If you caught our interview with The Jacka from earlier this year, then you know that he and Lee Majors recently released an 80’s themed album called The Gobots 2: D-Boy Era. In the interview he also talked about having a collaboration album with Paul Wall in the works. Well “Patty Cake” ft. Paul Wall, the 2nd and most recent video off The Gobots 2, is probably a good example of what you can expect from both.
If you missed the first video from The Gobots 2, “Female Funk” ft. Shad Gee and Young Loxx, peep it after the jump. I actually prefer it to Patty Cake. Dope bass line, 80’s gear, and break dancers. Legit.
Although Hip-Hop and R&B have an inseparable connection to each other, it’s interesting to note the differences in how acts from each genre are talked about, presented, and judged. One of the biggest distinctions that I’ve noticed over the past few years is that in Hip-Hop, for better or worse, MC’s and producers can never escape from having a public identity that is attached to the region from which they came from. Despite doing music for Nas, Jay-Z, 50 Cent, Eminem, Young Buck, Scarface, Big Pun, Busta Rhymes, Raekwon, Devin The Dude and tons of other people from all over the country, Dr. Dre will always be considered a West Coast producer with a West Coast sound. It doesn’t matter what he does musically anymore, that’s just how he will forever be perceived. The same can be said for the above MC’s: despite working with producers and rappers from every coast, everything Jay-Z does is New York from top to bottom. It’ll never change, that’s just part of his identity. Yet that is not the case for R&B singers. Nobody has ever accused Beyoncé or Usher of having a Texas sound to their music. Personally, I think that a lot of this is due to the fact that rappers endlessly talk about where they’re from in their music, but unless your Alicia Keys singing a hook on a Jay-Z track, singers don’t really sing specifically about their home towns. In my opinion, this gives them a more universal appeal that has allowed artists like Mary J Blige to blow up across the world (she doesn’t have a single album or song title that mentions New York).
Not surprisingly this same phenomenon exists in The Bay. While our rap is so oriented specifically to where we’re from, and often times people in Northern California are fans of mediocre MC’s solely due to the fact that they rep the Bay hell of hard, there doesn’t seem to be any regional pride attached to our singers. As a result often times it is completely over looked that the Bay Area has had and continues to have a thriving R&B scene that has garnered millions of fans world wide. Most people (some even in The Bay Area) have no idea that En Vogue, Tony! Toni! Toné! (and thus Raphael Saadiq), or more recently Keyshia Cole and Goapele, are all from Oakland. This is largely because for the most part they don’t mention where they are from in their music, which has kept them from being put in that “Bay Area” box.
I’m not 100% sure how I feel about this issue. On the one hand I take genuine pride in where I’m from, and I love to see talented people do the same, but on the other I think undying loyalty to our region is pretty uninteresting and not relatable to the rest of the country/world, and therefore is a large reason why truly talented rappers never make it out of the Bay. I guess for me, if you’re from the same general vicinity as I am, and you are genuinely talented, I’m going to rep you whether you rep our home or not.
That ridiculously wordy introduction is relevant, because today I’m writing about Netta Brielle’s newest mixtape Love, Pain, & Music, which she is giving away for free at her bandcamp page: www.nettabrielle.bandcamp.com. For those not in the know, Netta is a bay area R&B singer that balances her universal appeal and the influence of where she’s from better than most. While you won’t hear her belting out odes to her home town of Berkeley, she does utilize the talents of many of the best local producers The Bay has to offer including: Traxamillion, Bedrock, and Money Alwayz, and you will find her doing remixes to local favorites like The Jacka’s Traxamillion produced hit “Glamorous Lifestyle”, singing hooks for local MC’s like Oakland’s Fly Street Gang, playing the lead role in Erk Tha Jerk’s video for “The Perfect Mistake” , and doing a grip of shows at local venues like The New Parish. That balance, matched with her exceptional voice, if combined with a drive to get her music heard throughout the country, could make her one of the only bay area R&B singers to break into the mainstream yet still be repped to the fullest at home.
Despite being the capital of the incredible and one of a kind state of California, Sacramento is a place that is rarely talked about unless the topic is government. The Kings have been on a downward spiral ever since Robert Horry’s miracle shot in 2002, and being that there isn’t any other sports teams, or major universities (besides Sac State), or any other national identity to the city, it just isn’t on most people’s radars. Even in California. The first time I went was when I was 22 years old, and I have been living in Ca my entire life, and specifically in the Bay for the vast majority of it. Pathetic on my part, I know.
Yet out of nowhere Macramento’s hip-hop scene has started to emerge on a national level. First the forgotten OG’s have been making a push for reemergence. Brotha Lynch Hung jumped back into the scene by getting signed to Tech N9ne’s Strange Music and releasing Dinner and a Movie, which was a pretty amazing yet dark and creepy piece of art that earned him his highest sales numbers since the mid-late 90’s. Additionally C-Bo has announced that he and Yukmouth are reuniting for another Thuglordz album which has surprisingly received more press than when they got together in the first place, which is lame because both aren’t what they once were on the mic. Yet Sac’s few familiar names are not the only ones making ripples in the music scene. Newcomer Bueno has teamed up with Grammy nominated producers Stereotypes and has been killing it with 808 and synth heavy trunk music (download his newest free mixtape Maloof Money 2here, ), while another relatively unknown rapper, C Plus, has earned some internet love on sites like 2DopeBoyz, download his newest mixtape, All On Me, here.
Yet while both Bueno and C Plus are undeniably grinding on their way to success, without a doubt the biggest new hip-hop artist out of Sac has got to be producer Lee Bannon. Not only has he provided tracks for MC’s from both coasts including Talib Kweli, Inspectah Deck, Consequence, Termanology, Skyzoo, Torae, The Jacka, UNI, and Strong Arm Steady, but he also produced the entirety of an 11 track EP with C Plus called The Smallest Giant (which is available for free here, and Never A Dull Moment with Michigan’s Wille The Kid which garnered a lot of hype, anticipation, and discussion on the net. While that would be enough for most people to cap off a quality 2010, Bannon released one more project for the internet to devour this month, this time pairing up with another Sacramento native named Chuuwee.
To start things off Hot N Ready is free, so make sure to go grab it here. Next, if no one told you anything about this 11 song, 18 minute project, I would be amazed if you guessed that this came out of the West Coast or was made in 2010. That is as long as you forgot about the fact that theres a song named Sac, and Chuuwee mention’s their city on more than a few occasions. The point I’m trying to make is that Bannon’s production has a raw vintage quality that is more akin to experimental east coast hip-hop from the 90’s than anything recent out of California other than Madlib. The samples are chalk full of static, hissing and pops that come from old records, and they all have a dark and eery feel to them that is far from representative of the California sunshine. Chuuwee fits right in on these beats as well. His subject matter is rugged and street oriented, but it is expressed with a vast vocabulary of multisyllabic words that would make him fit in perfectly as a Wu affiliate. I also really like his desire to keep his tracks short and with much more time spent on verses than hooks. I’m impressed with Chuuwee and surprised because I feel like someone with hunger and bars like him would have more of a following than he does. Hopefully this project gets things moving in the right direction.
If you’re from the Bay, and you’re at all interested in hip-hop, there are a handful of rappers that you can’t help but know about. E-40 and Too $hort top that list due to the consistency and longevity of their careers, as well as the fact that they singlehandedly created what the world now knows as independent hip-hop. Mac Dre might not be as known beyond Northern California as the previous two, but to the late 80’s and early 90’s babies in the Bay, he may be more important than 40 Water or Short Dog. Hate him or love him everyone know’s Keak Da Sneak because of his unmistakable voice and the massive amount of buzz he had after “Super Hyphy” and “Tell Me When To Go”. And Mistah F.A.B. ain’t no stranger either, because he is literally featured on 90% of the albums that come out of the Bay. Yet over the past few years, in the wake of the let down and arguable disaster that was the Hyphy movement, The Bay has been in need of a new MC that they could unanimously be proud to call their own. Someone who is genuine, free of gimmicks and uninterested in following trends. While by no means a newcomer to the hip-hop scene, The Jacka filled that void, and quickly went from an underground favorite, to getting constant play on the local radio, in the clubs, at house parties, and pretty much in the stereo of every car with serious slap in the back. If you’re from the Bay and haven’t heard The Jacka’s name, it’s not that you aren’t listening hard enough, it’s that you must not be listening at all.
Last years Tear Gas marked the peak of The Jacka’s notoriety locally and beyond thus far, but after getting the opportunity to catch up with him recently, he made it clear that he has no inclinations to let up any time soon. In this Zebra Is Food exclusive interview, The Jacka catches you up on the first three albums that he already released in 2010, as well the other projects he’s dropping this year such as: a group album with Freeway, a group album with Paul Wall, and the second volumes of his Gobots and Devilz Rejects series with Lee Majors and Ampichino respectively. That’s not to mention his future with Bay Area supergroup The Mob Figgaz, his relationship with The Mobfather, C-Bo, what it’s like working with his in house producer, Rob Lo (one of my all time favorite Bay Area producers), and much more.
Magazines like The Source and XXL often get criticized for being run by people whose bourgeois ideals compromise the integrity of what a rap magazine should logically be. This conflict opened a market for magazines like Ozone, which is pretty street-cred worthy, in that they have groupies give graphic depictions of what Rich Boy did to them one after twelve too many shots of Cognac. However, if you really want to get gully, peep Murder Dog. It’s somewhat similar to Ozone but twelve times more low-rent, they never use spell-check and the photos look like they were taken with a Kodak disposable.
Murder Dog also deserves credit (notice I said also-as in they deserve credit for being low-rent) for featuring many below-the-radar artists that XXL and Source would never feature, such as Keak Da Sneak and the Jacka. This month, Murder Dog is featuring Wale, who’s actually an odd-choice in that I don’t think the Murder Dog demographic is really going to grasp Wale’s collabs with the Tings Tings, Mark Ronson and TV on the Radio. However, Wale’s business plan of giving away free music and doing hella shows may be a potentially fruitful path for many fledgling Murder Dog-esque rappers to imitate. I shall be eager to read the article.
