The A-Team – Maskaraid

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Live @ The Good Life Cafe (199?)

Omid is back again this month with five more great performances dubbed from LA’s seminal Good Life Cafe open mics. This was supposed to go up a few hours ago but I blacked out. It’s still Thursday night in Los Angeles.

Be sure to cop that This Is The Life doc if you haven’t yet…

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from I’m Not Playing (Uni, 1989 / Traffic, 2007)

Daedelus f/ Busdriver & Abstract Rude – “Girls“

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from The Quiet Party EP (Plug Research, 2002)

Ever since Wale’s “Pretty Girls” dropped I’d been wracking my brain trying to figure out which random rap group had previously rocked a “Girls” sample. I finally remembered, it was Ultimate Force, the recently unearthed pre-DITC Diamond D project. And it turns out nerd rappers like girls as well, with Busdriver and Ab Rude going uber emo on their Daedelus helmed take.

Of course both UF and Daedelus flip the Moments/Whatnauts version, vastly inferior to the BYB cover, because BYB is generally better than everything, especially drum n’ bass. But you get the point. Things go in cycles. Girls, and records about them, are like buses. You miss one, next 15 one’s coming.

Cocaine Blunts Bay Area Rap Tape representative Jonny Paycheck has ripped this batch of vintage footage from Bomb Hip Hop Magazine’s West Coast Underground Vol. 1. The footage itself is pretty low quality but the audio sounds solid enough. We’re not entirely sure of the venue or date of recording, but based on the songs being performed one might roughly estimate that it was from 94 or 95. (Anyone have more specific info?) Performances by Blackalicious, Raw Soul and Soul Kitchen as well as LA’s Abstract Tribe Unique and Jurassic 5 after the jump. Part two coming soon.

Update from Bomb Hip Hop’s David Paul: “The footage is from the 94 and the 95 parties. Both at the DNA Lounge in San Francisco presented by The Bomb Hip-Hop Magazine. These West Coast Underground video tapes are bootlegs from the UK and are of bad visual & audio quality. Someone had taken the tapes and decided to edit and make their own compilations (yuck). They don’t seem to sync up either. Glad everyone is enjoying the footage but we had nothing to do with the posting or the quality of this.” (more…)

I am on the faded side of the fence in writing this post. I’m letting it stand for now, but will probably edit it obsessively tomorrow morning. Enjoy the rapps.

Gucci Mane – “Untitled”
from Writing On The Walls (Mixtape, Coming Soon 2009)
Guess who’s back? Not even 48 hours out of lock and Gucci got a new joint for us. Short but sweet. Zaytoven really needs to start rocking some new sound modules. 2,000 beats and they all sound exactly the same. Still as long as Gucci is rapping on them I am not totally mad. We’re going to try and open every other “New Rap Songs”" of 2009 with New Guch Songs. Hopefully he keeps recording at the pace he was at before he went in.

Abstract Rude – “Rejuvenation“

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from Rejuvenation (Rhymesayers, In Stores May, 2009)
You guys are going to have to deal with my west coast indie revival for a little longer. And by a little longer I mean forever. To be perfectly honest I’ve never been a huge Ab Rude fan. He was a real friendly dude when he came through the radio show and a serviceable hook man, but for the most part I wasn’t checking for him as much as I was his peers. Because he didn’t chop so much. He always provided more of a spirtual/laid back counterweight to, say Mikah’s scattershot flow madness rap. But around the time of the second Haiku D’etat album he seemed to consciously step it up as far as flow goes. This is an extension of that technicality but he doesn’t really sacrifice his smoothness. Seattle’s Vitamin D is producing his entire album and seems to be a solid complement to Ab here. It’s pretty great what Rhymesayers does for the backpack rap community, it seems like Atmosphere tour money is basically funding a bunch of interesting projects that other labels wouldn’t take a risk on in 2009. The Jake One/Freeway album should be monstrous. And they still release VINYL. (more…)

Freestyle Fellowship f/ The Heavyweights – “Heavyweights“

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from Inner City Griots (4th & B’way, 1993)

Aceyalone, Spoon Iodine & CVE – “Jurassick“

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from Project Blowed Compilation (Project Blowed, 1994)

Spoon Iodine – “Dollar Bill”

Spoon Iodine – “Dollar Bill (Live Accapella)“

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unreleased (199?)

Spoon Iodine – “Anti-Christ“

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from Tags Of The Time 3 (Mary Joy, 2001)

Omid f/ Spoon – “I’m Just A Bill“

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from Monolith (Mush, 2003)

Some interesting Good Life / Project Blowed discussion has been going over at the Ning site promoting the This Is The Life documentary (now on DVD! I just ordered one yesterday.) In particular I wanted to highlight this post from Abstract Rude about Spoon Iodine. Spoon was one of the more enigmatic emcees from that camp. After demolishing Freestyle Fellowship’s “Heavyweights” (“style messiah / hot like a volcano with fire”) he basically disappeared, give or take a small handful of hiss heavy dubs and a brief turn of the century resurgence with producer Omid. We’ve talked about him here before, so I figured I’d just up the bulk of his catalog and let Ab fill in the blanks after the jump. (more…)