This week's post is dedicated to that mid 90's East Coast sound we grew up listening to. We like pushing the envelope in our music, but we always try and keep that sound alive in our music.
Not much to say for this one. We recorded this in my apt in NY at around 1AM; hooked up the Protools in the room, placed the mic inside a closet and went to work. The mix and everything is real rough right now, but it gets the job done.
Ren made this beat sometime last year, and we never really got a chance to mess with it, but I heard it the other day in the studio and I thought that this verse would be perfect for it. Ren thinks I jacked Wale's swag for this verse, but...ehh, I think hes hating. Enjoy!
Sorry for the delay on this week's post. This week's all about the exotic-sounding music that opened us up to a whole world of inspiration. Many of these songs draw on music from a variety of different cultures. Hope you like 'em.
A big part of why we do this has always been our influences. We’ve been trying to put people onto the music we listen to since back in high school. We knew that a lot of people would dig the music we were into if they were exposed to it, and always took it into our own hands to make that happen. For those of you are looking for more of those jawns, or those who like our music and want to know where our sound came from, your prayers have been answered.
This blogspot gives us an easy way to compile some of those joints that helped make our Green Street sound possible. We’re gonna make posts like these every weekend, so instead of nagging us to put you on to some new fire, just come check back every week to get your fix.
We’re gonna start off with different themes each week for the first month, and then we’ll start mixing it up after that. We’ll start it off with the songs that originally gave us our direction with the music we wanted to create. Enjoy.
Aight, so tonight, for better or for worse, we present the first song that we made as a group. This was made back in October, 2005 and its crazy to think how much time has passed since then. Its hard to say what exactly sparked us get our stuff together and make a song, but it was probably a combination of the artists we were listening to and the need to break out of everything that was going on.
This song was built around a piano sample from Miles Davis and a vocal sample from Nancy Wilson's "Never Will I Marry". We created the drum track ourselves, and this was our first time really messing with programming our own drums instead of using break beats and what not. Unfortunately, its pretty easy to see how immature our style was, but looking it back, you can't knock the hustle...word to Jay-Z.
For the record, we made this song with a $20 Radio Shack microphone, Acid 5.0 software and a makeshift pop-filter...straight gutta.
Honestly, despite the complete lack of production on this song and the obvious flaws in the mixing (we didnt do anything), I have a lot of love for this song. This is what kicked everything off for us, so it will always mean something to us. I remember how it felt to hear the final version of this song outta the speakers in Ren's Dodge Dynasty...official! Anyway, enough talk, lets get to the music. Enjoy.
"...and I used to rock chains that was missing a link, now I see myself change when I look above the sink, inspections take place before the session, in school half my life, but I never learned a lesson..."
Here is an article that The Hippodrome did about us sometime late last year. The Hippodrome describes themselves as the "not your average media blog, sending the best unknown and unheard musicians right to your computer, free of charge." We sent in a sample of our music to the site, and they liked it enough to ask us to do an interview for them, which provided the pieces for this article.
My initial reaction to the article was mixed. I think they misinterpreted our statements about how literature and philosophy play into our music; my initial point of bringing up our outside influences was to highlight how our style runs deeper than just music, but they kind of made that seem like the central aspect of our music, making us seem on some crazy, existentialism-oriented-neutron popping-Holden Caufield Wanna-be nerd rap type music. It's all good though, y'all know the drill.
Thats it for now, we got some BIG things in the works right now, working with some outside artists and whatnot, so we will keep y'all posted. New music coming soon, stay in tuned!
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