Wednesday, February 27, 2008

"Yo, I Got An Idea.."



About a year and a half ago I got a call from my man Spike Lee's advertising company, Spikeddb and they had a Pepsi ad that they needed musical interpretation for. The catch was they had to present it to Pepsi in 24 hours so they wanted to meet me on some 11th hour ish to break the concept down. They basically wanted "mashups" (thats how dude in charge of the music described 'em) of popular hiphop songs blending into and eventually "mashing" with popular alternative and rock records. They asked me to submit 3 different 30 second slots and i had till the morning to do so. No sweat. I hollered at my peoples Jao and Stos and we went to his peoples Blair Wells crib and knocked out two really corny and cheesy mixes that I knew they'd never clear anyway. The third mix I submitted was actually a record from the group we were involved in at the time, Petelshot and figured it would be a chance for us to maybe break something new, dope and most importantly "$free$" to both Spikeddb and Pepsi while getting the band some exposure in the process. Needless to say I emailed them 3 mp3's that night. Cheesemiester in charge of the music the next morning emails me and leaves me a voicemail going nuts about the Petelshot piece and gassed me to the point where I thought we had something. Flash forward, NBA All-Star game 2008. As I'm sittin in the crib watching the wackest basketball game ever televised, a Pepsi commercial comes on. Immediately i notice the pendulum balls swinging and it was exactly as they'd described the concept to me. Then outa nowhere, Skateboard P pops up and the rest is history. Funny thing, peep how he ends the commercial by telling dude on the jack, "Yo, I got an idea.." lol..


For the heck of it, heres the mp3's of what i sent em..

Snoop/Maroon 5 Mix
Curtis/Modest Mouse Mix
Petelshot 2 Worlds Collide Mix


*I wonder if P got to listen to the Petelshot piece prior to gettin' busy..

Monday, February 25, 2008

Fly on The Wall.. Grammy Edition





From time to time on here,  I'll be expanding on some of my experiences as a fly on the wall in what I think were the greatest instances in my life whether music or otherwise.  For this first one I chose to touch on one of the better ones. Back before Dame and Biggs exited stage left, and the Roc was the Army, better yet the Navy (you know the rest..) Baseline studios was like the reincarnation of D&D. For like 5 years, nothing but flames walked through that door. It was so crazy man I seen established producers who I won't name walk out halfway in tears cuz a certain crew from Philly would clown their beats to the point of havin' them break down.. Eventually i'll expand on what we called "Keep It Real Wednesdays" and prolly make that a weekly thing but back to the story..  I remember when HipHop and Gee started bringing Kanye around and he came through with the infamous cd of beats that became half of "The Dynasty" (no diss to Just cuz he was another animal altogether, doing 4 beats for Busta in 4 hours  upon one of his first visits to the studio after convincing Dubbs to let him rock in the B room.. he never left after that..lol)
Well Kanye was always a humble cat and we'd always kick it on what we thought was and wasn't hot (he swore Nelly was one of the nicest mc's in the game at the time.. needless to say I didnt agree with him on that..) and clothes like throwback jerseys and this is before mitchell n ness blew the f up..(he loved the Astros joint..lol) Well this eventually led to him confidin' enough in the kid to play me a cassette of some songs he had worked on in what sounded like a home studio.  At no point did he say it was him spittin but he was insistent on me givin him my honest opinion on what i had heard.. He played me 6 songs as i recall and although the quality was really bad and the vocals superloud, I could tell the kid spittin had some skills.. the songs mainly dealt with girls (one joint was like a 3 verse backwards story about some girl he liked and some shit that happened between them. Choppy, but it was a dope concept) but the one that stood out and I had him play three times for me was a joint that never made his debut. I recall wondering why that was the case but I'd learn later he was stashin' it for the 2nd go round! That song was Hey Mama. I remember the intro being the same and the chorus as well and i realized Kanye had it.  I ran to the lounge and got HipHop to come and listen and Hip listened for 30 seconds and told Kanye to stick to makin' beats and went back to his pool game..

(If you don't feel this record something's wrong witcha..)
r.i.p tito..

If You're Reading This..

.. you must be either bored, nuts, or cool as dogpoop with the kid.. nonetheless lets see if i can keep this up..