Keda Face - MOTIVATED

Keda Face's recent birthday bash was deejayed by the rap radio institution, Funk Master Flex. Thus, please feel free to read this post in his voice(💣🔥). New York, I'm so serious right now (💣🔥). I've been doing this a long time, OK? For those who don't know, Long Island is very much in the building. But there's one rapper from Long Island in particular right now, a young lady by the name of Keda Face (💣💣🔥🔥), who has really impressed me. She's a lovely young woman who is very much about her business, OK. And that business ... is bars (💣💣💣🔥🔥🔥). {Growling.} Suffolk County, Long Island, New York, please understand I am so MOTIVATED right now (💣💣🔥🔥🔥).

4DHxH & Azomali - "2:22 A.M."

I love a wild moniker. Case in point: the Outer Galactic Marauder Faction. This [landing] site's interdimensional observers might recall the name from a series of visual communiques Blaq Kush launched several years back, called Kushan Sundaze. The second installment of that series featured Kush along with his fellow Faction founders, including one by the name of 4DHxH, a relatively innocuous handle, that is, until one comes to find it stands for Fourth Dimensional HitchHiker! 

Time-warp to December 12, 2022, whence 4D has teamed with the elusive 1492 auteur Azomali for a one-off called "2:22 A.M." Speaking to the titular subject, the artist formerly known as Kaotik Ellement raps, "Overlook the Earth from the distance before the shine within / I do not understand Father Time so why would I align with him?" This, of course, could also be heard as a response to any and all Azomali acolytes asking how long it'll be until his next album drops, which is to say, probably a while and also it's already here, as it's always been.

Ry'lea - RESIDENCY

Six years ago, I was living in a shotgun-style one-bedroom near the border-zone of Floral Park, Elmont and Stewart Manor (in the latter technically, at the garden apartments pictured in the "Me, Myself And I" element on this page; if you know, you know) and working an 8:30-5:30 in nearby Garden City. The commute was easy. Nothing else was. Anyway, one morning as I was leaving for work, on the way downstairs I heard a frantic commotion. It was the adult daughter of the old lady who lived beneath me, screaming in a panic, having found her mother in the throes of a stroke or seizure of some kind. Their door was open so I saw this happening. I ran in, called 9-1-1 and did what I could to help. Thankfully, the ambulance came quick and the old lady survived to spend some more time with her family. I lived in that building longer than I've lived anywhere other than my parents' house. Eventually, the old lady died. One day afterward, in her apartment, her family mourned her passing in song. It was one of the most beautiful sounds I've ever heard, the complete opposite of the fearful cries that had delayed my commute some months prior. Ry'lea's "Tilted Halo" had me thinking about this. I don't know why exactly, probably in part because I'm listening to it the day after attending a wake, but also maybe partly because it speaks to the kind of perfect imperfections that make the universe what it is and life worth living long.

 

AWOL Da Mindwriter & JHershey - "Screaming Down the Block"

Cheat code for anyone who wants to see their music featured on this site, be it for the first time ever or in a while: make music with someone else who's been featured here. Not saying I don't love to hear an artist making her/his own lane, just that it's always nice to imagine someone on LI hearing someone else on LI (maybe from this site, maybe from up the block) and getting together on the strength of what they heard.

"Screaming Down the Block" features AWOL da Mindwriter, whose raps you might've heard previously on this site, rapping over a beat by JHershey, whose beats you might've heard previously on this site. Or maybe you've heard nothing because you don't even exist, and I'm doing all this for my own personal edification. Whatever, I had fun. And from the sounds of it, so did AWOL as he yelped and yammered on this track like a young Busta Rhymes reborn to predict Armageddon all over again. 

He Did It for Us: RIP Dave

For me, De La Soul has always been one of the most natural rap groups of all time. I don't mean to say that their music stems naturally from the earth, or spiritually from some ethereal plane as their name might be read to imply. I mean that their members complement one another so well, it's hard to imagine one without the others. Pos and Dave rap like lifelong friends in conversation, starting, continuing, and finishing each others' sentences, their exchange-routines so fluid the numbers 1 and 2 become more for the audience's benefit than anything else. I cannot begin to imagine what Posdnuos and Maseo are going through. 

The singular expression of the human experience Dave shared with the world through his words and voice goes far beyond music. In that sense, it's futile to lament how much the world loses in his absence. It's a shame that De La Soul's legacy and Dave's obituaries seem forever tied to industry politics when their art has so much more to offer; as reductive as dismissing the group as hippies or hearing Stakes Is High only as a reaction to the commodification of hip-hop culture. Those who wish to dwell on these points might do well to check out First Serve, Dave and Pos' 2012 concept album where they play two 20-somethings with a dream of making it in the rap game of that era. Ironically, this project, which has never not been available online, says more about industry politics than any article ever written on De La Soul's relationship with sampling and streaming.

On First Serve, Dave portrays not only one of the two main characters, rapper Dean "D" Witter, but also D's mother, Lenore Agnes Witter. I was playing the album on my way to work this past week. Ma Witter's appearance on "Clash Symphony" elicited in me one of those deep belly laughs, a kind of catharsis I guess. 

Am I just another lost in the pack? 

We Horshack shit, you know, laugh it off

The years just blow by

My eyes stay fixed but the picture's kind of out of focus

I cry a lot but admit to it

Enjoying life now but I been through it

Sometimes I wish that I can go back

No bills, no kids, just getting to' back

I want a wife, I love women

How could I front like I don't be in love with 'em

A little man that I could teach

A little sand but not the beach

I figure excess'll only bring an excessive amount of fuss

So when I'm gone make sure the head stone reads he did it for us

I'm like a modern-day Jesus

I cherish warm thoughts like a Grey Goose

And float soft kisses to my baby (Yo ain't that Dave's little girl?)

Yeah, respect for that, she gonna be somebody

Instead of somebody baby mama

You see, young minds are now made of armor

I'm tryna pop a hole in your Yankee cap, absorb me

The skies over your head ain't safe no more

And hip-hop ain't your home

And if it is you fucking up the crib, son

You make life look like I don't wanna live one

You might as well hold your breath until you die in a corner

Somewhere bent over in the crevice

This God theory overcomes the worst of weathers

As long as you willing to try

You on a good start, homie

You on a good start so get to trying

People are you ready?

Are you really ready?

Ready for the change that may approach you?

Follow down the path that you supposed to

People are you ready?

Are you really ready to try?

You know mistakes are trials that we learn from

In order to live life, you must earn one

People are you ready?

RIP David "Trugoy" Jolicoeur. 

(Everyone reading this, be sure to run up these De La Soul album pre-orders.)

Billie Ski Mask - F Love

In anticipation of Valentine's Day, F Love. In a world of AI language models that couldn't ghostwrite a Ghostface verse if their coding depended on it, there's some comfort in knowing that Billie Ski Mask fucked your bitch in the metaverse. ChatGPT can't seem to figure out that Wu-Tang and Tribe aren't from Long Island, but at least your bitch has been fucked in the metaverse. Ask ChatGPT to review F Love and it'll spit some jive talk about not knowing any albums from after 2021. Inform it that several earlier Billie Ski Mask releases are available and it'll continue to play dumb. Clearly, ChatGPT feels a certain type of way about Billie Ski Mask having fucked its bitch in the metaverse.

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.