SHORT BUT FUNKY

This evening's inspiration brought to you by this Too Short interview on the top-notch Cocaine Blunts blog, featuring heavy quotes like...

"We just knew that we could do it, so we started doing it. We would take 12″ records from New York artists and flip them over to the b-side and play the instrumental, run it through a DJ mixer with a microphone and rap over the instrumental."

"I just never looked back man, I used to grab the microphone anywhere. I’d be at a high school dance, I’d be at house party. Anywhere. And I’d just say ‘put on the instrumental and give me the mic’. To this day, 42 years old, I’m still saying ‘turn on the instrumental and give me the mic’ and I will rock the crowd."

"That’s my whole thing, it had to be the funk. And we were serious about that 808 too. Our whole thing was we make music for cars, we don’t make music for dance floors, we didn’t make music for listening to in the house, we made the music just for cars and people who had loud woofers in their cars. That was our one dimensional goal. We got music in the trunk. That’s what it was."

"So I always felt like that funk was my edge. It’s slower, it’s funky, it’s not for the dance floor, it’s not radio music. And it was just being rebellious like fuck the radio. People tell you all the time, ‘you gotta make radio songs’. Fuck a radio song. It’s still my philosophy."

"I kept that shit going long after everybody would chop the songs down to 3-4 minutes and they started writing rap songs and structuring them like R&B songs. I was like ‘Fuck that shit. I’m a rapper’. I made some songs where I would come on rapping from the first bar and the song would actually fade and I’m still rapping. I did that shit on purpose."

Haven't even gotten to part two yet..... Hearing Short talk about the slow funk and about "dudes rapping for 15 minutes straight" has got me thinking that one of the 12" records from New York he's talking about up there was "Beat Bop" by Rammelzee vs. K-Rob, its B side instrumental relocated to nowhere near an art gallery.


OTHER LISTENS TODAY
Death For The Whole World To See (they're playing at the Empty Bottle in Chicago tomorrow night, Saturday Sept 26.... part of a 3-show US tour, Detroit tonight and Cleveland on Sunday)
Polvo In Prism (seriously killer album!)
Morton Feldman For Bunita Marcus
Alan Bishop & Richard Bishop Present The Brothers Unconnected
Black Sabbath s/t (this just came up on ipod album shuffle... listening to the title track opener right now for the 100th time and wow, the way Bill Ward uses just the toms and hi-hat on the self-titled opening song, the "wide and progressive arrangements" Carducci was talking about... he makes a lot of room right there, enough for subsequent entire generations of heavy to fit comfortably inside... also amused that my ipod, and Wikipedia, has the bass solo "Bassically" as the intro to "N.I.B.," because up until now I always thought of it as the outro of "Behind the Wall of Sleep"...)