Fundamentals

Koncepts – “It’s The Beat”

The Mental Patients – “Mental Anxieties”

Hijinx – “Tactical”

from Koncepts Presents The Bomb Shelter (Unreleased, 1993-95)

Today our in house Bay Area Rap analyst Jonny Paycheck pka Koncepts gets personal with this sixteen track compilation of previously unreleased high school era demos that he and his crew recorded in the converted boiler room under his Mom’s house. Hit the jump for Jonny’s very detailed history of the artists involved.

Fundamentals consisted of Koncepts (me) and Karma. We came up with the name from the idea that you “gotta have the mentals to get the funds”. We met each other at Berkeley High, 1992. Karma was introduced to me as a kid who was into rap, and had a little bit of game to him – he knew all the different cats around school, kept good weed, and knew how to talk to girls. Quickly we started hanging out, going to parties, live shows. Long before the crew Kemetic Suns came about, we formed Fundamentals in early ‘93 and the crew “Ascension” shortly thereafter. In addition to us, we brought in a group called Hijinx (Peekaboo and Embassy), rappers Malignant and Level Z, and Anthony/Ayentee, eventually morphing into a larger collective called “Miscellaneous” that included Mixed Practice and Infamous MC. Now, before I got with Karma, I was in an pretty terrible band that played funk-rock-jazz-rap-fusion a la Alphabet Soup or the Mo’Fessionals (interesting sidenote, playwright Itamar Moses played keyboards in this group). I wanted to do something that was more straight-up Hip Hop. I already DJ’d parties and I played the guitar and so I started making primitive beats using a borrowed 4-track and a sampling Gemini mixer that I had.

Hijinx

Our crew would hang out and get busy together either at Anthony’s house or at my house. Anthony’s house was like a constant party – there would be any number of kids there, homies from the graf crew DOA, to West Side Berkeley gangster types, friends of his dad, relatives, kids from other schools… just always people hanging out there. I got hip to funk and latin and jazz music all courtesy of his father’s record collection. At my home, I was granted use of a narrow boiler room underneath my mom’s house – the “Bomb Shelter” – to record in, and all of the material featured on this compilation was made there. The beats here were made either on an Akai S-01 (a cheap version of the 950) and a Roland R8 Human Rhythm Composer, or the Ensoniq ASR-10, which I made all of the later Kemetic Suns material on and still use to this day. Kids would come through, I would throw together a beat or have one I had already worked up, and they would record.

Anthony’s House

Anthony, who made beats as well, occasionally helped out engineering things. I’d do arrangements, hooks, whatever. I wanted people to write songs, not just lay down rhymes, so I tried to focus their talents that way and that’s how much of this stuff came to be. A lot of guys didn’t have any idea how to write songs – like, verse/hook/bridge, or whatever. Some dudes just wanted to spit for like 6 minutes. Off the head. It was a mess. Karma and I taught cats how to count bars, develop concepts, etc. Part of that was osmosis from rock music we both privately enjoyed, which had a greater focus on songwriting and drama. But a lot of it also came from our affiliation with the Live Lyricists Society, a kind of outlaw school club run by three Berkeley High teachers (Hodari Davis, Quame Patton, and Tim Hood) who all still had one foot in the hip hop scene and cared enough to lesson the kids, us among them, on everything from writing rhymes to navigating the music industry. We had visits from major recording artists, and many of the members of the Society came from the burgeoning east bay scene, some who didn’t attend Berkeley High at all.

Tim Hood and Hodari Davis, Live Lyricists Society

Most of the folks in Ascension were from Berkeley or Oakland. Karma spent some time between Sacramento and the Bay early on. Malignant had one foot out in Richmond. Around the beginning of 1994 I moved to the Mission neighborhood in San Francisco to live with my father, but continued attending Berkeley High and hanging out with the crew every day. It was a regular thing to go from school the Bomb Shelter, record until 7 or 8, ride the bus back into San Francisco and wash up somewhere around 10 at my dad’s apartment. Peekaboo lived out by Eclipse, in the Union City area; they attended Logan High School together and that’s how we got down with the Mixed Practice crew. Eclipse tells me now that he got real tight when Peek played him some of my stuff, like “who is this other young dude out here with beats??” There were a lot of guys who could rhyme but it was rare to find someone who had beats. As such, people were always asking me for beats and I was just real loyal and introverted, never really thought about working with people outside of my circle.

Karma’s god-brother Wayne knew Corey (BFAP) from the Mystik Journeymen from back in the day and we got down with them around ’94 or so; still, I think they probably saw us as like, young’uns in the game. Karma brought me around 4001 and we’d hang out there from time to time. The folks I remember from around at this time were Bas1 and Mic T and the Cytoplazmz, Black Stone Rangers, B.L.A.C.K., M.O.S., Yapos and Sanitayshun, Quame (later known as Superstar Quamallah, and featured here cutting on “GQ Promo”), basically a lot of older heads from the Bay Area scene. Hobo Junction cats were around, particularly IQ, Poke, Rashinel. At this point Heiro was blowing up so I didn’t see them around much except for Del who was more ubiquitous. I recall one of our first performances as “Fundamentals”, at this place called the Afro House, I was drunk and stoned and Karma was tripping hard on mushrooms. We did “The Funeral” and “Inhalo” off the 30 Days tape and Del pulled me aside afterwards, like “your style is crazy!” I’m sure he was equally as blitted.

We met Kirby around then as well, up at UC Berkeley at KALX – Karma had gone up there with the Journeymen. Even though I doubt he’ll admit it, Corey was kind of lukewarm on Kirby originally! Kirby will tell you. It was obvious he had incredible talent though, he didn’t write anything and was just completely off the top of the head, all day with it. Although he was originally from East Oakland, Kirby had spent many years in Stockton prior to coming to Berkeley and it turned out he and Karma were from the same affiliation from up that way. We would hang out and freestyle in his dorm room but we hadn’t really clicked up in a formal way yet, like we would later. After a time, Karma and I struggled to focus him on writing songs rather than just freestyling. The resulting back and forth strengthened our bonds and helped us all grow as artists.

Rocko of The Mental Patients

Now our style was more on the “backpack”/”houser” thing, but still a lot of the guys in the crew had street ties, we just didn’t really put it out there like that. Karma’s pops was connected; Kirby had done some time in jail and lost his eye in gang violence. Others had come up in gangs or around drugs, but we were all trying to stay away from the negativity. The exception was The Mental Patients – featured here on “Mental Anxieties” – who were from South Berkeley, North Oakland, and East Oakland, and on some real street shit. But they’d come through, we’d smoke, lay down some music, no drama ever. They weren’t really a part of the crew per se but they showed love, and would share smoke or even muscle if it was needed (which, on a couple of occasions, it was). Good dudes. Any time there was beef you had an assemblage of dudes from West Side and South Side Berkeley as well as North Oakland and parts of the East as well. We rolled deep. We also made sure we made a presence at the underage venues en masse. Karma’s pops had a stake in a bar called “KC’s Your Place Too” which hosted a lot of underground shows and battles, Kirby made sure we rolled with him to UC Berkeley open mics and the rest of the folks always dragged us into random ciphers wherever we happened to be.

Still and all, this compilation covers only about 2 years of time from 1993 to early ‘95, and before long things began to change. Friendly competition turned into beef. Dudes started talking behind each others’ backs, trying to create little allegiances and whatever… just childish stuff but you know we were, at the time, anywhere from 14 at the youngest up to maybe 17 years old. Embassy and Karma, long rivals in the cipher, came to blows and everyone went their separate ways. I spent several months recording my own material, thinking I’d record my own demo/album… maybe sell it like the Journeymen and Mixed Practice and the other guys I was meeting around the scene at that time had been doing. This solo stuff never got released anywhere, but much of it is featured here.

In the summer of 1995, Karma and I were both working in San Francisco. He was interning at Polygram – Polygram had an office in San Francisco! We patched up and started working on what would become 30 Days & A Plane Ticket, our first “real” tape – the title owing to the fact that I was moving to New York City 30 days from when we started. Karma’s style, originally an old school, laid back flow, and at one point a bone of contention amongst the more east coast-influenced crew, had developed into a this tripped out, cerebral scattershot of freestyles, politics, hood slang, conspiracy theories, supreme mathematics, esoteric martial arts and folklore. I had come more into my own as well, becoming less derivative of the artists I was listening to and developing my own style of beats and rhymes. A cat Karma rolled with called Bay-Bay came up with the name Kemetic Suns based on the idea “Soul Unity, Never Separation”. At that time, though, it was basically just a loose affiliation of folks we rolled with, some of whom didn’t make music at all. It was just a crew in the loosest sense. Kirby had been down with us since the early days but the 4-man crew, as it would eventually be known, didn’t really gel until 1996 or so, after the point at which this compilation ends.

Honestly I don’t know what people will think of this stuff. I’m opening myself up which is always a risk. I think we were had some talent and though we never made a huge mark, we were really prolific (due mostly to my ability to record all the time). I had the good fortune to hold onto most of my old sessions. I’m sure there’s a ton of amazing stuff out there that has disappeared… I’ve certainly been met with that response as I’ve sought out material by other groups of the time. We wore our influences on our sleeves – but as kids, that’s just part of developing your own style. It wasn’t about getting signed, getting features or placements, or even tape sales really – just a bunch of cats doing music. That’s what the underground tape thing was really about. Ultimately we were just doing hip hop as we knew it and how were taught it – by developing ourselves.

** I ripped these tracks directly – in stereo – from the 4-track tapes. The mixes were done live, and although I think my ears are a bit better now for the purposes of mixing, I didn’t go in and alter any of the recordings. At first I was going to track them all out individually, add some compression/gate/automation/etc but as I listened back I decided to let them be… these sound much closer to the real thing than they would have if I had done any digital work on them.

Tags: Fundamentals, Kemetic Suns, Koncepts

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