Next time he might want to wait until he’s actually on the plane until he starts to Twitter about it…

Thanks to Big Hock for the putting me up on this.

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Tony ‘Bones’ Harrison recalls his first memory of R.A. The Rugged Man:

So in ‘93 I was an intern in the Jive Records art department working under Jean Kelly and Nick Gamma. Nick was working on Midnight Marauders, and various Heiro and KRS-One things. Exciting times.

I sat in a cubicle just outside the art room. Phone and art supplies – no computer. All of a sudden I hear what sounds like the opening scene to a movie with a fella entering an office and playing his demo tape. The songs kick in, and god damn – shit was ferocious! It was blaring out of the office of the A&R Jeff Sledge whom I hadn’t met, me being a lowly intern. Needless to say it was a pure banger and, if I’m not mistaken, ended with the interviewer being chainsawed.

After my internship was up I heard that RA was dropped off the label for allegedly wil’ing in the office and pulling out his j’doint. I’m not sure if that’s factual but like they say, when confronted with the myth or the truth, always go with the myth. I think I saw money in Harlem the other day. Good to see not only does R.A. still have it, he’s iller than ever.

R.A. The Rugged Man – ‘Every Record Label Sucks Dick’

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Concluding my talk with eskay, we cover his time at XXL, the Nah Right comment crew, why his detractors just don’t get it and future plans for the site.

Robbie: So how was your time XXL? Was it a 9-5 kinda role?

eskay: I was gonna run the content on the Scratch website, because the XXL website was already up-and-running but the Scratch website didn’t really have any content, so they wanted me to come in and handle that. But then Jerry Barrow – who was the Editor-In-Chief at Scratch at the time – left, and they appointed Brendan Frederick in his place. Brendan of course had launched the XXL site and he had been running it since it’s inception. I had already accepted the job at Scratch, so when I got there Elliott was like, ‘OK, there’s gonna be a change of plan. Brendan is doing Scratch so I want you to do the XXL site’. I felt more comfortable working at the XXL site ‘cos it was more general hip-hop than the sorta niche site that Scratch was. I was amped that Elliott gave me that job – I got to work with a lot of talented writers and editors. I didn’t learn as much as I would’ve liked to learn when I was there, but I definitely learned a lot.

Why do you think that was?

For one thing, I was an inexperienced editor. I was a blogger, basically, that was now in a position that they’re editing a website of a major magazine. Obviously I have no journalism degree, I’m not an accomplished writer or editor, so it was really a learning on the job type of thing. On top of that, it’s a web property. With a magazine you have a month or so to sit there and work on content and edit and go back and forth and do rewrites and this and that, but with the web you need content immediately. So the work-flow is just so crazy that it’s really hard to sit down with people and absorb what you want to observe. It is what it is. It definitely helped me a lot.

What prompted you to move on after a year?

At the beginning of 2008 they let Elliott go and they brought in Datwon – who is a great dude – but the publishers wanted to change the direction of the magazine. If you look at XXL now, they cover R&B artists and stuff like that, which is really not my thing. I could give a fuck about The Dream’s new album or who Ne-Yo is collaborating with. Those guys are talented but that’s just not my forte. I dreaded having to write a fuckin’ article about Lloyd or whatever. [laughs] The other thing was that Elliott had brought me in, and [with] him leaving, I was like, ‘I didn’t sign up for this’. Scratch had folded, and Brendan came back to XXL, so it was me and him doing the site. Then Elliott left, and about a month and a half later Brendan left to go to Complex, so it was now just me alone doing the site. I was like, ‘Fuck this. Do I want to kill myself trying to maintain this website by myself and let Nah Right fall by the wayside, or do I want to leave and focus all my energy on the site that I own?’ I had to make that decision, and obviously I’m gonna go with my site, so that’s when I left.

During those 12 months at XXL, did you feel like you were neglecting Nah?

Yeah, definitely, because at my old job nobody knew that I was a blogger. Nobody knew that I was blogging instead of working – they had no idea! [laughs] Then I go to XXL, and the whole reason that I’m there is because I’m blogger. They know about Nah Right, they know that I’m doing that at the same time that I’m doing XXL, and I’m also doing it on their dime! It was hard to put time into Nah Right but not put too much into it, where it was keeping me from doing my actual job. The site I think definitely suffered. That was really when I stopped writing as much and just started throwing-up songs and throwing-up videos and stuff like that, because I just didn’t have time to sit there and write for half-an-hour about whatever. I would say that it suffered, but at the same time a lot of what I do at Nah Right is aggregating content. There’s something to be said for just giving people music and letting them form their own opinion about it. I may download an mp3 and listen to it, but I don’t really have anything to say about it. Like, ‘OK, this is the new Blaq Poet joint produced by Premier’. OK, it’s a nice beat, but I may not have anything in-depth to write about it, so I may just throw the song up and let you listen to it and let you remark on it in the comments, or take it and upload on your website and write whatever you have to say about it. During that point where I was at XXL the site kinda turned more into an aggregation site than a traditional blog, but when I left XXL and I started doing it full-time, I kinda kept the aggregation part of it, because I still feel like there’s something to be said for that type of site. Plus I was one of the first sites doing that type of thing – now you have a thousand blogs that do the same thing – but just remember who was first.

And streamlining it allows you cover a lot more content.

Right. Would you rather I fuckin’ spend three hours writing about songs or post ten new songs for you?

Would you ever take a job at a record label if the deal was right?

That’s not really something I would want to do. I’ve always said, ‘I don’t want a job that depends on somebody else selling records’. [laughs] If this guy doesn’t sell records then I’m out of a job? Nah…I’m a fan of music. Not saying I wouldn’t like to at some point put out an artist or start some kind of company that would facilitate releasing artist’s music – maybe some underground artists that don’t get the attention paid to them – but that’s definitely not high on the list of things I want do.

Is it worthwhile doing more original content like Nah Right interviews in the future, or is that a waste of time?

For the most part, I don’t think it’s really worth it for me to sit there and do interviews because I feel like that shit is so saturated right now. It’s just so wack. It’s like – artist has an album, artist is doing a press run, artist talks to 20 bloggers. All 20 bloggers ask him the same questions, artist gives the same answer. Then the interviews go up – one goes up today, one goes up tomorrow, one goes up the next day, and it’s all the same shit. It’s just really not worth it to me, there are very few artists that I feel that I could speak to. First of all, if I’m gonna speak to you I’m not gonna ask you the same questions about your new album and why it’s your best album ever and this and that. I’m gonna want to talk about something interesting, something a little bit left-field, and there are very few artists who I feel are worth talking to at this point. I feel like there are a couple of good bloggers – yourself included – who do those good interviews, who get a hold of these artists and ask them good questions and do really worthwhile articles, and there are a couple of hip-hop websites that do that and a couple of magazines that do that. I just feel like it’s such a crowded space. I’m not trying to stick my flip-cam in your face and ask you questions – there’s too much of that shit as there is. I don’t need to add to that noise. That being said, I’m definitely gonna start to ‘blog’ more, like when I first started the site, and do a little bit more opinion pieces and commentary. It’s really been kinda crazy for me, the last few months. I’ve got a couple of other things – nothing I really wanna announce yet – but I’ve got a couple of other things in the works that I wanna do that I’ve been putting time and energy into. Now that Nah Right has become a business for me there’s a lot of shit behind the scenes that I have to take care of, which is why I brought in dre and nation to do blogging for me. And then I’ve just got shit going on in my personal life which doesn’t allow me to blog like I would really like to. I was actually thinking I’d like to do a separate blog on Nah Right – like ‘eskays blog’ type of thing – where I would talk about stuff. Not just music, but a little bit of everything. So I might do that, but I’m definitely gonna start doing a little bit more commentary on the site.

The other thing that makes Nah Right unique is the commentator community that you have. It’s funny seeing artists catch feelings from the comments section.

Shout-out to the Nah Right comments – we have the best comment section on the internet, hands down. Whenever my comments section comes up, all I hear is that, ‘The comments are not about the post, it doesn’t make sense!’ But people gotta understand that it’s a community. A lot of those people you see in the comments have been commenting there since 2005 when I started the site, and we’ve been meeting on Nah Right for the last four years. We know shit about each other in real life…we actually have relationships with these people that we’ve never even met before. So it’s a running conversation through the comments, and they’ll tell you, ‘We don’t give a fuck about what you posted, eskay! We’re having a conversation here and if you don’t like it, too bad’. [laughs] I learnt that, early on, that you can’t moderate them. You can’t tell them, ‘Don’t talk about this, talk about that!’ So it’s not even worth trying, so just let it go. A long time ago I realized that was the way to go. Definitely the gulliest comment sections on the internet.

I notice you’re also experiencing the ‘crabs in the barrel’ mentality, with some other bloggers taking little shots at you recently.

What can you do? When you reach a certain point or level of success I think that just comes with the territory. I think a lot of that shit is misguided though. I think that they don’t really follow my site, they probably just heard about my site in the last year or so. I don’t think they really read it everyday or go into the archives or read the commentary that I leave on the site. I think they have this limited picture of what they think Nah Right is and what they think my opinions are, so I think if they spoke to me on a real level – man-to-man shit – they would understand that everything I do is for the music. You may think that eskay feels one way about something when that’s actually not the case. Just because I make a smart-ass remark about something, you can’t take that and make assumptions about what my opinions are or how I feel about this or that. I’m definitely not one of these bloggers who feels he needs to talk shit – miscellaneous shit – and call people out for no reason to get attention or get traffic. I’m not with that ’shock blogging’ shit. I may say something crazy that you may take as a ’shock blogging’ tactic, but it’s really not. I really mean it. I mean everything I write. I say a lotta shit in jest, but that’s the voice of Nah Right. What can I tell them?

How many of the newer artists that you post on Nah Right are you a fan off, and how many are you just putting-up to let people decide for themselves? About half and half?

Am I real fan of all of them? No, but I respect of all of ‘em to a certain extent. If I thought they were utter garbage then I wouldn’t even post them. I may respect their talent, I may think they’re a good lyricist but I may not listen to their music on a regular basis. I’m probably an actual fan – as in I actually listen to their shit – of probably about half of them, and I respect all of them. I respect what they’re doing.

When’s the Nah Right BBQ popping off?

The comments have been asking for that for the last three years, so I have every intention of doing it somewhere around next Memorial Day weekend, which will be May of 2010. That’ll be the fifth year anniversary of Nah Right, so I’m trying to put it together and make sure we do it sometime in May 2010 – The First Annual Nah Right BBQ. Free beer, free food.

A Corona-free zone I hope!

No fuckin’ Coronas! If you come with a Corona, I’m throwing that shit at you! [laughs]

Previously: eskay, part 1

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If you want to check the newest/latest in the rap world, you’re first stop on the intehnets is probably gonna be Nah Right. As the originator of aggregate-style content back when your average hip-hop blog was usually an article with a couple of mp3’s at the end, eskay has carved-out his own lane in the blog game over the past four years, reaching the point where even you’re favorite rapper is checking it on the daily. I spoke to eskay about a month ago, starting off with some discussion of his life before blogging.

Robbie: What can you tell me about your graff days?

eskay: I started writing in 7th grade. I was a little toy, I didn’t know how to write – that’s how most writer’s start out. I actually stole my name from Subway Art. That was my graffiti bible, basically. I was 11 or 12 and I didn’t know shit about graffiti, other than what I saw on trains when I went to the city or what I saw on walls around my way. So I got Subway Art, and it had that SKEME piece on the cover and I was like, ‘Oh, I like that name’. I’m gonna take it’. I didn’t really understand that that’s not how it works! You could get killed for taking another writer’s name at the time! [chuckles] I was only writing walking back-and-forth the five blocks to school, or going up the park where there was a bunch of graff, so I wasn’t really violating like that. I quickly learned that you can’t do that, so I just shortened it to SK and I’ve had that name ever since. I used a bunch of different spellings nowadays I use ESKAY, although I’m kinda retired from graff now. In my high school days I started chilling in the city more. I ran around in Washington Heights and Brooklyn a lot and started to link with the more famous writers. I could go on for hours about that…

Were you mainly a bomber or did you get into piecing?

Trains were over by that time I started writing – this was early 90’s, so trains were finished. It was all walls and street bombing at the time. Now in New York city you hardly see any graff on the train stations, but back then in the early 90’s, even though the trains were clean, a lot of the stations were still bombed. I chilled in Washington Heights a lot, and the 1 Line runs through Manhattan, so we would really hit the 1 Line a lot. We would do rooftops and store-gates and all the standard graff spots that you hit. I really wasn’t into piecing too much. I tried it, but it takes a lot of talent. I consider myself a pretty good writer – I was pretty good at throw-ups and stuff like that – but I never got into big productions. I really was more of a street bomber. I did a lot of tagging and a lot of fill-ins and that’s pretty much it. I never really got into the more artistic stuff.

What was the next step after that? Pause tapes? Deejaying?

Yeah, definitely used to do pause tapes. Stretch and Bobbito, early 90’s, was our main source of underground, non-mainstream rap. We were staying-up late to tape that and make pause tapes of our favorite joints. This was the time when I was juts getting into high school – mainly Stretch and Bob and Yo! MTV Raps. That was like our only source of new music for the most part. I started doing more cohesive mixtapes later on, once the internet hit, but real early on it was the two-deck cassette radio joint of shit recorded off the radio. [laughs]

I assume you used to cop all the Clue mixtapes?

Definitely. Real early on it was Ron G, Double R, S&S, those guys were real big in the early 90’s and then the Clue era hit. Clue really changed the mixtape game – he moved it into the exclusive era where your mixtape didn’t really matter unless you had some new, exclusive shit. Back then, you couldn’t even get that shit in Yonkers, so we had to take our bus pass and hop on the Yonkers bus system to the 4 train, then go to Fordham Road to Young Star on Fordham to get all the new shit at the time. It was really only Clue at the time that was killing it like that. So we’d go down – hop the train of course – then hit 181st for some weed, you know?

What were they charging for a Clue tape?

Five or six dollars back then.

Then pop that shit in the Walkman…

Yeah, man, with the big fuckin’ headphones and no rewind button! Only fast forward, so you had to flip the tape over and fast-forward it if you wanted to hear the song again! [laughs]

What about copping bootlegs off the street vendors?

Early on, there were only a few spots you could go to to cop the tapes but then the bootleggers started to come in real heavy. They were bootlegging not only the albums that were coming out at the time, but they were also starting to bootleg the mix CD’s. You would walk-up Fordham or 125 and you would see tables of albums and mixtapes. It’s crazy to think about now, ‘cos you could never do that in New York now, but back then it was a free-for-all. You need a license now to even stand out there and sell anything, and you definitely can’t sell bootleg shit out there in the street!

There wouldn’t be much of a market for bootleg CD’s now anyway.

Right. Nowdays, you really only see bootleg DVD’s.

So was there anywhere in Yonkers to cop new music back then?

The center of Yonkers is Getty Square. That’s the downtown area of Yonkers, and the main area where there are clothing stores and the main hub for the bus system, so before school or after school that’s where everybody would stop and link-up. That’s where all the fights would happen and all that shit. There was a record store that was in square for many, many years – I wanna say it was called Music Man – and they would have shit, but they would always have it late. Yonkers was always late on shit. You could go there and get a Clue CD, but you would get it a couple of weeks after the fact – nowadays, to get something a couple of weeks after the fact is like ancient – but back then it was so bad, but we still wanted that shit the day the day it dropped, so we’d go downtown and find it.

What was the rap scene like in your neighborhood back then? Were you messing with The Warlox?

I really didn’t pay attention to The LOX when they were The Warlox. I guess I wasn’t really interested in local MC’s at the time. DMX was big in Yonkers as a local artist at the time. There were a bunch of dudes from Yonkers – Black Jesus, Phil Blunts – but I never really got up on The LOX until they became The LOX and signed with Diddy. I always remember the first time I heard a LOX joint was when my man played it for me. It was on a Bad Boy mixtape and he was like, ‘Yo, these cats are Yonkers’. I was like, ‘Oh, shit! My city is coming up!’ A lot of my peoples went to school with The LOX at the time, my man Amaury – KEM – he always tells me the story he put Styles P onto Nas. He brought Illmatic to school and played it to Styles P for the first time. He always takes credit for making Styles want to rap after he heard the Nas…[laughs] But I honestly wasn’t paying a lot of attention to them when they were just local Yonkers rappers.

How did you get into the I.T. game?

After I left high school I went and I did a year at Borough of Manhattan Community College down on Chamber Street. That shit was just another high school, basically. It was just a fashion show and popularity contest. [laughs] I was majoring in Liberal Arts, which basically means I don’t know what the fuck to do with my life! I did a year there and I was like, ‘Fuck this!’ and dropped out and got a job working fast food at Popeye’s. I was the fried chicken man! [laughs] I think we’ve all put in a little bid at a fast-food place at some time or another. Then my sister-in-law got me a job in the mail-room at the publishing house that she worked at. At that age and at that time that was all me and my boys could ever aspire to was like a fuckin’ mail-room job downtown. That was like the ultimate job you could get. [laughs] I did that for like a year and a half, maybe two years and the company had a real entry-level position in the I.T. department, doing help-desk, answering the phone and doing trouble tickets and stuff like that. So I applied for it and I got it – I guess it’s cheaper for them to hire somebody from within and give them a shit salary than it is to hire somebody that actually knows what they’re doing!

At that point, the extent of my computer knowledge was basically fucking around with my dad’s AOL account. Going into chat rooms, trying to talk to girls…this was ’97, so back then you wouldn’t even get an mp3. You’d get a Windows Media file or a Real Audio file back then…so I didn’t really know shit about computers, but when I got that job I just buckled down and really started studying on my own. The company paid for some classes and stuff, so I did that for the next seven years or so. I eventually rose from a lowly call center guy to pretty much supervisor of my department. If I had never gotten that job I probably wouldn’t be a blogger today, so it’s kinda ill how that shit played out.

So at what point did you start using company resources to start blogging?

Around 2004 I discovered blogs, and that year I really started reading blogs heavily and I discovered a few hip-hop blogs. Around May of 2005 I decided, ‘Let me start a site’. I actually had a little personal Blogspot blog before that, where I just wrote about nonsense that nobody really cares about – like my own personal life and shit – then I said, ‘Lemme do a real, actual site’. I had the nahright.com domain name that I had purchased a couple of months before, so I bought some hosting and set-up a site.

I’m trying to remember what blogs were out back then…

It was like O-Dub, Beats and Rants…were you around back then? Did you start that year?

Yeah, but I didn’t really do anything good until mid-2005.

Right. Hashim’s blog…you’d Google ‘hip-hop blogs’ and it would come-up with site. He was up on his search-engine optimization real early…He also had a short-lived mixtape site which I did reviews for early on. I think I had already launched Nah Right at the time though.

Was Bol around back then?

I’m pretty sure he was around.

Jay Smooth was for sure.

Jay Smooth was a big inspiration to me.

Something I find amusing is that dude’s try and have these fancy-ass templates, but you’re stuck with a default Wordpress theme. It’s proven that it’s all about the content.

At the time I had big plans in my head, I was like, ‘If this thing ever gets going, I’m gonna redesign it and I‘m gonna make it all pretty with logos and graphics and all that shit’. As time passed and the site got popular, a lotta people were like, ‘I like the simple layout. That’s a big factor in why I like your site so much’. So I was like, ‘You know what? Fuck it. I’m just gonna leave it like this’. Like you said, it’s all about the content.

Was there a turning point where you went, ‘Holy shit! This is getting good!’

Hashim was working at SOHH at the time – he was the Blog Editor – and he asked me to do their New York blog. He was one of the first people to really say, ‘This kid might have something to offer here, let’s give him a shot’. So I did that. The moment I realized, ‘Oh shit, I might have something here!’ was when Bun B reached out to me to do an interview…a site had done an interview where the writer claimed that saw him in the strip club and they sat-down for this interview. Bun said, ‘I wasn’t in the strip club. I never did the interview with you. This interview is fraudulent. He kinda reached-out to me to set the record straight and give his side of it and denounce the interview, basically. I got on the phone with him – first of all, it was amazing that somebody like Bun would be reaching out to me. I was amazed that he even knew about my site, but then while I was on the phone with him he really told me, ‘Yo, you know you really got something there. There’s a lotta people in the industry who read your site and pay attention to it, quiet as kept’. I figured that maybe a few people were looking at my site, but that’s when it really it really hit home that I had something that was starting to pop. Soon after that, Elliott [Wilson] reached out to me and offered me a job at XXL.

Next up: eskay’s time at XXLmag.com , the evolution of Nah Right and why the Nah comments section is ‘the gulliest on the internet’…

eskay, part 2

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Something from the Bet On Black mixtape. Banco!

Black Rob - ‘Three Course Meal’

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So it’s that time of year again, when I try to remember all the albums that I listened to more than once and didn’t hate so that I can order them on vinyl…thing is, this year it seems like no one bothered to actually release anything on 33 1/3. As you’d expect, Year Round supported the Blaq Poet release with both vocal and instrumental versions, and the latest MF Doom DOOM project is available in 2LP format, but what else? The only other good long player that I can cop on wax is Double Barrel. That new Raekwon? M.O.P? Big Twins? Cormega? Chamber Music? Sorry pal, no dice.

While I can appreciate that Serato/Final Scratch is key in reducing lower back problems and hernia’s cause by carting over-stuffed record crates up flights of stairs, it appears to have well and truly been the final nail in the proverbial coffin for hip-hop vinyl. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t really place any value in owning original CD’s. Considering that all of my compact discs have been picked-up second hand or sent to me for review purposes back when record labels and their distributors actually had a promotional budget, there haven’t been many occasions when I’ve been happy to drop $15 on a potential beer coaster. The same thing applied when you could buy new albums on tape – sure, it was convenient to be able to pop it straight into your Walkman for the train ride home, but considering you could tape that same LP onto a better quality chrome or metal tape yourself, it was also a huge waste of money.

It’s one thing to download every new release for ‘previewing purposes’, but when it comes down to supporting the finest of this years releases at the cash register, is it wrong that I want something that I can’t just make myself? Something that can be stored away for future listening sessions or to play to a crowd. Something that won’t get lost down the back of the couch or covered in finger-prints. As much as I enjoy the limited-edition exclusives that Diggers With Gratitude, Vinyl Addicts, Freestyle Records and One Leg Up are dropping, is it too much to ask that I can purchase more than five decent rap albums released this year on vinyl for under $20 each? Apparently so. Maybe it’s time to get into the bootlegging game….

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If you don’t laugh out loud at least six times while watching this vid from Dallas Penn….kill yourself.

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Ignoring Lil’ Romeo and Lil’ Eazy, there are a few half-decent son’s of MC’s floating around the booth these days. Given the strong family tradition of the Wu-Tang Clan, it’s hardly surprising that 90% of them are Killa Beez related.

Lord Jamar feat. Young Justice, Young Dirty & Young Lord - ‘Young Godz’

Ol’ Dirty’s son calls himself Young Dirty? Makes sense, I guess.

Masta Killa feat. Karim Justice, Shamel Irief & Young Prince - ‘Then & Now’

GZA Jnr., Young Masta and RZA’s son get a little shine on this opener from Made In Brooklyn.

Ghostface Killah feat. Trife Da God & Sun God - ‘Yapp City’

Sun God is old enough to have kids of his own – I guess Starks started planting seed’s mad early!

GZA feat. Justice Kareem - ‘Groundbreaking’

Just to confuse the issue, the son of the Genius is credited differently on every track he appears on…

DJ Babu feat. Niko - ‘Ahead Of My Time’

The youngest in charge drops by to seal off his pop’s Duck Season 3 album.

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It’s time to admit the awful truth – I wasted many years of my life as a lyrics nerd. From constantly rewinding ‘Prsioners of War’ to attempting to memorize Percee-P’s ‘Lung Collapsing Lyrics’ and even listening to Soul On Ice multiple times. Sure, I appreciated the genius of Willie D’s Shout Rap and enjoyed NWA as much as anyone, but I also went through a period of dismissing a lot of great records for their low syllable count. Then one day, I woke up and began to understand just how important the ‘Character MC’ really is. Hearing rap fans complain that rhymers like Blaq Poet, Big Twin and Tim Dog are garbage reminds me of the lessons that should have been learned during the dreaded Backpack Era – a lot of complicated but ultimately dull rhyme schemes over bland beats. Bogged down by their notebooks, the Lyricist Lounge Generation produced some incredibly boring music.

Somebody like Tupac, however, was able to overcome whatever limitations he had as an MC by projecting so much raw emotion into his vocals that you had to take notice, while a Too $hort is able to get over based on his larger-than-life character. The unfortunate side-effect of this phenomenon is that far too many rapper dudes now think they can get over on attitude alone. When these same characters are revealed to be as dull-as-dishwater, that’s where the problems start. The essential quality of any ‘character rapper’ is that you actually require an appealing personality to begin with – if you’re no Bushwick Bill, then you might want to actually put some time into those bars. That being said, when you’re able to find a technically proficient MC with an entertaining personality to boot, you’re onto a winner. Big L, Lord Finesse, KRS-One, Sean Price and early Kool Keith spring to mind as good examples of this. It’s tough to call which is worse – bland but decent rhymers or lyrical under-achievers who can still provide some amusement?

The idea that any hip-hop fanatic might fail to appreciate the charisma, presence and technique of an MC simply because they don’t sound like a Big Pun rip-off is pretty disturbing. If you hate Infamous Mobb for being ‘too street’ and fail to acknowledge the blissful ignorance of Gucci Mane’s ‘Wasted’ then you might as well go and sit in your parent’s basement and listen to all your Canibus CD’s while you punch through a few cones of that kush. A knocking beat and the right attitude on the track can work wonders, which is why the recent work of Prodigy still gets burn in my ride. P’s whole state of mind on those albums really translates through the speaker, regardless of how ’simple’ his lyrics might sound in comparison to early Mobb music. Not to say that I encourage the dumbing down of rap by any means, but a dope beat and a rapper with some personality should never be underestimated.

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This kid is an effin’ classic. Thanks to Big Hock for putting me onto these comedy gems.

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Here’s the world premier of the Sid Roams Remix EP to keep you going until the Zombie Musik album drops. Featuring remixes of classics from Big L, M.O.P., Mobb Deep, Ghostface Killah, Jay-Z and Cam’Ron.

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Sid Roams – The Unkut Interview

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After catching the ears of a lot of people from their work on Prodigy’s H.N.I.C.2, the production team of Joey Chavez and Bravo went on to oversee and release several impressive projects on their own Dirt Class Records label, including Product of The 80’s and The Project Kid. I caught-up with them recently yo discuss the lost art of the A&R, studio sessions and the classic bongs vs. blunts debate.

Robbie: So you guys have produced as a duo since around 2004?

Bravo: That sounds about right. We’re been making beats together since ’92-’93, but we didn’t really form Sid Roams until 2004-5. We’d been doing stuff together and then for a long time we were doing beats on our own, with Joey on the west coast and me in New York.

Joey: Both Bravo and I started off working on the first [unreleased] Dilated record in ’95-’96…

Bravo: We all grew-up on the west coast – me, Joey and Ev – we were all in the same neighborhood in Venice. Joey and Ev went to junior high-school together and then we all went to high school together and we all started making beats and Ev was rhyming. We had been in QDIII’s studio, which was next-door to Ev’s house and he had a monster studio. It was like walking into a spaceship! Lights everywhere, it was like being on Star Trek or something. We met Al[chemist] through Ev. He was also a rapper at that time, back when we were kids, but as things progressed Al really took the helm with the beats. By the time we all got out to New York, Al had a good jump on that whole Queensbridge scene, so we passed him a beat CD around 2003-2004 and he played all that stuff for Infamous Mobb. That’s how ‘Who We Ride For’ actually happened. They thought it was a beat that he made and they just flipped on it and recorded it. He played us the little demo and it sounded crazy, so we all met up and started building.

What’s the science behind the name Sid Roams?

We had this vision that we would create a character, because Joey and I had been working on beats together for so long, we were like, ‘Let’s create a one-man character, like one person’. Sid Roams to us was just like this legend – this former gangster, he was retired, he was like 75 years-old, maybe Cuban, maybe Columbian. He was like this wrinkly old man and he owns a villa on some island in the Caribbean with his harem of women and just makes beats and shit. We decided that that’s who Sid Roams was.

Rocking a white suit and straw hat…

Yeah! Linen. Straight fedora’s, the whole nine. We didn’t want to be like ‘The Neptunes’ or ‘The Heatmakerz’. We thought about it, we were like, ‘Let’s call ourselves The Controllers or whatever’, but it occurred to us that a name like Sid Roams would raise questions, ‘cos people would be like, ‘Oh, it’s one dude’. And then they’d find out it was two people and then they’d get confused…maybe it would help us, maybe it would hurt us, but at least we were being original!

I thought that the Big Twin album had a consistent sound, even though they were four different producers on there. How did you manage that?

Me and Joey were overseeing the whole project and we were picking all those beats, so we were picking stuff that really fit together well and actually making sense as an album. I think that the age of the A&R is really over. There was a time when there were talented A&R’s that were able to actually see an album through from Point A to Point B and really get it down in a cohesive way. But the era of those A&R’s is basically over. Now instead you have rappers that are trying to do that themselves. Not to discredit anyone out there, but there are some guys who can do it and some guys who can’t. For us, the fans, you can really tell when somebody kinda ran out of steam and couldn’t figure out what beats to pick anymore.

What can you tell me about the H.N.I.C. 2 project?

Joey: That project was something that Prodigy wanted to do for a long time. When we were just getting to know him P he had four different projects that he wanted to get off, then once he knew he was going to jail I think that really motivated him to just pick one thing to finish off. When he first came into the studio to start recording H.N.I.C. 2 he already had this playlist, but what he actually played that first day? I think only two or three things from that playlist actually stayed on the album, if that.

Bravo: There’s something specific that happened with that album in P’s mind. I think that all those beats really do click together and you do have kinda a new sound, something that’s unprecedented.

How much did you record with him before he went away?

Joey: We probably recorded thirty joints with him before he went away. There were nights when P would come into the studio and he would just be a monster. He would sit down, hear one beat for the first time and just write a song to it. Wrap that up, start writing the next song and even record it. Once he knew he had a limited amount of time, he really used his time wisely.

How have you been dealing with the way that music sales have plummeted in the last five years?

Bravo: Basically, we haven’t been dealing with that. We basically ignore that that’s a reality and juts keep making music! [laughs] It’s depressing, dude. Merely with a project like Product of the 80’s – we look at the sales that we actually had, and then we consider what it would’ve been if we’re dropped this project six years ago – the numbers would’ve been drastically different. That’s really a sad place to be as far as a business person is concerned, and then as a beat-maker we also suffer a lot because the problem for beat-makers is we rally don’t necessarily have a tangible live commodity to give to people – what we do is all behind-the-scenes work. The money for producers comes from the sale of CD’s specifically, because that’s where we are. We’re in the studio. So it’s a real challenge nowadays for producers to actually translate what they do into something that’s a viable commodity that they can actually make money off. For us, it’s really not realistic to do much of that. The only possibility at this point is to tour and DJ, which is something that neither of us are all that adept at. It’s not something that we every pursued or perfected. I’ve been talking to Twin every couple of days, and he’s basically making money out of Myspace stuff on top of the records that we do. He’s able to farm-out verses for $500, $1,000 –whatever it may be – a pop. It’s easy for an MC to write sixteen bars. Making a beat that’s actually classy that we want to stand behind, that we actually feel is cohesive to our sound…that’s a whole different thing. We can’t give-up ill beats for $500 a pop. It’s not worth it!

Joey, that must’ve been an exciting time when Dilated first came out and you could sell 15,000 copies of a 12”.

Joey: It was, but it didn’t live for that long. Vinyl quickly moved out not so long after that. The sales numbers from the first ABB record that I did to the second ABB 12” that I did, that came out maybe two years later – it was a huge difference. I think it was 1997, 98 when ABB first started selling the first Defari 12” and Dilated Peoples 12”, that was kinda the height of the whole vinyl thing. It all went downhill from there.

Any good studio stories?

Bravo: I worked in this studio for a little while called Green Street, which is this historic studio in New York. It’s where Public Enemy and Run-DMC, Salt ‘N Pepa…a lot of those early records were recorded there. Just from the engineers, I’d hear these stories about how they build the beats. The Bomb Squad and the way that they’d utilize just twelve seconds of sample time – which to them was like an eternity of sample time – and how ingenuitive they’d be with that. A little bit later, Pete Rock used the studio to do Soul Survivor. He’d come in and just link eleven or twelve SP’s in a line!

Eleven SP’s? That’s incredible.

He just linked together a bunch of them because they only had so much sample time, and then to layer all the space effects and everything else over it you had to add another SP on, another SP on…

When you guys are recording, do you try and keep it as a closed session?

Joey: As much as possible we try and keep it a closed session. The entourage really does end-up being a distraction. In our experience, working with anybody and everybody, when they come through by themselves or only with people who are relevant to the session we just get a better outcome or they’ll be more focused. There’d be times when we go down to the studio and there’d be mad, mad, mad heads down there. We’ve got this group called Hard White – which is actually gonna be the next project that we’re gonna release – Un Pacino is sorta the leader of the group. There’s already like six dudes in the group, but then each of those dudes would bring a homie who would bring a homie. There’d be times that we’d go down there and there’d be like twenty dudes in our studio…

Bravo: Not to mention the girls, man! Things would just be crazy! There’d be like three video game monitors rolling, somebody working on a beat-machine in the corner, people scribbling rhymes, girls having sex…it was too much, man! We’d be holding our heads, shaking our head like, ‘How did we get into this mess?’ Fifteen blunts, Hennessy and 40’s. It was just a grimy little Brooklyn studio, but we had 40 people jammed in there! It was crazy.

I know a lot of New Yorkers can’t really handle smoking bongs, right?

It’s funny man, ‘cos when we were in New York we were on the blunts with everybody. We were just trying to keep up with that, fifteen blunts per session kind of thing. But then you get one of them, a fish out of water, in Cali and you put a bong [in front of them], dudes just fall out! It’s hilarious. Twins sometimes will blame me, he’s like, ‘I can’t do this verse, man. That fucking bong!’ [laughs] I’m like, ‘Man, it’s not the bong, fool. It’s ‘cos you can’t get your mind right!’ That being said, the west coast holds down blunts, too. All Strong Arm Steady? Sick blunt rollers! Oh No? Madlib’s brother? Blunts! All blunts! I went to the studio last month, I was just chillin’ with Al, smoking some bong loads, and Oh No came through with three dudes – ‘cos they were working on that Gangrene project – and they smoked six blunts in fifteen minutes. This was a role-reversal, ‘cos all of a sudden I was fucked up! I’d be back in LA for eight months at that point and hadn’t been smoking blunts, and here they were, rolling up like it was nothing. I tired to take as many pulls as I could before I actually had to pass…

I’ve noticed you’ve flipped some old Nintendo 8-bit sounds on a couple of tracks. Do you play a lot of old video games?

Joey: We definitely played Castlevania and Rampage and Contra and all those joints. We were normal kids in the late 80’s, so of course we were geeked on Nintendo. We’re always looking for samples in the strangest places possible. I think beat-makers at this point are really exhausting every possible corner of the resources that are available. We’re going from the most obscure soundtracks that we can possibly lay our hands on, to actually straight-up ripping from a movie, to listening to video games. Anything and everything is open game. It’s a free-reign right now for producers. That lo-fi sound can be a lot of fun just aesthetically – the way that it comes out, the way that it feels when you make a beat out of it. Melodies are everywhere – why limit yourself?

Sid Roams @ Myspace

Look out for the new Sid Roams album, Zombie Musik, dropping Oct 27th on Dirt Class Records.

‘KZMB Special Bulletin’

Previously:

Seven Superior Sid Roams Productions

Prodigy Records Seven Minute Song From Prison

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Joey Chavez and Bravo, along with their boy Alchemist, have been giving that classic Queensbridge sound a fresh coat of paint in recent times. Even the most ardent Prodigy and Infamous Mobb haters would have to admit that the sound of H.N.I.C. 2, Product of the 80’s and The Project Kid was top notch. This week I’ll be showcasing some of their finest work, dropping an interview with the crew and premiering some exclusive music.

Prodigy - ‘ABC’

Drink some whiskey, then play this shit in the car. Loud.

Big Twins feat. Dog of ACD - ‘Get Em’

Some shit to creep to.

Prodigy feat. Big Twins - ‘Boxcutters’

Horror Movie Rap at it’s finest.

Dilated Peoples feat. PMD - ‘Mr. Slow Flow’ [Remix]

Parrish Smith and Ev on a record with Babu scratching the hook? Over an epic Roams banger? Approved.

Big Twins feat. Un Pacino - ‘Trapped In’

Straight from ‘The Grimey One’ mixtape. A perfect example of that 80’s meets 2009 Sid Roams beat science.

Vordul Mega feat. Vast Aire - ‘In The Mirror’

It’s not all gangsta music from these dudes, as they serve-up a smoother recipe for Can Ox.

Big Twins - ‘Trip Thru The PJ’s’

If you don’t feel this, it might be a good time to get into indie rock or some shit.

Download all seven…

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The struggle between artistic growth and keeping the listener’s happy is a delicate balance for any musician, even more so in the ever-fickle rap world. Do you keep making remaking the same songs that got you fans in the first place or try and test the limits of your abilities by stepping outside your comfort zone? Cormega has never been afraid to wear his heart on his sleeve, and even though he fills many of the tracks on Born and Raised with personal sentiment there’s no need for alarm – this isn’t some emo rap shit. Mega just spills it how he sees fit.

The first thing that impresses about this project is the cohesiveness of the overall sound. This actually feels like an real album, constructed with a unified vision and theme behind it, rather than some random collection of tracks to skip through. Take a look at the production line-up as well – minus Lord Finesse, Puffy and Q-Tip, Cormega has managed to assemble the same beat-smith’s that created the classic sounds of Ready To Die and Illmatic. DJ Premier, L.E.S., Pete Rock, Buckwild, Easy Moe Bee, Havoc and Large Professor all contribute, in addition to Fizzy Womack, Nottz, D.R. Period and Ayatollah. On paper, that’s an unbeatable team, right? The good news is pretty much everyone comes through in the clutch. While previous Montana projects have suffered from some patchy beats amongst the gems and the occasional awkward moment in his delivery, he seems to have perfected the formula this time around and doesn’t let a moment go to waste.

In the past, Mega often fed off the energy of his guests, and the same applies here. The rowdy ‘Get It In’ with Lil’ Fame continues the winning chemistry of their previous team-up ‘718′, while ‘Love Your Family’ with Havoc manages to come-off sincere without falling into corny melodrama, and ‘Mega Fresh X’ reveals the fan in Cory as he let’s some of his old favorites get shine in the booth. But it’s ‘Define Yourself’ that proves to be the true declaration of dominance here, as Cor’s old rhyme partner Tragedy delivers another classic sermon and Hav seals the deal with a suitable no-frills approach. On the rest of the record, Montana blends conventional street wisdom with life lessons he’s learned since he adopted the legal hustle, but doesn’t neglect some boats of traditional brag rap and ragging on the comp. When Mega announces that “I’m no longer seeking acceptance from people who aren’t feeling me/or squeezing my weapon for those who aren’t as real as me” it’s clear that we’re listening to an MC who not bowing to the demands of record labels, radio or even his own fans – he knows what the fuck he’s doing at this point, and with his third official solo album he’s finally manged to get all the pieces of the puzzle to fall into place and create the album that we always knew he was capable of. It’s too soon to call, but Born and Raised might just prove to be a modern-day classic.

Album Sampler

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Congrats to BIGSPICE for delivering this amusing anecdote:

At a concert (SOB’s – I think) I snuck to where his and Mos’ dressing room was, pushed some autograph seekers away, and when Kweli’s security dude came over, I told him I was “okay player security.” Dude actually believed me and I got to chill there and watch the door. It was funny because I was actually letting people in/denying people at the door. When Kweli was getting ready to leave I talked to him for about 5 minutes, and he must have been thinking “who the fuck is this asshole?” Man I love Vodka

Hit me up here with your email so I can get that pair of tickets to Noisemakers to you.

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