Rakim's Clothing Line, Urban Expedition

Two Rakim weeks ago, I covered Rakim's Rap City appearance, on which he promoted his clothing company, UBX.  About that: UBX stood for Urban Expedition. Rather than an independent clothing brand owned by Rakim, UBX was a label created by I.C. Isaacs & Company, Inc., a jeans and sportwear company founded in 1913. From then until the 1980s, the company primarily sold riding wear for the horse racing industry. In the 1980s, they were purchased by investors, started selling general men's and women's apparel, and made their way into J.C. Penney department stores. It was around this time that they also acquired Boss. By 1996, Boss become their best-selling line, accounting for more than 70% of annual sales. The acquisitions continued piling up, and in September 1999, I.C. Isaacs & Company announced the launch of UBX, an overt attempt to cash in on the streetwear trend that helped fuel Boss' rise. Or, as CEO Robert Arno put it, "The launch of Urban Expedition gives us the opportunity to capitalize on what we do best, providing style-conscious customers with cutting-edge fashions. By offering up-scale streetwear collections under a fresh new brand, we have an opportunity to capture a share of the audience who appreciates fashion-forward urban styling." The company hired Rakim to promote the line and even threw a party with Universal Records in November 1999 at NYC’s Metronome Restaurant & Lounge to celebrate the UBX launch along with the release of The Master. Also on the night's agenda: a preview of the Nelson George documentary A Great Day In Hip-Hop.

The only problem was that I.C. Isaacs was already running into financial trouble, had been since going public a couple years prior. UBX was discontinued in 2001. By 2011, I.C. Isaacs had completely divested from manufacturing and changed its name to Passport Brands Inc. 

Above: a selection of vintage UBX jackets, shirts and jeans floating around the resale market in recent years. Still unlocated: the Funkmaster Flex Great Day In Hip-Hop mix, a snippet of which accompanied the Rakim promo CD single handed out as an invite to The Master/UBX launch party.

Your Forecaster: Rakim (As Told by Art Of Noise)

Art of Noise were big in New York in the 1980s. How big? Getting played in clubs big, no doubt. But also pre-record-deal Public Enemy rapping over their songs big, Harry Allen doing spoken word sermons over their songs big. Did those WBAU airings make their way across the pond back then? Rakim definitely did. See: the UK-smash Coldcut remix to "Paid in Full." From there, Coldcut starts Ninja Tune. Ninja Tune begets trip-hop. And when Art of Noise return from a nine-year hiatus with Lol Creme (yes, that Lol Creme) in tow for high-concept comeback album The Seduction of Claude Debussy, it's Rakim, they ping to provide lead vocals on lead single "Metaforce."

Rakim had previously collaborated with Art Of Noise producer Trevor Horn on 1998's "Buffalo Gals (Back to School)," a reworking of Malcom McLaren and the World Famous Supreme Team's 1983 classic, and it's there that today's brief oral history lesson begins. 

Trevor Horn: "He remembered all the early hip-hop stuff I’d done with Malcolm McLaren like ‘Hobo Scratch’ but told me his favourite track was ‘Moments In Love.’"

Ann Dudley: "As soon as Rakim came up with the immortal rhyme 'Aerodynamic in the Evening Air' we knew that we had it!"

Paul Morley: "We just sent Rakim some information, thinking it wouldn't mean much to him, and he did this fabulous rap, throwing things out of context all over the shop."

Dudley: "He was very interested in it – the whole idea of what we were doing."

Morley: "We sent him this big raft of stuff about Charles Baudelaire, who’s one of my favorite poets. It was kind of interesting because one of the thrills of the whole thing was that he totally got inside the spirit of the record and didn’t lop anything on top of it that came from his world. [He] went inside what we were trying to do with the record and gave it something that then inspired us to cover other areas as well. It was a fabulous thing that he did. There’s some great images in there."

Dudley: "It seemed like Rakim represented the modern poet, the poet at the end of the 20th century, rapping about Charles Baudelaire, the poet at the end of the 19th century, and I've never heard those sort of rhymes in a rap."

Morley: "It was a wonderful moment. It’s like 'Splatter my wisdom in a design,' is a great way to describe painting. We were absolutely thrilled."

Sources

"The Noise are back in town," The Guardian, June 20, 1999; "Art of Noise makes a new impression with 'Debussy,'" CNN, September 27, 1999; "The Art Of Noise: Do You Dream in Color?" Ink19, October 15, 1999; "Anne Dudley and Paul Morley discuss The Art Of Noise," Chaos Control Digizine, 1999; "Does Rock ‘N’ Roll Kill Braincells?! – Trevor Horn," NME, November 11, 2021.

Additional reading: "Somebody Down There Loathes Me," The Observer, August 31, 2002; "The Velvet Revolution of Claude Debussy," The New Yorker, October 22, 2018.

Marley Marl's "My Melody" Remixes

Imagine you're Marley Marl. Eric B. has brought to your home studio an unknown 17-year-old Long Islander calling himself Rakim. The kid doesn't sound like any rapper you've ever heard. He's not putting much energy into this, won't get up from the couch. Shan comes in and has the same reaction. Matter of fact, the kid's like an anti-Shan. "Just let me finish doing what I'm doing," he says. So you do. And well, it's something. You don't know what, but something. The kid leaves, and you play it on the radio, and the lines blow up. Who was that? What was that? And now you get it. And you proceed to replay and remix it over and over for no less than a year.

More Than Friends: "A Variety of Party People in Unity"

"Friends," Jody Watley's hit single with Eric B. & Rakim, is known as the first R&B-rap crossover to achieve commercial success. To my ears, the song skates the lines between those genres and house music. Indeed, like most of Watley's hits, it landed on the Dance charts. The song's video, directed by Jim Sonzero, captures its broad appeal. "The video notably blends b-boys, drag queens, and a variety of party people in unity for a good time capturing a slice of New York nightlife at the time," Watley says. "Fabulous and street in its realness without pandering, being contrived or sending a negative message, certain stereotypes or coonery. Proud." 

That theme also comes out with the aptly titled, club friendly "Friends" Unity mix produced by André Cymone. However, there's another remix that deserves note in the annals of Long Island hip-hop history. I'm talking about the Extended Version, produced by Hank Shocklee, Eric Sadler, and Paul Shabazz of the Bomb Squad. Shocklee would, of course, later team with Eric B. & Rakim for "Juice (Know the Ledge)," one of the duo's biggest and final hits. But the "Friends" Extended Version is, I believe, the first release on which we can hear Rakim rapping over Bomb Squad production in all its deconstructive kinetic glory. 

Years after Eric B. and Rakim disbanded, the God MC would again collaborate with Watley for the remix to "Off the Hook," the lead single from her 1998 album Flower. The producer of that remix is D-Dot, another name that should be familiar to hip-hop heads, if for very different reasons. By the time "Off the Hook" released, practically every successful R&B album had at least one rap collaboration and vice versa. If "Friends" started the trend, Bad Boy Records' Deric "D-Dot" Angelettie helped to make it the formula for crossover success. While "Off the Hook" might not be as remembered in hip-hop circles, it still managed to hit number-one on the Dance charts. And it also provided Rakim the opportunity to reflect on his prior collaboration with Watley. "At the time, we didn't even realize what was going on," he told MTV News. "I wasn't sure our people was gonna accept it, everybody feeling me like one of the hardcore artists. But then ... it blew up."

One more deep cut while we're on the topic of Jody Watley: Those familiar with her full body of work know that she first rose to stardom as a member of Shalamar. The funk group has been sampled by all manner of rap producers. Whether Eric B. & Rakim ever made use of their records, I can't say. However, I can say that Hempstead rapper True Mathematics' 1988 single "For the Lover in You" is essentially a rap version of Shalamar's 1980 track "This Is for the Lover In You," and in a final cherry-on-top-kind-of moment for this post, it's produced by none other than Hank Shocklee, Carl Ryder, and Eric Sadler. Hit the playlist below for all the above and then some.

(Completely un)officially licensed Rakim football post

Today is Rakim's 56th birthday. And falling on Sunday this year, it's the beginning of Long Island Rap's 10th (!) annual Rakim week. It's also, I gather, a day of some consequence in football. Below, Rakim, Ed Lover, and former Giants linebacker Carl Banks talk about Rakim's high school football years and the Starter brand among other topics, plus more football-affiliated Rakim content: the "Rice Returns" webisode for All-Pro Football 2K8 and the DJ Z-Trip-produced remix to "Let the Rhythm Hit 'Em" from the game's soundtrack.

 

DJ not-I - In The Ghetto Tonight (Rakim & Phil Collins)

If Wednesday's post featured "one of the most perfect blends ever committed to wax," today's features one of the most perfect blends ever, period, end of story. 

DJ not-I's "In The Ghetto Tonight" was mixed sometime between 2004 and 2006. The video mash-up, also by DJ not-I, was posted to YouTube in 2015.

So concludes this year's Rakim week. Happy 55th birthday to the God MC.

The "Eric B. Is President" Beat that Never Was

"Using that 'Fonda Rae' bass line and putting it with 'Funky President' was impossible because the tempos did not match up," says Marley Marl in a video reconstructing how he produced the beat for Eric B. & Rakim's "Eric B. Is President." "Well to combat that problem, I needed to pull out my CZ-101 so I could replay it." But what if it weren't impossible?! What if one could line up any two samples regardless of their tempos and somehow stretch one or both of them to match? Of course, that's not only possible today, but done regularly through the time stretching feature that's a staple of modern production technology. 

Fortunately, Marley Marl is still around, mixing records live on the radio, and able to take advantage of said technology. So, on an episode of Golden Era Radio, he was able to make the impossible possible. "I guess that's what 'Eric B. Is President' would've sound like if I had the technology like I got today," Marley said after recreating the record on air using the original samples along with Rakim's acapella. "That's why I could do that, blend those together, but back then there wasn't time stretching and all the amazing things we're using these days in technology, so that's how it would've sound if I'd had that technology in my pocket."

DJ Mickey Knox - Forgotten Rakim Joints & Remixes

You know I already had this on hand back in August when I posted Mickey Knox's mix of lost Roc Marciano joints with links out to his Biz and De La tapes. There are plenty of rarities on here, some lesser heard than others, but one of the main attractions is Knox's mix itself: the transitions, scratches, all that good stuff. That being said, I will give Mickey extra credit for including at least one Rakim feature I had absolutely never heard or heard of in my life, that is, his appearance on "The Paragraph Chemist" by Norwegian DJ and producer The White Shadow of Norway, off that artist's 2013 album, Nightmare Concert. You know what they say. You learn something new every day (especially when you listen to Rakim daily).

Rakim's Games of Death & Life

In 1996, Shaquille O'Neal released his third rap album, You Can't Stop the Reign. Say what you will about Shaq's rap career; the album included a song with Rakim. And while Ra is technically the featured artist on "Game of Death," he essentially runs point, turning in not just a 16, but also a second eight-bar verse as well as the song's hook. Basketball-reference-laced "Punisher"-era bars abound — e.g., "Thoughts of torture terrify your team in the tournament" — as Rakim and Shaq execute a hip-hop tribute to Bruce Lee and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's famous fight from the 1978 film of the same title. Ironically, if not self-referentially, Rakim also used a basketball metaphor nine years later in his last lines on a song called "Game of Life." The track, also featuring Ice-T and Chilly Mac, appeared on the soundtrack of 2005 documentary Slippin': Ten Years with the Bloods. The film was co-produced by pioneering MC Kurtis Blow; hence Rakim's line, "First let me bust another verse for my man Kurtis Blow."

Bonus materials: Rakim's song "Welcome to the NBA" from the videogame NBA 07 (now retroactively included in LIRR's Rakim Soundtrack Work playlist) and a clip of Bobbito Garcia recalling a pickup game with Rakim and his friends from Long Island.

 

M.J. Rap / Billy Jean Knows You've Got Soul

In 1988, a house music label by the name of T.K.L.S.T. Production issued an unofficial white label featuring a Michael Jackson "Megamix" of several of his biggest songs. Bootlegs like this were not uncommon in the record club days of the 1980s. They'd sometimes include mashups and remixes, which often went uncredited as was the case here. Flip this 45-RPM record over and you'll find a track innocuously titled "M.J. Rap." But don't let that misnomer fool you, as this is not Michael Jackson rapping. In fact, it's one of the most perfect blends ever committed to wax: a mix of Eric B. & Rakim's 1987 single "I Know You Got Soul" and Michael Jackson's 1982 Grammy Award-winning hit, "Billie Jean." How perfectly do these songs align? So much so that eight years later, in 1996, another house music label called Cluedo? Records put out another version of the blend, with the much more descriptive title, "Billie Jean Knows You've Got Soul." While both are absolute body movers, there is a notable difference between the two. Where the first track slows the "Billie Jean" instrumental to match Rakim's vocals, the second instead speeds them up to keep pace with the music. Additionally, the first record was put out by a U.S. label while the second comes from the U.K. As for the DJs behind these blends, your guess is as good as mine. Regardless, both blends are well worth a spin and available via the following YouTube streams thanks to some generous record owners.

 

The 45 King & Rakim

Mark the 45 King's first Rakim remix was made for Kool
DJ Red Alert, seen above with a young Rakim.

Rakim's birthday is this Saturday. Rakim week starts now.

If you've listened to Funkmaster Flex much over the past year, there's a decent chance you heard him accompanied on air by the inimitable Kool DJ Red Alert, and if you heard one of those broadcasts there's an even better chance you heard Mark the 45 King's previously unreleased "I Know You Got Soul" remix played on Hot 97 ... in 2022. The track, previously played on Red Alert's Kiss FM more than three decades ago, was practically in Flex's regular rotation last year — a beautiful thing.

This got me thinking about the 45 King's other Rakim remixes, of which I knew there were at least a couple. Mark was behind the boards for the extended remixes of Eric B & Rakim's "Microphone Fiend" and "The R" off Follow the Leader, and it's even possible he had a(n uncredited) hand in the original versions as well. Additionally, he produced the club mix of "Let the Rhythm Hit 'Em," previously shared on this site in the first post of the first ever Rakim week. Then there was a white label release in 2000 for the remix of a song called "Feelin' You," which as far as I can tell was never otherwise released, thereby making the remix the original mix commercially speaking. Of course, before the last of those remixes dropped, the 45 King produced "How I Get Down" off The Master.

That makes no fewer than six 45 King-produced Rakim tracks, a nice EP's worth of music from two of the most transformational hip-hop artists of all time. (Let's not forget 45 King produced "Hard Knock Life" and "Stan" in addition to what's essentially a full discography of once-obscure now-familiar breakbeats.) If that sounds like the basis for a great playlist, then you're in luck as that's exactly what I've put together below. 

DJ Ran Cypher Session ft. Rakim (1998 Freestyle)

Sometimes somebody says freestyle and means live performance of an existing verse/song possibly over a different beat than the recorded version. See yesterday's post, "Rakim - Rap City Interview & Freestyle." But then sometimes somebody says freestyle and means otherwise undocumented maybe improvised performance, and when that performance is by Rakim, your ears damn well better perk up like they have radar antennae attached. 

This is that: a little heard freestyle by Rakim. Another YouTube post dates it to 1998, which sounds about right. The 2nd beat Rakim annihilates was produced by Erick Sermon from the infamous LL Cool J posse cut "4,3,2,1," which I somehow for the first time just realized is almost exactly the same beat as Def Squad's "Full Cooperation" (also produced by Sermon). If it ain't broke, don't fix it. If you don't know what the 1st beat is, how did you find me

This concludes the 8th (!) annual Rakim week. If you dug it, check out prior years' Rakim weeks as well as DJ Ran's YouTube, where you'll find more cypher sessions featuring other gifted MCs. Finally, happy belated birthday to the greatest rapper of all time, the God MC Rakim, and peace to anyone reading this.

Rakim - Rap City Interview & Freestyle

Here we have Rakim's appearance on Rap City Tha Basement. This was probably sometime in late 1999, as Ra was promoting his second solo album, The Master, which dropped in November of that year. In addition to plugging clothing company UBX (more on them later), Ra performs the DJ Premier-produced "When I Be On The Mic" and later kick his first verse from "It's a Must." Timeless! 

Rakim & J.PERIOD Present The Live Mixtape: God MC Edition

Rakim and J.PERIOD rang in 2021 with a very special installment of the latter's live mixtape series. Very special not just because it was the God MC Edition but because it was a three-parter, including a DJ set and a mini-documentary directed by Julia Liu in addition to a blazing live performance with speaking appearances by DJ Jazzy Jeff and Busta Rhymes. Total run time: 1 hour, 5 minutes and 18 seconds. Watch all three and stream/download the audio below.

Rakim & Damu the Fudgemunk - The Master Munk

As a rule of thumb, I've tried to avoid including blends in Rakim Week, opting instead for remixes if anything other than original songs. But this blend tape of Damu the Fudgemunk beats and Rakim vocals is in a whole other category. Seamlessly mixed and arranged by DJ Essential and Altered Crates, The Master Munk sounds so fluid it lives up to its time traveler back story, which essentially posits that the project stems from a crate of records that showed up on the DJ's doorstep in 1993, including several which hadn't yet been released, along with a note about "a seemingly limitless number of universes." Per Altered Crates, The Master Munk premiered "on this timeline" on February 5, 2021, putting LIRR almost a year behind schedule. Per physicist Julian Barbour, time is just "an illusion which emerges out of the law that governs the whole universe." 

Rakim - "Black Messiah"

With Fred Hampton Jr. (l) and DJ Free Leonard (r)

Every year around this time of year, Long Island Rap Records takes a week to celebrate the works of Rakim, one of the greatest poets and performers in history, who happens to be from Wyandanch, Long Island, and whose birthday happens to fall on January 28. A new Rakim song is always a cause for celebration and as it happens, the newest also fits into a playlist posted in a previous year's Rakim Week.  Released February 12, 2021, "Black Messiah" is an ode to Fred Hampton from the soundtrack to the biographical film, Judas and the Black Messiah, about the Black Panther Party leader and his betrayal at the hands of FBI informant William O'Neal. In his autobiography, Rakim wrote about his love of biographies, so it's no surprise that his song about Hampton succeeds in telling the revolutionary's story with much the same resonance as the Oscar-winning film. What is surprising is that Rakim was able to bang the song out in one day at the request of Fred Hampton Jr. himself (per a lecture at Grand Rapids Community College).

 

 "Black Messiah" has been added to Long Island Rap Records' YouTube playlist of Rakim's Soundtrack Work, which first launched in February 2018 and has been updated several times since.

Eric B. & Rakim - "In The Ghetto" (Break Plissken 11 Minutes of Minneapolis Remix)

Per Break Plissken, this mix was recorded on May 25, 2020 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

"Paid In Full" (Julio "Ton" Rodriguez Edit)

One of my personal favorite posts from seven years (!!!) of doing these Rakim Weeks is 2017's Behind the Boards of Coldcut's "Paid In Full" 7 Minutes of Madness Mix, and one of the things I like most about that remix is how, in a way, it foreshadowed the kind of anarchistic bricolage aesthetic that would later become a hallmark of the duo's Ninja Tune label. No doubt that remix arguably forever altered the course of hip-hop and music in general.

Back on this side of the pond, though, there was another 7-plus-minute remix of "Paid In Full." This one, which was issued on a white label sometime in the late 1980s with remixes of KRS-One and Public Enemy songs, was actually done exlusively for the club but ended up getting bootlegged and released without the remixer's name attached to it. Fast-forward decades: shortly after the remix is posted to YouTube in 2011, Julio "Ton" Rodriguez pops up in the comments claiming it as his own and providing a back-story on how it came to be. Rodriguez introduced himself as a DJ who did arrangements and editing work for Pal Joey, and said he put together this remix along with the KRS-One edit for Roman Ricardo to spin at Club 1018 (formerly The Roxy in Chelsea, Manhattan). "However, it got in the hands of the wrong person, and ... I never got recognition for the work I performed," he explained.

Ton's props may be long overdue but they're certainly deserved. An edit of the Coldcut remix, this version does seem to have a more distinctly New York club flavor than the British source material. Check it out below, along with the KRS-One "My Philosophy" edit that accompanies it.

Rakim's "My Melody" Jazz Demo with DJ Maniack & Stevie Blass Griffin

In the 2018 edition of Rakim Week, I shared a two-part documentary by James "Kraze" Billings called Check Out My Melody. If you haven't already watched this in full, do that. If you have, you should remember the clip of the pre-Eric B. jazz version of "My Melody" that played at the start of the second part. How could you forget it? 

For years since that documentary came out, I've been hoping the full track would surface. Sadly, that still hasn't happened. However, earlier this year, Kraze posted the entirety of his interview with Rakim's early DJ and producer, DJ Maniack, portions of which appeared in the documentary. Here, Maniack shares his recollections of several iterations of "My Melody" that were recorded before before Eric B. and Marley Marl entered the picture. These include the aforementioned jazz version.

As DJ Maniack (pictured on the left, above) recalls, "Me and Griff [Rakim’s older brother Stevie “Blass” Griffin] had already made this jazz tune. Griff had invented this jazz tune. He taught me how to play this melody while he played the bass line, and then he played some chords on top of that while I added some DJ stuff, and it was a jazz tune — it was really hot. And Rakim came and laid the 'Melody' lyrics over that jazz tune and we recorded that… That was the second 'Melody.'"

Below you can watch the full interview with DJ Maniack and stream or download the 41-second clip of Rakim's "My Melody" jazz demo with musical accompaniment by Blass (pictured below) and Maniack.

Chuck D Interviews Rakim