F. is conceptual. Smoke G drew the initial inspiration from the tag of a San Francisco graffiti group. "T.M.F. can be whatever – 'The Most Famous,' "The Most Fantastic' – but we are 'Tha Muthafuckaz.' It's a fitting name for three brothas." DU frontman Humpty Hump adds, "T.M.F. decided to represent us, like 2Pac did with Thug Life. 'I didn't create Thug Life,' Pac said, 'I just organized it.' To different degrees, we're all muthafuckas, right?"

Cris, for one, concurs. "We're not putting ourselves on another level from average, everyday people," he explains. "If we come into a spot to perform, we're not going to be hid backstage where can't nobody talk to us. You're liable to see us on the dance floor. We might be passing a blunt to you. That's part of the name. We're real muthafuckas."

In an age when 50 Cent needs to mobilize a small army before engaging in the most trivial pursuits, such an attitude is rare, if not outright unfashionable, but it conveys the peculiar essence of T.M.F.'s aesthetic. "We try to keep our music where it starts from," Cris says. "It's always had that real grimy, street touch, but it's not the same as what everybody else is talking about. It's not about getting hyphy or stupid, or shooting someone. We just bring it strictly from reality."

"They were like the Luniz, on some real hood shit," says former mentor Dotrix, who brought the group to DU's Money-B in 1995. As the first signees to his Bobby Beats Records, T.M.F. earned a spot on the compilation Folk Music, Volume One (1996). But despite the impressiveness of their Dotrix-produced theme song, "The Motherfuckas," and the string of successful gigs that followed, the trio had difficulty settling down to the business of making their album.

"We had our days," Cris recalls, "going to the studio, drunk and loaded. We needed to learn the work ethic – it's a job." By the end of decade, when Money-B wound up the label and moved to Los Angeles, the trio found itself without a deal or the crucial access to industry connections DU's presence afforded.

"We had problems that were greater than the group could handle," Chilli confesses, alluding to "vacations at Club County." Frustrated by a lack of progress at a time when Bay Area rap was tightening its belt, the group temporarily split. "I chose to do other things," Chilli says, "like go to work, but music was still in there." Cris began a solo career, while Smoke G, under the name Vulcangundalero, recorded two discs of Oakland Raiders-themed rap as a member of Stadiumkings. Gradually, however, the three realized they missed the tight vocal interplay that characterized T.M.F. Reuniting with penitent zeal, the group banged out a long-overdue debut, Chill wit Us, released this year on Cris's label, Contagiouz Entertainment. While distribution is largely "out the trunk," these days that trunk is also virtual – you can sample Chill on T.M.F.'s Web site (www.myspace.com/contagiouzentertainment) or download it from Artistgigs.com for $6. A stripped-down, street-style party album mingling the pimp talk and social consciousness that traditionally, if paradoxically, undergird Oakland hip-hop, Chill wit Us is hardcore rap unencumbered by the jewels, guns, and Gucci-obsessing of the average MC. While they're still a far grimier act than generally comes to the Red Devil – or to Blake's in Berkeley (Nov. 25) – T.M.F. are confident they can please any crowd.

"Even if they're not the type that would normally hear our music," Cris says, "people aren't intimidated by our group. I guess it's the vibe and energy that we bring. Even though it's on a street level, they feel comfortable with it. And once we on stage, we make the muthafuckas party."

T.M.F. play with Digital Underground (with Esinchill and King Beef) Fri/28, Red Devil Lounge, 1695 Polk, SF. Call for time and price. (415) 921-1695, www.ticketweb.com. They also play Nov. 25, Blakes, 2367 Telegraph, Berk. Call for time and price. (510) 848-0886.

Say 'Bay' -- Behind the New Bay sound of local hip-hop: NorCal producers

2006-10-17T21:16:00.000-07:00

by Garrett Caples
San Francisco Bay Guardian July 6, 2005

'WHAT AM I – Old Bay?" a sardonic Tone Capone says, digging up some 3X Krazy tracks on his computer. One of the main architects of the Bay Area's classic midtempo mid-1990s mob music, the North Oakland native Anthony Gilmour, a.k.a. Tone Capone, is perhaps best known as the producer of the Luniz's 1995 weed anthem, "I Got Five on It," the second-most-requested track in KMEL history. Tone was instrumental in launching the solo career of the Geto Boys' Scarface and later put high-schoolers Keak da Sneak, BA, and Agerman together as 3X Krazy. But despite the enduring popularity of "Five on It," the classic sound Tone helped pioneer has lately been held responsible for the Bay's subsequent commercial drought.

It's an idea Black Dog Bone, editor of Vallejo's redoubtable Murder Dog Magazine, doesn't quite buy. "I do think things got stagnant in the Bay, with the same sound for a long time. But mob music was really popular. People loved it." As a longtime observer, Black Dog attributes the Bay's subsequent commercial decline more to a lack of radio support. "I think the only reason KMEL is playing Bay music now is because of [Power 92.7]," he says. "KMEL was losing its audience. It wasn't about tempo."

Nevertheless, Black Dog's excited about the new sounds coming out of the Bay: "It's hyphy. The beats are faster and crunk-influenced, but the rap is still more like mob." Ivan Heredia, a marketing manager for Penalty/Rykodisc who heard the buzz E-A-Ski and the Frontline were generating out in New York, is confident the label can break the Frontline's Now U Know nationally because its "aggressive, more accessible sound" will appeal in other regions, like the South and the East Coast. "Now's the time for the New Bay to shine," he insists.

Tone Capone is unimpressed: "It's more of a club sound, if there's any kind of vibe attached to it. The New Bay stuff I hear is all kick-clap. Techno sounds. I even did one like that because that's what they wanted. But I can't say that that defines the Bay."

As Tone's remark suggests, the variety of sounds presently flourishing in the Bay can't be reduced to any single category. These days, most Bay Area producers won't even admit to having a particular style, but one thing's for sure: From Federation to the Frontline, most of the recent major signings in the Bay have occurred through local labels, themselves often based around the work of a single producer. In an age of increasingly capable digital technology, the producer has achieved an unprecedented autonomy and importance in hip-hop. Often he wears many hats: arranger, songwriter, musician, label head, artist rep, talent scout, surrogate parent, and sometimes also rapper. The ultimate model, of course, is Dr. Dre, a star in his own right, with million-dollar budgets and a continually expanding roster of platinum artists. Here are a few of the major players in and around the Bay.

Rick Rock

Label: Southwest Federation

Reppin': Fairfield and Sacramento

Like E-A-Ski, Rick Rock has maintained a national reputation as a producer even during the driest days of the Bay's commercial drought, providing hits for the likes of Fabolous, Jay-Z, and Busta Rhymes. And like Ski, Rock has played a central role in the present resurgence. In 2003, on the strength of the radio and club success of "Hyphy," the Fairfield trio Federation were picked up by Virgin through Rock's own Southwest Federation imprint. But Rock was unhappy with Virgin's promotion of Federation's The Album last year. "The whole reason why I did the major-label thing was I wanted the visuals," Rick groans. "But they didn't have a video. It's depressing to know we had a great body of work, and it falls by the wayside."

Besides completing a new Federation album, Rock's splitting production chores with Lil Jon on E-40's album for the crunk king's new BME label, due in September. "When everything was the slow mob music, I came through with the up-tempo, hard-hitting, Rick Rock aggressive music," he says. "Now people are switching to that up-tempo, hard-hitting type of thing. And that's cool – just do it your way. Because next time I come around, I'm going to come around with something else."

Droop E

Production team: The Pharmaceuticals
Reppin': Vallejo

"As far as the Bay Area," Rick Rock says, "I think Droop E, E-40's son, is gonna blow up. A youngster – he's 17 now. He was raised in music, though." Indeed, Droop E's first appearance on wax was at the age of three on his father's 1993 album, Federal (Sick wid It), though his production debut, at 15, was a Turf Talk track on Mack 10's 2003 compilation, Ghetto, Gutter and Gangsta (Ark21). He's also laced tracks for Mistah F.A.B., Baby Jaymes, and, of course, his pops.

"Pharmaceuticals: We're basically prescriptions and antidotes for these rappers," Droop E explains. Yet he adheres to no one formula. Compare the slow, swelling R&B brass on his "Can't Nobody," from Messy Marv's Disobayish (Scalen, 2004), with the techno-influenced shuffle of "Get On My Hype," from Marv's Bandanas, Tattoos and Tongue Rings (Scalen, 2005). "I flip-flop," he says. "I don't want to stay in one category." His own group, the Cabinet, is currently working on their Sick Wid It debut.

Sean T

Production Team: Dallas Squad

Reppin': East Palo Alto

If you're feelin' Mac Dre's posthumous hit, "Feelin' Myself," then you're feelin' Sean T. With a career stretching back to 1989 with Murder One Records, Sean T has numerous solo albums, but he is more known these days as a producer of "slaps," those monster handclap beats that remain a staple of a Bay Area hip-hop diet. Still, his production is diverse: The multi-instrumentalist draws on exotic varieties of world music in his search for sounds, layering them into thick, piano-laced slabs of gangsta funk. "I don't really have a style, because I'm like a chameleon," he says.

Having produced much of JT the Bigga Figga's two proto-Game releases, 2004's The Untold Story and 2005's West Coast Resurrection (both Get Low), Sean maintained ties with the Aftermath signee, who helped the producer land a distribution deal with Interscope for his own Get Gone Records. His album, Long Time Comin', is due out this month.

Mekanix (Dotrix and K. Tweed)

Label: Zoo Entertainment

Reppin': East Oakland

The Mekanix were accidentally formed in 1999, when former Digital Underground DJ Dotrix hooked up with street producer Kenny Tweed to work on a couple of tracks. Six years later they're still working together on a daily basis, laying down darkly atmospheric, stridently synthetic grooves for Eddie Projex, Dru Down, the Delinquents, Keak da Sneak, and Yukmouth. "They're definitely coming with something new that's not your typical Bay sound," E-A-Ski partner CMT remarks. "Very innovative beats." Recent albums featuring mostly Mekanix music include former Cydal member T-Luni's The Autobiography and FM Blue's The World Is Blue (both FastLife, 2004) and female rapper Okolo's Diamond N tha Ruff (HereAfter, 2005).

Touré

Label: 101% Music

Reppin': East Oakland

Touré's been holding it down for years as chief DJ for the Hieroglyphics, as recently documented on their Full Circle Tour DVD-live album (Hiero). His career as a producer started gradually, beginning with a track on Casual's 1994 classic, Fear Itself (Jive). Currently in the process of establishing his own label, 101% Music, Touré is working with former TWDY member Dolla Will, Emaculate, and Rhythm & Green members Ray Royal and Crown Jewel. He's also formulating Touré's Theory with the 101% roster.

Touré attributes the club sounds circulating throughout Bay music at present to the current software packages. "Hip-hop comes bundled with techno," he says. "And a lot of these keyboards now, you can manipulate and change the sound waveforms and create your whole sound."

Mike D

Label: Mo Slap Beats

Reppin': Oakland

An accomplished organist who enlivens the services at both Abyssian Baptist Church and Millenium Ministries in Oakland, Mike D has served as a musical director and performer on tours with TLC, Faith Evans, and Tony! Toni! Tone! But he is best known for laying down dark slices of funk behind OGs like Too $hort and the Delinquents. With his former partner, Sonny B, Mike laced $hort's coming-out-of-retirement albums, 1999's Can't Stay Away and 2000's You Nasty (Short), with four tracks each. His experience with the Delinquents' 1999 smash, "That Man!" confirms Ski's remarks on making music for the radio (see " 'Pressure' Drop"): "They really wasn't feelin' it, but I told them, 'You gotta give the radio something that moves.' " More recently Mike's been talking with Def Jam about his new label, Mo Slap Beats, and helping to promote Yella Paidgez (DoWhatchaDo), by his brother Yella Yezz.

One Drop Scott

Reppin': Berkeley

The son of Thalmus Rasulala (who appeared in such films as 1975's Friday Foster) and born in LA, Scott moved to the Bay as a kid in the early '70s. The accomplished percussionist helped form Salsa de Berkeley, played drums for jazz giants like Bill Summers, and replaced then-girlfriend Sheila E in Confunkshun.

While a member of the Freaky Executives, Scott wrote and produced a novelty rap song "Surf or Die" – a 1987 full-length of that name, credited to the Surf MC's on Profile Records, just edges out Life Is...Too Short (Jive, 1988) as the first big-label Bay Area rap album. One Drop worked with Tone Capone on Scarface and 3X Krazy projects, but it was his work on C-Bo's Til My Casket Drops (AWOL, 1998) that earned him his reputation for densely layered, musically sophisticated tracks that still bring the boom. One Drop recently contributed to BavGate's The InstaGator (Thizz, 2005).

Tone Capone

Reppin': North Oakland

"Straight mob," Tone says, his gravely voiced, staccato pronouncements betraying the world-weariness of one who's been to the platinum mountain yet found it wanting. "Just want to make some good music before I die, do my part." Yet despite Tone's seeming lack of ambition, his utter refusal to get excited about the latest round of major-label courtship, the ongoing intensity of his music is evident. In addition to recent work with San Quinn, Tone is preparing a conscious thug project called The Product, due on Koch in a few months, with Scarface, SF's Will Hen, and Mississippi's Young Malice. "It's a group with different flavors from different regions," he says, playing me cuts of awesomely revamped mob music, bouncing and slapping a little bit faster, more spaciously.

A track comes on that's a little slower, with the huge whomp bass of classic Bay mob. It's totally Tone, and I start to describe why this track reminds me of the old mob music in a way the other ones didn't, though I'm aware of an amusement dawning behind his impassive features. He waits for me to finish my explanation, then savors his mirth a moment longer. "Scarface produced that one."

part 1

'Pressure' Drop -- E-A-Ski cooks up a Bay sound from a higher ground

2006-10-17T20:37:00.000-07:00

by Garrett Caples
San Francisco Bay Guardian July 6, 2005

I'M FOLLOWING E-A-Ski's black Mercedes at a brisk clip through the winding turns of the Oakland Hills, en route to our interview.

Suddenly we plunge down a steep, straight road lined by two rows of enormous trees, like we were on our way to stately Wayne Manor but accidentally took the secret path to the Batcave. Our destination involves a little of both, for the immense, shingled affair, whose overall shape I can't quite determine, serves as residence and laboratory for an undeniably dynamic duo. Ski's cousin and coproducer, CMT – who combines the easy camaraderie of Robin with the quiet discretion of Alfred – later describes the house as having a "log-cabin feel," which, compared to any of the more vertically oriented mansions in the immediate vicinity, it does. But its size and weathered-wood exterior more readily recall a small sawmill, bent to a purpose alien to the more stockbrokerly pursuits of its neighbors.

CMT is already in the lab working when we arrive. The "lab" in question is a studio – not a home studio or preproduction studio, but a fully equipped, 32-track, take-it-from-here-and-press-it-up professional recording studio, the needs of which clearly dictate the house's design, an ocean-liner layout of skinny corridors surrounding large interior rooms. Built at the pair's behest 11 years ago with proceeds from a million-dollar deal with Priority for an album that never came out, the structure is a monument to Ski's business acumen, to the "Excellent Ability to stay on top" embodied in his initials. "Skiing" is Ski's metaphor for this, and it's apt, for Ski has skied through the wreckage of no less than four such deals.

Obstacles that have sent other careers into free fall have only launched Ski and CMT into higher tax brackets. In 1998, for example, when DreamWorks refused to release his completed second album, Earthquake, unless he added a track with an artist from the newly hot Dirty South, Ski forced the company into a breach-of-contract settlement. "A big settlement," he adds, not with relish or bitterness so much as a sense of outraged honor appeased by appropriate compensation.

Yet Ski's refusal to be ensnared in industry machinations has come at a cost. Platinum-hit makers since their first major label production – Spice One's "Trigger Gots No Heart," from the 1993 Menace II Society soundtrack (Jive) – the duo's extensive list of big-name clientele includes E-40, Ice Cube, even the almighty Dr. Dre himself. But Ski's own output as an artist has been limited to a handful of fugitive releases; he has yet to drop a proper solo album (one can't count the now-out-of-print 2003 limited-edition mix tape, Past and Present). Now, with a new distribution deal for his Infrared Music Group through Penalty/Rykodisc, and a hot young act, the Frontline, on his hands, Ski is putting the finishing touches on Apply Pressure, his debut and masterpiece rolled into one. Begun in 1998 as Aftershock – the follow-up to Earthquake (which was never released due to the dissolution of Relativity) and his 1992 EP, 1 Step Head of Yall (No Limit) – Apply Pressure has already spawned two hit singles, "Ride," in 2003, and "My Bad," from earlier this year. Given the current momentum of Bay Area hip-hop in terms of signings and airplay, a momentum he's had no small role in generating, the time is ripe for the Chronic-level event that Apply Pressure threatens to be. More than a dozen years into his career, will Ski finally release the classic he's always said he would?

The negotiator

Born Shon LaAnthony Adams and raised in East Oakland, E-A-Ski drives a hard bargain; it took no end of negotiations just to get me here. But Ski is more than ready to deliver: During the next two hours, under the attentive, confirming eye of CMT, he unreels enough material to fill several volumes. By turns guarded and unguarded, coolly rational and bubbling with an anger for which his raps serve as a therapeutic release, Ski is nothing if not complex. And productive: He and C claim a total of 15 million records sold, and with all the gold and platinum on the walls, I don't need to inspect the books.

"We're not young like we used to be," says the 30-year-old Ski. "We don't dictate the music. We have to make sure that we revolve around whatever the kids is liking." To this end, the producers do their "homework," bringing fresh tracks to the hood and playing them for kids in the 12- to 17-year-old range. They also study whatever music is popular. "We don't make music that's personal. We might not even like the stuff that's winning but we're like, I can see why this sound is moving the younger audience."

Such methodical research has helped Ski and C stay on top of hip-hop's constantly shifting terrain. Their consistent hit-making ability as producers has allowed them to achieve amicable resolutions when deals haven't turned out to their satisfaction. Apart from the contractual dispute with DreamWorks, whenever they've lost faith in a company's direction, they've been able to withdraw on good terms, using production to offset any advances.

"None of these companies were bad companies," Ski insists. "But ... wrong timing. With Priority in '94, everything was going right until they merged with EMI. So we opted out. Relativity was closed down because it was bought out. Columbia in 2001 did a merger and fired the A and R person who brought us there. But we've been fortunate because we've been able to use our production to leverage my situation as an artist."

Major label signees would do well to pause here and study Ski's game before buying that diamond-crusted bezzle they always wanted. Studio time is expensive – the primary expense of making albums – but once they'd built their own, Ski and C used it to work off the advance they'd used to pay for it, without having to spend their own money. After that, free studio. Free money-making machine. Not to mention a place to live. You don't need to be a college graduate, like College of Alameda alum Ski, to appreciate the economics of this arrangement.

"That's one of the things me and CMT did: We invested in our future," Ski explains. "We were smart. Our parents were smart. We can't say we don't have nothing to fall back on like property because we invested in dumb shit."

Rap dreams

After Columbia became the fourth consecutive label to sign him without releasing an album, a less stoic soul might have consoled himself by dropping his own records locally, or even settling into the lucrative and enviable position of a nationally recognized A-list hip-hop production team. Yet I doubt this is possible in E-A-Ski's case. His desire to rock the mic is undiminished from the days when he and CMT were in the basement rehearsing routines copped from a live tape of Run-DMC. And this hunger, more than any other single factor, seems to motivate the pair's rigorous quest to stay current in an age-conscious industry where short careers are the norm.

But rather than immediately shop for another deal, Ski decided to switch tactics "to show how you could make records without being under a major situation and get your community to support them." This campaign took two fronts, one of which, appropriately enough, was the Frontline: Left and Locksmith. Impressed by Locksmith's famous Bay-repping performance during MTV's 2003 freestyle competition, Ski subsequently met the Richmond rappers through MC Balance, a mutual friend. "They had great attitudes," Ski says. "They didn't smoke, didn't drink – they were focused, going to school. It was a great combination." The equally abstemious Ski and CMT quickly clicked with the Frontline, signing them to IMG, and moving around 10,000 units of their locally released debut, Who R You (2004). Fusing Left's own idiosyncratic, rock-influenced productions onto a solid backbone of E-A-Ski/CMT bangers, Who R You was sufficient proof of Ski's continued viability for Penalty/Rykodisc to sign on as distributor for the entire IMG label.

"I see what Ski is doing," veteran East Palo Alto rapper-producer Sean T says. "He's integrating Frontline with himself to bring himself back out there and let people know, 'Yeah, I rap too. Listen to my rap, plus I produce.' And that's a good thing too. I love Ski for that. A lot of people now are starting to know Ski as a rapper as opposed to when they didn't know about Ski at all."

Can't live without my radio

The impressive sales of Who R You even without distribution were stimulated in part by the strong support for the Ski-and-CMT-produced single, "What Is It," from the once local-leery Clear Channel station KMEL. KMEL, of course, was the second front of Ski's campaign. While he has generally maintained a radio presence as a producer, and even as an act in his own right, the level of rap superstardom Ski envisioned called for more than his own individual success. It required the support of a vibrant, hit-making scene in which Bay Area artists appeared on the radio, in the mix with nationally known acts from New York, the South, and LA. So he took the direct approach: He went to KMEL, willing to negotiate.

"If a veteran comes in with a résumé and gives you a hot record, and you don't take a chance on the record, you're basically saying that you don't want to try to make our area hot," he says. "That's all I ever said. If I give you a record that can compete with anything that's going on across the country, will you play it? They said yes. It was pretty much that simple.

"[KMEL managing director] Big Von told me clearly, 'You have to make records with a certain tempo. You have to tone down the profanity and subject matter.' I said, 'OK.' If you're trying to reach the commercial audience that radio reaches, you have to change your way of thinking, and I understood that."

Such deliberate catering to corporate dictates may have a Faustian ring to some ears, but Ski plainly feels this perspective is foolish. "Everything has a format," he points out, and getting KMEL to articulate one allowed Ski the opportunity to fulfill the format. The relative lack of stricture the station's ultimately vague requirements have placed on his creativity may be gauged by the Frontline's new single, "Bang It," from Rykodisc's recent revamped reissue of Who R You, retitled Now U Know. Compared to the hyper-boogie of "What Is It," "Bang It" is positively stately in its pace. What both songs share are the burbling techno noises, '80s synth sounds, and general club orientation found in much recent Bay Area hip-hop (see "Say 'Bay'"). Sounds that would have raised eyebrows in the mob-music milieu are becoming central to the Bay's digitally expanded tone palette.

Release the pressure

While Ski by no means deserves all the credit, his personal role in making the Bay Area hot again can't be denied. Yet even with all eyes on the Bay, and IMG's distribution deal already in hand, don't expect Ski to rush Apply Pressure out before he thinks it's ready.

"If you're gonna go out and make an album, you gotta stand firm behind it," he says. "And until I'm firm, my album will be out when it be out." The release is tentatively set for fall 2005.

With their own studio at their disposal, Ski and CMT have been able to update Apply Pressure at their leisure, replacing tracks that have become dated with ever more advanced material. Before I leave, they play me a few cuts, and I have to admit, I'm totally convinced. A spacious, aired-out reinvention of G-Funk, complete with radio-friendly singles, Apply Pressure is as far advanced as the duo claim. "This is some 2007 shit," Ski says proudly – though hopefully not literally. The Bay could use it right about now.

part 2

Money-B: Porn on the Job

2006-10-16T21:33:00.000-07:00

by Garrett Caples
January 2005

The original “Freak of the Industry,” Money-B has long been known for Talkin’ Dirty, as the title of his 1999 solo disc put it. And it’s not just talk; along with cousin and fellow Digital Underground member Cleetis Mack, Mon is the mastermind behind Sex in the Studio, an adult dvd series featuring some of the biggest names in hip hop. Chingy, Xzibit, and Ludacris headline Episode Two, which includes a 17-song cd by the likes of Planet Asia, the Outlawz, Numskull, Yukmouth, and Bun B. For our opinions issue, we caught up with the Larry Flint of rap at a recent DU gig, to get his take on porn, from the other side of the camera.

We envisioned Sex in the Studio as a celebrity-based adult music video magazine. What we do, our lifestyle, our experiences, the wild parties we go to, the wild shows—we have a lot of outrageous happenings going on. So we just felt like, man, we should share this with the world. Who wouldn’t want to see it? Even though I did it I still want to see it again.

We go out and interview celebrities. The fact that they’re our peers makes them comfortable being candid about themselves; they know we’re going to put shit on there they like. So you’ll probably hear them say things that you’d never hear on Clear Channel or Rap City or any other video show.

We have interview segments, then between each segment we have XXX hardcore scenes. And we have your favorite adult stars. Getting involved with porn stars, for us, it’s a natural progression. We hang out, keep the same hours, hang out at the same clubs. So we know each other. And so I tell them I’m doing this thing; do you want to interview Redman? And they already know Redman. So it’s like that.

Working with Ron Jeremy [on Episode One] was cool. We’ve known Ron for a long time; we’ve done a lot of shows with him, at the porn convention and whatnot. And it just so happened when we got our deal at Metro, he’s actually signed to Metro, so we’re almost like labelmates. Company colleagues. He’s real open and he enjoys what we do, and we definitely enjoy him. He’s always got something funny or nice to say. He’s a real good person to hang out with. Sometimes too much so.

What are the ingredients of good porn? I think you gotta do things that people want to see. A lot of people who watch porn, or a lot of companies, they think, the nastier you are the better. But there’s some things that are just too nasty; I don’t think people are going to want to see it. I don’t think you have to do the most outrageous thing.

But you definitely want beautiful women; that’s the most important. The other thing that’s important is that the women either be into it, or act like they’re into it and be convincing. And a lotta times, more times than not, you want to have a dude with a big dick. And to get really tight, clean shots without a lot of shadows. You definitely have to light it well. That’ll tell you that somebody’s really putting in the time and shooting it well. You know, you get shadows, you can’t see the hole.

The thing I learned, I always thought rappers were late for places. You know how they say, “colored people time”? There’s definitely a porno time. If you want to start at 2, you tell a porno chick it starts at 10.

And you know a porn scene is about 12-15 minutes. But you have to shoot for like three hours. And you know, a lot times you see the same guys in all the porno films; it’s because they can do it. You gotta be able to keep it up for 3 hours. I can’t do that shit, especially with people watching you, and then, “Cut!”—change positions. You have to have it in you. So I would say, it’s definitely a talent.

You treat them like artists. You have to. And it’s wild because, I don’t give a fuck if you’re a man or a woman, you watch pornos for the women. And so the women get paid the most, but it’s the men who really do the most work. It is what it is.

Sex and the Studio climaxes with a -- video hit?

2006-10-16T21:19:00.000-07:00

by Garrett Caples
San Francisco Bay Guardian April 6, 2005

ANYONE OVER A certain age remembers the commercials: some dude in historical costume, walking through the forest with an open jar of peanut butter, bumps into another dude with an unsheathed chocolate bar, which, to their mutual consternation, is accidentally thrust into the jar. This chance insemination yields Reese's Peanut Butter Cups: two great tastes that taste great together.

Like any origin myth, the commercials were silent on several questions, like why the experiment, repeated at home, tasted terrible, and how the sandy substance at the center of a Reese's could really be called "peanut butter." One began to suspect that no small amount of artistry was concealed by the apparent simplicity of the concept.

So it goes with the adult hip-hop DVD. As a concept, it makes perfect sense. Ever since Too $hort blazed a trail in the mid-1980s with songs like "The Bitch Sucks Dick," graphic sex has been a routine part of rap's lyrical repertoire. Once MCs began exploring the direct-to-video market in the late '90s, more-risqué fare was perhaps inevitable. But viewed another way, the demand that your favorite rapper produce serviceable adult entertainment is as arbitrary as expecting the mailman to deliver a pizza. It's not really his line.

Thus the field of adult hip-hop DVDs is littered with failures. Even partisans of the boob-flashing-on-spring-break school of eroticism, for example, won't defend the dreary Girls Gone Wild: Doggystyle (2002), in which an overextended Snoop Dogg shuffles wearily through Mardi Gras. More recently, Lion's Gate nixed its planned theatrical release of Method Man's directorial debut, a pole-dancing documentary called The Strip Game, by quietly dropping it on DVD in early March. Despite increasing amounts of product, a real uncertainty remains as to what constitutes a winning formula for blending two distinct forms of entertainment.

Come here often?

With two episodes in stores and a third in progress, Los Angeles-based Metro Entertainment's Sex and the Studio series (www.sexandthestudio.com) is among the more popular examples of the burgeoning genre; thus far 2003's episode one has sold 30,000 copies. The brainchild of Digital Underground members Cleetis Mack, who directs each episode, and Money B, who assembles the soundtrack and hosts various segments, Sex and the Studio quickly established a brand identity based on its unique format, consisting of short interviews with high-profile rappers, like Redman in episode one and Ludacris in episode two, interspersed with hardcore sex scenes performed not by the rappers but by seasoned professionals. Each episode also includes its own album-length CD, a compilation of tracks by the extended D.U. crew, with guest contributions by the likes of Bun B and Planet Asia (both episode two). Some of the music appears on the video, but there's no strict correlation between the artists on the CD and those on the DVD.

This diversified solution to the difficulties raised by a hybrid art form succeeds for at least two reasons. First, let's face it: as much as we want to live the dream and enjoy both at once, porn needs to maintain some degree of separation from hip-hop in order to achieve its traditional goals. Sometimes a "fashizzle" can ruin the mood. But the flexible structure of each Sex and the Studio lends itself to the modular capacities of the DVD, which offers a choice of the full-length feature or individual segments. Episode two's improved interactive menu even separates the scenes by type, allowing you to watch only the interviews – or, more crucially, only the porn – without interruption.

What's your fantasy?

This attention to small but important functional details betrays the hand of connoisseurs for whom porn is both a vocation and a passion. Digital Underground aren't known as the "freaks of the industry" for nothing. From the concept of their first album, Sex Packets (1990), named for a mythical drug whose consumption induced a virtual reality-style sexual experience, to their numerous condom- and lube-throwing shows at the Exotic Erotic Ball, D.U. have long cultivated a P-Funk-influenced, sci-fi image of amorous experimentation. But for Mack, more concrete connections to adult entertainment developed with the recording of Good Laaawd, That's a Lot of Drank (1999), his ultra-rare, label-less, Poli Pol-produced collaboration with Numskull of the Luniz. "We shot a porno-stylish video ['Knockdiesel'] for the Internet," Mack says. "My mind started racing about what we could really do together." Money B confirms, "Getting involved with porn stars, for us, it's a natural progression. We keep the same hours, hang out at the same clubs. So we know each other."

Such familiarity with the world of adult entertainment is more than evident in the quality of Sex and the Studio's sex scenes, which is the second key ingredient to the brand's success. The high level of filmmaking professionalism – in terms of clean, tight, well-lit shots and smooth, cinematic editing – was a self-conscious achievement.

"On a black porn set, if it's a black production, it's a lackadaisical kind of thing," Money B explains. "They expect the talent to show up late. Usually they're done in somebody's room, for the whole movie, or in a hotel room, whereas white porn, of course, has bigger budgets. They have features and elaborate stage sets. They take more time with the girls in makeup and whatnot. I think we took it to that next level."

Indeed, Mon's ambition is equally apparent on the hip-hop side of the Sex and the Studio equation, particularly in terms of the soundtrack CDs, which serve as outlets for various members of D.U.'s associated crew, such as Esinchill and Chop Black of the Whoridas. The duo plan to use the Sex and the Studio brand, under the acronym SATS, as the basis for a label and production company. Their first signee, Fifth, an 18-year-old wunderkind from San Diego, produced about two-thirds of episode two's soundtrack, and his already formidable skills are behind the most improbable chapter in the Sex and the Studio saga: a video hit, "Drank-A-Lot," featuring Money B, Numskull, and Eddie Projex, in late-night rotation on BET (see sidebar).

No, really

The very impressiveness of Sex and the Studio's separate presentations of hip-hop and porn nonetheless calls into question the premise on which the adult hip-hop DVD market is founded, namely that the two great tastes can produce a genuinely viable mix. Many of the interviews, in which the promised "interaction" between rappers and porn stars occur, fall flat. Most of the biggies like Luda and Xzibit grow strangely reticent when pressed on a subject they otherwise rap freely about. A notable exception is Redman, whose candor concerning his love of fat women and feet steals the show in episode one. If every MC queried were as unashamedly forthcoming, we'd have a document on the order of such late-19th-century compendia as Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), which shed the first lurid light on modern sexual practices. As it stands, both episodes are bizarrely compelling if sometimes disconcerting (episode one wins on interviews, but two gets the nod for better overall sex scenes).

Ultimately, I'm not entirely convinced of the merits of the adult hip-hop DVD genre as a whole. The same music might have distinct appeals to different audiences, but if a particular pornographic image doesn't excite a viewer, all the technical craftsmanship in the world is immaterial. If you're an admirer of well-shot hardcore close-up penetration and superhuman deep throating, I can, in all seriousness, recommend it, though I have to confess such porn leaves me cold. Yet, at the risk of sounding like the guy who claims he reads Playboy for the articles, I admit I'll probably check out the upcoming episode three of Sex and the Studio. For the music, of course.

Drunken Master

2006-10-16T21:05:00.000-07:00

by Garrett Caples
San Francisco Bay Guardian April 6, 2005

When I'm drunk I don't think a lot
Wave your cups in the air if you drink a lot.
Eddie Projex, "Drank-A-Lot"

IF YOU SEE the video for "Drank-A-Lot" and aren't too distracted by the clubful of ass cheeks jiggling, you might notice the guy who spits the hook and first verse. He's Eddie Projex, from Oakland's Hittaz on tha Payroll, and the huge grin that never leaves his face throughout the clip is inspired by more than booty and booze. As the lead single from the soundtrack to episode two of the Sex and the Studio series, with verses by better-known buddies Numskull and Money B, "Drank-A-Lot" puts Eddie out front. The video has raised his profile, garnering nationwide "cable play" on BET Uncut, the station's adult-oriented music show (Wednesdays through Fridays, 3 to 4 a.m.). Now, after years of grinding away underground, Eddie's ready to shine.

"I like Hittaz on tha Payroll anyway, and Eddie's voice stands out," says Money B, recalling the "Drank-A-Lot" session. "I said, 'You pick the beat. Tell me which one you dig.' I went out the room, came back, and he'd already laid the hook. I was like, 'Yeeeaaahhhh.' "

Eddie's eagerness and efficiency reflect his persistence over the course of a decade in which Bay Area hip-hop got little mainstream love or major-label support. Along with MCs Polo, Curcinado, and Fletchberg Slim, Eddie formed Hittaz on tha Payroll in 1996.

"When 'I Got 5 on It' came out," Eddie says, referring to the Luniz' 1995 platinum hit, "we was in different groups. Everybody started fallin' off, and we were the only ones left standing. While the Luniz were making their mark, Num was busy doin' him. But we knew each other from back in the day, and when he came back, and sees we were still at it, he couldn't do nothing but accept it." Indeed, Num soon moved beyond acceptance. "He took me off the turf and flew me to L.A. Took care of me, gave me money, bought me clothes. He was like, 'Y'all gotta be my niggas.' "

Numskull premiered his new crew in 1999 on Good Laaawd, That's a Lot of Drank. In 2001, with no distribution deal, the Hittaz sold their debut disc, Underground Like Dead People, straight out the trunk, but it was with the release of Ghetto Storm (2003), on their own City Hall-distributed Hitta Records, that the Payroll began to attract attention. Produced entirely by the Mekanix, save for one banger by Sean T, Ghetto Storm was an instant East Oakland classic, due in no small part to Eddie's hook-writing ability on tracks like the atmospheric gangsta drama "Tha Game" and the sideshow anthem "Rims." Clearly Money B hadn't overlooked this elusive talent when he picked the Fifth-produced "Drank-A-Lot" as the single for Sex and the Studio's episode two.

Currently Eddie is shopping for a deal for his debut solo disc, Now or Never, even as he finishes two others: Ghetto Celebrity, for Hitta Records, and The Eddie Projex Project, for the Mekanix' Zoo Entertainment. In the meantime, taking advantage of the BET buzz, he's about to drop a street-only compilation, Eddie Projex Presents Oakland Street Music, Volume 1, which he hopes to turn into an annual showcase for emerging talent. Volume 1, which will also be sold at East Bay record stores like Rasputin's in Berkeley and Moses Music in East Oakland, features some of Oakland's hottest young artists – like Stevie Jo, E-Maculate, and R&B singer Naté – with production by the Mekanix, Sean T, and Harm and LT. Those unable to wait can check out the Hittaz' 2004 releases: Underground Like Dead People II, a recent Hitta Records mix tape, and Acid, a Polo and Curcinado duo project from FastLife Entertainment.

Fresh for the Underground

2006-10-16T20:29:00.000-07:00

by Garrett Caples
San Diego Reader August 25, 2005

Chicago-born Fifth (a.k.a. Derrick Stanton) moved to San Diego with his family a decade ago, settling in El Cajon and then Spring Valley. The 19-year-old rapper/producer is the latest addition to rap crew Digital Underground. Fifth met original members Shock-G and Money B three years ago at "Gutfest," a barbecue thrown by local Digital Underground fan club Da Noses (which refers to Shock's plastic-nosed alter-ego, Humpty Hump).

"We played football," Fifth recalls, "then I let them hear my music. They let me get onstage that night. It was a surreal experience. My first professional recording was with Shock-G on 'Cherry Flava'd Email' [from last year's Fear of a Mixed Planet]. I was still 16."

Since then, the Mount Miguel High School grad has produced 11 songs for Money B's Sex and the Studio DVD series. "Drank-A-Lot," a Fifth-produced single, has been playing on BET's late-night video show Uncut. Fifth recently showed for the third annual Gutfest, which climaxed with DU's August 12 performance at 'Canes. That night, Fifth delivered his own three-song set.

"[Money B] introduced me, 'This guy's from San Diego, you gotta love him.' I came up and did 'Down 'n Diego,' my big banger for San Diego, and everyone loved it. That was the song I originally played for Shock and Mon, so it was only right I started with that."

Fifth and DU are working on And Tomorrow, an upcoming 2pac album. Fifth, now living in L.A., plans to return to the area later this year to promote his as-yet-unreleased debut, Treason.

"We're still shopping for a deal, but we're going to release a single in San Diego, getting some airtime, giving it a buzz."

Behind the Nose -- Shock G steps out

2006-10-14T21:21:00.000-07:00

by Garrett Caples
September 2005

Kev Kelley is excited. The Hunters Point emcee has been taken on as a protege by Shock-G, legendary leader of Digital Underground, who produces two tracks on the 23-year-old’s upcoming debut. It’s 3 a.m. Shock’s exhausted, having just wrapped a two-hour jam between DU and a funk band called Slapback, in celebration of his own “solo debut,” Fear Of A Mixed Planet. As we roll to the hotel for the interview, Kev insists on carrying Shock’s bag, despite its owner’s modest protests. “Fuck that!” Kev yells, zooming ahead with his treasure. “I’m doing what 2Pac did!” Shock accepts this with the habitual calm that contrasts so strikingly with his on-stage presence, whether as Shock-G or as his plastic-nosed alter ego, Humpty Hump. And Kev has a point. While never just a roadie — “We were producing and grooming and trying to get him a deal the whole time,” Shock says — 2Pac definitely lugged his share of equipment on the first DU tour in 1989. Shock’s ear for talent, moreover, is undeniable; through DU over the years he’s also boosted the careers of Saafir, the Luniz, and Mystic, among many others. As a producer Shock profoundly influenced rap’s development in the early ’90s. Two years before The Chronic had everyone jumping on the Mothership, Shock drew the blueprints for a hip-hop built on P-Funk principles. Tracks like “Rhymin’ on the Funk” (Sex Packets, 1990), “Same Song” (This Is An EP Release, 1991), and “The D-Flo Shuttle” (Sons Of The P, 1991) — all on Tommy Boy Records — laid the groundwork for much that followed. According to Digital Underground: Raw Uncut, a new DVD documenting the group’s entire history, “Freaks Of The Industry” remains, after 14 years, the #1 requested song on the Bay Area’s main hip-hop station KMEL despite never being a single. (#2? The Bay Area Ballers mix of the Luniz’s “I Got 5 On It,” also featuring Shock.) Such achievements and innovations have been obscured, however, by the huge pop success of “The Humpty Dance,” which led many to see the group as a bubblegum novelty. The beautifully eclectic, meticulously detailed, and deeply felt Fear Of A Mixed Planet is Shock’s ambitious attempt to finally step out of the shadow of Humpty Hump.

GC: Describe the end of the Tommy Boy period.
SHOCK: Tommy Boy always wanted to be with the current trend. When they thought Digital Underground was hip, they were all for it but when we started not being the cutting edge, they were chasing what was next. DU and other groups that incorporated humor started to slump in sales. Gangsta and pimp stuff was on the rise. They were looking at that. Learning the unity thing from Parliament made me want to have a group that all shined, but all that got squished up under Humpty. So The Body-Hat Syndrome (1993) was our anti-radio album. They were squeezing us so hard, the only way we could fight back was to turn in something that couldn’t be considered just pop, that wasn’t quite the Humpty they were looking for. It’s not that we couldn’t make those beats anymore; we made “I Get Around” for 2Pac that year. But if we gave them a “Kiss You Back”, they were going to keep running us that way. That’s why on Body-Hat there’s a lot of stuff that didn’t have our logo handclap and a lotta Humpty being a little meaner than usual.

We didn’t want to get dropped but I wanted to get on a different label. I’ve always been a keyboard player, an artist. I was an Afrocentric type and followed the stuff Pac rhymed about. There was a side of me that always wanted to voice that. Me and Tom Silverman [of Tommy Boy] made a deal, after Body-Hat didn’t do so well that if I produced some things for the label, I could have DU do what I want. So he let us go.

GC: How did DU’s 1998 album Who Got the Gravy? come about?
SHOCK: Critique had all these experimental things and wanted DU too. They told us, “you didn’t get a fair shot; we can promote you well.” I was like, ”OK, let me make an album that picks up where Sons of the P left off, instead of Body-Hat.” So Future Rhythm happened. I think there weren’t really marketable singles on it. I was still trying to get out of being pigeon-holed as pop. So it didn’t happen; Critique ran out of money and folded. But then this guy who produced Steely Dan, Gary Katz, pops up. He was saying the same thing: “We don’t think Critique did anything right with your record. Let’s do another one.” So we did it and that was Who Got The Gravy?

The company was called Jake Records. Dan Hartman — brother of the Saturday Night Live comedian Phil Hartman — was one of the people who was not only putting the money up for the label, but he ran it and was the DU fan. When Phil’s wife shot him, Dan just fell apart. So I didn’t want to bug him no more about making records.

Then I figured I’m not going to make records; I’m just going to produce. That wasn’t moving for me either. By then, we’re not on tour because we’re chasing the dream; we’re on tour because we have to eat. So I just got into drugs and shit back then. Started partying a lot. We turned into ecstasy heads, but then we bottomed out with that. Sobriety and consciousness hit me and my mom was like, “Why do you work with all these people talking about weed and guns? Why do you talk about pimping? You’re not a pimp.” I was just like, “Mom, that’s not how the rap business is.”

Through all that partying, my mom was like, “How come you don’t own property, what are you gonna do when you get old? Just give me 10%, when you get money; I’ll put it away for you.” After my accountants started taking it out automatically, I forgot about it. One day my mom was like, “You got almost $60,000 tucked away.” I was like, “I can put that on a house now.” But then I was like, “But mom, I wanna do an album! But I see now, I see what you mean!”

And not just her; a lot of things started to change. People were coming to me for my 2Pac stories, finally. From when Pac died ‘til Thug Angel (2000) [a documentary on 2Pac], nobody asked me nothing. That shit really hurt me. He was with us for four years but nobody was interested in what we had to say. Doing Thug Angel gave me the opportunity. With everybody speaking on him, I was like, “damn, he was giving so much of himself.” We all stand for different things, and maybe some of the things I stand for are broader than what 2Pac stood for; some are really smaller. But whatever I stand for, I felt I could stand up more for it, more of the time, with everything I do.

Thug Angel really got people to know there was something else to DU besides Humpty. And the crew was starting to shine, people associating us with the Luniz and Mystic. Mystic used to be suicidal before she joined DU. At the beginning of Gridlock’d there was this spoken word poetry by Pac’s girlfriend in the movie. That was Mystic. But she was still depressed because her father was a musician who never made it and OD’ed and died. A zebra child we called her, a white parent and a black parent, so she never fit in anywhere. She was so fragile. Sometimes you’d go to her house and she’d have the pills sitting there, a gun right here and a knife right there and she’d be like, “Give me a reason to keep going.” Crazy shit! She went on tour with us, right? She used to come to me and go, “I’ve never laughed this much. In my life! When I get home I’m going to start on my album.” And I’m like, “What you waiting for?” I was good at telling it to other people to hide my own depression. But, she came home, started on the album; next thing you know, Mystic got nominated for a Grammy, best new female artist.

GC: Talk about the production on Fear of a Mixed Planet.
SHOCK: I related the dense sound of Future Rhythm to the ’90s. To chunky it all up like that didn’t sound new and different. I thought there was a lot of space missing in rap music. Usually a song starts and once the rap starts it goes straight to the chorus, then more rap, chorus, more rap and that’s it. No songs had that space like a Miles Davis record. There’s a lot of space in Portishead, Groove Jazzmatazz, Easy Mo Bee — that last Miles record. I’m not into disco but you know Jamiroquai? One thing I liked about his record is it had a lot of space. I thought, if somebody did a rap album like that it would stand out.

GC: What does the future hold for Digital? Will there be a new album?
SHOCK: DU’s a group; even though it was my project, I still shared a lot of it and I wore a lot of hats. And I hid behind the character of Shock-G. Not just Humpty. Humpty’s a character, of course; but Shock-G’s a character. That’s me being a rapper. I feel like I never really stood up for the issues I stand for, never made that record. The things I really say, when I’m not on stage and I’m behind closed doors, I wasn’t putting that stuff in. So this album allowed me to speak my heart. But I’ll never be like, “I’m solo now, I don’t do DU no more.” I’m trying to take it like Wu-Tang. If one of us drops a solo album, it’s just making our reach broader. If I’m the central figure, maybe I’m like the RZA of the group; I just did me a Bobby Digital album. Wu-Tang still is there. Digital Underground’s still here.

You ain't knowin' -- DU and 2Pac

2006-10-14T16:43:00.000-07:00

All roads lead back to the Digital Underground and 2Pac
By Garrett Caples
San Francisco Bay Guardian March 16, 2005

I CAN'T COUNT how many surprised responses I've elicited with the information that 2Pac started out in Digital Underground. To anyone first exposed to him through the movies or during his final phase on Death Row Records, the idea of Pac coming up under the plastic-nosed guidance of Humpty Hump is scandalous. Such skeptics are referred to the 2004 documentary DVD Digital Underground: Raw Uncut, which features footage of the future Makaveli rocking "The Humpty Dance" for all he's worth.

Atron Gregory, the group's first manager, introduced the young 2Pac to Humpty's alter-ego, D.U. leader and producer Shock-G, after the group completed Sex Packets (Tommy Boy, 1990) but before the album's release. As a result, Pac was on hand for the group's MTV-fueled explosion, making his recording debut on "Same Song," from their 1991 This Is an EP Release (Tommy Boy). Inevitably, once he blew up with the 1992 film Juice, 2Pac concentrated on his solo career, though he continued to appear on D.U. albums until 1996's Future Rhythm (Critique).

In a sense, to take a cue from Dotrix 4000, "the underground is all connected" – through D.U., which some might say laid the blueprint for the Bay's blend of sexed-up P-Funk grooves, psychedelic thought, and streetwise yet conscious hip-hop.

"I couldn't have ever been 2Pac," Shock says now. "It's not my personality. By the same token, Pac probably couldn't have ever made it like I did as a producer-central figure in a collage of people. You gotta do you."

This is not to say Pac lacked protégés, however. In 1993 he put Mac Mall on the map by directing and appearing in the video for "Ghetto Theme," Mall's first single. Having recently taken over Mac Dre's Thizz Records in order to release their collaboration, Da U.S. Open, Mall still maintains his own Sessed Out Records and has recently joined with Ray Luv (see "The Post-2Pac Pack," page 41) in the rap-rock group Crhyme Scene.

Though he moved out of the Bay Area – first to the Pocanos, then to Los Angeles – after the Oakland hills fire in late 1991, Shock has always turned to the Bay for new talent. Rap historians might note he was the first to tap Richmond, helping the duo Goldmoney score a deal with Tommy Boy and featuring them on Sons of the P (Tommy Boy, 1991). But Shock's most successful protégés after 2Pac are undoubtedly the Luniz, who appear on Future Rhythm and whose platinum debut, Operation Stackola (Noo Tribe, 1995), features production by Shock. That year Shock appeared on the remix of the Luniz' weed-smoking anthem "I Got 5 on It," alongside such local heavyweights as E-40 and Richie Rich.

In the late '90s, Shock continued to influence the Bay through his associates. D.U. members DJ JZ and Saafir joined Hobo Junction for the critically acclaimed Box Car Sessions (Qwest, 1999) as well as three classic underground discs on their own Hobo Records. While D.U.'s 1998 album Who Got the Gravy? (Jake) failed to make a huge impression, it introduced Esinchill (see "Breaking Down the Battle Lines," page 43) as well as Mystic, whose debut, Cuts for Luck, Scars for Freedom (JCor), was nominated for a Grammy in 2002.

Now, with the release of his first solo album, Fear of a Mixed Planet (33rd St), Shock has finally begun to receive his due as a pioneer. He's been producing tracks for Hunters Point MC Kev Kelly, even as he's transformed D.U.'s live show with the addition of an eight-piece funk band called Slapback. "I think people saw Humpty as a gimmick," Numskull of the Luniz says, "but Humpty is just a part of Shock. Shock is our driving force. For real. He's a genius."

Breaking Down the Battle Lines: Frontline's Locksmith and DU's Esinchill

2006-10-14T16:17:00.000-07:00

By Garrett Caples
San Francisco Bay Guardian March 16, 2005

ESINCHILL FIRST DROPPED on Digital Underground's Who Got the Gravy? (see "You Ain't Knowin'," page 44), honing his skills with the group for the next five years on the road, and he has the support of fellow D.U. members like Numskull, also of the Luniz. "Esinchill is one of the best artists coming out of the Bay right now," he says. "He's book smart, and that comes out in his rhymes."

He's also a ferocious freestyler, so I was impressed to learn the Frontline's Locksmith beat him in a battle on KMEL, 106 FM, a few months ago. "We went one round, and they was like, 'It's a tie,' " Esinchill recalls. "Then we went a second round, and I fumbled. I couldn't bring it back."

But E remains philosophical. "I think what the Frontline do best is battle. That's where Locksmith shines. But there's a difference between being able to rap and being able to make songs. I think I make better songs."

He raises an interesting point, insofar as the majority of the Frontline's verses are battle rhymes. The "realness" of the battle rhymer is almost inevitably gauged by "hardness," which we might provisionally define here as experience with, and stoicism in the face of, street life. As much as I dig their refusal to adopt the usual gangsta pose, the Frontline's emphasis on hardness limits their lyrics.

Take four bars of Locksmith on "I Gotcha," from the Richie Rich comp Grabs, Snatches, and Takes (Ten-Six, 2004):

You might see Lock on the block in some Tims and Nikes
Making motherfuckers duck when I extend my right
I'm an mc; I fight with pens and mics
You're a bitch; you fight for women's rights

Like many of rap's memorable moments, the third and fourth lines are at once clever and offensive. The repeated grammatical structure creates the expectation of a similar parallel in logic, which is then violated by the second half of the fourth line. (Remember your SATs: "MC" is to "bitch" as "pens and mics" are to "women's rights" is not the correct answer.) Though he might have shored it up with a better rhyme than "right" and "rights," the structure is complex and compelling, even if – for a UC Berkeley grad like Lock – the sentiment isn't very nice.

Here are four bars from the "Intro" to Esinchill's Everything to Lose! (Rceason, 2002):

Born sick and with seizures, massive head trauma
Bitch-ass doctors woulda killed me if it wasn't for mama
Took me off the medicine, didn't have no more falls
No more emergency phone calls and hospital halls

Though the difference in subject matter makes it absurd to compare these examples, each is representative of the rappers' respective concerns. With the notable exception of "Hennessy," Esinchill doesn't really stunt on brand names, and where Locksmith raps about being hard, Esinchill is introspective at the top of his lungs, eliding pronouns and breaking up syntax to pack a few years into four lines. On paper, "hospital halls" seems like a throwaway, yet on disc it leaps out, neatly condensing a kid's perspective on hospitals: boredom and waiting.

Here's the conclusion of both verses – Locksmith's, then Esinchill's:

Lock: Nigga, me no singer
I'm from the Rich where them boys like to keep those things
And they stay with their ring on bling
And they wear more gold than a Chinese ping pong team

I rap instead; I notice I'm at peace when I rhyme
I think with my dick so let me give you a piece of my mind –
Suck it; me in a nutshell, forever passionate
I'm through with this control; I gotta go, I got some ass to get

We've already heard Lock "stretch metaphors like a Chinese jump rope" on Who R You, so the use of "Chinese" for mere verbal flashiness begins to pall this time around. E's ending crushes it. To hear "passionate" rhymed with "ass to get" is exactly what I turn to rap for. The other rhyme is nearly as pleasing, and the second line's combination of two shopworn phrases leads so inevitably to "suck it," you can admire its formal invention even while declining its invitation.

Esinchill's versatility in style and subject matter is what makes Everything to Lose! so accomplished a debut. And just as the Frontline's run of luck began with Locksmith's questionable 2003 battle loss on MTV, so Esinchill's buzz has picked up since losing to Locksmith. He's in talks with Hiero Imperium to release his next album, a duo record with partner King Beef called Choice Cuts, while the advance single – the Touré-produced "Hip Hop" – has been bubbling up in Funkmaster Flex's record pool. Maybe losing is everything.

hear tracks from Locksmith and Esinchill

Is There Really a New Bay Rising?

2006-10-14T14:24:00.000-07:00

The post-2Pac pack
Did the death of Tupac Shakur throw Bay Area hip-hop into a tailspin? And is there really a "New Bay" rising?

By Garrett Caples
San Francisco Bay Guardian March 16, 2005

You can pick me up; I'll be posted on 10th Street

'Cause you know that's where I'll be

Stuck like a telephone pole.

SO SINGS YOUNG rapper J-Stalin – a DJ Darryl discovery and former Richie Rich protégé – on a hook from his recent first mix tape, R-N-B. And it's true. As I roll up 10th Street in West Oakland's Oak Center, I see the short, wiry MC in the distance, standing in the middle of the street, talking on his cell. On the other end of the line, next to me in the car, is Dotrix 4000, a.k.a. Dontrell Mayfield, a former Digital Underground DJ turned MC-producer as half of the Mekanix. We've just driven from his house in East Oakland to pick up Stalin and bring him back to the Mekanix's studio, where they're finishing Stalin's debut, On Behalf of the Streets, for the duo's new label, Zoo Entertainment.

I live downtown, in a neighborhood no one calls Lakeside, about 20 blocks from where Stalin's "posted." In effect, I've spent my day doing a citywide doughnut. But Stalin's hood is worth it. A post-WWII black community inhabiting the structures of a middle-class Victorian past, Oak Center is funky as hell, beautiful blocks of houses in all shades and states of repair, dotted with buildings of a more recent vintage.

According to the fall 2003 Oakland Heritage Alliance News, the entire neighborhood was slated for demolition by the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the early '60s to make way for vast, anonymous housing projects. Only stubborn local resistance thwarted the plan.

'New Bay' vibed

Like Oak Center, Bay Area hip-hop is characterized by stubborn resistance, epitomized by 2Pac and still evident in Stalin's provocative choice of namesake. And that same spirit animates the community's reception of the catchphrase "New Bay." Coined by Oakland MC Balance but popularized by Richmond duo the Frontline, the term "New Bay" has led to press in national publications like Vibe and XXL. The latter forecast a "resurrection" of Bay Area hip-hop based on Virgin's 2004 success with the Federation (from Fairfield) and Ryko's signing of the Frontline on the strength of their EA-SKI-produced hit "What Is It." Since the single broke into the rotation of the notoriously local-leery KMEL, 106 FM, the radio exposure has helped the group move 10,000 copies of Who R You (IMG), their 2004 independent debut, which will be updated and rereleased by Ryko as Now U Know.

Yet the phrase has also sparked a firestorm of controversy in the Bay Area hip-hop scene.

"I guess people are like, we done worked too hard to let people come in and say, 'We're the New Bay – fuck all the old shit,' " Dotrix 4000 says. "Those cats screaming, 'New Bay' – they ain't connected. But the underground is all connected. We've been connected."

As if cued, G-Stack of Oakland's Delinquents calls Dotrix 4000's cell. "I think it's bullshit," he says of the New Bay concept. At the same time, he lets it be known his gripe isn't personal. "I think the Frontline does have talent, and I wish them well. But it's about public perception. 'New' comes right after 'old.' "

Therein lies the problem. Like most forms of popular entertainment, hip-hop is extremely susceptible to the cult of the new. Careers start young and end early, unless you can adapt to rap's ever-changing circumstances. It requires indefatigable effort to stay on top of the game, the type of effort that's driven the Delinquents to record not one but two mix CDs – Have Money Have Heart volumes 1 and 2 (Dank or Die Records) – addressing the New Bay controversy. In a gesture of defiance, G-Stack and fellow Delinquent V. White enlisted the aid of Too $hort, Oakland's ultimate OG, for "Say Bitch," the lead single, which disses the New Bay in no uncertain terms.

The "2Pacalypse" Theory

To fully understand why a phrase so small could generate a reaction so extreme from a vet like G-Stack, we must invoke the "2Pacalypse" theory. Believers argue that Pac's death in '96 triggered an artistic decline that left Bay Area hip-hop incapable of attracting a national audience or major-label interest. Thus, the Frontline's bio on www.thefrontlineonline.com offers, "In the past six years, the Bay Area hip-hop scene has become stagnant, passing off replicas of established artists as new talent." Add a couple of years to account for the age of this blurb and we're back at 1997, without even mentioning Makaveli directly. The New Bay clearly presupposes the 2Pacalypse, insofar as there must be a grave from which to resurrect Bay Area hip-hop.

But the 2Pacalypse theory has at least two major holes that make it an unsuitable foundation on which to build an understanding of local hip-hop. For starters, it holds the artists responsible for the behavior of major labels. Yet even before 2Pac's death, major labels were getting cold feet in the Bay. On his Web site, www.guerillafunk.com, for example, Paris is vocal about his problems with Tommy Boy and then Priority regarding the political content of his work, which effectively stalled his career in the mid-'90s.

Or take the case of Ray Luv, 2Pac's partner in the Marin City group Strictly D.O.P.E. In 1993, Ray scored an independent radio hit with "Get Your Money On," on Mac Dre's Strictly Business Records. In 1995, with Dre in prison, Ray signed with Atlantic (once part of Time Warner and now with Warner Music Group), through Khayree's label, Young Black Brotha. Atlantic, he tells me, "put out my album about six weeks before Time Warner was about to fire Interscope over Death Row and 2Pac. So every record like Pac's basically got shelved because they didn't want you to blow up."

"I'd be in L.A. – I'm getting walk-ons on the biggest shows," he says. "Shows they couldn't get me, I'm getting. Atlantic moved me from there and sent me to Kansas City for five days. And I'm like, what just happened? Once we pissed each other off, they were sending me to hotels where my window faced a brick wall. It got weird, so I quit. I took from '96 to '99 off."

If this sounds like the paranoia of a could've-been contender, consider the source. Handsome and charismatic, Ray was already a proven hit-maker, as was Khayree. The label exec who couldn't exploit so close a connection to Pac for at least gold in 1995, when he was already the biggest-selling rapper ever, strikes me as an underachiever at best.

The second hole in the 2Pacalypse theory is the fact that the creative decline of Bay Area hip-hop never really occurred. With the major labels increasingly reluctant to sign acts, much of the scene went underground. If you generated huge numbers, like E-40, whose 1993 EP, The Mail Man, debuted in the Billboard Top 20 with no distribution deal, you could force the majors to deal with you. (E-40 was quickly signed by Jive.)

But it grew increasingly apparent that you could do without them. Indie scenes sprang up around artists like Blackalicious and the Soulsides/Quannum collective. In Oakland, Pam the Funkstress and Boots reinvigorated political rap on a national level as the Coup. Artists like Del tha Funky Homosapien left labels like Elektra to establish their own companies, while others, like the Delinquents, built huge followings from the ground up.

New bosses

By 1999, the revolution was in full swing, as independent tunes began to infiltrate the airwaves. Among the local hits on KMEL that year was "That Man!," by the Delinquents, who went on to move 50,000 copies of 1999's Bosses Will Be Bosses (Dank or Die). By the end of the year, however, Clear Channel had bought KMEL, and G-Stack says he's been unable to get airplay since. (As of press time, KMEL musical director "Big Von" Johnson was unavailable for comment.)

The Delinquents maintain a sizable fan base. "They are Oakland," Dotrix 4000 says, "in terms of selling records and reppin' our city. They can't throw a party and it's not sold out." But while successful acts like the Delinquents have countered the lack of radio exposure and label support through relentless hustle, it's unclear whether hustle alone can withstand the effect of the media actively promoting other artists as New Bay hip-hop.

On the phone, the Frontline are more conciliatory than they come off online. They seem genuinely nonplused by the furor the New Bay catchphrase has provoked. "Without the veterans," MC Locksmith of the Frontline says, "you have no Frontline, without the Too $horts, the E-40s, the Delinquents, the Luniz, without any of these cats." His partner, Left, concurs: New Bay was meant to be "a fresh way of looking at Bay music" rather than an attack. "Let everybody come up. Let's all make good music and all come up together."

I brought this statement to a number of rappers, and responses ranged from "They should've said that first" to "SKI should've known better" to "Fuck them niggas" – disappointing, but you can see their point. We're talking about a scene that still produces entire albums dedicated to Rappin' Ron of Bad Influenz, who died in a car crash in 1997. Most Bay Area rappers I've spoken to have real reverence for the tradition on which they build, and the New Bay concept offends their sensibilities.

Like the residents of Oak Center, they're proud of their community and don't want it wrecked by decisions made outside. In that light, the resentment provoked by the New Bay concept and the flurry of accompanying diss records shouldn't be ascribed to envy. They signify, instead, the stubborn resistance of a community that has survived without assistance and that refuses to cooperate, or be co-opted, except on its own terms.

Hyphy Thizz Go

Holdin' the weight of the Bay -- Mistah F.A.B.

FOLLOW THE YELLOW BUS ROAD

GHOSTBUSTED

ENTER DA BAYDESTRIAN

"Dream" -- Graffiti artist Mike Dream

Naté

Purple Reign

Alias John Brown -- For the Non-Believers (Wildlife/I-Khan Distribution)

DJ Fresh -- So fresh and so clean

J-Stalin -- On Behalf of the Streets (Livewire Records/Zoo Entertainment)

Hyphy Holidays

Shock G corrects the record

The 'Moe Show -- San Quinn, Messy Marv, Big Rich, Will Hen leading out from the Fillmore

THE EDGE OF PACIFIC HEIGHTS

“BUSTING HEADS”

HOOD PRIDE

Traxamillion wins a Goldie

Method Man at the crossroads

Too Short -- Blow the Whistle (Short/Jive)

E-40 on cover of Modern Luxury's mag, San Francisco

Regaining consciousness --East Oakland rapper Ise Lyfe spreads the word, makes his mark

Confessions of a Gofessional

STALLED PREMIERE?

GOING FOR THE STREETS

Dope, rap, and religion

BLACK DIAMOND

“THIS IS MONEY”

COKE ADDS LIFE?

Busta Rhymes -- The Big Bang (Aftermath/Interscope)

The Team -- World Premiere (Moedoe/Rex/Koch)

The Product -- One Hunid (Underground Railroad/Koch)

Ruling party -- Rising hip-hop star J-Stalin morphs from d-boy to Go Boy

He's next

On the Go Movement

Getting in early

Bring on the Demolition Men

Prince -- 3121 (NPG/Universal)

MTV2 My Block Bay Area

Super size me -- E-40's Ghetto Report Card

GAME RELATED

JIVE DEAL

HISTORY IN THE MAKING: DROOP-E

STILL BREADED

The Mob Figaz Meet Marvaless -- 3 Da Hard Way (FriscoStreetShow.com)

B-Legit -- Block Movement (SMC/Sick Wid It)

Don't hate the playa ... Hate the game: Mac Dre's murder is still a mystery, but that doesn't mean he ought to be crucified

Nation of Thizzlam: The Rebirth of Thizz Entertainment

The Luniz: 10 On It!

Yukmouth: The Regime Declares War

The Mystery of Numskull

Rick Rock Changes the Game

Esinchill cuts

Make them party -- T.M.F., a.k.a. Tha Muthafuckaz, return to the Yay

Say 'Bay' -- Behind the New Bay sound of local hip-hop: NorCal producers

'Pressure' Drop -- E-A-Ski cooks up a Bay sound from a higher ground

by Garrett CaplesSan Francisco Bay Guardian July 6, 2005

The negotiator

Rap dreams

Can't live without my radio

Release the pressure

Money-B: Porn on the Job

Sex and the Studio climaxes with a -- video hit?

Come here often?

What's your fantasy?

No, really

Drunken Master

Fresh for the Underground

Behind the Nose -- Shock G steps out

You ain't knowin' -- DU and 2Pac

Breaking Down the Battle Lines: Frontline's Locksmith and DU's Esinchill

Is There Really a New Bay Rising?

By Garrett CaplesSan Francisco Bay Guardian March 16, 2005

'New Bay' vibed

The "2Pacalypse" Theory

New bosses

by Garrett Caples
San Francisco Bay Guardian July 6, 2005

By Garrett Caples
San Francisco Bay Guardian March 16, 2005