Today in smuggery, 04/25/10

Birds flyin high, you know how I feel! Sun in the sky, you know how I feel!

You wake up on a Sunday, you remember that the Lakers lost and you're sad, but then the clouds part. You read the Sunday paper. Your mom calls. The day improves. Things happen to make you feel pretty damn good about the hand you were dealt in life.

My mom never taught me to be smug; it's not ladylike. But still. It cheers me up sometimes. I never claimed that I could fuck with your Dougie, and you should see what passes for wood grain in my Civic, but at this moment I'm ruling because of all this:



- Curtis Mayfield and me, sartorial equals. People, you must respect this.



Sorry to prance around and revel in it, but you'd do the same if you were wearing your trench right now. You'd do the same.













- I swear I just read in this interview, right there in black and white, that Scarface didn't know Ced Gee produced Criminal Minded. Scarface also loved Guru, of course, but Scarface thought Guru was from Brooklyn. He never thought about the Boston accent? The dropped r's? "He might be loose in the pahhhhk, or lurkin at the train station"?


Guru was from Boston, actually, the interviewer tells him.
No shit?, says Scarface, and in my apartment I reply, No shit. Smugly.


The logical conclusion, of course, is that I know more about hiphop than 'Face (!!!). I'm not sure how this is possible, since I'm not from Houston and I definitely don't rap-a-lot. It doesn't matter how this is possible. It just matters that it's true. Recognize a real don when you see one. (she'll probably be wearing a trenchcoat)



[I also appreciate his beautiful humble simple existential take on the end of human life, from the same interview:

"If you don’t know anything else about life, and life’s promise, you know that at the end of the day you have to say goodbye... No one is gonna live forever, and to be able to accept and respect the order is a sign of a good person. We have to respect the order."

And there it is. Since '91, Scarface has owned my heart and mind. He possesses that lovely combination of wordplay skill, booming voice, humor, and humbleness that most ladies require, gentlemen, in order to get them to take their dresses off in your presence. Plus he gave Devin the Dude his name! Girls love that.]










- Jayceon has never made me feel compelled to brag that he is from the same part of the globe as me. Producer Scoop Deville, however, makes me proud that he is from the same part of the globe as me. I'm a sucker for a nicely-placed Eazy vocal fragment.

This cheerful and melodic ray of sunshine (thank you so very much, RapRadar) is Episode 18,000 of The Producer Matters More Than the Words That Are Being Said Over the Beat. (And I have a degree in English, so that statement is especially meaningful.)

OMG, can't wait til I find the mp3 of this. Can you even imagine?? It's dangerous to rush the natural progression of things, though. You're supposed to hear a poor quality/tagged version on YouTube first, then you get emailed an mp3 link and hear a bad digital no-tags version of it, then you find the instrumental at Amoeba on a glorious piece of round black vinyl. And then you're smug that you have it. Not to rap over it--just to have it. But you do it all in good time.

It's like my good friend 'Face says, Respect the order.







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