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!
