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.

 

PlusNone & Marlo DeMore - Imported Diesel

I first heard Marlo DeMore going on 10 years ago. I had just started this site and was searching Soundcloud for music to write about. Lo and behold, here was a rapper living around the way from where I grew up, and he had a show coming up at the pool hall I used to hang out at every weekend. The pool hall I used to hang out at every weekend did rap shows, what? A kid named Theravada also performed. It was a great show. A good time was had by all. Today, Imported Diesel dropped. Also today, I'm married to a beautiful woman who's my best friend and a physicist. We own a house in Lido Beach about a half mile from the Atlantic Ocean. It has a pool, too. All my enemies are dead, truly. 

Nikmoody - "Say It Twice" ft. Marlo DeMore

Most everybody can appreciate art that's so bad it's good, or at least we can all appreciate this being a thing. What now concerns me is the opposite. What about art that's so good it's bad? Not bad as in good, but bad-bad, awful, sucking hard. Today, I watched The Whale and concluded that this too is a thing. The Whale is a brilliant film. Anyone who says they enjoyed watching it is a liar or masochist. The Whale is like The Witch if it were set in a condominium and centered around food and Moby Dick instead of a goat and the devil. The Whale is so good I almost made myself watch Sound of Freedom afterward as a palate cleanser. I'm not saying The Cypher Tape, Nikmoody's album with 50 rappers on it, is so good it's bad. But the thought occurs. Anyway, here's the song with Marlo on it. Nikmoody has an EP called Rabbit's Foot coming January 31. Marlo DeMore has one called Imported Diesel coming January 24 (release party Jan. 26).

KAD - KADZLAB TAPE TWO

From Metal Face Akademy bomb shelter rubble rise a new crop of villainous rabble rousers. There's a Bronx-based self-proclaimed bot acting as such, launching album promotions as daily spam attacks, with no fewer than two more bombardments to come. And now here comes doom legionnaire KAD, riding the drive-in theatre intermission wave to concession stand infamy. Does he get in a few good licks?  Do prison reform programs channel car thieves to tow truck companies?

Armand Hammer & JPEGMAFIA - My Thoughts On Barbarians Dying

Extrasensory perception is just extra-sensitive hearing, the ability to tap someone's subvocalization, i.e,. thought patterning its way to speech. Ever go to a rap show and feel like you knew all the words to a song even though you'd only heard it once or twice? Or never? Ever rap along to a song's first performance? Of course, this could go the other way, too—a much more common occurrence I'd imagine. ROME is my favorite album of all time. "Barbarians" runs neck and neck with "Pakistani Brain" for my favorite song on my favorite album of all time. A fun little aside here: one time in Minneapolis, when Armand Hammer was supporting Ceschi, they opened with "Pakistani Brain" (as they often did for a stretch), and I forgot the opening lines to woods' first verse three times in a row. Living out there, imagining some rivalry between Minnesota and Wisconsin sports teams, I kept wanting to jump into "Whitey swept through like Green Bay," the beginning of his second verse. I believe I only made the mistake aloud once. But I digress. One might could say the way "Barbarians" bled into "Overseas" set the stage for the sequencing of every Armand Hammer album thereafter. It also made putting together this blend of "Barbarians" and "My Thoughts On Neogaf Dying" significantly more challenging than it sounds. In celebration of Peggy's placements all over We Buy Diabetic Test Strips, a phenomenal musical reunion, albeit one potentially overshadowed by DJ Stitches' involvement with the WBDTS Players, here's that blend. After after you might be surprised who’d clap, who scattered, who’d survive, who captured, with the Jew in the rafters. Free every goddamn body. Happy Chanukah.

KILLKURT - KURT MUST DIE 3

Just because you're paranoid do[es]n't mean they're not after you. The best freestyles ever recorded likely live only in a megamarket corporate office's Google Drive folder labeled surveillance footage. May a sentient language model one day learn from it to unironically obsolete another executive position. Get rich and dine tyrant, the most dangerous game. In this sense, KURT MUST DIE 3 recalls an anecdote, mysteriously wiped from the internet, about Marx and Engels walking the streets of London. Passing some royal estate or another, Engels says imagine, one day nobody will live like this anymore, to which Marx goes nah, bro, everyone's going to live like this, like, that's the whole point.

Anna Catalanotto & Fony Wallace - Mind Of Horror With A Pretty Girl Aura

"I can't, I can't vibe with none of you. I don't even want to." That used to be me talking to the tools at Home Depot when dad dragged me along as a kid. Now, I find myself making lists of things I need to get there. Move two-to-three-prong outlet adapters to the top of that list. "Truth Hurts Interlude" yields the blunted-edge lyric at the top of this post. As it happens, it also concisely summarizes the Rakim-Dre collaboration that never was. But I digress. Mind Of Horror With A Pretty Girl Aura has more than a lovely voice and a clever near-rhyme going for it. Catalanotto and Wallace's tragic siren call also has vinyl, CDs, shirts and stickers, oh my. Vibe with all that and then some.

Gray to Dayglo: Black & White Roots of the Daisy Age

November 11, 2021, Bonhams London, New Bond Street sells at auction Six Original Studies for the De La Soul '3 Feet High and Rising' Debut Album Artwork at 32,250 British pound sterling. The auction house describes the lot's centerpiece as a "black and white photographic print with Posca paint pen art work on acetate overlay bearing the band and album name with floral design motifs, adhered with small pieces of tape to each side, stamped Grey Organisation along lower right margin." May 21, 1985, the Gray Organisation (GO) artists collective executes an "art terrorist attack" on London's Cork Street galleries, splattering their front windows with grey paint. Some years later, GO founder Toby Mott has De La Soul over to the collective's Grand Street, Manhattan loft for the 3 Feet High and Rising cover shoot. Prior to this encounter, Mott and co. film the video for "Potholes in My Lawn" in Amityville. The Super 8 recording begins in anarchic black-and-white stop-motion not so far removed from the Organisation's founding aesthetic. "We parodied yuppie and Soviet corporate monoculture with our uniformed anonymity, shaved heads, white shirts, English suits, making and exhibiting art as product without individual authorship, something inspired from the rigorous orthodoxy of Crass." The video ends in color. The cover shoot follows a similar trajectory. "We laid the trio down on the floor of our loft with their heads almost touching and took a black and white photo from above. They seemed mystified. We added the dayglo background and, since the daisy-age concept suggested flowers, I drew some on with Posca paint pens, which were the new thing, very popular with graffiti artists." Thus, from the Situationist International origins of Crass (dé)collage, filtered through an acid house revival of psychedelic flower power, "The whole visual identity of the Daisy Age was born." Bonus trivia: Mott goes on to operate the Biz Markie puppet on the cover of Master Ace's "Me and the Biz" single and direct the video for Public Enemy's "Shut 'Em Down."