It’s Sunday so not to sound like a televangelist but I’m about to dress like an old-timey, fast-talking frontier town preacher (a la Sauce in the artwork for this single) and hit y’all with a little with a little gospel, the Ghetto Gospel that is. This is Sauce Walka at his downright, well, sauciest. Spitting some real knowledge/life experience over a shimmery beat apparently from Kingdom Hearts (and French Montana). I can’t blame him for having his mind on boudan; and all this talk of boudan has got me feeling like Kevin Belton. It’s too early to say but definitley could be in the mix for a song of the year contender for me.
Just wanted to say RIP to C Struggs. I feel bad he died he always seemed like a genuine dude to me and someone who had some real substance to their music. Someone who had been through a lot of storms in life but was still standing and pursuing their dream. He also definitely wasn’t chasing trends or changing his style to try to get more popular, he made real music just telling his own story and in a style that listeners of a certain age will appreciate. It’s sad he died of cancer because I know from IG that he was putting a lot of effort into getting into better health by eating healthier and working out, which I know all too well myself is a hard process to begin and follow through with, and then you get taken out by something like that.
This was one of my favorite songs by him; so many real lines…
“I was 17, tryna win a state ring, niggas gave me hell for tryna do the right thing”
“Born broke as shit, now I run the bands up, still fat as fuck but that don’t stop my grind bruh.”
“My daddy died in 98 that was a bad year, but that was the same year my life got a little clear, I met God, got out the streets, started doing shit right, fast forward 8 years I be back earning stripes”
This came out so dope with that heavenly Stan Getz sax sample and the way H-Town’s DJ Mr Rogers cut it up. I played the part in the middle where he’s working on the beat over and over again, it was so relaxing and hypnotic to watch/listen to. The ’25 Lighters’ and ‘I Get Money’ snippets he added in were nice touches too. Would love to see this turn into an actual song on an official release from Le$. Mr. Rogers really worked his magic on this one.
20 years later and The Leprechaun has still got it!
It takes a minute or so to get going but once Lil Flip hits his stride he burns down this freestyle over the G-Eazy ‘No Limit’ beat, which is awesome, because the beat isn’t bad but I can’t stand the actual song or most of the artists on it. Just replace them all with Lil Flip and the chorus to Bay Bay marching in place yelling ‘Rock with us and get some money’ like in the video. Side note – I love how hyped up BayBay gets for this freestyle, and his antics that go along with it like acting like he’s riding a motorcycle or sprinting like a track star.
“I be in these Texas streets. Last night, threw 500 at XTC!”
“I still do this for Pimp and Fat Pat, free Twisted Black, and I’m still here, in a white Wraith looking like veneers, cheers, I used to shop at Sears, now I appear in movies like Richard Gere. One million wasn’t enough I had to get 3. I tell ’em smoke something B, that’s for Pimp C, I’m an underground king like Bun B, 25 choppers if you jump me.”
“The Wraith paid off, the Bentley truck next, you ain’t nothing man you know we rep Tex. Man this is H-Town, the real H-Town, if rap don’t work we got bricks on the Greyhound. 25 lighters on my dresser, yessir, you ain’t smoking gas like a Tesla. This a freestyle dog I ain’t write this. If you gon pimp dog, you better get a white chick.” (The real H-Town line was my favorite of the song but I couldn’t pass up the Sears/Richard Gere line as the title of this post just because of how ridiculous it is).
I love the look on Bay Bay’s face when Flip says ‘Shoot you and then give it to Bay Bay now that’s a flea flicker’ he looks like he’s excited but then he’s like ‘Oh wait a minute I don’t want to be holding this’ lmao. “Wooooo!”
I also like all the Texas/Houston pride here from the shoutouts to departed Texas legends like Pimp C and Fat Pat and imprisoned ones like Twisted Black, to naming restaurants like Ojos Locos and local streets in Dallas plus of course about a half dozen Houston and Dallas strip clubs, of course. The Houston Rockets t shirt is sick too.
I love all these OG’s in the game dropping stuff lately to show that they’re still a force to be reckoned with. The mix of Flip’s great voice and clever punch lines mixed with his high level of Texas/Houston pride and local references makes this a dope and memorable addition to the canon.
Rap songs named after NBA players just seems like a natural combination and a tale as old as time, really anything from Young Dolph’s ‘Lebron’ to Starlito’s ‘Black John Stockton’. We get another addition to that proud pantheon with Sheck Wes’ ‘Mo Bamba’ except that not only is Mo Bamba not an NBA player, he’s actually yet to enter the college ranks and suit up for the Texas Longhorns for the first time. The 7-foot tall center out of Harlem, the #4 overall player in 2017’s ‘ESPN 100′ chose Texas over Duke, Kentucky, and Michigan, and will be starring for the Longhorns this fall, so I figured Wes Sheck was from Texas but he and Bamba are fellow Harlemites.
“I be ballllllin’, like a motherf*ckin pro, I be baaallllin’, like my nigga Mooooooo”
The way Wes sings and drags out the words, pro, Mo, etc. in his gravelly voice is almost so abrasive that it becomes instantly catchy and melodic, almost like some of Tay K’s recent songs, or Chief Keef’s more experimental work, or of course XXXtentacion, but it is also his own unique spin on it. I also like the way he switches up his flow at about the 1:40 mark and goes into overdrive. The light beat by 16yrold and Take a Day Trip is really nice and goes perfect with the blunt vocals.
I would love to see Texas Longhorns run out onto the court with this as their intro music for home games this season but I’m not quite sure that that will happen, but alas a blogger can dream right?
After ‘The Race’ mania from the last few weeks I decided to check out Tay K’s “Santana World” mixtape (which admittedly wasn’t any huge commitment on my end since I’d be surprised if the 8 tracks clock in at more than 20 minutes) and there were definitely some more slaps on there.
My favorite of these was ‘Dat Way’. While sunnier and more cheerful sounding than ‘The Race’ it’s similar in the way that Tay K takes an extremely simple, lo-fi kind of catchy beat and just kills it. It almost reminds me of vintage Chief Keef from when he would crush fuzzy, simple, happy-sounding beats like on ‘Citgo’ and the cheerfulness or haziness of the beat would belie the menacing flow and subject matter. Tay K seems to be another master of this art, between this song, ‘The Race’ and also check out his latest ‘Lay Low’ for another good example. This is definitely one of those short, 2-minute type songs that you’ll play 20 times a day the first few days after you hear it.
Tay K’s future output is obviously uncertain given the extensive legal troubles facing him, but it seems like new songs are coming out post-incarceration, so hopefully he has a stockpile of material in the safe somewhere that can be released periodically going forward.
A lot of ink has already been spilled over this barely over a minute and a half long video by this teenage Texas rapper Tay K so I’m not going to go too far into the backstory. ‘The Race’ has already racked up over 12 million views in a mere 3 weeks since being posted on Youtube and is currently the #2 song on all of Soundcloud (behind only the seemingly insurmountable ‘Bodak Yellow’), thanks to the infectiousness of the song combined with the dark back story surrounding it. Tay K is almost like a rap game Icarus, with a meteoric rise to fame quickly followed by a shockingly fast fall from grace. (I’m aware that he had somewhat of a following before ‘The Race’ but let’s be honest this song took his fame to a whole different level and put him into the mainstream consciousness). At the risk of sounding like I’m trying to make some kind of bold statement, the whole thing kind of reminds me of an XXXtentacion, in that they’re both rappers who were finding some baseline of fanbase via their output but then whose notoriety from their criminal exploits propelled them to previously unforeseen levels of infamy.
There’s something about this DJ Screw remix that just reminds me of spring and simpler times, so I wanted to post this today. Something about this gem just makes me think of spring time, March Madness NBA playoffs, Easter, Shamrock Shakes from McDonald’s and riding around town in an old school in the nice weather. I have the vaguest memories of linking this up with one of those tape adapters that allowed you to play your Ipod in old cars and bumping this on a nice March or April day in my first car, a baby blue 1987 Cadillac Deville. Does life get any better than that?
In essence, the song is a remake of a remake, since its Screw working his magic and putting his own touch on ‘Scandalous’ a 1995 song by The Click, a group most prominently featuring E-40. Scandalous itself borrowed the beat and hook from Zapp’s ‘Computer Love’. Somehow, slowed down and ‘chopped and screwed’ by ‘The Originator’ himself, the remake takes on a totally different vibe and a life of its own. With all due respect to The Click Screw’s version outgrew the original and became a classic. There’s something about the way he slows down the way Roger Troutman sings ‘Scandalous’ in the chorus and accentuates the ‘electronic’ or ‘robotic’ quality of it that just makes it so memorable and emphatic that it has always stayed in my mind 10 years later long after the first time I heard it.
I also love the ‘I keep a chopper ’cause I’m tryna get paid, gotta shake these city slickers out of my way’ line. Whoever made the collage for this song on Youtube did a great job of making a touching tribute to Screw. Gotta love the White Sox jersey he’s wearing in it and the Chicago Bulls windbreaker; so 90s!
Screw was a genius in the truest sense of the word, and the fact that this loose track he threw together so many years ago has stayed in my mind so many years after I initially heard it speaks volumes about his impact and how far ahead of his time he was. It also shows how wide-reaching and expansive his expertise was – in the early/mid 90s you didn’t have the luxury of just jumping on the internet and having any music you wanted instantly accessible to you, which makes Screw’s selections of this (and other) songs to remix even more impressive and shows how remarkably resourceful he was. He was remixing everything from his own Screwed Up Click artists to E-40 and Tupac to Michael Jackson and Phil Collins long before the days of Pandora and Spotify.
While this burgeoning musical genius was taken away long before his time, he was so productive and dynamic of an artist that there are literally hundreds if not thousands of songs-worth of material that he lives on through and that fans can go through before they’ve heard everything in his expansive catalog. RIP Screw!
