обожаю такой арт! лица не плохо получилось пририсовать

-Цитата от BoneZ

обожаю такой арт! лица не плохо получилось пририсовать

подделка, лиц на оригинале нету, лица эти есть в буклете блек сандая.

нашёл-таки долго искавшийся (лично мной, по крайней мере) трек Tatto Ink & Sick Jacken - Terrorism)))))))))))))))))))))))
Джэк там как-то непосвоему читает, но трек прикольный, при чём сами Тату Инк порадовали (притом что я их первыый раз слышал)))))
если кому нужен - выложу завтра)

делись

T-Ray - The Unkut Interview Part 1

Tuesday August 14th 2007

This one’s been sitting in the stash for a long time. I actually got into contact with Todd Ray after he dropped a comment in defense of DJ Ivory of the P Brothers, who had upset a few Outkast fans during my interview with him way back in December of 2004. By the time I got to speak to T-Ray, it was mid 2005, which makes this conversation over two years old, but no less entertaining. It’s actually so long that I’ve decided to run it as a three parter - but rest assured, I won’t keep you waiting long for the next two installments. From spinning records in South Carolina, to working with Big L, Artifacts and Cypress Hill and eventually working on Carlos Santana’s duet album that sold millions of copies worldwide, this dude has seen some shit.
Robbie: You went through a very prolific period in hip-hop production in the early nineties, working in some really good records, but you were originally a DJ, weren’t you?
T-Ray: That’s how I started out, as a DJ. When I heard “Planet Rock” I just said “Yo, that’s it right there. That’s my shit.” It was on some cosmic shit, it had a beat that was crazy. After a minute, I just started saying “Fuck it, I’m gonna just DJ this shit.” I started getting more into straight hip-hop, more into rhymes, instead of just the uptempo beat type stuff. It just kept escalating from there, man. I just kept deejaying, got up my equipment and kept building. I was in South Carolina, so I started drivin’ up and flying up to New York, and I would just go to Music Factory, near Times Square, and just buy two of everything. Everything that was on the wall. I would come back down South and I started deejaying with only underground New York hip-hop that people in New York didn’t even know about.
And obviously people in South Carolina didn’t have any of that stuff.
They didn’t know shit, man. They were listening to 80s rock and shit like that, and even just pure 80s pop, depending on who you were. When I came back and started deejaying just that, I created a movement down South. I mean really, I tell a lot of people that I’m - in some ways - one of the Grandmaster Flash’s of the South. Everyone’s real big about the South now, but in the early 80s I was like a needle in a haystack. You couldn’t find me. There was no hip-hop down South. No one even knew what it was. So at that time I was just so into it that I was just trying to create my own scene, so basically I could DJ what I loved. And that’s what happened. I started gettin’ hundreds of people showing up at the clubs just to hear hip-hop, and they didn’t even know the records!
Who would of thought, twenty years later you’ve got guys like Bubba Sparxx rolling around in the mud, wrestling pigs in their filmclips.
Yeah, and the funny thing is back then, if you were white, it was bugged out and people didn’t know what to think. They didn’t even know about the black artists that were doin’ it, so to have a white kid doin’ it was like “What the fuck is this?” Now, I have an accent, but back then I was super-country. I came straight outta the woods! I lived in the middle of a hundred acres of woods, in a shack. No heat, I chopped wood every day, that’s how I made my heat. I didn’t have no money, I was a broke hillbilly. I got a full scholarship to college, the first person in my family to go to school - I just put my mind to work. After I while, I said “Fuck this! I wanna go to school, but really I wanna be a hip-hop deejay”. So I quit college just to continue to be a hip-hop deejay. It’s crazy when you see it now, people love the South, and the racial barriers are definitely breaking down more and more, which is really the concept of hip-hop. Even hip-hop itself is growin’ and accepting more people. Even though it’s lost in its direction right now, it’s still the top game in the music business.
So where you doing production back in South Carolina?
I was doing production, but I didn’t know that’s what it was. At that time, the DJ was the king. The DJ was really more important than a rapper, at that time. I was doing production, but it seemed like it was just part of my “being a DJ” job. When I would DJ, I’d have drum machines and shit…basically it just like a ‘rock the party’ kinda thing. It was just a super-old school vibe, it was just for the club, it wasn’t about a record. Then I started thinking about “I could do this bigger”. I took over my home area - about a hundred miles circle around my home - I owned it. I defeated all the deejays, I battled everybody. Anybody that was good, I battled ‘em, I took all of ‘em out. So I just felt like I’ve already proved it, I’ve introduced hip-hop to the South - at least my part of the South - and I’ve dominated the whole area, so I felt like now it’s time to go to New York and tell them what’s up. They don’t really know. This kid, who was basically a friend of mine, started rhyming at the shows, and finally I just made demo, me and him, and I went up to New York and tried to get people to listen to it.
Was that the White Boys?
Yes, but we weren’t called the White Boys. We were called Double Trouble at the time, and we didn’t know about New York’s Double Trouble. So we were calling ourselves Double Trouble, but every time we would do a show as Double Trouble they would advertise us as “The White Boys”, just ’cause people had never seen white boys doing it, you know what I mean?
So it was a bit of a gimmick almost…
It started becoming a gimmick. What happened was that the clubs…we would draw so many people that they couldn’t get ‘em in. These clubs would be packed if 500 people showed up, and we had 800 people before the doors opened. People couldn’t believe that some white kids were doin’ somethin’ like this, and visually it was just very odd. So everybody was just calling us “Yo! That’s the White Boys! That’s them White Boys!” and that kinda started to stick, ’cause we found out that there was another Double Trouble. I went to a few competitions on my own. There was a battle in Charlotte, North Carolina, where I won this competition - and I won it rhymin’, my partner couldn’t make it - so I just freestyled. I kept doin’ that, and there were some record people in the audience, and it led to people talkin’ about me, and all of a sudden people like Kurtis Blow was calling me down South, trying to see who I was. So then I got down with this guy who was doing promotion at Polygram records and I flew out to New York to talk to him. We ended up hangin’ out with the Fat Boys and all these guys, ’cause his friend happened to run the label that the Fat Boys was on. At that time, the Fat Boys were actually a big group. It was like a kid group, it was for very young kids, but that’s what we were at the time.
Their first records were good though, before they started hanging out with Chubby Checker.
Yeah, the time when we got down was just before that time. When I met ‘em, they were just cool people, and it was funny after seeing them on TV and you’re like “Oh, shit! It’s the Fat Boys!” Talkin’ about it now, it seems kind of corny, but back then it seemed like “Oh, shit. We’re makin’ it!” We were in the circle with Run-DMC… things like that. So we’re sitting around these people who are like the 50 Cent’s of their time. As a matter of fact, we ended up getting on the Fresh Fest tour, and I’m not kidding you man, we were playin’ in front of 15-20,000 people a night! It’s hard for a lot of rap tours to even do that now. Back then, sometimes we would do two shows in a day. The amazing thing that I’ve gotten to experience it from damn near the beginning. I’m one of the few people that I know that was really in it back then - and I’m not takin’ ’bout “in it” like I was fan and I’m watchin’ it from the TV screen - I’m talkin’ ’bout I was in it! I was right in the heart of it. I saw the inner-workings of the beginnings of Def Jam and Tin Pan Apple. They were rivals at that time! Even being on the road, I was on the road when LL came out. I saw his whole thing be born. Do you remember in Krush Groove, that guy Beaker? The bald, kinda white guy that was tryin’ to convince LL to sign with him and shit? That was the guy that ended up being my co-manager, so from that point on I was like “Yo! I’m in the fuckin’ big time! This is Beaker, man! This is the guy who was tryin’ to sign LL!”
[laughing] I haven’t seen that movie in a minute, I’ll have to watch it again.
It’s the cheesiest movie, but at that time, if you were a teenager… now remember that I was a fuckin’ teenager at the time. I’ve seen these guys in these movies and shit, and here I am standing with them, and now they’re saying to me what they were saying to LL in that movie! Like “Yo! You’re the new shit. I wanna sign you!” It was a really incredible moment, man. It really showed me how the game worked, to a degree. I was on the road when KRS came out! A lot of times they talk about KRS like “He goes back”, but I was on the Fresh Fest tour right when his 12″ dropped. I remember watching as we were doing a sound check… it might have been DJ AJ - Kurtis Blow’s original DJ - who threw that record on, and all of a sudden “South Bronx! South-South Bronx!” Everybody was just buggin’ out on it. I got to not just witness that moment as a fan, but witness how it affected the artists. Another thing that I was really fuckin’ bugged out on, some shit that had to do with what me and the P Brothers and a lot of other people represent in terms of beats, is the early days of when the Ultimate Breaks and Beats started coming out. You could see - those Ultimate Beats and Breaks would drop, and next thing you know, Eric B. and Rakim has a song with a beat that was on it. I’d start seeing how the breaks were really influencing not only the artists, the rappers and the producers and deejays, but now all of a sudden these breaks are influencing the whole culture. I had been mixing beats, but I really started grabbing hold of the concept of “Oh, shit! This is really the thing right here!”
After that, I moved up to New York with the White Boys. That was in the mid-80’s, going into ‘89. I got to experience New York, I was there all the time and I was on tour and things like that, but when I moved to New York, that’s when I really started seeing how it is. I was in Queens at first, this area called Rosedale, Queens. I used to go over behind the Sunrise cinemas - they had a flea market back there - I used to catch records like you wouldn’t fuckin’ believe. Every Saturday I would come home with at least four crates of records. This was at a time when nobody… I mean people knew breaks, but you could count the number of people you could talk to about breaks on one hand.
Most people were just copping Ultimates and stuff at that stage.
Yeah, exactly. People would get the Ultimate Breaks, but they didn’t know about the originals. No one was looking at jazz records, no one was looking at rock records. No one was really even looking at reggae records for beats. No one was looking at easy-listening records with beats. But I would look at ‘em all. Most times, the records were really cheap - a quarter, five for a dollar. Sometimes if they were water-damaged or something, you could get a whole crate or two of records for a couple of bucks. I would come home with those, and I could go through a record in a heartbeat, and read the grooves, find the sounds – boom! Boom! Boom! I’d mark my records - move on! Before you know it, I’ve got a house full of nothin’ but beats! Literally - nothing but beats. Not a bunch of extra-curricular records, just pure cream…I mean thousands and thousands of breaks that to this day nobody knows. The day I die - I’m goin’ to live to be an old, old man - but the day I die, when they go through my records they’re gonna be shocked at how many beats I know about that nobody knows. To this day!
That was part of the game back then - finding that fuckin’ beat that nobody knew. Findin’ that little stab beat. I mean, it might be just a kick and a snare in the right place, but it’s that kick and snare that’s so incredible. I got to the point where I would buy a record just ’cause it had a good grunt on it, or someone just went “Uhh!” I’m not kidding you! I paid 25 to 100 dollars for a record that just had a good intro. “Y’all ready to get down? Well c’mon, let’s do it!” and I’d pay $20 just for that. I got to the point where I didn’t give a shit. I didn’t care if I had food money, I didn’t care if I had rent money. If it came between a record and rent - rent’s gonna be late! That’s just how it was, I didn’t give a shit. That’s when I really started realising like “Yo man, you one of the kings! A lotta people just don’t know what you know”. Everyone I would speak to, I would talk to them “What beats you got?” and they’d have maybe one or two crates. They’d have good beats in ‘em, but it’d be James Brown or it’d be Funkadelic… you could read any music history book and know about these artists.
Just common stuff.
Everyday bullshit… the standard breaks. All they knew is what the DJ before them had turned into classics. One guy that I met up with in the early days, before I even moved to New York, was Cutmaster DC. Visually, he looked like a corny character. He’d wear suits and dumb outfits and shit when he would DJ, he had the jerri curls and stuff, but the thing was that he was fuckin’ phenomenal as a DJ! His personality was great, but his visual was horrible. He didn’t know how to present himself, he always felt like he had to be dressed-up to DJ like it was a wedding or something. I never forget goin’ to his apartment - he had every fucking drum machine, every fucking break - and he was doing cuts that I’ve never seen at that time. I was just doin’ normal shit, he was doing what he called “animation”, which later they named “transforming”. To this day I trying to make a little history moment for him ’cause the truth is, before transforming ever got on wax, before I ever heard Jazzy Jeff doing all that shit back in the day - I heard Cutmaster DC doin’ it in Spanish Harlem. Yo, he had moves, man! That guy, he really knew what the fuck he was doin’. The drum programming he could do back then was just sick. He was truly in the top ten at that time, even though not many people knew it. One of my great memories was at his place, where I got to meet everybody. Eric B. came over with the test-pressing of “Eric B. For President”. Me, Eric B. and DC dropped the needle on that record for the first time in history. We were the first people to hear that on wax.
Ill, man.
That same day I battled Heavy D - Heavy D had never come out on a record yet. Andre Harrell came by, they were just talking about starting Uptown Records, it hadn’t even officially started. I battled Heavy D on the mic and Cutmaster DC on the turntables! At one point I said “Yo! DC - I’m takin’ you on the turntables, and Heavy - I’m takin’ you on the fuckin’ mic!” Those are points in my career, when I look back on the history of hip-hop… teaching Spinderella how to DJ when she hardly knew how to DJ! She’s out deejaying for Salt ‘N Pepa and she didn’t even hardly know how to do nothin’!
You mean the first Spinderella?
No, this was the second one. I was there when… that same day with Eric B, that same day Herbie Luv Bug came by and played the project that was Salt ‘N Pepa. They weren’t even called that, they were The Showstoppers with a rip-off of “The Show”.
Yeah, they were Super Nature.
He came over to DC’s apartment while I was there, to play us the idea for what he was doin’. Later I ended up being on the Fresh Fest with Salt ‘N Pepa, and turned around and showed Spinderalla how to transform, that I had learned from DC. When “Push It” blew up, I got to see… I told ‘em that record was gonna be hot. I said “Look, down South where it’s all about Bass music and shit - this is the beat! This pattern right here is the beat that we all rock down South, so this shit’s gonna be huge!”, and they were like “You think?”, I was like “I don’t think, I know! I’m a DJ, I would rock this shit”. And at that time that record was a club jam, that record took-off. It actually became like a pop record.
That was in the pop charts over here.
Yeah! It was a phenomenon, that record. Then I witnessed what was goin’ on in the streets of New York in terms of black consciousness and people really waking up to the concepts that had gone down in the ’60’s and the early ’70’s, but they were reawakening to ‘em on the streets. People were really sick of what was goin’ on, I started seeing a lotta people wearing African medallions. And sure enough - boom! Here comes Public Enemy. Man, that was a tough time to be white in hip-hop, I’m telling you. It was fucked-up. I had to get in more people’s faces at that time and just say “You know what? If my shit is funky - it’s funky! And if it’s not, just tell me to fuck off! Don’t fuckin’ get in my face ’cause I’m white. I don’t give a fuck about that - but this is hip-hop!” So many times I had to confront people at that time, but I understood what was going on.
And you weren’t one of those dudes that had like a flat-top or anything like MC Serch, you had long hair didn’t you?
I had long hair! I even grew my hair one time ’til my hair was down to my ass. I wasn’t trying to be anything I wasn’t, I was just trying to be me within it. The one thing I’ll say about Serch - I’ve got a lotta negative stuff to say about Serch, too - but the one positive thing I’ve gotta say about Serch is the first time that I went to the Latin Quarter in New York, my friend got me in. He knew Paradise who helped run the place and was later down with X-Clan, so he got me in. When I walked in the first person I saw was Mele Mel, fuckin’ standing right there with the whole outfit on and I’m like “Oh shit! That’s my fuckin’ hero! I love this motherfucker!” I wanted to run up and hug him! I’m telling you, I loved him like that. I was straight hillbilly, I’m not kidding you, I was in the club with holes in my fuckin’ jeans, worn-out t-shirt… I looked busted. That’s who I was at the time - I was busted!
[laughing] Because you were spending all your money on records!
Well, exactly, that’s how I did it. It wasn’t about me, it was about the beats. Then I walked over to the bar and I’ll never forget, MC Serch was sitting at the bar! The only reason I show that man respect is because he was there. He always did try to be Black, and he always did have a hard time being himself within hip-hop, but the truth of the matter is - and I’ll stand up for him on this - he was fuckin’ there. What’s that record by Just-Ice, back in the days, where he said a line “If I don’t know you then you weren’t there”?
“Going Way Back”.
Well, I’ll tell you somethin’ - he was there. He was trying to be a “black” white guy, but he really was there. He was real. So I respect him for that. Later, I got into problems with him over some business, but in terms of just history of it, he was there damn-near from the beginning. But yeah man, fuckin’ Latin Quarter back then… that seemed like hip-hop, man. I went up and tried to get on the turntables with Red Alert! Red Alert was fucking deejaying and I had the balls to go up to the DJ booth and actually said: “Yo, lemme get on those turntables real quick!”
Ha! How did that go down? Not too well?
He just laughed at me: “Yo, you a wild motherfucker!” I said “Yo, lemme just get five minutes!” Can you imagine rockin’ the Latin Quarter? C’mon man, that’s the shit!

T-Ray - The Unkut Interview Part 2

Wednesday August 15th 2007

Continuing on from Part 1, Todd discusses being a white guy in rap when Public Enemy blew up, working with Big Beat Records, producing Percee-P, skateboard connections and “Lost Tapes” tragedy….

T-Ray: I’ll never forget walking down the streets of New York City with a fuckin’ red bomber jacket that had a big logo on the back that said “The White Boys”.

[I burst out laughing]

There were six or seven of us, and people thought that we were a racist gang, like skinheads or something. We’re just tryin’ to rap and have fun with young kids - at that time it wasn’t even a grown-up thing, it was like a kid thing - and I’ll never forget people coming up as we’d walk by, and they’d yell “That’s the most racist thing I’ve ever seen!” and I was like “Yo?!?”. I found out I was naïve, I just didn’t understand that people are so lost in their mind, that race really separates. See I grew up in the woods - I grew up in I guess a secluded way or something, and it started bugging me out. I really started learning about the world like that. I learnt about the world through hip-hop, because I was intelligent, I was very smart, but I was not worldly. We were named the White Boys by Black people, but now Black people are looking at this name - because I’m in New York, I’m not down South. They don’t know about how we came up, they don’t know who we are, they’re seeing is a bunch of guys walkin’ round with “White Boys” jackets on. Then I went back to our album - we had a fuckin’ song called “The White Boys Are Runnin’ The Show”! [laughs]. I never thought of it from an angry Black person’s point of view. “Oh shit! They’re gonna take this fucked-up!” We were just with the wrong producers at the time, the wrong managers, ’cause they didn’t catch onto all of that shit. We were naïve country boys, we didn’t know how people would respond to shit like that. But when Public Enemy came out, that’s when it became super-clear, and my group fell apart.
Robbie: I still remember buying that “You’re Gonna Get Yours” 12″, and it took me about five listens to the B-side, “Rebel Without A Pause”, to take it all in. When I first heard it, I thought “What is this?” It was so different.
Exactly! And the fact that they were just looping [imitates the whining loop], I was like “What the fuck?! That’s crazy!”, ’cause at that time, going all the way back to when I was in my shack, literally in the woods, I made beats very similar to that. What I would do was just take sounds, and I would incorporate multiple sounds, like every sound that I could throw in, and when they came with that, I said “Oh shit!” But the problem was I was white as a motherfucker in the most black moment! I just took it as “Fuck it. This is a moment for you, ’cause you’ve always made beats like this. You should be doing this. If people are having a hard time with the way you look, with the way you talk, with that you’ve got long hair, you’re white - well fuck it, I’ll make beats!” I got so fuckin’ broke I had to move back down South, back to that fuckin’ shack, and I just started making beats, man. Mad beats, I’m not kidding - every fucking day, from the time I went to bed, to the time the sun came up the next morning, I would do nothing but make beats. Actually, I made beats and I made furniture. I would go out in to the woods and cut down little trees, pick up sticks and shit and just nail them together into some real bugged-out natural thrones and shit like that. I would just make chairs out of natural wood, and then people started bugging-out on my chairs. They started buying my stuff, considering me like a folk artist. I started making tons of money just off my furniture, so would I would do was I’d make a chair a day, and make beats for the rest of it. It would take me about two hours to make a chair, and I could get maybe get anywhere from 200 to 700 dollars for that chair.
For two hours work? You’ve gotta love that.
Oh yeah. That’s how I made my money to get back to New York. I made beats all day, every fucking day for a couple of years. This was going right into ‘90, I guess. What happened was I called a friend of mine from New York - at the time I didn’t have a fuckin’ phone, I was deep in the woods. It took me 15-20 minutes to get to a pay phone. So I called him up, he was like “Yo! What you been up to man? Where you at? I’m in the studio with KRS!” And this kid - I had just taught him how to make beats, he didn’t know how to make beats for more than a year, at the most - and now he’s in the studio hangin’ out with KRS! I was like “I’m supposed to be in New York. If this kid’s getting on, then I’m fuckin’ running shit!”
Who was that dude? Is that someone who I’d know of?
No, he never made it. He never did anything with KRS, he was just in Power Play Studios, and KRS was in the other room. He was a friend of mine, a graffiti artist by the name of NAP. So I just decided to move back to New York. I didn’t know anybody man, I just packed up all my shit. I told my girl - she’d actually come down with me from New York, straight New Yorker - “Look, I’m putting you on the bus, you’re gonna go back to your moms to find us an apartment that we can afford. As soon as you find one, I’m coming”. A day or so later, she’d found an apartment. I loaded up all my records, my couch, my bed, my TV, drove straight to New York. We ended up moving into Brooklyn, and from that point on man, I did nothing but make beats. I got to the point where I was running out of money in New York, I got the point where I was penniless. I didn’t have my rent, I didn’t know what the fuck I was gonna do. I got to the point where I said “Yo, fuck it, I’m just gonna have to take somebody’s money. I just gotta get the rent, I gotta rob somebody. There’s nothing else I can do!” I’ll never forget it, this moment was real, this is the cosmic shit coming to life with full force right here. The day before, there was an internship advertised in the Village Voice, and I said “Well shit, maybe I can get a job at a label, and that’ll be the way I’ll get back in”. So I went to the office, it was a little-ass office, maybe 15 by 15 feet. It was just one guy behind a desk and this one girl who was like an intern and his assistant. They had a couple of boxes of records on the floor and nothing else in the room, but a box to play cassettes on. So I go in and I was like “Well what kind of music is the label?” and he tells me and plays me one song. It was like a remake of a dance record that was already out, this was a new version of it or something. I was like “That’s cool, I know this song. How much does it pay?” He’s like “It’s an internship, it doesn’t pay”, I was like “Oh shit, man. I would love to work with you but I gotta pay my rent right now and I can’t do it. But I’ll tell you somethin’, this shit that you’re doin’ right here, this dance shit? This is cool, you’re gonna sell a few records like this, but the real shit, the shit that’s gonna take over, that’s gonna make you big? Is hip-hop”. “Dang, why do you say that?” So I threw on a cassette. Bro, I played him a ninety minute tape, front and back, and each beat was only on there for two minutes at the most, and he stood there looking at the cassette like “Oh shit! This is something!” The girl, his assistant, was sitting in there like “Yo, that’s hot! Oh this is the shit!” When I got done playing that tape, he was like “Yo, we need to talk! That’s some incredible shit.” I was like “You wanna hear more?” Man, I dumped my whole bag of cassettes all over his desk and said “All I’ve got is beats. This is what I do. This is what’s gonna make you rich.”
So anyway, to get back to the story of me about to rob somebody, I was in a basement apartment, sleeping next to the fuckin’ furnace - I mean that’s how bad my shit was, I used to sweat all fuckin’ night - I came out, I had my fucking knife, I put my hoodie on, and I’ll never forget… I walked out, and it started pouring down with rain. It was the coldest fuckin’ rain I ever felt in my life - and the water woke me up. I was ready to hurt somebody, it just didn’t seem like it mattered at that time. That water woke me up, man. So I turned around and went back into my apartment, sat on the bed - almost fuckin’ cried, I was that hurt. I came from violence, but at that time I was more positive, on some cosmic “trying to change the world” shit, so it was hurtin’ me to feel that. I lay down and went to bed. I got woke up next morning from that guy from that label calling me on the phone saying “Yo, this kid did a one minute promo for Red Alert, and people are calling the store thinking it’s a record. If you can figure out how to make it a record, I’ll give you a job.” He played me the loop and it was “Don Dada, now easy Supercat man you a Don Dada” - it was Kenny Dope. He had just looped that chorus, and he had put it under a beat that was out at the time. So I told him “Yo Craig, man, I’ve been doing this style since ‘83! I know this style!” I had made songs like that before that I would play while I was deejaying, looping-up things like the intro to “Planet Rock” and putting a beat under it. So I said “Yo, I know how to do this shit. I’ll do this in one day!” and so was like “How much is your rent?” My rent was $550, and he was like “I’ll give you $500.” So I went in a day or two later. That Supercat song had mad breaks, all the classics, it went on for like seven minutes - all of that’s me! The only thing that’s Kenny Dope’s is the chorus that he sampled off of the record.
[laughing] So you were “The Mad Racket”?
Yeah! That shit came out and blew-up. That was really the start of Big Beat Records, who later put out everyone from Artifacts to Lil’ Kim. That’s how I ended-up producing all that 90s shit for them, ‘cause in a sense I brought all that to the table with them. Later, there was Stretch Armstrong, who was a part of that. Reef, who continued to be a part of Big Beat into Atlantic and now does a lot of beats and shit. The way that Artifacts got on the label was cause me, Stretch Armstrong and Reef - Stretch had his radio show at the time, so we were hanging out up there, and these guys who later were named Artifacts - they were That’s Them before that - they would come up to the show and rhyme, and Stretch was like “Yo, these guys are nice, man. Tell me what you think about ‘em?” and I was like “I could turn them into something good, man. Let’s me, you and Reef start our own independent label, and make these guys be our first artist”. But we didn’t have the money to do it, so I said “Fuck it, let’s take it to Craig and he’ll put it out”. So I produced the record, and I decided to put “Wrong Side of The Tracks” out with “Whassup Now Muthafucka” and all that on the B-side. I was tryin’ to bring back the era of having bonus beats and shit like that. I wanted to make sure that that 12″ had three songs, bonus beats and an accapella. I wanted to make sure that the DJ’s had all that they needed. And it worked. I don’t think it went gold, but that album sold 350,000 or some shit like that, and at that time, that was big! It didn’t have no super-hit on it or nothin’, that was just street hip-hop at the time. Same thing with Double XX Posse. Sugar Ray had a record out before, and then we found out that he had a group, so we were like “Fuck it, let’s do this. Let’s sign this guy!”
I love that album.
That was a moment, man! That was just crazy. That was that era when I was making beats with tonnes of layers. When I listen back, the mixes weren’t that good and shit like that, but I really didn’t know what I was doin’. I was just doin’ what I felt. I remember The Beatnuts hangin’ out with me, and their track might have a drum loop, a kick, snare, an 808 and a loop - it’s be like eight, ten tracks, and I’d be like “Wow, how are they doin’ that?” I’d have two 2-inch tapes locked-up with 48 tracks runnin’, and the first whole reel would be nothing but drums. I didn’t know how to make records, I was just doin’ it. I remember them comin’ in like “Oh shit! That’s how you do it? I never saw nothin’ like that!” It just bugged them out.
Were you one of the first people to filter basslines? Like on “Not Gonna Be Able To Do It”?
I was one of the first. That guy Nap that I was tellin’ you about, me and him were messin’ around on my keyboard one day and we found out how to filter totally by accident! I had a Casio FZ-1, and the filter on that keyboard was so good, I could take any record and it would sound like a bassline. Boom! It was like instant bassline. I started getting known for having basslines back then. I was one of the first people to do the [imitates a horn echo] echos. For me, coming up in the eighties, back then people just called it “rap crap”. “Oh this is just a trend, it’ll be gone next week. It’s over!” I almost slapped a million people, ‘cause I was a skateboarder too. That was the bugged-out thing. Now you see skateboarding in videos, Pharrell wears skateboarder clothes and shit. In the eighties, people thought I was a nut. It’s funny, because the White Boys did this video… we did this sponsorship with Converse sneakers back then, and I was in Thrasher magazine, all the skateboard magazines and shit - skateboarding! As a rapper! In fuckin’ ‘86, ‘85. Now, there’s the X-Games - back then there was none of that shit. Converse paid for us to do a video thing, and when we did that I called up all the top skaters. Everybody. Literally, the Tony Hawk’s… Steve Cavellero, Hasoi, all the fuckin’ guys that were the top skateboarders back then, and still are! I got ‘em all to come down and be in the video.
That’s the only thing that stresses me about hip-hop, is that young people are really being defined by the music and by the culture - but there is no culture no more. There is no direction. In every culture you have your elders, the people that make sure that everybody’s on their right path, make sure everybody’s together - make sure if there’s a problem people are workin’ it out. Now it’s just image and manipulation. It’s pushing kids to be more violent, to be more materialistic. Back in the days when we were about gold chains and four-finger rings, my whole world wasn’t the gold chain and the four-finger ring, that was part of our crown that we wore. That was just a demonstration. But today, it’s almost like the music’s gotten so powerful that it’s over-whelming young people’s personalities, where the music is so fuckin’ dominant that the kids start being over-whelmed by the image to the point where they feel like if they’re not the image, then they’re not shit.
Like they’re a sucker.
Everything that really happens has to do with the people behind it. I’ve even said that about Puffy. Puffy would show-up at the clubs and he would be all decked-out, so he was using image to control the thoughts of other people - through his imagery. I respected him for that ’cause that’s part of the game. I did the same thing when I was comin’ up, I would walk into the club with a bunch of jewelery on and everybody would check me out. But then when he got into hip-hop, he knew that science to such a degree that he over-whelmed all of hip-hop. One of the reasons I left New York was cause when I heard Buckwild tryin’ to do Puffy beats, I said “Oh shit. Right now I can’t even respect New York. I can’t fuckin’ deal with this bullshit”. I moved to New York ’cause I wanted to be involved in what I was seeing that was so revolutionary and so different. But by the mid-’90’s, New York was just a fuckin’ robotic clone factory. I kept looking at everybody like “Damn!” Everybody’s balls got cut off. I used to feel like I need to pull my pants down just to let my balls sag all the way to the fuckin’ concrete, ’cause y’all a bunch of fuckin’ pussies! It just got to the point where New York had no heart. New York sold out! Puffy didn’t sell-out, Puffy did Puffy. Puffy did it to such a powerful degree that he overwhelmed the whole fuckin’ city!
And they all just followed like sheep?
They didn’t know what to do! That’s when I actually decided to leave New York… do you know a lot of the records I’ve done in the past?
I wanted to ask you about the Percee P record. “Lung Collapsing Lyrics” was amazing when that came out, but then nothing really happened with his career for years.
It’s funny because that record has given him a continued career, in a way. People really rediscovered that record. He was lyrical like a motherfucker back then, and he still is. He hasn’t changed one bit! Percee P is the same today as he was back then. I think what happened back then for him was that Big Beat started selling bigger and bigger records, unfortunately he didn’t get in the right movement, it didn’t move forward for him in that way. We recorded a bunch of stuff at that time. With “Lung Collapsing Lyrics”, Percee was like “I wanna rock one of these up-tempo beats”. We were listening to some James Brown and he was like “I wanna use that shit right there, T!” and I was like “I’ll hook that up in a heartbeat, let’s go. Let’s not even put a chorus on it. This is just gonna be rhymin’. This is not a hit record, this is not for the radio, this is just you rhymin’ the whole way”. He used parts of one of his classic rhymes and some new shit he had, and we just threw that shit together. Same thing – Power Play Studios, man, in Long Island City, New York. That studio was classic. I keep bigging that place up, because when I got to New York, that’s where I got my start, really. I would go from Brooklyn all the way to fuckin’ Long Island City to go to that studio. That’s how he got his start, with that. He had done one other record before called “Let The Homicides Begin”.
He was down with Finesse, remember he was on that second album?
Oh yeah, Percee goes way back. They grew-up in the same projects and all that. Percee is like a time capsule, man. Percee is another guy that has always been down with hip-hop since the beginning. He grew-up in the heart of it, so it was just a part of who he was. If you meet Percee today, that’s how Percee was in the 90s - that’s how Percee was in the 80s! He’s just a great example of someone who’s always remained true to himself, and always remained true to hip-hop. Even in his darkest days, he would be out selling mixtapes and getting on people’s shit. It didn’t matter. Now that Stones Throw is backing him, it’s a really good thing. I had found some of the old shit that’d we’d done, and we was thinking about putting it out there, but I think we’re gonna wait ‘till he puts out his new shit first. I got a bunch of old Perecce shit, old JVC Force, Double XX Posse, Artifacts, shit nobody ever heard.
AJ Rock was saying that they did a whole album for Big Beat that never came out.
I know, check it out! I started spreading the word to everybody about that album, because it does exist . I want somebody to make sure they get that out. I would put it out but I don’t have all the masters. Here’s the sad thing. Power Play called me up, I was out here so I couldn’t make it in time – some guys I knew that had bought Power Play, they called me up and they were like “We gotta clean out all the old tapes, ‘cause we only got this one tape closet for the whole studio and it’s full of tapes. We just saw about twenty in here with your name on it!” I was like “Damn man, I gotta get those! How can I do this?” And I called up Percee, ‘cause they had some Percee-P tapes in there, with maybe seven or eight songs that had never come out, on two-inch reels. So I called Percee: “Yo, pick ‘em up”. Percee didn’t go do it, and it’s my understanding that all of those got thrown in the garbage, including the original tapes of the Kenny Dope record with all that shit separated, versions we didn’t use and shit. What I’m scared of is that potentially that whole JVC Force album got thrown away, unless there are copies he has.
Last but not least, Part 3 covers Big L, Kool G Rap, Nas, Cypress Hill and more.

T-Ray - The Unkut Interview Part 3

Thursday August 16th 2007

The final chapter…of course I’ve saved the best ’till last. T-Ray covers working with Big L, Nas, Cypress Hill and Milano, and fires back at Mike Heron.

Robbie: Then you did “Yes, You May (Remix)” and all that stuff with Finesse.

T-Ray: Yep, and that was Big L’s first time in the studio you know. What happened is that I had another beat that Finesse wanted me to loop up for him. I didn’t like the way the beat he wanted sounded. I had brought a bunch of records with me, and I said “Yo Finesse, I got somethin’ right here man. I’m actually thinking about hookin’ it up, it’s supposed to be for Biz but if you want it I’ll give it to you for this, ’cause it would work perfectly for this”. So basically, I hooked-up the beat right there in the studio. That final is not even a final, what people hear on that record - that was just a rough mix! I made that beat in about 30 minutes in the studio. Finesse went through his book of rhymes to figure out what rhyme he was droppin’, and Big L came in and I said “Yo, kick me what rhyme you wanna do”, and it was his first time in the studio so he was really green, he was new, and he kicked me his rhyme and it was like “Oh, this is great!” Percee was actually supposed to come down and be on that, but he didn’t end-up makin’ it.
Since he was on the LP version.
Yeah, I was tryin’ to get him on it with them, and basically that’s how it came about. I just threw that beat together, that’s why in the chorus when it goes to the [does the horn part] there’ nothin’ on it! I intended to throw some more shit on top of that, but Finesse had a deadline that he didn’t tell me about. So he just ended up sending it to his A&R or whatever and they just pressed it up and put it out! And later everybody was like “Yo, this is a classic!” and everybody was freestylin’ on it - like any radio show you’d turn on, they were freestylin’ on that instrumental.
It was so raw, it was great.
Yeah. What you hear on that record is what it sounded like after an afternoon in the studio - and that’s the rough mix. I keep a picture of Big L on my mixing board every day. He called me and he wanted me to bring him some beats - this was long after the first record and shit - and he lived way uptown. I had a brand new Land Cruiser at the time - and I had my family with me - now listen to this, this is still me, still that naïve country boy. I took my whole family with me, my wife and my two little kids - a little boy and a little girl. Now they’re in the backseat in car seats, I drive up to fuckin’ meet L in front of his buildin’ -
Was it 139th and Lennox?
There you go, exactly. I go outside his building, call him up and his mom answers. He comes running down, I’ll never forget, he had a big fluffy coat on - I think it was red - he leaned into my window, we kicked it for a minute and it was just like “Yo, thanks for coming out T!” He couldn’t have been more cool, this man could not have been as innocent, as happy… it was just a moment of us talking about beats, rhymes. No gangster, killer, fuckin’ drug dealer shit! I mean in his rhymes he always talks a lotta shit, I’m just saying though - at that moment the essence of who he was, was just a young man who loved rhyming, who loved beats, lived in not the best area - but not the worst, either. I give him the cassette, I pull off - I don’t get two blocks down and two or three undercover cop cars pull me over, forcing me off the road! Not only forcing me off the road, but four or five cops get out with their guns drawn, pointed right at my head.
With your kids in the car? Damn!
My kids are in the backseat, my wife is next to me, and they’ve got guns pointed at my wife from her side, pointed at my head! These guns are loaded, man! This isn’t no fuckin’ TV show! You know what they said to me? “What are you doing here?!” I was like “What am I doing here?! What the fuck are you doing with this gun pointed at me? I’m a producer, that’s a rapper, we’re talking music - what the fuck are you doing?” Then I roll down the backseat and I’m like “Can you lower your guns so my children don’t have to deal with this?” Then they said “Just last week, seven people were shot right on that block! That kid that you were talking to is a known cocaine dealer!” I’m like “Man, will you shut up! That is Big L! We’re trying to become famous!” Just what you hear him rapping about. I forget the name of the song, I just put it on this new mixtape that I’m working on, it’s him with Fat Joe…
“The Enemy”?
Yes! He’s rhyming about how these Federals won’t get off his back - that is the fucking truth! I never really got the full low-down on why he got killed, but those cops and all that fake bullshit that’s going on in the world - that had a lot to do with it. There was no reason for that man to die. That’s what I keep trying to get out, ’cause I normally don’t even talk to people about anything. People gotta wake-up to this shit. Just like how Puffy can develop an image and you’ll think “He’s a star” because he portrays it like that, if the cops start thinking of you as a criminal, it’s the same. Neither one of them is the truth, but it depends on what their perception of you is.
That’s how they treat you.
The sad thing in this country is that the stereotypes are still getting fucked-up, and hip-hop is being a part of continuing those stereotypes. Like L, he was rhymin’ about real-life shit, ’cause I experienced it with him! When I left, they pulled me over! They had guns to my head! If he had that happening to him every day… off that one incident – I was ready to kill somebody. So if someone did that to me everyday – forget it! Another kid I used to always deal with, who never got out, was AJ Domain. I’m telling you, that kid got beat-up every other day by the cops. I couldn’t believe it. I was on the phone with him, at times, when cops would just jump him, man. On the phone with him!
Hostyle from Screwball lost an eye thanks to the cops over there. Which reminds me, I interviewed Mike Heron a while back. I take it you guys didn’t really get along?
Mike is just a dick. Mike thinks he knows something more than anybody. Jerry’s a great guy, and Jerry’s real. He’s sincere, he’s been always puttin’ out records so you can’t question him, he’s for real. He’s really connected to the streets, he really knows the artists, he’s a real independent label. Mike… and again I can only go by what I experienced with Mike, but I’ll tell you real quick. I got a label deal through Warner Brothers that could’ve opened the door to hundreds of hip-hop artists. DJs, rappers, producers, up-and-coming executives… so many opportunities were there for us. Warner Brothers were opening the doors fully to me, and the first artists I tried to sign - but we couldn’t get our deal done in time – was Jurassic 5, Dilated Peoples, Planet Asia. I wanted to lock-down the LA underground hip-hop scene and help that turn into a full scene. I wasn’t able to get those done because my deal with Warners wasn’t done yet, and they ended up signing [elsewhere] before I could get ‘em. So I signed Milano, I signed him off hearing him on a cassette, I didn’t even see him or nothin’. I heard one verse, and signed him.
He’s dope.
The next person that I thought of after that – well actually, before that – was V.I.C. Now Vic I had known goin’ all the way back to The Beatnuts. I was down with The Beatnuts the day they decided they were gonna start rhymin’. They just made beats. I remember Les lookin’ at me and sayin’ “Yo T, this shit ain’t nothin’, man. You need to rhyme with us”, and Vic complaining ‘cause the Beatnuts weren’t showing him enough light or some shit. When I went to Vic’s house, he was living with his moms, his room was down in the basement. He had a decent mixing board, and he really knew how to get things to sound really good, but was mainly doing dance stuff and shit like that. He was into hip-hop and he’d tried to do some independent label type shit, but he wasn’t really a beat person. So I walk in - and you’ve gotta remember, I’m going in there as somebody who had damn near ten years in the game, and that was in the early nineties. Probably ’92. We’ve been talkin’ about beats and all that, and I walk in his apartment, and he had one crate, and there was about ten records in it. I said “Yo, where are all your records, man. Where are your beats?” He said “That’s them right there.” I’m tellin’ you the fuckin’ truth! When I got done with Vic, people were looking at him like he was one of the beat guys, because we rolled to every convention, we went down to Virginia looking for beats, everywhere we’d go. I would be looking through crates or through bins right next to him. “Yo Vic, you got this?” “No, I ain’t got that one” “Yo, that’s got a beat on it.” When I got the label, I thought of Vic, ‘cause I knew Vic had always wanted to be known, other than the underground. I didn’t look to “who’s the next star who’s I can put some gold on, and next thing I know he’s gonna be somebody”, I went to somebody who didn’t have shit! He didn’t have no money, still living in the basement of his mother’s house, still don’t have no fuckin’ records like me, but I love the way he hooks-up beats. I love Vic’s beats, and I always have, and I always respected him because I like his taste. But the truth is truth. When I met him, I put the fuckin’ heart of the beat science in his brain, and when I fuckin’ got on with the label I called up Vic. He’s like “I’m probably gonna put out this 12”” I’m like “Fuck a 12”, man. You know what? I’ma give you a fuckin’ budget.” I gave this motherfucker a half-million dollars. You listen to those numbers. I didn’t give him fuckin’ 5,000 do the typical shit, I gave this motherfucker half-a-million dollars. I told him “All I need you to do is do the record you’ve always dreamed of, Vic”. You know what that motherfucker did? He panicked! Now he couldn’t talk about it, he had to do it! The motherfucker took two years, and didn’t have shit done!
Originally, the concept was we were gonna take the name Ghetto Pros and turn that into a production team. He was talking about bringing in No I.D., which I loved, but then after a minute VIC was like “No, fuck No I.D., I don’t want him there.” I brought in Al – Alchemist. I had produced Alchemist back when he was in The Whooliganz! You ask Alchemist, he’ll tell you, man. He’s always said it: “T-Ray’s one of my inspirations”, because when he was a rapper I told him he could be a producer. When he was a little 14 year-old kid, rappin’. When he decided he wanted to be a producer, he moved to New York and I hooked him up with everybody I knew, and I told him exactly what he needed to do. He had not broken yet, and I told Vic “Yo, Alchemist needs to be one of the Ghetto Pros”, and he was on some hatin’ him shit “Nah, fuck Al!” You see what I’m sayin? Vic wanted it to be what he wanted it to be, but Vic couldn’t get it done. Finally, after about two years, I started yelling at him every day “What the fuck? You gotta get this shit together! Damn, I gave you what you wanted in life and it’s just like you’re sitting on it. You shoulda had this record done in two months, fuck two years!” He started getting so down about the fact that I was giving him a hard time about it, that he decides to join with Mike… as though Mike was gonna come in and save the day or somethin’. But what Mike did is he started calling me up, yelling at me! And I already told you how I am, I couldn’t give a fuck about somebody yelling. I’ll stab you in the fuckin’ heart! I’ll fuckin’ cut your whole fuckin’ head off! So I just told him “Fuck you! Who the fuck are you calling? I gave this motherfucker half a million dollars, it’s two years later and I only have about three fuckin’ songs! Fuck you! Do you know how to make a beat?! If you know how to make a beat, go to a fuckin’ studio! Fuckin’ make some music you lil’ bitch! Don’t talk your bullshit to me!” He was working at Rawkus – that’s why he thought he was somebody, ’cause daddy’s rich money from somebody else was payin’ your fuckin’ bill, and you feel powerful because you’re around some wimpy white motherfuckers that you can yell at all day, and you think ‘cause I’m fuckin’ rich now in Malibu, and I’m white and country, that you can talk to me? Bitch, I’ll fuckin’ knock your teeth down your fuckin’ throat! I’ll cut you a new asshole! What the fuck are you talking about?! I let him fuckin’ have it, and the motherfucker never fuckin’ stopped. He fuckin’ ‘caused so much havoc, and never fuckin’ made a fuckin’ beat! He couldn’t even get it done! [begins yelling] It got to the point where I had to fly Vic out, give him the fuckin’ loops, loop it for him, tell him the fuckin’ concept, have my fuckin’ musican guys to come in and play guitar and keyboards on his shit so it would be more musical… I gave him a whole style! Actually, the style that I helped create for him – that’s his style now! But the thing that really frustrates me about these guys, is that in the course of their bullshit, they caused me to lose my fuckin’ deal with Warner Brothers. Mike was just a fuckin’ hot-head who wanted to run his mouth. After the fact, you know what he did? He went and bootlegged the shit, and fucked me more! The real deal is – Mike Heron is a bitch who, next time I see him, is gonna get knocked the fuck out!
So how did you get from producing underground hip-hop records to making deals in Malibu?
MC Serch tried to claim a lot of times that he found Nas or some shit. For instance, Big L – I produced his first appearance, but Finesse really had Big L. It was Finesse’s session and Big L was coming down, so I ended up producing his first session because I was doing the track, but it wasn’t like I discovered Big L. I didn’t discover Nas! He had just come out on “Live At The BBQ”, but when I was producing MC Serch I was doing a song called “Back To The Grill Again”. It was just MC Serch with Chubb Rock, and the track was just so fuckin’ happy – at that time, happy tracks were kinda cool, but that track was really happy – and I liked more darker tracks, but Serch wanted to use that track so I was cool with it. But then when I heard Serch and Chubb Rock I said “Damn, both of these guys kinda have passed their prime, so I need some new blood on here. Someone who’s more street.” So I called up every unknown MC at the time, including Percee-P, including Nas, including Akinyele and a few others, like maybe four or five others. The original version of “Back To The Grill Again” had maybe eight rappers on it. I told ‘em “Whoever does the best is gonna get on the record”. So we did a whole version with Akinyele and everybody on it, and Nas just destroyed it! So Nas, in a sense, won the position and he got on the record. It was literally a recording battle. When we got done, I went in the booth with Nas and I said “Yo Nas, I gotta get on your record”, and he didn’t have a deal. So I went in the next room and I was like “Yo Serch, we gotta call some people, man! This kid right here – this is the future.” And he was like “You think?” I’ll never forget it, because he just did not get how powerful Nas was. He was a rapper and he just didn’t get it! Sometimes rappers compete with each other anyway, so maybe that’s what it was. He didn’t open himself to see Nas’ true talent, so I called up Faith Newman at Columbia Records, I said “Yo, I got Nas in the studio, he just killed a verse on the Serch record, you basically need to sign this kid.” And she’s like “Oh, I’ve heard of him! I really want to link up with him”, and fuckin’ MC Serch went behind my back and did a production deal with him. So that’s how Serch hooked-up with Nas. Serch never knew Nas, he didn’t know “Live At The BBQ”! He didn’t even recognise after the fact that Nas was that great. What he recognised, was that once Faith Newman wanted to sign him, that there was money to be made. He did a production deal with Nas and claimed that he got the record deal, when I was the one that called-up Faith and hyped her and told her “This is it!” I just didn’t know about the business at that time. It was because of moments like that. I produced G Rap back in the day, “Take ‘Em To War” and all that.
Of course, I forgot about that.
That’s the first time people saw B-1 and those guys, and Grimm was rhymin’ on it after he’d been shot. G Rap is the realest. I’ve never met nobody more real than G Rap. You know what? Nas, Pun, Raekwon, all of them owe their styles to him. All of them! He’s like the Muddy Waters of hip-hop.
Definitely, I agree with that.
I’ll tell you something I did for G Rap back in the day – I think Stretch Armstrong actually bootlegged it – there was one called…it later got called “Hey Mr Mr”, but it was originally called “Don’t Interrupt Me When I’m Whippin’ On My Bitch’s Ass”.
He’s talking some real ignorant stuff on there. That’s a great record.
When I was doing that for him, I was like “G, nobody wants to hear about you beating on some girl’s ass! We need ‘Men At Work Part 2′!” Right? That song didn’t even make it on his Triple XXX album. I think that’s one of the most violent records ever.
So I got down with Muggs for a minute, and things didn’t work - see, I never really understood the business. This business is a real rip-off. Sometimes people are ripping you off, and in the business they say “Oh, that’s normal” [laughs], “Oh, they’re supposed to take your credit”, shit like that. A little bit of that was going on in the Soul Assassins camp, and I didn’t feel that. I was from the days of “what you do is who you are”, and if somebody takes credit for what you do then they’re bitin’ or robbing you.
Alchemist was talking about that recently.
For me just to get my proper credit on “I Ain’t Goin’ Out Like That”, I had to give ‘em the beat for “When The Shit Goes Down”, and I had to give ‘em the beat and the bassline for “Insane In The Brain”. I didn’t get no credit for any of that, but I didn’t care, because I was a fan. But then he took half my publishing on the song, so I was like “Fuck!” But that’s neither here nor there, that type of shit goes on in the game. What you kinda learn, is that in the beginning when they were ripping people off, is that every person that’s coming up in the game has to get ripped off. It’s almost like an initiation to the fuckin’ game. Then you learn the rules of the game, and it’s a cut-throat, snaky business.
All the rock records I was doing, they were mainly out in California, so I just said “Fuck it, I’m gonna move to California, see what that’s about”. It was sad to leave New York, and to feel like New York had fallen off, at least for then. I feel like New York is coming back, but it was really dead at that time. So I flew my whole family across the country, moved to the top of a mountain out here in Malibu. All the way to the fuckin’ top, on some Moses shit. I mean twenty minutes, straight up a mountain. No neighbours or nothin’, just rattlesnakes, coyotes and nature.
That sounds good. So were these projects paying more than the hip-hop stuff you’d worked on?
No, they was probably about the same, sometimes even less, but the hip-hop opportunities were just all fake. The difference was, I can go in the studio with some pop/hip-hop thing, with some rapper who really doesn’t know how to write ‘cause so-and-so’s writing his rhymes for him, and be in this fake environment with A&R’s telling you “We need a club banger” – or I could be in the studio with these hard rock guys, who got the same mentality as Kool G Rap. Up drinking vodka ‘till fuckin’ morning, doin’ drugs all day, fuckin’ shootin’ guns, beatin’ the fuck outta people… mainly because they’re so fuckin’ hurt by the world. One of the guys was the son of a preacher. He had God and the devil at war, 24 hours a day. It was like watching Armageddon walking around.
I’m the same underground guy in rock that I am in hip-hop. Ozomatli, I produced their first album, with Cut Chemist as the DJ and Chali 2Na as the rapper. Imagine if you had the Incredible Bongo Band today? That’s how I felt when I met them. This is when I was not really feeling hip-hop, so I was trying to stick to my roots, and I said “Yo, I wanna make a record that feels like those records, like the soul bands or the soul/funk/rock bands that had percussion and guitars, Sly and The Family Stone type of shit. That’s what I did with Ozomatli, I did that on their first album, and that was a big, big record. Right after that I produced Santana, and Ozomatli was his favourite band. I had Clive Davis call me up with Carlos, like “You’ve got to do this for us”. I went in - killed it – got to be a part of that album that sold like 30 million albums.
OK, now I see why you’ve got your own tennis court!
Exactly. I got a Grammy off of that. Then, all of a sudden, Warner’s looked at my whole history, from hip-hop to rock to all this, and they just said “T-Ray, you need a label!” Of course I said yes. So that’s how I got to that position of getting a label, is from doing all forms of music, keeping it hip-hop no matter what I did, and being really true to what it is I am. So that’s why there was big lapse in my career actually, is ’cause I was dealing with Mike and Vic for a couple of years, having to babysit them on a daily basis.
So you’re back to square one.
The only good news about it is that right now, Beatdown Recordings is more focussed, more real – we don’t have the same kind of money backing us as we did, so it’s gotta be more street, more hard. It’s gonna take us a minute, but what we’re about to do is we’re gonna just bring hip-hop back where it’s supposed to be. I’m working on a real bugged-out side-project with Ill Bill and that whole family. I’m actually producing a record with Bill and a few other people. It’s gonna be all my production, and it’s gonna be way the fuck out. [laughs] This is gonna be some next level hip-hop being born again. This is Public Enemy – but not that style – that kinda energy coming back. I just recently won another Grammy for Ozomatli’s new album that I did. Other than that, I‘m working on new Milano shit, because when they fucked-up the deal, Milano’s deal got fucked up. That’s why he went from having a moment where he was about to break – to just disappearing. Milano’s actually goin’ in with Showbiz, working on some new shit with Show, so we got that whole relationship back together.

-Цитата от sickdog

жесть! вопервых приятно что почти ВСЕ старые пирдилы собрались , сен, би, боба, хорошо.

вот бы видео оттуда.

а маск анд асасинс видос тож невидел, дома вечером посмотрю

Посмотрел я на работе (там интернет хороший, жалко правда что ни безлимитка) ссылки которые в той статье были а там подстава, реклама вместо обещанного клипа .

Но вот какие клипы нашёл, я и незнал о их существовании:

Funkdoobiest-XXX Funk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3RLcio-qt8

Funkdoobiest-Freak Mode

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkkujmiFFbY

Братья делитесь, у кого есть залейте пожайлуста!!!

P.S. Вот ещё одна фотка с того пати.

Cypress Hill feat. Chino Moreno - Rock Superstar (Live At Lowlands 2000)

Размер: 18,1 MB

http://ifolder.ru/3432317

Cypress Hill - Insane in the brain (Live At Lowlands 2000)

Размер: 41.15 Мб

http://g-funk.ifolder.ru/1093118

Есть у кого нибудь этот концерт полностью, залейте пожайлуста!!!

Зальём...

такс, всётаки осилил интервью. блять. великий человек, раньше я нифига особо незнал про него, сеичас я понимаю что он один из оцов, которые всегда были на фоне или в тени, но они были OG'S. а магз и СА это только фрагмент истории, и то видно что не всё там было гладко и мяхко. странный чувства охватывают когда после стольких лет узнаёш что твои любимые исполнители тоже нечисты душой, с той стороны с которой ты неожидал.

всётаки надо credits писать....

good read.

Кстати, на unkut.com полно таких замечательных интервью и всяких там подборок редких треков Кул Джи Рэпа, отличный сайт в общем.

Одна из моих любимых групп

вот так вот бля:
wassup soldados?

so we had a reallllllllllly good time with supper nice LA persons like Jacken, Muggs, Cynic, DJ Solo and CO today in Estonian club. At the same club tomorrow will be their show, damn cant wait it.

So soldados, Jacken told me today personally that after the Muggs/Jacken tour, Jacken will be focus really carefully on the Jacken spanish album. As Jacken promised me today. spanish album will be realesed 100% sure in 2008 under the RMG label...
On the spanish album will be Jacken, Muggs , Cynic beats + some new MR BIG DUKE VOCAL stuff.... damn soldados, can u all beliave it?? Its all truth.

damn cant wait to hear that stuff.


aiiiiiiiiiiight
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

and + more some news about psycho realm unreleased material they will release soon and so i'll post tomorrow, coz im supppppppppppppper tired right now......its 6'45 in t he morning.

вот и ещё цель на горизонте, конечно не знаю, что ожидать от испаноязычного диска, но всё же, наверно будет интересно прослушать его...

Muggs Jacken team has 2 video cameras, so I hope soon we all can see it on some dvd.

and of course lot of pix will be soon............I'll post all them here too.

As I remember some old unreleased stuff will be on the terror tapes vol 2. As Jack mentioned yesterday the terror tapes vol 2 will be the next thing after Jacken spanish album. And Cynic told in Berlin new Street Platoon album will be out in 2008 sure.

killer

Приятно слышать, что люди стараются

афигенно жду анрелиза. хотелось бы чтобы анрелиз шол отдельным диском, а не только на терортапес2.

http://gallery.site.hu/u/Buttercup/Sajat/Muggs_vs_Sick_J...0.jpg.html

ебать их так - супер! Очень жду всего этого обещенного моим, черт возьми, любимым MC
И очень жду появления ДЮКА

Ну вот и старые пердилы наконец порадуют в досталь. Твою мать ДВД ожидаю и надеюсь на это. Испаноязычный сука как жду + :ahuel: охуел от 2го тайпса с анрелизами Сайко твою же мать так же, Биг Дюк, правда вот вчера буквально созванивался с товарищем, не так уж и хорошо у него дела всё таки Но как повторялся ранее, всё значительно лучше, чем во время "...".

И вот Уличный Взвод так же очень давно аж с момента выхода Стального Шторма ожидаю... Надеюсь Crow пришёл в себя...

СА4Л

ну тоже жду, и дюка услышать тоже заябись, но если честно то ну и нах этот испанский.. ну два.. ну пять треков.. но весь альбом, хз. лучшебы альбом был 50 на 50.

но хуй с ним, ждём.

Не думаю, что будет 50/50, разве что базар в скитах если таковы на голову упадут, а возвращаясь к LGEEE то там так же, уважение к испаноязычным товарищам, здесь думаю будет тоже самое, и если честно надеюсь на это...

СА4Л

-Цитата от SAOPP

Не думаю, что будет 50/50, разве что базар в скитах если таковы на голову упадут, а возвращаясь к LGEEE то там так же, уважение к испаноязычным товарищам, здесь думаю будет тоже самое, и если честно надеюсь на это...

СА4Л

не так небудет 50/50, я просто думаю что так лучше было бы. кстати на ПР форуме тоже некоторые пишут что конкретно испанскийальбом это нехорошо. да и для меня джекен сначала как лирик всё остальное после, а что толку от умных текстов на испанском, буит тожесамое как я вам щас эту сцылку дам: http://www.hip-hop.lt/hip-hop/index.php?page=albums&action=item&id=376

Стилл Смокин Ласт Эдишн есть у кого-нить?