12.25.2008

Straight Up Sess


What yall know bout Shurty Smiles? Happy Holidays from T&G.

12.24.2008

Q93 Addendum



Rebirth on Q93 performing the track "Running Away" sampled on Cash Money underdog Big Heavy (of PxMxW)'s "Gangsta Walk Pt. 2" (from Doggin Em: 1996, RedRum) available at a very low sample rate here.

Also, on an unrelated note I'd like to mention that I have both developed and implemented an emergency plan in the event of this blog's deletion. Should you ever arrive to find some low-level google employee has attempted to stamp us out like a cockroach, fret not. There is a shadow blog lurking in the....um....shadows. T&G4LIFE.

12.23.2008

What We Want for Xmas

Q93 Ad - the Bomb? album

I'm at my parents snowed-in Grand Rapids home (where incidentally I've never lived) digging thru boxes of my discarded shit in the ice-cold moth-ball attic and basement. Amongst many things yall could surely give one fuck about, I've uncovered this 5th generation bootlegg 8-hands-passed cassette of Q93 excerpts circa Y2K and having done so has brought haunting life back to one of my life's most limp-dick pursuits: the frustrated attempt to obtain a real or jacked copy of whatever record is advertised in this 54 second zshare clip. Please any and all twankle-reading bounce aficionados listen to this clip and rack brains. Everyone else: listen to this clip and grow hungry.

Admittedly, its a hunger much appreciated in a world hell-bent on destroying such a sentiment or at least reducing its duration to seconds or less. But nostalgic appreciation of a slowed-down passed-up past doesn't mean that waiting longer will grow that appreciation - I've waited long enough! This record will not taste better ever. Nerds of Rap: serve me or help me serve myself - What Is This??? Bring to me... the Bomb Album...or something like that. Featuring something like Overdose, something like Scott Free, something like Someone f/ Troy Gotti, anything by something like Down 4 Life records.

12.11.2008

Request Line

Willie Puckett Million Dollar Hotboy
(1998, Take Fo') @33 kbps

By request, 2nd? solo record by the Bounce Squad's Willie Puckett. Everything on Take Fo' is on the raw side but this one in particular sounds like it was dropped straight onto a Radioshack karaoke machine. "Tear It Down" is a highlight, built around the "For the Love of Money" break. "Tear It Up" is about as good and both sound like 50 hollering dancers packed into a 3 foot booth. If a recording booth was even put to use here. Not too much else on here I'm interested in except (is it Bigg Ramp?) those imitated Triggaman bells (the one the "broads" are doin).

Having never really warmed to this record gives me insight into the way people who don't like this kind of bounce experience those records like this I have warmed to.

Pagan-Worship

Pretty Tony & Block Revelation
(1998, Recognize Records) 420 kbps

Weird silences scatter this record. At the end of the first song there is a 2 second clip of lord knows what. I suppose its the audio equivalent of spelling the album name and title track with different vowels, an also present mis-edit.

Don't know why I'm focused on the boring.... Pretty Tony is the TT Tucker of Memphis Get Buck music and though this is years after the "Get Buck" performance posted last week there are moments almost as good, like "Ten toes down", and even if his rhymes sometimes are so simple they're strange (I'm Pretty Tony and my music don't suck) he has a way of wrapping triangle raps around square beats. Tentoesdown Wheremfound Northmemphisbound andIneverclownaround Wheremfound Wheremfound Northmemphisbound Wheremfound Wheremfound Tentoesdown Wheremfound Wheremfound Northmemphisbound Wheremfound Wheremfound Tentoesdown Wheremfound Wheremfound Northmemphisbound Wheremfound Wheremfound Tentoesdown.. his left pan voice not sure where the right pan one is taking him, punctuating already strange lyrical math with half-spoke syllables.

Female Thugs

Brown Suga Female Thugs
(1998, Street Vibe) @ Three20

Budget production bounce that only wavers in quality when the production team steps up to the mic or maybe we just like our thugs best female. The best track on here is single "Ya Ya YaY" and depending on how closely you inspect the fruits of your DSL hoarding you're likely to find more tracks worthwhile.

I was hoping to learn more about Brown Suga but any attempt to do so was clouded by the name's stripper prevalence. And thats too bad because Ba Dunk A Bounce 6 and Doin the Bubble Butt 4 sound just like the comps upon which I'd like to stumble.

12.10.2008

Bounce Around

DJ Jubilee presents the Bounce Squad: Bouncin All Over the World
(2000, Take Fo') @ 320

The Bounce Squad is DJ Jubilee's dance group. Of their 4 members (Willie Puckett, Twerker, Kooly and Anky) only Puckett has solo releases (also on Take Fo') as far as I know. Yall can check the whole squad here, doing their strange thang and there's a good offBeat interview with DJ Jubilee here, where Jube claims to be working with Dick Clark Productions on a miniseries or movie about his life and offers this analysis of TT Tucker, Bounce's OG MC: "He’d just talk trash behind the microphone and sometimes not make any sense. He’d talk about an an outfit, how you fix your hair."

This record served as my introduction to Bounce music 7 years ago so any objective perspective is without hope. Great contributions by a beefsquashed UNLV (surviving duo at this point, Yella Boy having passed), Junie Bezel (who in one of Bounce's most unfortunate moments of disconnect was taken to France by author Nik Cohn to perform with Stardust vocalist Benjamin Diamond as laptop DJ) and Bigg Ramp (check "Get Ignorant").

There's a remix of the "Jubilee All" on his first release that replaces the bassline with the Barney themesong. I think that's a good metaphor sometimes for Jubilee's innocent and simple bounce style, but the energy and enthusiasm is next-leveled enough for my full respect.

12.04.2008

08 Crank Update


A quick survey of recent Youtube rap dance crazes, whose real-world locus seems to have shifted from Atlanta to Dallas. I know this is often the most-hated music, but if like Big Boi says "To make one bob they head be the track job" then getting someone dancing in the driveway, street, garage, bedroom or basement, then documenting and sharing that with the whole world is a track gone above and beyond.

Fat Pimp - Rack Daddy
Dion - I Jump Judy
Unknown - What Dat Gurl Name?
G-spot Boyz - Stanky Legg

12.03.2008

Memphis: Dec. 7, 1991



The best vintage gangsta-walk footage I've seen web-wise and a good set-up for Pretty Tony's "Revelations" disc soon to be posted. Its hard to remember this was the raw stuff of inspiration for MC Hammer.

12.01.2008

Rapsick



Re: Murderdog Magazine, Vol. 15 Num. 2
So...what the fuck is up with Murderdog Magazine???

Extensive Sri Lanka feature, Wildlife photography, performative Chinese stage painting, David Wolfe's Raw Food Diet... what is this bullshit doing in my dog? When its more understated, like the Osho quotes in last years Pioneers section, I can almost appreciate it. From my perspective, Screw was a dude so deep into downers he got his music fucked up on drugs too. I think that has fuck-all to do with the 7 chakras, but thats just my slant. But when it overtakes the whole mag?? And if there has to be a World-Rap feature, could it at least be on something half-decent? These Sri-Lankan artists are still 10 years away from a modest Biggie impression, at least Brazil Funk is caught-up style-wise with mid-90s Miami.

And I don't mind flipping past the clown rap, I realize the meth-hick children of Missouri sword-swallowers need rap too. But I need more than a cut-short Killer Mike interview to make up for it. They could at least pair these contradictions together in an interesting way - have David Wolfe teaching ICP the truth about chocolate.

So, for real - what up. Is murder dog staff on vacation? Was this issue left completely up to Black Dog Bone? Yall, I will write for your magazine. You can pay me in backissues. Or whatever rare psychedelics you brought back from your last rainforest spirit-quest.