SOULMAN JOINT #2 – THE LOST HIP HOP MIXTAPE FROM 1994

Back in 1994 a 40 watt lightbulb flashed over my head and I got a bright idea: “Hey, I think I wanna be a mixtape DJ”. Not a break mixtape DJ, I mean a living, breathing Hip Hop mixtape DJ, like a Ron G or an S&S or whoever else who was pushin’ tapes back in the early-to-mid 90’s. Only difference was I wanted to be a REAL SCHITT mixtape DJ. Not that the state of Hip Hop was anywhere near what it is now- there was still a lot of hardcore underground Hip Hop that was held in high regard in the streets, clubs and elsewhere. Things were definitely changing, though, what with the rise of the west coast thanks to Dre and Snoop‘s takeover of rap music. But the idea of Hip Hop being dead was still over a decade away.
Still, I wanted to go a little bit against the grain (as I always do) by playing album cuts that I thought were dope but you really didn’t hear all that much on other mixtapes or mixshows. Plus I wanted to throw some of my own remixes and beats into the stew, as well as a little old school flava, breaks and samples, etc. etc… you know, THAT REAL SCHITT. Just trying to do something kinda cool and different. I ended up making Soulman Joint #1 and Soulman Joint #2– two 90 minute tapes that me and my crew at the time Soul Brothers No. 9 (more on them at a later date) could give out while promoting some of the other schitt we planned on doing.
I thought the tapes were pretty dope to my ears (although my little vocal drops were pretty annoying even to me), but many of my east coast brethren were not diggin’ some of the west coast schitt I poured into the gumbo. BOY were they hatin’ on some of the Heiro stuff! Yeah, well, the hell with ’em… I still love the early Heiro stuff, specifically the 1st Casual and Souls Of Mischief lps and the 2nd Del joint. One thing I don’t do, i do NOT discriminate based on a fool’s geographical location- if you killin’ THAT REAL SCHITT you have a fan in The Soulman.
Anyway, I decided the mixtape grind was not for me. Even back then I was too steeped in real schittery for the masses, with their limited comprehension, to be able to relate (lol). Here’s the tracklisting to SOULMAN JOINT #2:

SIDE 1
Soulbrothers No 9 Intro feat. 45 King – ???
De La Soul & ATCQ – Sh Fe MCs
Black Moon – I Got Cha Opin (Remix)
Strictly Roots featuring Fat Joe & Grand Puba – Begs No Friends (Remix)
UMCs – Some Speak Ill Thoughts
Gangstarr – Brainstorm
Casual – Get Off It
Wu-Tang Clan – Da Mystery of Chessboxin’ (Soulman Remix)
Das Efx – Wontu
ATCQ – Steve Biko
Shyheim – On And On (Primo Remix)
N-Tyce – Root Beer Float
Erick Sermon featuring Ice Cube & Kam – The Ill Shit
Nas – It Ain’t Hard To Tell / Isaac Hayes – Joy (Soulman Remix)

SIDE 2
Soulbrothers No 9 Intro feat. Solomon Burke – Fight Back
45 King – ???
ATCQ – Electric Relaxation
Del – No Need For Alarm
Das Efx – Check It Out
24-7 – Let’s Have It (intro)
Dr. Dre featuring Snoop Doggy Dogg, Kurrupt & Dat Nigga Daz – Nuthin’ But A G Thing (Freestyle Remix)
N-Tyce – Hush Hush Tip
Wu-tang Clan – C.R.E.A.M. / Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five – The Message (Soulman Remix)
Wildman Steve Interlude
Gangstarr – Words From the Nutcracker
Tragedy – Street Life (Remix)
KMD – What A Niggy Know (Remix)
Black Moon – Reality (Killing Every Nigga)
Monk Higgins – The Look Of Slim
Three Dog Night – I Can Hear You Callin’
Kain The Blue Guerilla interlude
Kurious – I’m Kurious
Doug E Fresh & Slick Rick – Treat ‘Em Like A Prostitute (live)

I’ll drop the first SOULMAN JOINT somewhere down the line if y’all dig this one at all. I think I like #2 better though… my vocals REALLY bug me on #1.
And BTW, if anybody knows the titles of those 45 King tracks let me know… I still have the records around here somewhere, I’m just way too lazy to look for them. The KMD track, too… is that title right? Duh. Let me know if ya know.

SOULMAN JOINT #2 HIP HOP MIXTAPE 1994 side one (RE-UPPED)
SOULMAN JOINT #2 HIP HOP MIXTAPE 1994 side two (RE-UPPED)

PURPLE CITY

When I got a mind to interior decorate my expedits in purple, I didn’t realize the task that was ahead of me. I don’t have many lp’s with purple covers, let alone holy grail-ish lp’s with purple covers! Yellow or red either (those were my next choices when it looked like the purple might not be possible). Any other vinyl collectors out there wanna take the challenge? Decorate your shelves with your records, using whatever themes you like (covers all in the same color, covers with faces, covers with beautiful females, joints with food on the cover, whatever you wish) and send me the pics. If I get a few nice ones I’ll put them up in a future post. Don’t be afraid to let your inner record nerd out so that it can run around naked and unashamed. I think I’m gonna try white covers next time.

AIR

In my last post I mentioned my dude L.Dula‘s latest mix “The Need To Calm” (highly recommended, as I’ve already gushed… you should still be able to cop it over at my nephew Thermoshead’s favorite guilty pleasure, soulstrut.com)… one of the tunes on that disc that was really melting my mind was this joint called “Sister Bessie” by a group called AIR (not to be confused with the French duo that came out in the 90’s with stuff like “All I Need” and the Virgin Suicides OST… I dig that stuff too, but this ain’t that).
Air was actually Herbie Mann‘s backing band back in the late 60’s / early 70’s. So when Herbie launched Embryo Records in 1970, it wasn’t long before he gave his band a shot at their fifteen minutes of fame. I don’t know if they ever got any of that fifteen minutes, because lead singer Googie Coppola left the group to become a born again christian not much longer after their self titled debut album was released (I really love me some Googie, btw). But fame, schmame… they left behind a solid album for us crate diggin’ mofos to slobber over even now, 37 some odd years after the fact. And that, my friends, is all that matters… the group’s personal success is really neither here nor there.
Funny thing about this album for me is that I’d never really peeped it, even though I’ve known about it for at least a decade and a half and have had the mp3s gathering dust in my hard drive for years as well. Just one of those joints that I never got around to checking out thoroughly (I still have a ton of those in my mp3 collection). As for the “Sister Bessie” track, it just kinda haunted me from the first time I really listened to it. What in the hell is Googie singing about here? Something about a child, or is Bessie a lover maybe (lesbian themes in 1971)?

“Sister Bessie, don’t you say no prayer for me
a slow boat’s gonna lead me where I’m bound
I’m for to travel far across the distant seas
My destiny will lead me where I’m bound

just a child, and with a sweet child’s tender heart
waiting for someone to call you mine
how do you keep your faith, when you are always falling, yes, I’m falling
how do you find a way to keep from crying

Bessie don’t you weep, Bessie don’t you moan
you stole my heart in oh so many ways
but the woman who stole my soul has taken all I have
and left me here alone and in a daze
Bessie don’t you weep no more”

Well, I finally found the deal, as explained by the song’s writer Moogy Klingman: “Someone told me a true story about a nun, who took LSD after falling in love with a hippie, and then made love to him, deciding she would leave the church and the convent. Apparently, the hippie had different ideas and left town quickly. This song is about what he might say to her about his hasty exit, if he said anything at all.” Okay… safe to say I wouldn’t have ever guessed that one. NEXT LEVEL.
You can check out the “Sister Bessie” joint and / or you can DL the whole album, which is pretty great from start to finish. I think most people who ride for this album actually big up the “Mr. Man” track more than they do the Bessie song… me, I’m partial to Bessie, but that’s just me. I’m not like most people.

AIR – Sister Bessie RE-UPPED

AIR – self titled lp (rar file) RE-UPPED

L. DULA- ONLY THE NEEDLE KNOWS

What’s good… I’m back, at long last, doing what I do best- anointing y’alls azzes with a healthy dose of THAT REAL SCHITT. I am once again well physically… not so sure about the mentally part, but I guess some things are beyond even modern medicine. I am still dealing with external hard drive issues that are hampering my ability to bust ya schitt with extra-heavyweight blogposts, but you KNOW I can’t be stopped entirely. I may or may not recover what was lost on that drive, but I still got plenty of stuff to hit you with.

Case in point: for my comeback post, I dug through my break mix collection and came out with the full L.Dula arsenal. L.Dula… now, that’s my guy right there. Brothers from other mothers, no doubt. There are a lot of dudes putting out some damn nice mixes these days (seems like only yesterday when there was merely a few of us, relatively speaking), but for my pesos Dula is one of the nicest. He’s like me, seems like he will play ANY damn thing. Fearless with that schitt. So what if it’s not some ol’ boogaloo breakdown funky chicken schitt… if it sounds good to you, PLAY IT. EZ listening, obscure mellowed out hippy rock, jazz covers of soul songs, stuff that you can’t even really place a genre tag on- son will hit any and ALL of it.

Inspiration for this post was the latest L.Dula offering, “The Need To Calm”, a double cd killer. You know you’re really diggin’ a cd when you just can’t get it out of your head, and that’s how that joint was for me. At least six cuts on there had me constantly hitting the rewind button, man. And that’s just cd one… I haven’t even had a chance to get into the second cd yet.

So like I said, I dug through my L.Dula section and found some ill blasts from the past- “Let My Children Hear The Music”, “New Soul Gangbang”, “Cool Calm & Collected” (the promos came with a liner notes sheet and a couple of Silly CDs trading cards!), etc. I’m gonna give y’all a couple of joints Dula sent me copies of years back- “L.Dula’s Magic Record” and it’s companion disc, “Broken Window” (see the pic up above for that whole story). I give both mixes the two thumbs up and a big AYEEEE!!!!!!! (That’s an inside joke.)

L.DULA’S MAGIC RECORD (RE-UPPED)

L.DULA – BROKEN WINDOW (RE-UPPED)

SOULMAN ON THE CHECK-IN

Yo yo… been out of commission for a minute with the dreaded influenza virus, hence the lack of real schittery on the page in the last week or two. Also had a MAJOR situation with what looks like a damaged external hard drive. Hopefully I’ll be able to find a way to restore the data, but as it stands now I lost a lot of stuff. Not everything, luckily- I still have a couple of other drives with other stuff on them (the porn collection is safe, thank God). But looks like I lost a lot of my rarer music files and almost all of my art and pictures, stuff that can’t be replaced. Alas, I also had all the pics and music files earmarked for future THAT REAL SCHITT posts on that drive. Luckily I should be able to replace most of that stuff, but it’s probably gonna be slow on this site for awhile until I’m able to get back to where I was with the real schitt material. So bear with me and we’ll see how it goes from here. Back up your schitt, kiddies… I know better, but still got caught out there.

In other news, I don’t know if there are even any NFL football fans out there checking this site, but I gotta tip my Kangol to the NEW YORK GIANTS for drinking the New England Patriots’ milkshake in the Super Bowl last Sunday. Ever since week 9 of the season I’d been saying that the Patriots are beatable… very good team, but their flaws were clearly exposed by the Colts and then magnified by teams like the Eagles, Ravens and the Giants in the regular season finale. Somehow they were always able to pull games out in the end, though. So by Super Bowl Sunday I actually had conceded that these guys were gonna go 19-0. You don’t win every game all season and then lose the one that matters more than any of ’em, do you? But somehow, the Giants just BEAT those dudes down. Physically. By the 3rd quarter I’m watching the game and saying “damn, they are whuppin’ the Pats’ azzes on the line of scrimmage, offense and defense!” Whoever wins that battle in the trenches almost always wins the game in the NFL, no matter how great your skill position players are. So I’m glad to see that my basic football philosophy- great defense beats great offense- still rings true, even in this era of rules that favor offensive production. Tom Brady looks great when he has all day to throw and receivers are wide open, but when your weapons are clamped down and you’ve got a pack of wild dogs coming to kill you on every play even the great quarterbacks become mortal reeeeeal quick. Congrats to the G-men- they earned it.

Now, back to the music related schitt- all fans of Phill Most the rap dude should go check out some tracks I did with the Bankrupt Europeans production team. They’re up on their MySpace page for a short time, so peep ’em quickly before they’re gone. I’ve spoken about my boys the Bankrupt Euros before, but I really like their style- simple but interesting with a nod to the past but still a sense of the future. That’s the best I can say it, yo… just some hot Hip Hop schitt in my opinion. We bringin’ back fast rap in 2008!

There’s another new Soulman interview that needs to be checked, too… over at the site that I personally consider to be one of the best if not THE best Hip Hop sites on the ‘net, THE FOUNDATION. It honestly is a huge honor to be included on a list of interviewees that are some of the greatest pioneers in the annals of Hip Hop. Grandmaster Caz, Busy Bee, Kool Moe Dee, Kurtis Blow, Pete DJ Jones, Spoonie Gee, T La Rock, Pebblee Poo… I mean the list goes on and on. And for me to be put in that company… man, you’re talking about some of my heroes right there! I gotta give a huge shout out to my brothers Jayquan and Troy L. Smith not only for asking me to be a part of it, but more importantly for what they are doing with that site. They are getting the REAL stories from the early history of Hip Hop and making them available to the world, straight from the mouths of the people who actually made that history. And like me, they do what they do purely for the love of the music and the culture. So if you aren’t already familiar with The Foundation you need to get over there asap and emerse yourself into the many interviews with the pioneers of rap. REQUIRED REAL SCHITT READING. And by the way, no, I’m not a pioneer of Hip Hop (although I’m not much younger than those dudes)- I am a breakbeat specialist, though, so that’s what I basically talked about with Troy. Read it for yourself and let me know how ya dig it.

And before I drag myself back to my sick bed, one last thing- recently I’ve gotten a lot of requests for drops from deejays for their radio shows and / or mix cds. A lot of y’all I either haven’t responded to or haven’t gotten the drops to you. My apologies for that… it’s just that recording drops, which may seem like a prety simple request, really can be a little bit of a headache for me due to the way my equipment is set up (too much to explain, just take my word for it). I do want to hook everybody up, so what I want to do is try to record all of them at once so I won’t have to go through the trouble over and over and over and over again. So anybody out there who has hit me up for a drop in the past as well as anybody else who’d be interested, it’s open enrollment time at THAT REAL SCHITT. Just hit me at my email, philasoul@aol.com, and give me the details on what you want me to say on the drop. I’ll wait for a couple of weeks or so and see how many requests I get, then I’ll go ahead and record them all at once and send them out. Cool? Cool. Thanks for your patience… it really is hard being me sometimes, so I appreciate the understanding.

More music is coming, have no fear. Hold tight and let me take my Mucinex for now… i’ll be back.