SOMA – DEGREE FROM REALITY U

I said it before about my dude Willie Ev and I gotta say it as well about in guy in the picture to the right…. there are just a few things that I regret about my years being involved in the Hip Hop world and one of them is not being able to get my homie Soma Splitfinger out there like I think he deserves to be out there (I got a post about Kiko The Toilet Rhyme Writer that needs to be written one of these days as well).
Unlike Willie Evans, me and Soma go back a fairly long ways… I’m trying to think now, was it ’93? ’94 maybe? (Help me out here, Carm… you know I’m old and forgetful as hell.) We did a 12″ on the indy Apex label back then called “Causin’ Mass Hysteria”… I’d done a beat for an unused Wu-Tang remix that everybody was lovin’ (Skull Snaps drums + Maynard Ferguson horns = pretty damn dope if I do say so myself), so Soma’s managers got him to spit on the track, we added some Rakim and KRS-One vocal samples, Apex pressed it up and there you have it. Essential early 90’s random rap, yo.
We teamed up again in ’95 for the sophomore Soma single, “You’re Not Ready”. I assisted on the production of the original version of this song (basically just provided the sampler and the records sampled), then did my thing for real on the remix. For those who are unaware (or should I say for the few people who give two schitts), I flipped that Tami Lynn “Light My Fire” schitt first, at least about a half a year before Dilated Peoples came out with “Triple Optics”. I’m sorry, but things like that matter to me. Anyway, for this remix we had to ditch the female vocals on the hook, and Soma was a few hundred miles away in Pittsburgh PA so he wasn’t available to do a new hook. Enter who else but yours truly to the rescue… I didn’t want to do the hook but it had to be done. So more random rap history was made.
Actually this record made some pretty damn decent east coast noise when it initially dropped… once again, just like when the Baritone Tiplove record came out earlier in the decade, I was getting calls from my New York peoples tellin’ me “Yo, they playin’ your record on the radio in the daytime, son!” I know myself that they were playing it in the daytime in Philly on Power 99. That’s a good feeling because we’re talking about getting major spins on big commercial stations strictly on the strength of deejays liking the wax- nobody involved with the making of this record had any real industry pull (or payola loot). Soma even got invited to the Stretch & Bobbito show on WKCR in NYC, which was like the mecca for unsigned hypees and real heads worldwide (anybody got a tape of that show holla atcha dude, I need that).
Of course I’m biased, but I put my dude’s poeticalness (damn, I had to check and make sure that’s really a word) up against pretty much any rapper dead or alive. REAL TALK. We’ll get into his G.U.N output in a future post, but before this starts sounding too much like an advertisement I’ll chill and just let y’all peep the realness…

SOMA – Broken Water RE-UPPED (the 2007 new schitt produced by AKSIM)

SOMA – You Ain’t Ready Remix RE-UPPED (the 1996 old schitt produced by Soulman)