Chromeo is a duo out of Canada that makes groovy, humorous, dance music, and I’ve been a fan of theirs for a while. They’ve got a new album coming out (their 3rd), and the first single is “Don’t Turn The Lights On”. I particularly like the video for it, watch it above. And check them out in their NYC lab below with Fader TV, showing off their ridiculous collection of keyboards and synths, and also discussing the new album, Business Casual.
These guys are cool, right? Business Casual drops September 14th…
I was DJ’ing the “Last Day of Summer Camp Carnival” on Friday, and after playing Usher and Justin Bieber etc. for a couple hours, I had to bring it back to my era for these kids and show them what was really good when I was in middle school. These are early 90’s throwback jams that used to have Eastview’s PRIDE DAY jumping! The videos are crack too. Boyz II Men “Motownphilly” up top and Bel Biv Devoe “Poison” below…
Stan’s Samples is a collection of some of my favorite songs I’ve sampled, looped up, or remixed, dating back to my first album. I’ve been wanting to put this project together for a while, and I finally did it! I think you’re gonna like it, especially if you’re a fan of all kinds of good music, and extra especially if you’re familiar with my rap song catalog. Here’s the tracklist, along with some sounds, visuals, and background stories for each song on the mix. And the download link is at the bottom…
1. The Meters “Cissy Strut” (sampled on “Ippy Strut”)
-I first heard this song in the movie Jackie Brown. Fell in love with The Meters after that. I’ve sampled them a couple times. “Ippy Strut” was from my first album, then I re-did it for IPmatic. This is as funky as an instrumental track can get.
2. Aaron Neville “She Took You For A Ride” (sampled on “Nothing U Can Do”)
-I found this song on a soul music blog, I forget which one. Always loved the Neville Brothers, but had never heard this particular Aaron Neville solo track before. Gave it to my boy Kaliph, and he flipped it nice. Peep the video for “Nothing U Can Do” if you missed it…
3. Style Council “Long Hot Summer” (sampled on “Dan Dynamite”)
-My cousin CI gave me this song and told me to sample it. It’s some fly 80’s euro shit. I listened to it on repeat forever because I just thought it was a great song, but wasn’t sure how I was gonna flip it. I finally looped it up a couple years later and wrote to it, then Max Bee added some instruments to when we recorded it. Really proud of how the final product came out.
4. Spoon “I Turn My Camera On” (sampled on “Hammer”)
-Oh man, I had this looped for months before I finally figured out what to do with it! Then the chorus popped into my head, and the rest is history. I know some other people will get credited, like Kanye West or Kid Cudi, for sampling indie rock shit first, but for real I was on it before them. I’m a big indie rock guy. Check the video of me and Matty B performing this at Thirsty Turtle. This is the WP show banger of the century…
5. Arctic Monkeys “Fake Tales of San Francisco” (sampled on “Get Horny”)
-I fucking love the Arctic Monkeys. This song is so crack! The beat is ridiculous, and the vocals are amazing. These guys are like The Beatles with a hip hop influence. And “Get Horny” is one of the most fun songs I ever recorded. My wife loves that shit.
6. Red Hot Chili Peppers “Hey” (sampled on “Hey”)
-One of the first times I ever looped up a rock song was with this. DJ Destro used to love to use this at shows early on to get the crowd fired up. Peep the video of me spitting over this, my first Youtube video I ever made at my old crib on Greenridge Avenue in WP…
7. Run DMC “My Adidas” (sampled on “My Ferris Buellers”)
-Ahh, the classic! Run DMC was all we listened to back in elementary school. Check them performing live above. Shouts to Cipha Sounds for breaking “My Ferris Buellers” on Hot 97 and giving the boy a shot. Watch my video below…
8. The Beastie Boys “So What’cha Want” (sampled on “Gadush Gadush”)
My favorite Beastie Boys song of all time. I saw some older counselors at Hi Rock summer camp perform this one night at a party in the mess hall back in the day, and from then on it was my shit. And I idolized Ad Rock as a young teen. Yeah, I had to get on this beat sooner or later. The footage above of them performing this song on Arsenio Hall with a special appearance at the end from Cypress Hill is awesome.
9. G. Love & Special Sauce “Baby’s Got Sauce” (sampled on “Spit Crack, Get Face”)
-This song brings back the best memories of high school. Such a cool track. And when I was putting together the Real Breezy mixtape with Roz, I looped it up one day and wrote a story joint to it and recorded it on my laptop. The quality of “Spit Crack, Get Face” kinda sucks, but it’s still fun. Think I’m gonna pull out that first G. Love album today and give it a listen, haven’t bumped it in a while.
10. Kool G. Rap “For Da Brothaz” (sampled on “Wifey Material”)
-I still remember hearing this on underground NYC radio back in the 90’s when it first came out. It was either Stretch and Bobbito or Mayhem and those guys at 89.1FM, can’t remember. But they kept bringing back the opening loop, and I thought it was the illest beat ever. I’m so drawn to slow, laidback beats. And G. Rap murders it on some real hood story shit. I gave it a different flavor and made it into like an introspective love song, and Max Bee played keys over the loop to give it our own feel. “Wifey Material” is one of my favorite songs I ever did, shouts to Peter Rosenberg for playing it a bunch of times on Hot 97, that’s what’s up.
11. Sade “Hang On To Your Love” (sampled on “Keepin’ It Movin'”)
-I’m a major Sade fan, she’s so dope. This was a smooth loop. If I did it now, I’d put the guitars on the hook, but back then I would just loop something, record it, and on to the next one. Whatever though, because my boy K-Wet killed the hook!!! But yeah, Sade gets major burn in my life. Her new album is hot.
12. Amy Winehouse “You Know I’m No Good” (sampled on “Rap Video”)
-This seems obvious, and I know there’s a version with Ghostface rapping on it, but I had to make my own song out of this. It’s too funky of an intro, and once it was looped up it sounded like an old Grand Puba joint. Max Bee played guitar over this to thicken it up. Amy Winehouse is so ill, I hope she comes out with a new album soon. Word up, Back to Black is in my desert island Top 5.
13. Fish Go Deep “The Cure and The Cause” (sampled on “Highlands to Hollywood”)
-My wife’s friend put me on to this song on New Year’s of 2007. She was thumping it in the whip, and I told her I needed it asap. I put the quick flow on this for all my Westchester kids who fist pump at the local bars. This is probably the most left field song I ever looped up, but the final product came out dope. Matty B on the hook makes this loop even crazier!
14. Jim White “Static On The Radio” (sampled on “Let’s Walk”)
-Don’t fuck with me. This is probably the dopest loop I ever made. Heard this on WFUV, found the song, looped it, and went the fuck in. I never really got the recording “Let’s Walk” the way I wanted, but it’s on Bachelor Party. Peep the video of me spitting over it…
15. David Ruffin “I Let Love Slip Away” (sampled on “Picket Fence Dream”)
-Ooooh, this is smooth. I like how I made the chorus on this one. I rocked this for The Young Professional when I was trying out some new styles and more grown up themes. I don’t really loop shit any more though. Nos if I find something I like, I just give it to Kaliph, because he’s so ill with it. He’ll make it sound way better than what I could do with it anyway.
16. Cymande “One More” (sampled on “Lyrical Delight” & “Farting In Your Faces”)
-The Cymande album got so much burn during my college days. It was in constant rotation. On my first album, I had a bunch of slow songs, and I chopped this one into two different long verses during the album. This is like the most mellow song in the history of music. Makes me think back to the days when we would just chill for hours upon hours outside getting twisted without a care in the world.
Thanks for checking this project out, I hope you like it. And yo, if you want all the Stan Ipcus songs from Stan’s Samples, download them all HERE!!!!! Hollerrrr at your boy…
Ok, this is what happens when I spend a whole summer with a bunch of middle school campers. We hang out every day, play pool and tetherball, crack jokes nonstop, and then go into the lab and make rap music together. These kids, who call themselves “The Kunais” (I’m told it means “japanese tool”) came up with the concept and beat for two great songs, and we ended up performing them for the whole camp.
The first, “I’m Pumped”, came from them being so fired up everyday at camp. They’d walk around all day saying “I’m so pumped right now” and then wail on each other’s arms with fists of fury. Then one day they bumrushed me in the lab and said they wanted to make a song called “I’m Pumped”. They banged out the beat on Garage Band, and I helped them shape their verses and the chorus. Then, true story, when we were done recording I was so pumped myself that I went in and freestyled the last verse. We were all cracking up and they loved it so we decided to keep it on the song. For the rest of the summer, this was our anthem. Everyone knew all the words, and campers were constantly quoting my freestyle back to me, which was so funny.
The second, “Says Who”, was another saying of theirs. For example, if a counselor would ask them to do something, they would respond “Says who!?” Completely rude, obnoxious, and disrespectful, but really, really funny. So I suggested we make a song about it. I came up with the hook, like I’m the counselor and they’re talking back to me, and they wrote their verses. The rest is summer camp history.
So the above video is us performing these two songs at the end of camp Variety Show. You can’t tell from the video, but the entire gym is filled with campers and their parents and families. It was an off the hook performance, and I’m confident that no summer camp Variety Show has ever witnessed anything like it. Enjoy the rest of your summer, and big shout out to my boys at the BGC for making the past eight weeks unforgettable…
*BONUS*
My beat boxing brother Max Bee came to perform for the campers and shut the place down. It was extremely sick. Here’s a clip from the performance of him playing the “Name Game” with the campers (he makes beats using their first names), and also beat boxing for a staff dance battle. Thanks for coming Max!
Video game, that is. I’m not a big gamer or anything, but I do own a PS3. And the sole reason I have it is to play NBA 2K when I get the itch. It really is the greatest video game ever. I grew up playing all the classic basketball NBA games, from NBA Jam to Bulls vs. Lakers and all those, then NBA Live, then NBA Street, through all the systems from Sega Genesis to now Playstation 3, and now for the past year it’s been all about NBA 2K. At this point they’ve really perfected the NBA video game experience. No wonder NBA 2K is the all time #1 basketball game seller. I’m sorry but EA’s NBA Live (now called NBA Elite I think) can’t fuck with it. The NBA 2K graphics are ridiculously real, the gameplay is bananas, the features are endless, the music and announcing is great, and the online connection stays up to date with the season, from the schedule to the stats to the trades to the, well, everything. And now, for NBA 2K11, they brought back Michael Jordan as the poster boy, and you can officially without codes or bullshit play with him and all the classic teams and players we grew up with from the past (not just wack 80’s and 90’s All-Star teams) which is what I’ve been wishing they would do forever! Just peep the video trailer, then mark your calendars for October 5th, that’s when it comes out….
For the record, I’m really not as nice as I used to be at video games, nor do I really have time to play that much (I only rock a few times a month if I’m lucky), but if you have PS3 get at me when this drops, we gonna get it poppington this season. Let’s get gamed out! Big shout out to my boy J. Tunas for sending me the trailer! You can bring that bitch ass Miami Heat squad of yours, I’m coming with the old school Knicks! Patrick Ewing and them! Let’s gooooooooooo!
I was very hesitant at first to embrace these Rockabye Baby! CDs when I first discovered them while registering for my wife’s baby shower. I heard a sample in the store, and I thought they were kind of weird and wack. Although I was happy when we received the CDs as gifts, I figured I’d rather just put my son on to the real thing rather than lullaby renditions of songs by my favorite artists, which is basically what all these CDs are. But now that my son is here, I’ve come to realize that they’re dope. He really loves them! We put them on in the car or in the crib, and he completely chills out to them. In fact, during the first month or so of his life, he was having trouble relaxing in his car seat, but once we started thumping these in the whip, yo! He was a changed baby! Now in his car seat, whether he’s asleep or awake, he’s completely content, and I give some of that credit (even though he’s a really chill baby) to these Rockabye CDs. Most of the time they just put him right to sleep. And they’re fun for the parents because they’re songs we like, just baby muzak’d out with bells and shit.
Of course, I prefer actual music, but since my son is only a couple months old, I feel him on only wanting to hear soft sounds and melodies. My dude can’t understand words yet or decipher the different sounds of mad instruments at once. I mean, how the hell is he gonna understand song lyrics (especially rap) anyway at such a young age? It must be frustrating for him. Now, he can become familiar with the classic artists that his parents love, but on his own terms. So to my new parents or parents-to-be, I recommend that you give these a shot. They’re fun for you, but more importantly, your babies will love them. At least ours does. Check the new Kanye West one out (cover above), I just got it. My other favorite is the Bob Marley joint. Stream/buy them both below.
And check out the rest of their selection HERE. They’ve got everyone from Elvis Presley to Metallica. By the way, if you don’t have kids or don’t plan on having any soon, don’t bother checking these out. You’ll just feel like you’re in a baby elevator with no floor to get out on. But if one day you are expecting, refer back to this post.
*Bonus*
Kanye West just premiered a new song on Hot 97 this afternoon he supposedly recorded last night, featuring Beyonce. Get it HERE, along with his half hour interview with Angie Martinez. And follow him on Twitter HERE!
I think I’ve listened to The Shins remake of Squeeze’s “Goodbye Girl” more than any other song that’s been released this summer. It’s awesome. I’m way overdue posting about it. Pardon me, I have a newborn baby at home and am still working out my blogging time. Anyway, James Mercer (pictured above) gave us some fresh new music this year as part of Broken Bells, but it’s nice to hear him back in his Shins zone, even if it isn’t an original. Check the video below of him talking about the song, which also includes footage from the recording session. Then download it for free courtesy of Levi’s…
I grew up reading the The Source magazine, and still have lots of old issues stashed away in my crib and my parents’ attic. So it’s only right that I post the first ever issue of The Source (August 1988), which I saw over at my White Plains homeboy Dan’s site Sour Powered. Click it twice to enlarge and read about what was hot 22 summers ago in rap music. And if you want to see some of the old hip hop mags I have in my personal stash, click HERE. And for all your other throwback hip hop needs, sift through the Up North Trips archive (it’s so deep it’s not even funny). Holler scholar.
Oh boy. The Bay Area’s filthiest white rapper Dirt Nasty (actor Simon Rex) is back with his second full length release, Nasty As I Wanna Be. I’ve posted a bunch of his stuff before, because I can’t front I think he’s hysterical, and he’s actually nice on the mic. He’s got an old school style, and always has some funny shit to say. Check out the video for the title track, produced by one of my favorite hip hop producers out there, The Alchemist…
More Dirt Nasty x Westcheddar posts HERE. And here’s the link to his website, where you can cop the album (it dropped today) and other Dirt Nasty paraphernalia…
My boy Ev Boogie at Up North Trips has been telling me about the Harlem bred pothead MC Smoke Dza for a while. So when his new mixtape dropped last week, George Kush Da Button, I was excited to check it out, especially when I saw that more half of the production is by Ski Beatz (you probably know him best from his work on Reasonable Doubt and Camp Lo’s first album). Well I’ve been thumping it for the past few days, and I like it. There’s some nice songs on there. Ski did his thing, and Smoke Dza’s pretty sharp with the mic (coincidentally he flows like a young Jay-Z at times). Definitely worth checking out if you like weed-influenced rap music. My favorites are the opening track “Continental Kush Breakfast”, and the Ski Beatz produced songs “Sour Hour” and “We On”. Stream and download for free HERE.
Another rapper out there from the new school who loves smoking is Curren$y. I first heard him on Lil’ Wayne’s song “Grown Man” years ago, and since he’s broken off and started his own movement, dropped a bunch of mixtapes, and now, along with Smoke Dza, is part of the Ski Beatz collective. His new album, Pilot Talk, also features production from Ski, and guest appearances from heavy smokers Smoke Dza (they’re both on each others projects), Devin the Dude, and Snoop Dogg, as well as guest spots from two of the best up and coming rappers Mikey Rocks from The Cool Kids and Jay Electronica. My two favorite cuts on the album, “Skybourne” (featuring Smoke Dza and Big K.R.I.T.) and “The Day” (featuring Jay Electronica and Mos Def) were both produced by Ski Beatz. Again, if you like your trees to mix with your rap music, you might want to check this out. Cop it HERE.
*I zipped up my faves from both joints for you to download. That’s how much I care about my loyal readers. Get them HERE. And be on the look out for Ski Beatz 24 Hour Karate School project, which I previewed a few months ago, featuring all these same dudes and more. It drops next month. Light up!
Westcheddar 