Culture Productions (f/ Erykah Badu) – “Free-Style”

Culture Productions – “Rough Necks”

Culture Productions – “Hip Hall Stylee“

from Black Panther Stylee EP (Build & Destroy, 1993)

Blame it on a childhood of comic books in the era of sexual frustration and pouches, but I’ve long been obsessed with finding the first recorded performance of famous artists. Today we’re looking at the first and only 12″ from Culture Productions, a product of Grambling University and host to the on-record debut of the woman who would later be known as Erykah Badu. The story of my long tail half research starts like this – sometime in the last decade I read the following usenet post:

O.K here is some of the dope on Ms. Badu, And I know because I know her personally. I spent some time @ grambling university back in 90′, where Erykah Badu started college, We were in a group called Culture Productions Erykah was an MC along with (rasta) Che’ Malik, another female MC (Half Pint) a male MC (Self-Equality) 3 Dj\producers (Dj Ed, Dj Tekno & Myself). Erykah & I even did a duet She & I rapped & she sang the hook on it. We also put out (locally) a 12″ with three cuts on it. She never focused on the singing aspect of it, she was an MC first & not just an MC, her lyrics were mad deep. (& long), ( I used to trip on how she could remember them all.) Long story short, She left grambling headed for New York, ended up back home in Dallas doin’ her thing & boom the rest is history.

Being a good rap nerd, I zoned in on the part about a locally released 12″ and added it to my “list of records that might exist.” Many years years later a few Black Panther Stylee EP finally turned up on the random rap circuit, exchanging hands in the low three figure range. I don’t think anybody realized it’s minor significance – in fact it was billed as an Oakland record (half true – some members of the group were from Oaktown and one of the addresses on the label directs to a PO box there).

If my estimations are correct, and they always are, Ms. Badu only appears on one of these tracks – “Free-Style.” I asked her about the record on the mighty twitter and only received this befuddled response. She did not reply to further inquiry and my attempts to reach out to other members of the group fell through as well. So there you go, my fact checking has been reduced to inference and twelve year old usenet posts. Blogging! It’s pretty clearly her singing on “Free-Style” – check the vamp on the closing bars. There are two female rappers on the track, the first being “Half Pint,” as mentioned in the above post. The second, unidentified, closes out the record and actually sounds pretty amateurish. Presumably this is Erykah as well? Either way the eerie track is the most musically interesting track here. The rest is well produced, if a little derivative, often drawing heavily on both the sound and ideology of Poor Righteous Teachers and other 5%er groups of the time. (They even claim “CP Posse!” inna Wise Intelligent stylee ala “PRT Posse.”) Neo-soul footnote status aside, it’s a solid listen.

(The above artwork is from CP’s Demo tape, which does not feature Erykah, but does contain alternate mixes to two of the 12″ tracks.)

Tags: Culture Productions, Erykah Badu

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 at 6:20 pm and is filed under Bay Area, Louisiana, Texas. 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.