Sleepy Brown f/ Big Rube – “Bending Corners”
Sleepy Brown f/ Big Gipp – “Can’t Give It Up“
from Phunk-O-Naut (Dreamworks, Unreleased, 2004)
Lil Will f/ Cool Breeze & Pimp C – “Low, Low“
from Betta Days (Organized Noize/Interscope, Unreleased 1998)

The Dungeon Family catalog is infectious in the most literal sense. You listen to one record and then all you want to do is revisit their entire catalog. I can’t tell you how many afternoons I’ve wasted spent running the first three Outkast albums in a row and then going straight into the first two Goodies. Obviously yesterdays out of nowhere future classic (?) has inspired a similar streak, though I’ve been going deeper into their unheralded r&b productions. So here are a few unreleased soul joints from the ONP camp with good rapping on them.

Phunk-O-Naut would have been Sleepy’s sophomore effort, but it got devoured by the Dreamworks machine. It seems like Sleepy loosely predicted/influenced that breezey soul pop that’s been gaining steam in the wake of “Sexual Seduction” and Shawty Redd’s “Drifter”. (I guess their calling it “vibe music,” but I haven’t heard that term anywhere but on message board and blogs).

A few weeks back I got clowned by a certain magazine editor slalf hash blogger when he asked what I thought of Lil Will and I started gushing about the unreleased Betta Days. Turns out he was talking about this guy, who I had already forgotten (and probably doesn’t have a Pimp C verse).