Sometimes you have to go analog. One of the great underrated production teams in hip hop history has been the house ensemble for Rap-a-Lot Records, who made some banging ass perfect to ride to beats. “Wood Wheels” or “Ever So Clear” could play for hours and not get old. Pitch shift it down and it’s even better. Only dude I remember is John Bido, but they had a slew of dudes involved, sampling, recreating funk bass lines with live musicians, and it’s some solid shit. Yet you can’t find nice instrumental collections of Rap-a-Lot Records hits anywhere inside the internet. You can find instrumental packages of every goddamned J. Dilla-wannabe with some sci-fi comic book name that’s out there today, but no Rap-a-Lot.
So I’ve gone back to the record collection, the one that is separated between about 1000 in the house on an unfinished bookshelf, and the other 1000 or so out in the camper, digging through the vinyl and getting the original singles I had, ones I collected fresh out the box back in the days, as well as the secret gems dug out the dollar bins in the basement of Plan 9 Carytown, trying to say ahead of hipster dorkism record store pricing. But like I said, there’s no Rap-a-Lot instrumentals clogging up mediafire links right now, so I could probably stroll into the basement this Saturday and find a stack of old shit that they don’t even know about.
Not Devin the Dude though. He has crossed over from simple Rap-a-Lot artist to Something Hipsters Know About, probably because being high is part of his schtick and because he’s not a scary black guy. Devin has some all-time classics, usually about one or two per album; but he also suffers from the Rap-a-Lot disease, which is there’s usually about three or four songs that should’ve just not been included at all. That’s also kinda what makes Rap-a-Lot so great, because it never was a major label where you had long-time record industry insiders steering the final product. It’s an underground street label where drug money was most likely laundered into a legitimate business. It was either this or a rim shop (or both, if you a true baller). And there’s something beautiful about those underground joints, stupid songs that never should’ve been made, or crews with names that sound like they made them up in 8th grade gym class, or album covers done on a computer rented at Kinko’s for about an hour and a half one Thursday afternoon. It’s fucking perfect.
This is a Devin the Dude song about getting high and about being poor, both staples of Devin’s appeal. It also is a good fucking song. I would like to think I could find the 12-inch of this in the basement of Plan 9 for a dollar, but more than likely I would not, and if I looked on ebay, it would be Buy It Now for $9.99, which goes against both getting high and being poor in general principle, therefore does not make sense. Instead I can just dig out “Wood Wheel” or maybe “Cadillac on 22s” and put it on my USB turntable (which marries analog to digilog) and rip it into Audacity so that I can just repeat it for about four hours straight. (This reminds me I have a bootleg version of ProTools to install, but at the same time, the full extent of my desire to record and make homemade music is to loop some stupid shit, slow it down in Audacity, record some hobo rap nonsense, warping the vocals, and exporting it as an MP3.)
In fact, I think I’m gonna go plug in the USB turntable (it’s in the camper) and play some old ass The Band records right now. It just makes better sense. It is Thanksgiving and I was gonna buy “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” at the Itunes store, but they only sold it as part of the full album for $9.99, and not as a single song. Thus I realize stealing music is more appropriate, because I’m not paying $10 for an Arlo Guthrie digital purchase. And then I figured why even bother stealing it and have those brain waves of evil shoot through my house? I’ll just play “Up On Cripple Creek” instead.
STEAL “Doobie Ashtray”
NEXT UP: My wife’s favorite – screwed and chopped norteno music!
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