NahRight posted this back in July, and when I came across it I remember basically putting it on loop over and over; was reminded by the internets earlier today to track down those early 90s Mob Style releases, and that in turn reminded me of this video, which came out in ’91.

Back in the 80s there was a triage of Harlem crack kingpins named Alpo, Rich Porter (“Yo, rest in peace to Rich and Ron, money what they was about yo/ The twins was from queens but got crazy cream with Alpo”) and AZ (from whom the Firm/Illmatic/solo rapper took his name). The movie Paid in Full, which came out in ’02, was based on the story of the rise and fall of these figures.

Thing is, the REAL AZ (“Azie”) was also a rapper, and released a couple albums with Mob style & solo. I’ve only heard a few tracks here and there, and this shit hasn’t been rereleased or anything…but then there is this video on YouTube which is pretty amazing. You’ll recognize the beat – there’s that track on Cuban Linx which is basically a tribute to this song. Its a pretty significant historical piece I think, and despite AZie’s sorta off-the-beat flow, its a really strong song too.

Read about Azie’s background and his time coming up in the 80s, including the incredibly story of when he was betrayed and shot, here. And StreetsOnBeats did an informative post on Mob Style last October, which you can read here, including the story of the events described in “Whats Goin On Black.”

MTV’s My Block came to Chicago this summer and they finally sent me a promo copy of the companion CD released alongside it. Its got some good shit – Gemini and GLC both sound pretty good, plus its got some classic hits from Crucial Conflict and Do or Die, but as an overview of Chicago or its sound its not very representative – no Triple Darkness, E.C. Illa, Traxster (“Po Pimp” aside), Psychodrama, Infamous Syndicate (Shawnna gets a solo cut tho), Los Marijuanos or Snypaz. Also, why the hell they would include “Girl Tonite” and “Overnight Celebrity” but not “Adrenaline Rush” is just beyond me.

If you’re looking for a good idea of Chicago rap and its history you can’t do better than the Chi-Bangin compilations – there are a bunch of them but they went and compiled a ‘Chi-Bangin re-release’ double disc comp of some of the best shit which you can get here via The Tip CDs.

Not convinced? Well fuck you. No but seriously, here’s some tracks to convince you to get off your ass. First is a Lil Reap freestyle about Humboldt Park, the Puerto Rican neighborhood on the near northwest side, and the song is hard as fuck.

Another significant track that probably should have been included on a My Block comp is D.A. Smart’s “Walk With Me,” which is basically a neighborhood tour of gang blocks on the south and west sides and can be found on another comp better worth your time than My Block:

here‘s a bonus track off Wicked Streets to give you an idea.

Of course this leaves off my actual block, where I grew up on the north side (which people in the Chi call the ‘north pole’). And maybe one of the best tracks you discover in the Chi-Bangin set is Jiggs and Cheeks “North Pole Anthem,” which does the same thing for the hoods on the north side that “Walk Wit Me” did for the rest of the city. (DA Smart recently did a new version of “Walk Wit Me” that you can find a performance of on YouTube that has him talking about the North Side.) You can read some Chicago message board debates about the relative gangsta-ness of the north pole here. Of course, a lot of this stuff is now outdated, since the city began tearing down public housing and shunting people off to suburbs in the outer ring of the city like Dalton and Cicero, but to me this makes these tracks even more valuable, as snapshots of the mid-late 90s Chicago rap scene, when the ‘inner city’ actually meant in-the-city and when the music was much more gangsta rap-oriented than a sanitized MTV-approved collection featuring a Common song with John Mayer would suggest.

Jiggs and Cheeks – North Pole Anthem
Jiggs and Cheeks – Gamble with Life

Theres something incredibly suffocating about the utterly claustrophobic production that came out of this city throughout the 90s on most of these underground tapes; Resurrection, as classic as it was, was about as representative of Chicago’s sound as the Pharcyde were for Cali in the Dr. Dre era. “Gamble With Life” is bleak, and thats a word people use to talk about somber rap music a lot but its hard to come up with other words to describe just how spare the track is. But on the rapping tip, Jiggs really brought it on this song:

In my lifetime I seen a lot that
n***as underestimate the next man and thats how fools get got
and thats how thugs get shot
and thats how family gets hurt
and thats how n***as end up dead six feet under the dirt
its either me and you first
you fallin offa your square
and my mind is made up that i ain’t goin nowhere
Too many folks to take care of
can’t let you shatter they dreams
close the curtains on my future
let you battle my team
I’ll be in yo hair like a bad perm
until we reach an agreement
or better yet
til we come to my terms
cuz I refuse to get burned by non-negotiable
unapproachable
little pranks screamin that they got rank
frontin like they got bank when i could care less
I will suggest you walk around with a bulletproof vest
cuz frankly I think you well outta tune
with more to lose
if you got beef
then simply have me removed
No need for bad attitudes,
cuz I ain’t got the latitude for f*ggot dudes
that think on a small magnitude
you in the danger zone
never travel alone
and when you see me on the streets
I’m concealin the chrome
Jiggs Capone will blast first and ask questions later
playa haters calm down and i’ll return the favor
acknowledge me instead of botherin me
this ain’t a threat, its a promise like godfather part III,
I’m bein honest

you can gamble with your life dude
but its a price to pay
for everything that you might do
nobody needs to enlight you
we trife too
ain’t no tellin what we might do
to strike you

Jiggs is an amazing rapper, but after dropping their underground classic “The Don,” they disappeared and only recently resurfaced – Cheeks moved to Detroit and has a MySpace page up and goes by “Chameleon Chief” now; some of that shit sounds alright. Jiggs still lives in Chicago and apparently recorded a bunch of songs and wants to get back into the music, according to an article Chi Bangin posted in April of ’05. The best news I’ve heard lately tho is that “The Don” is back in print, for a limited time, at The Tip CDs; I just ordered a copy and if you like “Gamble with Life” and “North Pole Anthem” it is recommended you do the same.

Another Chicago dude missed in the My Block comp is No I.D., which is especially fucked since he’s been producing for more than a minute, and I’m not just talking Resurrection. He’s done work for a bunch of folks – “Beats for Common feat. Lauryn Hill, Jay-Z, DMX, G-Unit, Bow Wow, Toni Braxton, Janet Jackson, Jaheim, Jamie Foxx, Beanie Sigel, John Legend, Monica, Mikkey, Rhymefest, Kaye Fox, India.Arie, Ghostface Killah, Method Man, Johnta Austin, LEP, GLC, Imfamous Syndicate, Shawnna, Daz (Dog Pound), Do or Die, Malik Yusef, Magic Massey, Bossman,” sez his Myspace – the track for Daz was “Thang on My Hip” off Daz’s So So Gangsta from this year. Plus dude has an underrated record under his own name (plus whatever this is), and the Beatnuts remix of his track “State to State” is one of my favorite cuts ever. He’s been working with Jermaine Dupri lately (which is how he got on the Daz record) and he got Dupri to sign this Chicago rapper named Mikkey, another cat that probably could have gotten a spot on My Block over the second Lupe Fiasco song.

Mikkey grew up in Hamilton Park and worked with Kanye (who, to bring this full circle, was mentored by No I.D….) and eventually got signed to Cash Money – he’s on Hood Rich and Undisputed and dissed CM over the “Go DJ” beat awhile back although for some reason I can’t find the mp3 I used to have of that shit. He had a contract dispute and left them, now he’s got an album coming out co-produced by Dupri and No I.D. One track, “Poppin,” shows how strong No I.D.’s soulful style still is; another, “Liquor Store,” is kind of a tour-de-force indictment of the Liquor Store’s effects on ghetto life and you can hear both at Mikkey’s myspace. Its caused a kind of minor “Black Korea”-style boycott due to the following couplet:
“Shorties run up in the store, Arab on they every move” and “He’s getting money here, ships his bread back home / They give him tax breaks, banks give him easy loans.”

…which, shockingly, The Chicago Reader actually covered.

In other news, wtf this new Black Sheep album isnt bad at all.

OK so I finally checked that Snoop album. Its a really strong record – “Vato” of course, but he gets all old-school lyrical on (the Impressions-sampling) “Think About It,” great smooth funk on “Crazy,” and Neptunes don’t come off to bad at all (“Vato” of course, and “10 Lil Crips”). I do kind of wish it was more smooth Cali bangers (“Don’t Stop”) and less jumping around, but really its hard to complain when the Timbaland, Rick Rock and Nottz tracks are that good (I’ll pass on Dre sampling Dido but bringing back D’Angelo makes up for that garbage). I wish MC Eiht was still sounding good. Someone should try to convince me to pick up 2006 CMW in the comments section, if there’s anyone out there who actually heard the damn thing.

90s vets keep dropping event records, though for every Kingdom Come and (probably) Hip-Hop is Dead (the title track blows in like every way) we’ve been lucky and gotten solid-to-great records from Fat Joe and E-40. Plus 90s-worshipping weirdos like Game, who’s sounded like an oldster veteran ever since he dropped fully formed from the brain of Dr. Dre, obsessed with a past he was never a part of.

Anyway the point of this post is that between Cali iz Active and the new Snoop album and the production from dudes like Soopafly, Battlecat and Daz, its hard not to think that these guys are really bringing it, making LA rap exciting again; “still the beats bang,” this badass modern Cali g-funk. I mean check Battlecat’s work on “LAX,” the way he flips and chops the vocal sample is like nu-Swizz, with Big&Puff vocals stabbing all over the track, over loose grooves with busy samples and random sound drops that suggest a serious amount of craft, even if they seem sort of conservative compared to massive aggro-Atlanta anthems, or blockbuster-sized Dre and Storch beats, or the beats we’re used to from the swizz-neptunes-timbo-mannie era of super-syncopated keyboard space funk. But that conservatism seems timely, refreshingly smooth and tasteful. Like the rap world focusing on rap again instead of being all bigger-than-rap millenial crossover artists, and very Cali, the musical equivelent of creased khakis and chucks. Classicist.

For a guy who had beats on All Eyez On Me, Daz Dillinger’s profile’s been pretty low on the production tip, although he did get some dap in Murder Dog’s year end roundup last year for his ’05 output. He’s been real consistent lately – check Kurupt’s ’06 album as Young Gotti (myspace here), or check Daz’s solo record from this year, which is hot (new No I.D.!) if you drop some of the shittier Jermaine Dupri tracks and Rick Ross – but his profile’s just gonna get higher in the next year. He didn’t have any tracks on the last DPG record but he’s producing Dogg Chit (terrible title), and it drops January 2nd. In other Daz news:

Daz is producing Khujo Goodie’s album. Keep an eye on this, its sure to be the next Gnarls Barkley.

A track that should have been on Cali Iz Active prod. by the Alchemist, and another track w/ San Quinn from earlier this year. He and Kurupt are on the Baby&Wayne album, and the DPGs are hosting the track on their site. If you haven’t heard it yet check it here, shit could not be hotter.

And this:

“Talented” is pretty hot.
Soopafly produced my favorite beat on Cali Iz Active, “Thrown Up Da C”. Uh and this post should not be read as an endorsement of any particular street gangs, obv.

(Classic records, by the way.)

Finally, Robert’s classic SMS post on the “Eat A Dicc Saga.”