What Is the Soundtrack for Urban Renewal?

DaVinci - "What You Finna Do" (Music Video) from Sweetbreads Creative Collective on Vimeo.

I was just about to condemn Davinci to the internet buzz cycle. This video is a well-filmed little slice of Bay Area life in noir et blanche, but the track was very bland to me. Very low-key, with some thoughtful dialogue interspersed with hustle raps. It's pretty insane how fast this dude moved from anonymous rapper dude 3 days ago to having Noz post this video up on Cocaine Blunts and having BlvdSt.com and Maurice Garland, among others, cosigning the fuck outta him. I honestly was skeptical, but shit. This. Album. Goes. Hard.

A couple posts ago I wrote up about "Southern reality rap" as a new thematic movement in rap coming up in 2010. However, I think dropping the "Southern" out of it might be a good idea, if Davinci (and Lil B, though his reality is not a reality being experience by anyone except Martians) are any indication. The Day the Turf Stood Still is a GREAT example of "reality rap", and it's also unlike any rap album I've heard in some time. Beatwise, the album sounds like a hybrid of well-worn East Coast soul sample beats and thumping Bay Area slaps. Like I wrote in the reality rap post, the producers behind this album seemed to have worked pretty closely with Davinci, creating an album where the lyrics, voice, and beat have a deep and complex interplay, to the point it's hard to imagine another rapper working as well as Davinci does over these instrumentals.

The real draw, and something I haven't heard in a minute from the Bay Area, is a completely different style lyricist and MC that Davinci embodies. While E-40 continues to do his thing, Lil B spins further into the collective Internet consciousness, and the Livewire gang makes us all remember what it means to be an 80s baby, Davinci is drawing from truly gritty East Coast and Southern styles, but filtering it through his life in a rapidly-gentrifying Bay Area. The last 5 or 6 years in rap since the hyphy movement exploded and then the whole scene had it's post-thizz comedown, it seems like most critics have either lauded (or written off) the entire region as "weird", and dudes like E-40 and Lil B have more or less supported that notion. What has been totally missed in all that is that it's still ground zero for a lot of class and political struggle, as well as everyday struggle for people there. Davinci is a gifted MC: crafting an album full of verses like

The corner up the street used to be the spot/
till they replaced all the liquor stores with coffee shops/
I ain't sayin' it's a bad thing/
but where am I supposed to hustle at?

and not sound like a PHd candidate masking as a street corner hustler is not easy, but he manages. Davinci wants to show you this street scene all around him in the Bay Area, and he films it in IMAX with his words.

Don't say I didn't tell you: REALITY RAP IS THE MOVEMENT IN 2010!

Below is the link for The Day the Turf Stood Still, which you can download for free or buy.

Davinci- The Day the Turf Stood Still

The Box: A Personal Retrospective

Literally the only image I could find of The Box logo

Noz' post today about Common included the video for "One-Nine-Nine-Nine", one of my favorite videos and songs from my childhood. That song still has a strong resonance with me, remaining one of the only Common songs I've ever really liked, and one of the few tracks from the Rawkus discography I listen to with any regularity. There is a frustratingly scattershot revue of rap songs I remember playing a formative role in my childhood, and which I still cherish to this day, all of which came via the holy grail of bootleg television channels, The Box.

When I was growing up, up until my freshmen year of high school, I did not have cable television in my house. We were a strictly network TV family, which means I had access to CBS, ABC, NBC, two PBS channels, Fox, and sometimes UPN. The only real access I had to MTV or BET was when I was hanging out at a friend's house or something like that. Instead, most of the music I heard outside of the radio came from channel 14, the scratchy, grainy, might-have-been-pirated channel known as The Box. Except for maybe The Simpsons, The Box is the favorite thing I remember from my childhood experience with television.

According to its Wikipedia page, The Box started in 1985 as a byproduct of the Miami Bass scene, and by the early 90s has spread to a number of different locales around the country. The "catch" about The Box, which I still think is a great look, is that they offered a constantly rotating list of videos which were like a really good radio playlist that were tailored to the region each channel was broadcasting in, which meant it was possible to see huge hit videos and obscure local videos. Richmond's list was almost entirely (though as you'll see in a second, not completely) rap; the only other Box channel I ever experienced was the in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and the playlist for that was virtually all nu-metal bands- I distinctly remember seeing videos for Good Charlotte and Kittie on there (it was also vastly clearer than The Box in Richmond, which was sometimes unable to be picked up by my TV).

On top of that, viewers could call in, and for 99 cents a pop, choose whichever video they wanted to see on the channel. This was kind of a gift and a curse for a small network. On the one hand, viewers had almost total control over the programming for the channel; it was possible to watch the "Can I Get A..." video 50 times in a row if you wanted to. However, The Box was a small channel, and at least in Richmond it would sometimes sit desolate for hours. However, there were at least a few other people watching, as I never called in since I was like 10 and had no credit rating, and videos were playing on there at least semi-regularly.

Given the grainy video I was watching constantly, which was oftentimes punctuated by the surreal, low budget violence and sex so often seen in low-budget rap videos from the 90s, The Box has left me with a Videodrome-esque memory of a lot of rap music: many images and melodies etched into my brain, which I sometimes recall for no reason at all, but are often mostly lost to me. I distinctly remember loving a video by the Okayplayer-associated French duo Les Nubianes, but I don't remember anything about it other than I thought they were really attractive sisters (were they sisters?). There was also a commercial that aired for a Richmond-area rapper (I think) that was sepia-toned that included the lyric "try to find the key so I can open up the door", but that's all I can recall about it.

However, there were many, many videos which I was first exposed to there which I have come to love and cherish. Common feat. Talib Kweli and Sadat X- "One-Nine-Nine-Nine" was definitely one of them. I remember Common sitting in the wicker chair with the staff, as well as DJ Babu randomly showing up:



There were a lot of Cash Money videos that appeared on there, but the two that I remember the most were, obviously, Juvenile's "Ha" and, less obviously, Tear Da Club Up Thugs feat. the Hot Boys- "Playa Why U Hatin'":





Two of the craziest and weirdest rap videos ever, Wu-Tang's "Triumph" and Missy Elliott's "The Rain" (which has disabled embedding but you can see here):



Three random stray shots: JT Money's "Who Dat", E-40's "Earl, That's Yo Life" and Craig Mack's "Jockin' My Style"







Remember how I said there were a couple videos that were non-rap? I definitely remember Limp Bizkit's "Break Stuff" inexplicably being in heavy rotation:



These two were probably two of my favorites on the channel, and the two which sparked a casual interest in backpack rap around the turn of the milennium- Jurassic 5's "Quality Control", and Dilated People's "Worse Comes to Worst" (again, embedding disabled but available here):



The two best East Coast videos I remember, Gang Starr's "Full Clip" and Nas' "Nas Is Like":





Finally, the two videos which really unknowingly got me into Texas rap, as I would remember these songs the most after The Box was absorbed by MTV2 in 2001, DJ DMD's deathless "25 Lighters" and UGK's "Wood Wheel":






There are about a hundred more videos I could put up here, but I'm gonna stop here for now.

African by the Bay

The video and beat off for the lead single for E-40's new Sweat/Suit-style fake double album, Revenue Retrievin' (coming out March 30th), are pretty fucking great. So's Earl's rapping, but I'm not interested in talking about that in this post. Rick Rock's beat on "The Server" is a menacing slab of industrial stomp and well placed percussion, where maracas and woodblocks and deep synth bumps sit right alongside each other. It immediately reminds me of what would have happened if DJ Quik had combined the best aspects of "9x Outta 10" and "Moroccan Blues" off BlaQKout. The video makes this combination even more apparent, where dudes in prison shank each other with turkey bones while wearing war paint, and women in the same facepaint and grass skirts shake it while dudes in bongos sit near them in the middle of some Bay Area projects. It's a pretty thrilling track and video, and 40's wordplay, twisting and sliding off and on beat, is as compelling as ever (okay so maybe I did talk about his rapping a little bit).

All of this made me wonder if Rick Rock, E-40 ,or even the director of the video have heard Chief Boima's new EP, African by the Bay. Boima's a Bay Area producer that specializes in making dance music and remixes based on African electronic music from all over the map. I copped the EP about a month ago, and while occasionally it misses the mark, it's interesting to hear how well he incorporates the bounce and synths commonly found in African electronic music genre's like Kuduro and Kwaito into rap, particularly the post-hyphy sound being produced by rappers like The Jacka and J. Stalin these days. In fact, perhaps the best remix on the album is that of The Jacka track "Fabulous Lifestyle". It's amazing how natural the extra percussion sounds within the original, adding a whole bunch of small, moving parts to the fluttery beat of the original. In fact, the one original track on the EP, "Shake Them Dreads", features a lot of the same parts found in a typical track from someone like Rick Rock or Droop-E, just arranged differently and set to a different BPM. Interesting stuff.


I wonder if Timbaland ever feels like he peaked early. At this point, some of the most unique and refreshing production is coming out of the roots of the work he did in the early 00s. I don't think anyone finds that to be a shocking statement. But it would have been interesting to see where he would have gone had he not ended up teaming with Nelly Furtado and OneRepublic, or spending an unhealthy amount of time in the gym and receiving packages from BALCO. One of the few areas of the world Timbaland never seemed to consciously promote or draw influence from was sub-Saharan Africa (to my knowledge, if any readers can point me to some of his work that does I'd love to hear it). In addition to Chief Boima, who is drawing obvious connections between Timbaland synth gurgles (I see you, Tom Breihan) that Rick Rock and Droop-E are the standard bearers of now, and African electronic music, there's also Amon Tobin's Two Fingers project. Released last year, it also works in that area of fantasy that imagines "What if Timbaland ever visited Luanda?", something Noz wrote about a lot better than me a couple months back. Truth be told I can't get into this album fully, but the instrumental "Keman Rhythm" off the album is a monster, full of buzzing synths and djembes (you really need to listen to this on a system that can handle bass, but I would hope you already knew that if you listen to rap). I'd love to hear someone like 40 or Turf Talk rap over a track like this, though I guess "The Server" is a pretty good prototype of that right now.

Below are some MP3s of the tracks mentioned, as well as another highlight off the Chief Boima album, his remix of "Money to Blow" and the newly released video for my favorite E-40 associated track from last year, D-Lo's "No Hoe (Remix)":



The Jacka feat. Andre Nickatina- Fabulous Lifestyle (Original)
The Jacka feat. Andre Nickatina- Fabulous Lifestyle (Chief Boima Remix)
Chief Boima- Shake Them Dreads
Birdman feat. Drake and Lil Wayne- Money to Blow (Chief Boima Remix)
Two Fingers- Keman Rhythm