Early funk based hip hop. This is so much fun. I am currently engaged in trying to get Rich JC 'in the house' via a Craigslist search. Soon I will live in Oakland and listen to this record there, it will sound so good.
This is possibly the widest lens I've ever seen in a autobiographical rap. He just travels all over the place not really doing anything. You know, though, that he was having a lot of fun and just doesn't tell you about it.
In preparation for swine flu I've been studying the following: Breathless - Shankar Mahadevan, Breathless
You can also watch the video, which is well worth your while: The secret is, he doesn't take a breath the entire song (from 0:40-3:00), for a total of 2 and 1/3 minutes of lung power. I am up to 1/6 of one minute and have yet to catch any pigs.
Scenario: You are in the record store. You see this cover. What do you do? Correct Response: You buy it 5-10 seconds after looking at the back and seeing that it is produced by Dr. Dre (and Yella and Arabian Prince) in 1988. Same year as Straight Out of Compton.
The first single off the record sounds familiar: Supersonic - JJ Fad, Supersonic (1998)
It always blows my mind when I hear what I like to think of as 'sampled concepts'. I wonder if a straight up audio sample isn't more legit than a re-production of a concept. I strike this distinction provisionally, and fully understand that everything under the sun is 'new'. Keeping that in mind, my thinking goes as follows: audio sampling takes original work and provides it with a new context, while 'concept-sampling' takes a context and gives it a new audio form. This is of course common in many forms of music (jazz, soul, folk etc.), but somehow in pop music it feels less worthwhile.
Perhaps another way of saying this is that if Fergie were going to come out with a bad pop song, couldn't she have come up with it herself? I prefer JJ Fad any day of the week, both for their originality and for their version.
To get back to the quality, Dre's production on these beats is so much fun. Its like reading the diary of a genius and getting to see brilliance even in the notes and scribbles: Time Tah Get Stupid - JJ Fad, Supersonic (1998)
For example, I like to think that he came up with the intro to the song. I do remember seeing Snoop interviewed once talking about how Dre told him to put that sing-song into his voice when they were working on Doggystyle. What a guy.
