On Vacation

Enjoy this brief SMK footage until I return...

Bring Your "A" Game, Spread the News

...Romeo is back. Have yall heard this? I haven't heard this. Recent or recent enough solo track from G-Style's Romeo. Its confusing enough that G-Style's only or just only known release was a single called Romeo. Anyways, this video's been up for a couple of years and it definitely does not have a couple years worth of views. The track's guitar-heavy production is a somewhat of a turn-off for me but this guy is credited for bringing the gangsta-walk to Memphis so its interesting to seem him take it all in, bring it all back. Still, slack cut for being involved in the best classic gangsta walking footage around.

Follow the Gangsta Train

KmSm Featuring Kidd Money
Gangster Walkin
(Avenue, 1992)
vinyl rip @ 320 kbps

Hope to soon present a Gangster Walk mix starting with Underground Mafia's version and moving through Memphis Get Buck bangers to NOLA Buck Jump jams (as well as their color gang roots). In the meantime, this isolated offering by a moniker-jumbled early incarnation of producer SMK (of golden era Indo G & Lil Blunt production fame).

Like FM's Porkchop, Gangster Walking is the strong point of an otherwise unfocused full-length, Black Enimie.

Get Buck Funk

DJ Kid Slizzard presents...
Get Buck Funk: Da Mixtape
Side A, Side B

Another non-stop mix set up to fit tight into one 2 sided C-90. Anyone interested in obtaining a hard copy without making it themselves can hit me up at jib.kidder@gmail.com.

Aged and rare hardcore Memphis rap has had a strange life in the internet age. Scarcity must have played its part - where upstart New Orleans labels were able to piggyback on Cash Money & No Limit's respective cash trains (or at least get wrapped up in their cash dreams), local Memphis rap defined itself through infighting and Three 6 beef. This kept labels small, tapes circulating from trunk to trunk and then eventually through online auctions to this dude. Early tapes have become international fetish objects and now Russian Rap message boards are filled with obsessives' alphabetized Memphis collection lists. Shit is constantly clouding up my googling.

Compilers of this shit too often zoom in on the horror/devil shit aspect of the M-Town underground. Though plenty of cuts on here flaunt that darkness it is in no way the binding element. I've always found early Al Kapone much more compelling than, say, Evil Pimp. Instead, I've organized this mix around a different force: the Funk. I'm thinking of 'funk' in this sense as a measure of some rhythmic Gestalt, or the felt presence of some thrust able to propel bodies into motion through sound. The 'funk' of Get Buck Funk is a hard 'funk' - it has to be: gangsta walking is a hard ass dance; a gang is a hard ass kind of family.

The Get Buck sound of Memphis is just as indebted to its Soul past (in both the productive and consumptive sense) as NOLA Bounce is to Second Line, evidenced both through its sample sources and frequent "bumpin Womack" or "bumping Marvin Gaye" shout outs or even just what audio rolls in skits' backgrounds (see the H.O.H. track on here).

Many different kinds of shit on here: SMK's "Fuck All Yall" may be a pre-sippin sampling of Marvin Gaye's "Is That Enough" and his "Pop That Puzzy" almost sounds like a Dance Mania 12". If DJ Diz's black revolution cut-up just had a fucking djembe in the mix it could pass as an interlude off the most recent Badu record. Though all this shit is fairly gutter production-wise, I think the Tom Skee track on here maybe be the lowest fidelity shit I’ve ever given a close listen - I had to triple the volume just to make it audible in context. Oh, and plenty flavors of weed anthem scattered about.

Monkey Nuts is such great crack slang and someone answer me this: does Indonesia actually export any weed to the US? Would it be worth it for any party involved? An Australian woman got the fucking death penalty for weed possession in Bali. Maybe the price paid in lives makes Indo weed a delicacy enjoyed only by the greatest of rap veterans.

Ten Toes Down

A short series of essential early M-Town Junts from youtube account 10toesdown:

If you're down check this site which recently upped a pile of hard to find Street
Smart cassette releases.

COMING SOON: double-disc triple 6 satellite compilation feat. lil noid, lil sko,
lil fly, lil glock, lil gin, mc mack and much more