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.

Buckle Up G

Lo Key Test My Nutz
(199?, Street Smart?)
cassette rip @ 320

Lo Key, cousin of Tommy Wright, of the Willett Click, South Memphis.

Is this Lo Key or 2 Lo Key? And if its the former (and I think it is) then how accurate are my track names, pulled from a site that used the latter? Questions from the fog. The title track of this cassette made its debut on this blog here, where I (mis?)attributed it to Lil Noid.

Boring uncertainties yall could give shits about. This one is excellent, the evil dream psychedelic vibe, warm tape-echoed vox, simultaneously psychopathic, apathetic, brooding. Dislocated funk, sativa paranoia.

More M-Town Tubing

Leading up to some things.... some full tapes ripped, new Memphis mix and old mixes formally cassetted, but on the way down that path I'd like to share a line of youtube mp3s from poster Redsavage24. The videos are all just cover images, but you'll enjoy that aspect just as much - notably Ever So Thick Fam's Daniel Johnston math class daydream.

Yall probably tired of me asking it, but does Ever So Thick Family's "Automatic" share a common sample with Mystikal's "Yall Ain't Ready"or is that track just this track's sample? As a collective audience, you are the best research resource on these matters.

I guess the internet is all dots with varying amounts of stems and as such lazy can be as useful as efforted blogging and if you're lost in the untwitterably large maze of this media overload skip straight to La Chat & Womack "Smokin On A Fat Sack".

Smoke Sumthin

Gangsta Pat's "Smoke Something" & G-Style's "Gangsta" videos from the Tha Memphis Underground DVD culled from clips of Ska Faced Al Kapone's cable access show. More or less all of the best vintage footage from Dirty States of America hails from this release, some from these videos plus more from Ball & G and Pretty Tony 1991 live performances.

Whose That Knocking on the Door?

Gangsta Pat
I'm the Gangsta / Shootin' on Narcs
(1990, On Top) @ 320

Gangsta Patrick "Too Big" Hall, son of Bar-Kays drummer Willie Hall. His first single and probably the hardest pressed wax from the city of Memphis in the year 1990. I included the remake "I'm Still the Gangsta" from his 1992 release All About Comin' Up so you can compare major and minor production values. From Roni Saarig's Third Coast:

Before Pat was out of high school, he hooked up with a label called Good to Go, but one day he and the label's owner, a hustler named Fat Tony, were driving down Beale Street when a gunshot entered the car, killing Tony.

A guy named Reginald Boyland took over and renamed the label On the Strength. Over the next few years, OTS almost single-handedly put Memphis on the map by releasing records from the city's most significant early acts - the first of which was Gangsta Pat. Growing up the son of a famous musician, Pat traveled with his dad to shows and learned to play drums, keyboards, trumpet and guitar. But he also went through rough times in White Haven and other deteriorating parts of Memphis. Though initially an LL Cool J adherent, Pat changed styles once he heard NWA. As a gangsta rapper, Pat fell in love with the Geto Boys around 1989, when they made a promotional appearance at a local record store. He gave them his tape, and they liked it so much they invited Pat to join them on tour.

You'll recognize lines from the B-side for their later sampling in seminal early Ball & G or 3-6 tracks (Shoot his ass down to the concrete; whose that knockin at the door / narcotics). How much local wax was around to sample? On Paul's earliest leaked tape he makes weird 4-track funk out of Al Kapone's "Once a Thug".

TW3 Shows His New Crib

I wish MTV cribs was like this sometimes, at least to the extent that I give a fuck what MTV cribs is like. Check it out for a real in-depth look into where your Ebay orders are processed.

Nice performance of "Don't Start No Shit" at the end of pt. 2.

He's got a Youtube account with the first part of this posted but with embedding disabled by req. His page makes bold claims about what's to come in the near future and I'm reminded of the porno mag and movie that were to supposed to happen.

The real Tommy Wright is now on You Tube with real videos of 10 Wanted Men, Mac T-Dog, Princess Loko, Lil Ramsey, Project Pimp, C-9, Lachat, Womack, M.D.B.,Chickenbone, K-Rock, Playa Fly, and Street Smart Sinistaz. Why watch bullshit pictures while a song is playing.

Til The Cup Iz M-T

Various Artists
Memphiz Undaground Hustlaz: Vol. 1
(1995, Alkatraz Productionz)
from cassette to 320 mp3

Al Kapone, he's one of the only niggas in Memphis you can go talk to, no matter who you have beef with, you can have beef with one of his best friends. Al Kapone, he the only nigga you can just really go talk to and work shit out. And he one of the hardest niggas in Memphis plus one of the coolest niggas in Memphis to fuck with.

-Skinny Pimp (Murderdog Vol 8 #2)

And here Memphiz's hardest, coolest mediator presents a great compilation of local talent that is solid thru and thru.

My personal favorites are the Project Playaz "Real Hustlaz Everywhere" and 1st Degree & GK's "Ghetto Pimpin". For some reason the cassette version excludes the hidden track present on the CD version. Maybe cassettes are a more difficult place to hide things.

Nascent M-Town 12s: Motherfuck the Cops

Men of the Hour
Cop's Aint Shit 2 Me / Psycho
(1991, Bazooka) @ 320 kbps

Noz already streamed this shit, but I've giving it out fully and including the instrumentals too because I really like this release and not just as a historical document but as music.

And maybe being a guitarist makes me more sympathetic to the instrument's rap inclusion. I also love the orchestra hit synth sounds in both tracks because they sound so dated but their arrangement makes it hard. A much rawer sound than the contemporary Radical T features.

Instrumentalwise, "Psycho" works well as a stand-alone. The crowd sounds, drums & samples, no-reservations funk wah guitar and whispered "psycho" all combine to make a really unexpected music.

Lemon Heads Believe In Luck

Playa Fly Fly Shit

(1996, Super Sigg) @ 320

I am presenting today's post in the form of an Amazon review and wikipedia entry cut-up as a sort of game played by the unwritten rules of the internet. But first, some real words of mine:

This fly record like so many Memphis rap records has had a busy and promiscuous life in Internet Prison. A pod of rap cloned in so many ways, each child floating through a series of tubes to some faraway continent. Who could have guessed that by 2009 there would be no hover board, no shrink-fit jacket but instead: the worldwide, virus-like flight of data. The Thug Fantasies of Russian preteens and Japanese Salarymen and Born Africans all filled with MPEG color... and I don't often post the often-posted, but the Web needed a better clone, a 320 child strong enough to weather the long, cold life of data immortality.  

Playa Fly is da best rapper in the world, but the world doesn't know Fly. His flows are so real that they are understood by everyone. Unlike most southern rappers, Playa Fly doesn't embrace materialism in his rhymes, usually speaking on a deeper, more political level. If you grew up middle class - tell me about your braces, if you grew up in the projects - tell me about your Uncle being shot and wearing braces. Playa Fly motivated me to go on to better my self. He also keeps the Memphis-rich tradition for seriously talented rappers. The messages he gives are very easy to relate to and hardly commercial or modified for TV and his lyrics make you forgot about Mr. Chill's awful singing. I love 3-6 Mafia but pluck the chicken they got lyrically murdered on this shit. This cd is one of the best I've heard and I've heard any CD you could name. His Hardcore rapin is the stuff.

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.

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.

Buckwilden

There is meaninglessness in this. Archive passwords, premium upload accounts, external hard-drives, message-board hierarchies, expired links... rainsoaked tagless bootlegg cassette-rips of records you never would have wanted if you hadn't first seen them move in online auctions for 3 digit figures.

In a different sense, though, good record collecting always was a compulsive disorder and in the absense of some coordinated and all-encompassing online audio-archive database (currently impossible, currently illegal) there will always be some gems off-radar, whether 45 RPM or hyperlink, left to stoke the fantasies of the incurable. I recently downloaded some disturbed number of Fuck Action and Lights Off .zips leading to the sort of misguided listening that creates more aversion than either pleasure or knowledge. The best feeling I got from those files was watching my HD space double in one recycle-bin dumping.

But just when MP3's were starting to feel like some niche-porn jpegs - the intangible and illusory representations of real-live records - BOTM uploaded the fucking Womack Da Omen album. And having worked up reality-sized anticipation, I'm sitting here right now enjoying this like a true plastic tape. Whether it lives up to itself is a question not worth asking. Instead: where are the La Chat verses? And I've heard a few, but this is one of the strangest hardcore appropriations of Enya I know of, good Young & Restless tucked up too.

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.

10% Talent, 90 % Business

FM (Freakmaster)
Gimme What You Got!
(Avenue, 1992)
vinyl rip @ 320 kbps

Today's post to fill-in cracks in the "Where They At" response ripples. This one's for the DJ Jimi "original" (misnomer), not TT Tucker though, and is part of an Avenue distro triple post.

If it seems strange this bounce remake hails from Memphis Tenn, just remind yourself that New Orleans and Memphis are Phil D. Triggerman's adoptive parents and this just a rap custody battle.

That the rest of Freakmaster's Mac of the round Table is weak by comparison suggests he buckled under the timeless industry pressure to make less good music some time between the release of this 12" and his full-length. Or, maybe it's Freak's style to cop styles - elsewhere he lays out the Making Easy Money Pimpin Hoez In Style acronym over Bill Withers' Use Me Up (a la UGK) and there's a track that sounds something like a weaker version of an early Ball & G joint.

Memphis Pimpology

Eightball & MJG Pimpology Collection
(93-94?) @ 320 kbps

This is a meta-compilation of the best tracks from a pre-Comin Out Hard 8ball & MJG, previously compiled (with other material) on Lyrics of a Pimp and Memphis Underworld.

Most tracks are paired duplicates, giving each a sense of some identity that exists outside the single recording. Sitting together, nuances of production & inflection stick out stronger. And you get a second chance to catch any lyrics you may have missed the first time.

listen to the bass / keep the snare in a flash / with a blast / to forever last / my rhymes that move past / these crooks / who just / stole an old ladies pocketbook / jook when you hear my hard rhyme / pass me a book / a Tops / and let me get high / as a raindrop / when I start kickin chicken / tell me why I gotta stop / I ain't / so witness my Memphis Pimpology / don't like chicken / but I smoke it don't follow me / hard black brother / with a curl and a real limp / you're listening to the lyrics of a pimp

Ike Moods: The Mixtape

DJ Kid Slizzard presents
Ike Moods: Da Mixtape
Side A, Side B

I mentioned in my distant but most recent post a desire to unleash some convoluted Bar-Kays rap family tree mixtape, with space allotted for the Bar Kays, Isaac Hayes, Ike Dirty, Gangsta Pat & Jazze Pha - all connected through musical & familial relations - and works related through sampling. But then Isaac Hayes' death became an inspiration to review more closely that life now lost. So in place of something with a larger scope is this mix of Hayes' most trampled breaks in both raw and sampled forms. The fact that samples of Ike's work follow the full trajectory of rap history from the East Coast (Biz Markie, Ultramagnetic) to the West coast (NWA, CMW, Spice 1) to the Southern States (BG, Skinny Pimp) gives some clue as to the weight of his boots in rap annals. I hope this bootlegg cassette shows due respect in a way that only a bootlegg cassette can. RIP.

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.

M-Town Team

M-Team For Deposit Only
(1991, Waylo) cassette rip @ 320

For today's sendoff I first considered Jazze Pha's debut record (as Phalon), Rising To The Top, but backed out both because we don't fuck with major label records here at Twankle & Glisten (its on Elektra), and because I try not to guide anyone's ear toward jams that weak. At some point in the future we might throw up a second generation Bar-Kays mix - Pha is the son of bassist James Alexander and Gangsta Pat that of drummer Willie Hall - maybe a mix of tracks birthed through sampling and those birthed through... um... birth.

In place of that is a different cassette from Memphis Soul progeny: M-Team are brothers Archie & Boo Mitchell, sons of soul artist and Hi records founder Willie Mitchell, and the same production team behind the Radical T record posted a while back (which feat. early raps by Al Kapone and 8ball). It may also be mentioned that producer Phunk Dawg of Ay Bay Bay fame apprenticed under their father as a teenager.

This is going to be a bit too New Jack for most of yall, but its great for a comparative analysis of contemporaneous Memphis releases, like the first tapes of Skaface Al Kapone or DJ Paul's first 4-track fuckings around. Either way this is one of the earliest rap releases out of Memphis, at least in terms of what has survived to the extent that it can written about. Cool K's "I Need Money" predates it by 5 years, though, and if anyone can offer up an MP3 or cover shot of that it would be much appreciated.

Rapidshare raised their maximum upload bar and now both sides of a tape fit in one rar. This is good for you because it means you only have to enter that elusive password one time.

One Man Gang

Tommy Wright III On The Run
(1996, Street Smart Records)
[link removed: visit the Street Smart ebay store]

One of my top ten favorite rap records and maybe number one in covers, designed by this dude whose myspace features a john mayer music player, a bible verse widget and a picture titled "kitty bed time".

I've read that his first single was produced by DJ Paul, I wonder what that is and I wonder if I've heard it. And I wonder what Tommy could have pulled off if he hadn't spent the first five years of the new century on lockdown. Maybe he would have fulfilled the epic sized promise in On the Run's liner notes:

Everybody don't forget about the Nationwide Video that is associated to this release. Street Smart Records needs every one support as we intend on beginning an uncut radio station and a porno magazine following an underground rap magazine.

Anyways, nothing else really sounds quite like this. Not even other Street Smart records or earlier Tommy Wright tapes. Although there are guest production spots alluded to (Squeeky, MDB, Blackout), vague inner info suggests its really Tommy whose responsible for the distinct and completely horrific counterpoint gracing these tracks. Shit is so evil and dissonant... and complex. I can't help but imagine Tommy sitting in some blood-spattered dungeon slamming Old E 40s and listening to Bartok.

Oh and I've been enjoying the tracks on former CIA member Charlie Brown's myspace... does this record exist? God has truly fucked up by blessing a nigga like Tommy Wright III.