Warren G and Nate Dogg, “Regulate”

If there was ever a high school anthem that still resonates with me still to this day, it would be Warren G and Nate Dogg’s “Regulate”. While Dr. Dre’s The Chronic and Snoop Doggy Dogg’s Doggystyle really ushered in the new era of west coast sound, I think of “Regulate” as the song that really stamped the quintessential West Coast G-Funk sound. The former two titles both were in their own rights landmark albums, Dre came with the all star lineup, bringing in Breakbeats that were slowed down, basslines and of course, the “G-Whistle”. You wouldn’t have G-Funk without the G-Whistle, that high pitched hypnotic synthesizer that rode atop the bassline.

But Regulate was the textbook example of a smooth R&B/Easy Listening Michael McDonald hit that really evoked pleasantry, propping up the more menacing, violent and gangsta lyrics of the era. It was music that gave a warning of, “I’m smiling now, but you cross me, I’ll kill you”. I mean, if somebody just said to you “16 in the clip and one in the hole, Nate Dogg is about to make some bodies turn cold” rather than Nate Dogg signing it, you’d probably be ducking under some tables rather than dancing or bobbing your head. For the cynics out there, G-Funk found a way to make violence sound funky and soulful.

I remember a few years ago, a friend from high school while being all of a nicely aged 29 or 30, years old, was dating a fresh college graduate. While she was a cool girl, she had one ultimately fatal flaw: she didn’t know the song. We were both abhorred to find this out as we were going buck wild at the Rock The Bells concert a few years back, when Warren G was touring with Snoop. They’re not together today. And although the lack of song knowledge wasn’t credited for their break up, it was indicative of a generational divide.

To celebrate the contradictions of the music we love and the nostalgia it inspires, I’ll be grabbing my copy of the “Above The Rim” soundtrack and bumping it in my Honda for old times’ sake this weekend. Something I’m sure my friend’s ex girlfriend was deprived of, due to her youth.

GZA/Genius - Liquid Swords, produced by the RZA

Besides being one of the greatest Hip Hop groups ever to assemble, the Wu Tang Clan did me a solid, when I growing up, for this single fact: FINALLY, SOMEONE IN HIP HOP THOUGHT IT WAS COOL TO BE CHINESE.

As a young Asian kid growing up in the 90’s I felt like society did a lot to make us fairly invisible… well, besides Ernie Reyes Jr’s part as Keno the ass kicking pizza delivery boy in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: Secret of the Ooze, we didn’t have a whole lot. Forget the fact that sure, we had to live up to the status of being bad ass wandering Gung Fu masters or deadly Ninja Assassins, or theories of exotification, model minority mythgs and Edward Said’s seminal text Orientalism… I will just be honest and say, I felt cool listening to Wu Tang. Period. And what kid doesn’t want to feel cool sometimes? In a black and white world… you’re either black or your white, or you kick ass. I choose kicking ass AND listening to rap songs at the same time.

Not only that… I remember reciting that intro snippet from Shogun’s Assassin, with the homies Jason and Gian over and over whenever we played this. This was one of the great examples of a 90’s Hip Hop record’s skit really creating an entire world BEFORE the song. As a DJ and filmmaker, I took these ideas of mythology and creation stories that cultures embody, and how this song and other Wu Tan classics functioned to marry the ideas of Hip Hop, Martial Arts, and Eastern philosophies together, to do the same in my documentary film Among B-Boys… check it out also in the film’s trailer! 

[slightly updated]

Young Life, “Street Life” (1995)

When I found out recently this emcee Young Life, was from the East Palo Alto/East Menlo Park area, it blew my mind. I still need to do additional research on this song, but this song already elicits stories of my own.

From an early age I seemed to thirst for new music in general. Music was always an escape for me, opening up a whole other world. I was became especially fascinated with Hip Hop/Rap music as I came of age in the mid 1990’s, I would like to say for the stories told in its songs, but I can’t lie. It was because for my generation, it was our popular music, especially growing up not white in the suburbs. It was a departure sonically and ideologically from the ideals of white manhood that I didn’t fit into.

While there were many benefits of general safety and physical well being where I grew up in Foster City, CA, the concept of racial difference was always looming over myself and other people of color in a seemingly innocuous, yet abject and often ignored way. The burbs always has had its ways of blurring lines and teasing you with its incomplete promises of acceptance and multiculturalism. Just ask all the white republican neighbors I’ve had growing up (and funny enough, we knew them better than the Asian neighbors who surround us).

Anyways, this song is one I remember from waiting up with my radio playing softly next to my bed (so I wouldn’t get in trouble from my parents), listening to the Wake Up Show with Sway and Tech, Sway’s show, the 10 O’Clock Bomb on KMEL, and Street Soldiers on KMEL. Although this was a local hit across the Bay, I remember this with the Street Soldiers show because of not only the stories in the song, but also the stories I would hear during that show.

For those who don’t know, Street Soliders is a Bay Area radio show dedicated towards addressing issues of violence, addiction, and abject poverty in our communities of color, and it was the other side to the coin, the real stories behind my Hip Hop education. It provided context and real voices to experiences that I was geographically and generationally removed from (I’m a fifth generation Chinese American, with much in common with a 3rd generation experience, and currently a 2nd generation with a college education and even 2nd generation with an advanced degree) I definitely wasn’t raised in the streets. But these stories and experiences along with the friendships made with people allows stories to guide the way I experience life, especially as a Hip Hop beatmaker/musician, scholar, and filmmaker.

It’s amazing how in the long run I’ve come to forge my own brief relationship with the city of East Palo Alto (working at the Boys & Girls Club there) and forging a lasting musical friendship with a few of its finest representatives and diaspora, emcees including O2 and Khabral. So I guess this song was by no accident, and just like the others its story is one woven into my own.

Remix

Common, “Resurrection ‘95” from the album Resurrection

While the first album I bought of Common’s was 2000’s Like Water for Chocolate (Jay Dee/J. Dilla and Soulquarians production again!) it wasn’t until a year later in my second year of college, that I was really put on to his body of work with the albums Can I Borrow a Dollar, Resurrection, and One Day It’ll All Make Sense. Thus far, he was a beloved figure for the later stages of the “Golden Era” of Hip Hop, a defender of the integrity of Hip Hop’s evolution of values and ideologies. My good college friend Sohrab aka the “Skeptik Dreamer” of Fresno’s The Basement crew put me onto Common amongst others, providing me an alternate soundscape from the music of 2pac, Snoop, Dre, E-40 and Spice 1 (all of whom I still enjoy listening to). Sohrab is also a guy who, whether he knew it or not, challenged me to expand intellectually and ideologically.

“Resurrection,” for me represented for more me what what I wanted in Hip Hop as a young idealist. College was the years of my development of personal, cultural and political identity. It was also young brashness with a desire to uplift often at odds yet both there, just as Common juxtaposes his ideas:

If a broad ain’t got a mind or job or crib she useless
acoustic baselines, embrace rhymes as I chase mines
they say that the end is near
but can I walk a righteous path holding a beer

I too was finding stumbling my way through my own contradictions, but always centered enough in my values and convictions to never stray too far. Looking back, although Common’s search and connection with Chicago’s community and black nationalist history is not at all my experience, just as the stories of Dre, Cube and Easy E in Compton aren’t mine, the core components of what I saw as his personal quest were easier for me to identify. 

Aesthetically it was a done deal for me. Producer No I.D.’s took a loop from an easily overlooked adlib from Ahmad Jamal’s “Dolphin Dance” (from the album The Awakening) is pretty amazing.  The fact that he loops an adlib provides a sense of ease and grace, he preserves Ahmad Jamal’s gift for the casual yet precise grace notes, And No I.D.’s context highlights this line, adding to it an even greater presence to me. Now that I think about it, one of the foundational sensibilities I emulated (and still do) when I started sampling for my own music, best example being my track with Grand Visitor of Homeliss Derilex. Lyrically and musically open and honest, it is a brand of Hip Hop I’ve tried to emulate in my own production when working with artists:

music that exposes a view into the artists’ soul.

Here’s a great mini feature for further context of the making of the Resurrection album for Common’s career and Hip Hop history from Complex and also check out a great write-up on Common’s early producer No I.D. from the 2dopeboyz blog and a link to a great mixtape.

dandiggity:

That’s my homie Bryan getting stabbed in the leg!

raw rhymes/beats/video

thebeatrockers:

When I was listening to Bwan’s “Living Room” album, I came across this particular song, “Bust Back.” I focused more on Bwan because we’ve grown to understand Bambu’s stance in politics with his back and forth verse with Irie Eyez. So Bwan starts off by comparing himself to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. by saying that by using words as his weapons than guns to try and get the messages of his songs out but on the contrary, if it fails he can turn the other check and use violence to get what he wants. Bwan understands that as a minority, the system awaits for his “slip up” and become another victim of violence. By proclaiming that if money is the key to success, then many of those who are underprivileged are out of luck. He goes onto references about the murder of Oscar Grant, the cost of justice for one will be to kill a cop and how the status of power can corrupt one’s mind. From the verse itself, there were a lot of references to black figures (from MLK to Oscar Grant). It is clear that the actions of these people influenced Bwan and his actions towards society. Which brought me to think that this challenges or relates back to Elaine Kim’s article called Atleast You’re Not Black, which talked about how minorities “should be grateful that you are not black.” But blacks prominently helped pave way for minorities to prosper in this country, and this so-called hierarchy amongst minorities only infuriates one another and either fights one another or fights the man. Here, Bwan fights the system/man using the words for MLK and Malcolm to influence his actions, with thoughts of Oscar Grant in the back of his mind.

-Zed

Thoughtful writeup… plus here’s my Bwan x Paper Son remixes!

Nas, “Made You Look” produced by Salaam Remi

Just like that, they became one. As if my endless hours practicing DJ sets and spinning at college parties had melded with the times drinking and smoking with my roommates, watching Freestyle Session VHS tapes - all in one song! The way Salaam Remi flipped the break to the canonical B-Boy anthem Apache made me instantly envious. If Stillmatic was the checkup that reassured us that the Ginuwine riddled STD that was Nastradamus was curable, “Made You Look” was the antibiotics that smashed that infection. No longer did we have to flip back and forth between two spins of Illmatic and  one of It Was Written! If Stillmatic was Nas’ answer to the Jay-Z question (his song Ether was the first reply to the Takeover), “Made You Look” was the song that made emcees question themselves!

They shootin’…. Made You Look!
You a slave to a page in my rhyme book.

I think around this time there were still many that regarded Nas as the world’s greatest Hip Hop emcee (sorry BIG, sorry ‘Pac) but Jay-Z challenged that notion with the “one hot album every 10 year average” line in the Takeover. He’s been supplanted in the popular imagination by the corporate brand Jay-Z has created for himself, however in my opinion, this continued underdog status (and maybe also his divorce) has left him hungrier than ever for his most recent album “Good Life”. Best of all, in the lead single “Nasty” I hear the same sonic overtones and crazy breakbeat feel I first heard in “Made You Look”.

Needless to say, this is another one from my musically formative college years, one of those exciting moments when something old and something new come together in just the right way! And it also doesn’t hurt that God’s Son spawn this now classic remix album!

ps… did ANYONE ELSE know this was produced by Salaam Remi?! With tracks like this I feel like I should respect his career more than I do. His work is pretty much Just Blaze quality, I guess I’ve just slept on his career.

[updated]

Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth, “Back on the Block” Thes One remix

I forgot how much I love this record. I can remember how elated I was to find this on Hip Hop site that I bought two copies! (well, I always bought two… DJs you know what’s up).

I was already obsessed with this track in two other forms, the first was the original Produced by Pete Rock, from the album Petestrumentals. Besides his record nerd inspiring master sould and jazz sampling, a characteristic of his production was that smooth bass bounce over some rugged drums! The second was an amazing DJ Krush remix. I love this track so much I actually included both versions in a mixtape I made back then.

But THIS version, produced by Thes One of The People Under the Stairs (P.U.T.S., more on them in a future post)… I actually I remember hearing this at a venue on Grand, in DTLA, that is probably now defunct. It was in a sets of playing after a DJ battle, I remember seeing the freestyle dancers grooving and the DJ had slipped this into his set. I love this record so much I that I think of this for two things when listening to it:

1.) the feel good vibe I had running around Los Angeles in the early 2000’s probably ‘01-‘03 chasing those underground Hip Hop shows and checking out various DJ comps (even got to see both DMC and ITF USA finals back when the scratch scene could fill a theater).

2.) one of the reasons why I stopped DJing. Mostly because I couldn’t book parties that would allow me to play songs like this that I loved to hear.

It may sound sad that such a favorite record of mine is connected to something so traumatic as giving up something I love to do. However it wasn’t that I won’t spin anymore, I’m just looking for the right venue for the right type of party that I want to play. So right now I got one eye open that I might be able to find a nice spot to play once or twice a month. 

On that note, I can happily say that since then I’ve never bought records that I wouldn’t enjoy listening to. Well… except for sampling… but that’s another story.

Jay Dee/J. DIlla - Fall in Love, performed by Slum Village

I had to think long and hard about what my quintessential Jay Dee/J Dilla beat would be. My first instinct was the De La Soul Classic Stakes is High. However, while this is up there as one of my favorite songs I was thinking about what might have characteristics that I think holds through his entire body of work. In “Fall in Love,” I hear the soft understated theme of the Wurlitzer with the rugged crack of his sampled drums.

This album was the beginning of my real obsession with finding great Hip Hop music. I’d been tired of what the radio and corporations had been berating me with for years, and Slum Village’s “Fantastic, Vol 2” was one of the first suggestions by Shane, the owner of “Below the Surface” an all independent Hip Hop shop in Burlingame, of all places, a middle class suburb on the Mid Peninsula here in the SF Bay Area. I’d been searching for years for a place to quench my musical curiosity, and I’d finally found it!

Without “Fall in Love,” I never would have developed my affinity for my trips out to Melrose every other week to check for the latest 12”s from FatBeats spending all the money I made from DJing parties in college, in the early 2000’s on MORE RECORDS! I never would’ve known the genealogy from Gap Mangione’s “Diana in the Autumn Wind” to Madlib’s Jaylib beat for “The Official”, I might never have known about Robert Glasper. I often cringe at the hero worship of J.Dilla by those who caught on after the release of his album Donuts, but I realize, “hey, everybody has to have their start, that’s where their Dilla genealogy begins. It’s not their fault they were born later.”

But I digress. We’re all the same really… I’m sure if they coulda been at the Madvillain release tour show in LA at the Henry Fonda theater when Madlib and Jay Dee were performing, and Common came out singing the chorus to this song, they would’ve gone just as bonkers as I did. [update, just found this show recap with show mp3 from Stonesthrow!]

Here’s to falling in love all over again.

“I toured round the world.. from London to the Bay, it’s Hammer! Go Hammer! MC Hammer, YO Hammer! and the rest can go and play…

Can’t Touch This”

One of my earliest introductions to the idea of the sample, when I realized hey… MC Hammer’s “Can’t Touch This” sounds just like this other song. I can’t quite say I was “hooked” yet. But this was a start. It wasn’t until years later when I realized “Hey, I can do this too.” Either way, thanks for the start.

This is the restart to this blog, an introduction to the classic Hip Hop, songs, samples and beats that inspire me… and everything else that comes after!