After spending many months circumnavigating Murs’ unidread, our resident Bay underground historian Jonny Paychecks has returned with another round of his Bay Area Rap Tapes series. Today he looks at “It’s Going Down” by Oakland’s Misfitz Ov Stylz. (Apologies for the ugly jpg, Discogs is all we have to go on. If you have a better scan or old photos of the group then you know what to do.)

Misfitz Ov Stylz – “It’s Going Down”

from Black Death (Underground, 1998, recorded ‘93/’94?)

Despite appearing formally on the Black Death tape in 1998, I think this particular track predates that substantially. “It’s Going Down” was a mainstay of M.O.S.’s sets at the Unsigned & Hella Broke shows going back to the early days (I remember hearing this at Jackson Street Studios, but I might be confusing venues here). This cut was a crowd favorite, to the point that folks knew it well enough to sing along at the hook, “La la la la laaaa…”

The group at the time consisted of Aaron (now Dub ESQ) and DJ Lexx; they were loosely affiliated to other Oakland underground rap figures like Yapos (founding member of Sanitayshun Dept, and part of early incarnations of The Coup and Mystik Journeymen), DJ True Justice, the Cytoplazmz, etc. MOS was one of many crews in the East Bay underground scene that kind of fell under the “Underworld” umbrella and performed at a lot of the same venues and shows as groups like the Mystik Journeymen, Hobo Junction, Mixed Practice, Black Stone Rangers, B.L.A.C.K., The CUF, etc. But unlike some of these groups they didn’t really have a home-based operation generating mass-produced tapes of their stuff. They relied more on outside production, and songs (like this one) seemed to only surface on dubs. That explains why it didn’t see the (official) light of day until several years afterward. 

Back then, you would get a beat from someone and just record it, usually on the 4-track. It wasn’t a big deal, nobody was keeping score. And in attempting to trace the origin of this particular beat, that was made crystal clear – it took a week or two, many phone calls and referrals and conversations, to determine who made it. Nobody remembered. Eventually Nat from the Cytoplazmz confirmed that it was done by a cat named Tone, p/k/a SlurFace , later of the group PsychoKinetics. SlurFace lived in Alameda at the time, off High Street, not far from the Grouch’s house – a place where various East Bay underground characters would hang out, occasionally turning up on the material recorded there. You’d take the 51 bus through the tunnel and walk a few blocks… I think there was a pool table? I just remember the mic smelling like death. A lot of early UHB-era stuff was recorded there. Apparently SlurFace recorded a lot of folks at his place as well. “It’s Going Down” is a product of the brief Alameda-based movement around that time.

The beat samples a stretched-out clip of the same Isley Brothers loop as used on “Just Riden” by Saafir, and this was no small thing back in those days. Biting was forbidden, and a lot of hay was made over MOS choosing to rock a beat that was just released as a single by a major Oakland artist. “Why are you using the same beat as Reg??” Funny how that stuff is more or less irrelevant in 2009 but back then it was an issue! 

It’s worth mentioning that when I started calling around for info on this track, few seemed to remember it as well as I did. More to the point, many seemed not to want to remember that time at all. It reminds me that when it the scene started to come apart, a lot of folks were left with frustration, hurt feelings, bad blood. Still, ”It’s Going Down” brings back memories of sunny days and sticky green, just chilling in the Bay and thinking this underground shit was really gonna pop. It was good times.

Tags: Misfitz Ov Stylz

This entry was posted on Friday, November 13th, 2009 at 5:44 pm and is filed under BART, Bay Area. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.