Camp Lo's Uptown Saturday Night 9781501322723, 9781501322716, 9781501322693

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Uptown Saturday Night Praise for the series: It was only a matter of time before a clever publisher realized that there is an audience for whom Exile on Main Street or Electric Ladyland are as significant and worthy of study as The Catcher in the Rye or Middlemarch … The series … is freewheeling and eclectic, ranging from minute rock-geek analysis to idiosyncratic personal celebration — The New York Times Book Review Ideal for the rock geek who thinks liner notes just aren’t enough — Rolling Stone One of the coolest publishing imprints on the planet — Bookslut These are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate fantastic design, well-executed thinking, and things that make your house look cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album and breaks it down in startling minutiae. We love these. We are huge nerds — Vice A brilliant series … each one a work of real love — NME (UK) Passionate, obsessive, and smart — Nylon Religious tracts for the rock ’n’ roll faithful — Boldtype [A] consistently excellent series — Uncut (UK) We … aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your only source for reading about music (but if we had our way … watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything there is to know about an album, you’d do well to check out Bloomsbury’s “33 1/3” series of books — Pitchfork For reviews of individual titles in the series, please visit our blog at 333sound.com and our website at http://www.bloomsbury.com/ musicandsoundstudies Follow us on Twitter: @333books Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/33.3books For a complete list of books in this series, see the back of this book

Forthcoming in the series: The Raincoats by Jenn Pelly Homogenic by Emily Mackay Boys for Pele by Amy Gentry Return to the 36 Chambers by Jarett Kobek Okie from Muskogee by Rachel Rubin Tin Drum by Agata Pyzik Peepshow by Samantha Bennett In on the Kill Taker by Joe Gross 24 Hour Revenge Therapy by Ronen Givony Transformer by Ezra Furman Switched on Bach by Roshanak Kheshti Jesus Freak by Will Stockton and D. Gilson The Holy Bible by David Evans Southern Rock Opera by Rien Fertel Golden Hits of the Shangri-Las by Ada Wolin and many more …

Uptown Saturday Night

Patrick Rivers and Will Fulton

Bloomsbury Academic An Imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Patrick Rivers and Will Fulton, 2017 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Rivers, Patrick, 1984- author. | Fulton, Will, author. Title: Uptown Saturday night / Patrick Rivers & Will Fulton. Description: New York, NY : Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. | Series: 33 1/3 Identifiers: LCCN 2017008519| ISBN 9781501322723 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781501322709 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Camp Lo (Musical group) | Rap (Music)--History and criticism. Classification: LCC ML421.C257 R58 2017 | DDC 782.421649092/2-dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017008519 ISBN:

PB: 978-1-5013-2272-3 ePub: 978-1-5013-2270-9 ePDF: 978-1-5013-2269-3 Series: 33 13 Cover image © 333sound

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Contents

Introdu-cin’ 1 Black Nostaljack 9 Bronx Vigilantes 29 Coolie High Gotcha Wide 41 The Diamond Delegates at D&D Studios 65 Blazay, Blazay, Blazay 79 Diamond Crooks Takin’ It Over 121 Epilogue: Sippin’ Amaretta 135 Works Cited 141

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“This is it, what!”

The utterance of those four words with the proper articulation and rhythm can prompt many hip hop enthusiasts into a united chorus. Camp Lo’s 1997 debut Uptown Saturday Night is one of the most beloved albums in 1990s hip hop. That anthemic call, “Luchini pourin’ from the sky, let’s get rich, what!” still emanates from nightclubs and car speakers alike. From the outset, the group’s sound was distinct, filled with secretive slang and intense nostalgia. Camp Lo’s language and style set them apart from other rappers, which was no simple feat considering the incredible diversity of 1990s hip hop. While other rappers were making noise, bragging about bling, and bringing ruckus, Geechi Suede and Sonny Cheeba were on the “Lo,” whispering and rapping with an argot all of their own. The album wove a tapestry of retro culture that combined uniquely Camp Lo elements: the youthful memories of Cooley High characters and the late-night crime world of Sidney Poitier and Bill Cosby’s film trilogy. While Wu-Tang Clan were drawing inspiration  1 •

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from kung fu films and Chinese martial arts aesthetics, Camp Lo were bringing 1970s black culture back to public consciousness. Sure, other rappers’ music sampled that era too, but Camp Lo re-envisioned it on their own terms, both acknowledging the ways in which the present pays homage to the past and reinterpreting the past to offer something fresh in the present. The songs on Uptown Saturday Night are aural films that fluidly juxtapose late-night diamond heist narratives with free association rhymes of exotic locales and luxury cars, creating a world that was both gritty and glamorous. It was fantastic, and fantasy: music that reintroduced an unfiltered 1970s black masculine cool—a cool made all the more complex in that it had already been absorbed and exploited by mainstream popular culture. Accessible and appealing as Uptown Saturday Night and “Luchini” were, they were lyrically crafted to speak to a small number of friends in the Bronx. It was insider slang, a hyperlocal regionalism that challenged listeners. Their distinct terminology (money was “Luchini,” girls’ posteriors were “Ox,” guns were “istols,” and “Hollywood” meant fly) was fascinating to listeners in that it presented a mysterious world entirely of its own. Even within the hip hop community, no one outside of the Lo could truly decipher the complexities of their secretive language—not even in one-on-one conversation. Camp Lo were hip hop’s version of the two black passengers in the 1980 film Airplane, whose slang was so thick and complex that the hapless, bewildered white flight attendant needed to rely on the translation of an older woman who offered: “Oh stewardess, I speak jive.” As life imitates art (imitating life), during an early  2 •

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promotional tour in 1996, Camp Lo were stopped at LaGuardia airport in New York City for attempting to board a flight without identification. Like the hapless stewardess in Airplane, the airline attendant was bewildered both by Sonny Cheeba’s drawled slang and by his response that he didn’t own a photo ID. When she asked how he deposits his checks, she was further baffled by his response (and the knowing mention of a name that would have been completely unfamiliar to the general public in 1996) when he replied: “I sign my checks over to my man Jay-Z.” Like the passengers in Airplane, Cochise, Geechi Dan, and the host of characters that populate the blaxploitation film culture of the 1970s were two-dimensional and often stereotypical. To Geechi Suede and Sonny Cheeba of Camp Lo, however, they represented a profound aesthetic concept of cool and a nostalgic vision of an outmoded black cultural look and identity. At a time when hip hop fashion was dominated by Timberlands, hockey jerseys, and designer labels like Hilfiger, Karl Kani, and Polo, Camp Lo donned satin and polyester, flat caps, and brown leather coats: vintage clothes (“vines”) to match their personas (“diamond crooks”). But while their slang and vines were “nostaljack” (nostalgic), their flows were far from derivative retrospectives. Although the jazzy flows of Digable Planets and the earthy vibes of the late ’80s to early ’90s Native Tongues collective certainly provided inspiration, Camp Lo occupied a vanguard lyrical space of their own. Arriving at a time when lyrical innovation and vocal charisma were of the utmost importance for emcees even in the mainstream, Camp Lo showed and proved with staggering wordplay.  3 •

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The music of Uptown Saturday Night stems from a complex tapestry of black popular culture. The album owes its title to the 1973 film directed by Sidney Poitier, but the phrase “Uptown Saturday Night” also represented an ideal: a place, time, and culturally black space in which good times and hijinks prevailed, the (black) hero wins, gets the diamonds, and speeds off with the shapely heroine. Of course, adopted personas had long been prevalent in hip hop culture, yet the personas created by Camp Lo and the way in which they combined 1970s imagery and “good times” ethos with hip hop hardness was undeniably out of step with the growing mid-1990s commerciality of hip hop culture and mainstreamed gangsta. Their money was “Luchini,” not “Benjamins,” and coveted diamonds were, well … diamonds, to steal and unload for cash, not to wear as “bling.” As hip hop grew more successful (and more lucrative), raps became increasingly about buying, not heisting, and the new trope of hip hop became an ostentatious display of real money or wealth, rather than wild stories about fantastic capers. In many ways, under the influence of commercialism, practical street tales and consumer fantasies had begun to overshadow imagination and effervescence in hip hop. Camp Lo intended to be out of step with this (real) world, and preferred a flyer place. As Cheeba would later describe, Camp Lo thrived on being different: “Chances are, the music we make is pretty low. You know what I’m saying? The odds are against you finding a group just like us. We expect that from ourselves … that we will make music that is not like anything else you will hear that is out at the time.” But being original, and developing a persona captured  4 •

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on tape itself, doesn’t get the music off the block. Hip hop artists relied on a complex network of mediators to get their music from the demo to the marketplace: shady record labels with Draconian contracts, inexperienced management, cantankerous club owners who are rarely fans of new music, radio station programmers who pride themselves on their innovation but are usually the last to try something new. Many artists change their rap style and image in order to get a record deal, only to see the deal fall apart before the record was released. Many dreams fell apart, and many artists went broke. For Camp Lo, navigating this world of shady characters entered their rapped narratives in metaphor on Uptown Saturday Night, as they viewed the whole thing in term of a caper, or more specifically, a “world heist.” In writing this volume, the authors have attempted to allow the voices of the group, producers, contributors, and collaborators on Uptown Saturday Night to play the central role of telling the album’s story. We have chosen to use the interview material to shape our own analysis and contextualization of the album as much as possible, without reading too deeply into statements or putting new words into the various speakers’ mouths. This is not our story, but the story of Camp Lo (Geechi Suede and Sonny Cheeba) and Ski Beatz, the album producer and unofficial third member. The authors are eternally grateful that Suede, Cheeba, and Ski took the time to share their story in interviews for this volume, as did album contributors Ish/Butterfly of Digable Planets, Jungle Brown, and Dave (Trugoy the Dove) of De La Soul. Further insight was provided by: David Lotwin, co-owner of D&D Studios; former  5 •

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Lo co-manager and mentor Tone Hooker (Original Flavor); Jim Mahoney, director of promotions for Profile Records throughout the process of Uptown; stylist Tisha Brown; and the group’s primary live deejay, Technician. In addition, volume co-author and former A&R for Profile Records Will Fulton offered further first-hand perspective on working with Camp Lo, consulting an archive of demo tapes, press materials, and album outtakes. As M-1 from Dead Prez eloquently rapped in the 2000 song “Hip hop,” “in the real world, these just people with ideas.” And indeed, the collective ideas, interactions, dreams, concepts, and labors of Suede, Cheeba, Ski, and their network of friends and influences were what created Uptown Saturday Night. While the group, the album, and its history are considered here as a distinct entity, the authors are well aware that too often hip hop history is considered in terms of a parade of individual albums floating outside of their contexts of conception and creation, rather than viewed as an ongoing process of co-influence, discovery, and invention—of circles of friends rhyming in cyphers and sharing flows, records to sample, and drum programming techniques. Any number of reasons can keep one emcee rhyming on the block or a demo tape from becoming a hit single. Thus, in this volume, we focus on the collectivity of process and community to explore how this album both reflects and redefines the networks of black cultural production (film characters, tropes, and images from a previous time) to shape the sonic cinema of Camp Lo’s black cultural nostalgia. In order to understand that nostalgia and the world of Uptown Saturday Night, we first need to travel elsewhere:  6 •

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to Madame Zenobia’s after-hours club; to “The Sugar Shack” as imagined by painter Ernie Barnes; to Don Cornelius’s Soul Train; to the soulful musical culture of Curtis Mayfield and Rose Royce; to the world of Donald Goines and Iceberg Slim; to Max Julien’s “Goldie” and Calvin Lockhart’s “Biggie Smalls.” We need to examine the complex mixture of racial pride and cultural exploitation—of fictions that often glamorized a poverty and desperation that was far from glamorous—that defined 1970s black popular culture in the wake of the civil rights movement and the rise of black nationalism. And so, let us begin.

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Black Nostaljack

This chapter is dedicated to all of the Brothers and Sisters out there who never had enough of ’70s black culture.

Sonny Cheeba (b. Salahadeen Wilds, 1975) grew up on 183rd St and Tiebout Ave in the Bronx, not far from Geechi Suede (b. Saladine Wallace, 1977), who grew up on 197th and Valentine. Monotone apartment buildings, row houses, elevated subway platforms, and a dense demographic of blacks and Latinos were markers of their connected neighborhoods. Both had Muslim upbringings; their given first names are variations of the name Saladin, the first Sultan of Egypt and Syria, reflecting their parents’ Muslim faith as well as the naming practices that resulted from a pronounced wave of black consciousness in the 1970s. As Cheeba recalls about their meeting: “when you meet someone who has the same name as you, and know both what it means, you just run with it.” Then, a chance meeting with producer Ski (b. David Willis, 1969)—at that point a member of the hip hop duo Original Flavor—on a Bronx block became the serendipitous encounter that led to the creation of Uptown Saturday Night.  9 •

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There are several demographic groups in the U.S. that have seen their culture absorbed and transformed by the processes of mainstreaming. Yet, more consistently than any other group, black people in America—from enslaved Africans to American Negroes to Blacks to African-Americans—have been appropriated and incorporated into the mélange that makes up American popular culture. While the cultural practices and signifiers of black Americans will always be a foundation of a larger, American culture, there is a continuous cat-and-mouse game that proceeds as such: 1) racially and economically suppressed black culture creators breed practices and products for the marginalized community around them that is too “raw,” “real,” and different for the center; 2) the newfound culture is superficially disparaged while its innovative and “authentic” qualities begin to attract many at the fringes of the cultural center; 3) the fresh culture is eventually absorbed or appropriated, introducing financial gains to some; 4) the next generation—still racially and/or economically suppressed—soak in what the previous generation accomplished while forging new practices within and for their community, only for the cycle to begin anew. Due to the variety of black locales and experiences in the U.S., particularly in the late twentieth century, this progression is usually staggered. There was a time, however, when all four of these stages were simultaneously occurring, providing a rush of community-based, mainstream, underground, and subversive black culture shooting through the media conduits of America. It was a time of cultural awareness and black resistance movements—broadcast on national television, radio, and •

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movie circuits—sowed by the neglected youth in major cities. The increased social, visual, political, and aural presence of potent blackness in the 1970s is essential to understanding much of the culture that has been produced in the past forty years. It is important here to note that Cheeba, Suede, Ski, and all of the principals involved in crafting Uptown Saturday Night were children during the 1970s. In this chapter, we’ll show how this early absorption and adolescent processing of that politically vibrant decade as they went through their young adult years in the 1980s (to then become culture creators themselves in the 1990s) was paramount to the nostalgic inspiration that directly stimulated the conception and ethos of Camp Lo. I feel that the ’70s sonically was just wider. —Sonny Cheeba

There is a diversity to black culture that is not always recognized. Often, black culture is reduced to a couple of practices that are made to represent the totality of black creativity, experience, and values. While the dynamic range of analog tape did, quite literally, produce a wider sound on recordings from the 1970s in comparison to the digital recordings of today, Cheeba’s statement refers more figuratively to the wide range of personalities, voices, instrumentation, and lyrics sonically presented on recordings from that decade. Miles Davis, Nina Simone, Sun Ra, Bob James, The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and others were exploring and experimenting with a range of improvised music and jazz. Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, •

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Diana Ross, and the Temptations were all breaking away from the soul templates established at Motown. And, as the home of soul was evolving, various styles of rhythm and blues were being shepherded in by LaBelle, Kool & The Gang, Jimmy Castor, James Brown, Esther Phillips, Leon Ware, The Chi-Lites, Marlena Shaw, and a multitude of bands, singers, and producers that, to mainstream entertainment consumers, seemed unhinged in regard to their particular expressions of blackness. For many black people that were coming of age during this time, the aesthetic shift was apparent: … there was a freshness to the culture that came forward, a sense of liberation, a statement of self-determination on the part of all those people who felt that they were no longer going to try to appease mainstream taste. Instead, they were emboldened in their commitment to being as Black as they wanted to be: in style, taste, and overall action. The Blacker, the better. —Boyd 2007, 6

Cinema and Media Studies Professor Todd Boyd’s comment speaks to a major reconfiguration of blackness in the American public that extended beyond music. The wideness of black culture was seen and felt through the bodies of Muhammad Ali and Lynn Swann, digested and contemplated through the poetic arts of Nikki Giovanni and Amiri Baraka, and engaged with every week on television through George and Weezy Jefferson and the variegated blackness of Don Cornelius’s hippest ride in America. For black children and teenagers who had not already been accustomed to the extremely narrow •

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representation of public, media-constructed blackness, these characters, voices, bodies, sounds, and perspectives provided a rich constellation of cultural and entertainment options with which they could identify. Arguably the most significant—if not the most discussed and referred to—platform for the cultural representation of 1970s blackness was feature films. In the 1970s, before BET, YouTube, and Twitch, if you were a black kid or teenager, seeing a beloved actor or character on the living room console television, or on the movie screen, was momentous. Black actors, directors, screenwriters, and producers proliferated during the decade and created an assortment of cinematic content intended for black audiences, now known as the “Blaxploitation Films” of the 1970s. Blaxploitation has become a catchall term for popular films of that era which featured a largely black cast and depicted various facets of black life and culture. Regardless of the race or ethnicity of the people directing, producing, writing, or developing a film, the cinematic genre was distinguished by a “you know it when you see it” type of calculation: if you saw a lot of black people, it had to be blaxploitation. And yet, such a two-dimensional view—ironic, considering the greater racial self-awareness of America at the turn of the twentyfirst century—actually breeds a flawed understanding of 1970s black film culture which disavows the artistic and perhaps political intent of many black filmmakers and actors. As director John Singleton puts it, “To call every black-themed film made between 1971 and 1977 blaxploitation is very unfair; I think it’s very racist. It denigrates a lot of good work that came out of some of •

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those films” (Martinez et al. 1998, 78). Thankfully, over time, as critical awareness of the variety of black themes explored in films made during the decade has grown, there has been a broader discussion of what those films meant at the time and a recognition of the profound impact that they had and continue to have on black and American culture. The term blaxploitation was coined in 1972. Junius Griffin, the former head of the Hollywood/Beverly Hills chapter of the NAACP, initiated the debate over the proliferation of then contemporary black images in mainstream media. In 1971, independent filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles completed and released Sweet Sweetback’s BaadAsssss Song and MGM produced and released Shaft by photographer and director Gordon Parks, films that at their most superficial level were ostensibly narratives of empowered black masculinity outside and within the justice system. Following the box office success of those films, Griffin was quoted in an August 16th, 1972 Variety story referring to Sweetback and Shaft as “black exploitation films”; he had read each film as a depiction of and indulgence in black social pathologies that were far from empowering. By the end of that month, Griffin and Roy Innis of CORE (Congress of Racial Equity) formed the Coalition Against Blaxploitation (CAB). The activist group’s stated purpose was to create a ratings system for black movies and serve as a gatekeeper and filter for black subject matter in films. The first film CAB officially identified by the moniker of “blaxploitation” was Superfly (1973), a work that would set the standard for depicting drug culture in urban areas. The movie also established a third archetype •

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for black male lead characters in the contemporaneous wave of high profile black films: the gangster/hustler persona represented in Superfly by Youngblood Priest (Ron O’Neal). Previously, Sweetback and Shaft had codified the tropes of the “stick it to whitey” badass— Sweet Sweetback (Melvin Van Peebles)—and the badass enforcer of community order—private detective John Shaft (Richard Roundtree), respectively. In 1973, The Mack unveiled Goldie (Max Julien) as the new pimp/player archetype. From there, versions of these two-dimensional characters proliferated in filmmaking. Responding to these on-film representations of black men, Griffin would state that “the transformation from the stereotyped Stepin Fetchit to Super Nigger on the screen is just another form of cultural genocide” (quoted in McGee 1972). Griffin never completely qualified what “cultural genocide” meant or how it would manifest, but he established a discourse that deemed all cinematic depictions of working class blackness as unrefined or boorish, and unnecessary. There were, of course, blaxploitation films that were undeniably exploitative in their over-exaggerated and denigrating depictions of black people—particularly in the late 1970s when the plots, themes, and characters became pure derivations of early blaxploitation films. It is, however, more appropriate to take Boyd’s and Singleton’s more nuanced perspectives and see this era of film as an emergence of black representation on the screen and behind the scenes—one that had both positive and negative effect. Unacknowledged by Griffin, the content and style of those films were transforming and sustaining the film medium for black culture creators •

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and American cinema as a whole (Martinez et al. 1998). After all, those films created a generation of black actors, actresses, producers, screen writers, music directors, film composers, and directors who received their first exposure to the industry through what CAB was disparagingly referring to as blaxploitation. For Griffin, however, representation in and of itself was not enough. The Coalition Against Blaxploitation’s perspective did not allow for an understanding that black people wanted to see their living conditions and situations displayed in a film, or that some black people that had lived through police brutality, black and Italian race contestations in New York City, or urban drug trafficking could in fact recognize the exaggerated essence of the characters in these films. Sweetback, Shaft, Priest, and Goldie are considered the templates for blaxploitation masculinity, a masculinity steeped in gendered chauvinism whose potency was sustained as it trickled down and was adopted by hip hop. While there is a persistent and legitimate debate about the impact of sensationalizing violence and over-sexualizing black characters in film, that debate can sometimes become paternalistic and often fails to document the wants and desires of black creators and consumers, their rationale for engaging with certain content, or their critical understanding of who they are and what they are creating or consuming. In expressing this perspective, Cooley High (1975) actor Glynn Turman explained, “Another thing we were so proud of, as Black people, was to share with the rest of the world what our life was like. It was like a greeting card. This is how we are” (ibid., 188). •

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Then smoke the shooby dooby with the black nostaljack

Blaxploitation had a feel, a groove, an art, an urban blackness that impacted the hip hop generation of black culture creators—Camp Lo included. Group producer Ski discusses his exposure to blaxploitation films: “being in North Carolina we had a dollar movie theater, we used to go and see them there. But you could always catch a blaxploitation film in the hood.” Being a toddler as the production of the early 1970s films ramped up, Ski was immersed in blaxploitation films as the seventies concluded in large part because they were cheap entertainment. Then, once a new technology became ubiquitous in the home, the nascent hip hop generation was even more exposed to 1970s ideas of blackness. Ski articulates this point: “In the hood, you got the theater. Then boom, VHS.” The videocassette made engagement with blaxploitation cinema even more accessible, and VHS was a seminal part of Cheeba’s early interaction with the films: Well at that point, I had older cousins. So, if my parents weren’t showing me what’s crackin’, they was. They’d bring in those type of flicks, and we’ll sit there with a bowl of cereal and watch it in the morning.

Turntables, drum machines, synthesizers, and samplers are the technologies most often credited for establishing and transforming the sound of hip hop music, but in regard to the personas of the rappers themselves, the VHS tape machine deserves the credit Boyd allots: “When many of today’s artists were coming of age in the •

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’80s, the first decade when VCRs were becoming staples in the home, films from the blaxploitation era formed the largest body of work for them to draw on in creating their own sense of identity” (2007, 12). We got the Emporio and vino just for the caper And yes he be the Cheeba And yes I be the Suede

Different rappers of course identified with different personas from these films, but the most popular links between blaxploitation and hip hop can be found in famous characters that were “gangsters.” The term blaxploitation had lumped all black-oriented films from the era together as accentuating and encouraging the social pathologies of black urban areas, and for some, this stream of thought was confirmed when gangsta rap became a dominant mode of expressing youthful subversion. Gangsta rap, these critics might argue, was a tendency toward a glorification of violence that was born directly out of 1970s black film. Blaxploitation was prominently referenced in gangsta rap through characters and plot devices associated with the gangster/ drug dealer and pimp personas of the genre. Priest, Goldie, and Dolomite are three characters that were often referred to, quoted, and sampled in 1990s gangsta rap. Blaxploitation films, then, were a cultural heritage that manifested as a reservoir of influence for hip hop creatives, Camp Lo included. Yet, as Camp Lo were not gangsta rappers, they chose instead to identify with certain other black characters that came to life in films from the era. Suede and Cheeba used their blaxploitation •

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references to present a contrast to the gangsta personas and imagery that dominated hip hop in the mid-1990s; their nostalgia was common enough, but it was an alternative take, all the same. Cheeba was essential to bringing blaxploitation film culture to the Camp Lo group concept. He was a critical consumer of the content of the era, and very aware of the over-exaggerated and denigrating depictions of black people that often characterized the genre: I like the style, I like the way cats were talking, and the scene—for every dude they had theme music, you know what I’m saying. So, I was digging all that. I was never really big on the slap happy joints. So I was really more into the Cooley [High] and Youngblood, you know what I’m saying. The Uptown [Saturday Night]—Uptown was more classic, you know what I mean, because you got Sidney Poitier and Bill Cos[by].

Neither the “slap happy joints” with buffoonish characters nor the over-the-top gangster flicks enticed Cheeba. For him, blaxploitation represents an era of film featuring a deluge of black-oriented concepts; all other content was supplemental. He preferred the more grounded films of the era that embraced the style of the period but still offered relatable characters and realistic scenarios. Like Singleton and Boyd, Cheeba does not view all of blaxploitation as exploitative. In fact, Cooley High and Uptown Saturday Night were films that Cheeba held in high regard, as “classics.” As a result, it is unsurprising that they would later serve as the primary building block of the story of Camp Lo. •

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Cooley High “may not have fit into the blaxploitation formula, but it was most definitely urban, and most especially real in its representation of Black life in Chicago during the 1960s” (Boyd 2007: 73). With George Lucas’s American Graffiti as a reference, Cooley High (1975) was pitched to American International Pictures (AIP) as a coming-of-age film inspired by screenwriter Eric Monte’s teenage years in the 1960s, but set in an alternate American reality—the Cabrini-Green public housing projects in Chicago’s South Side. In the film, Leroy “Preach” Jackson (Glynn Turman) and Richard “Cochise” Morris (Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs) are seniors in their final weeks at Edwin J. Cooley Vocational High School with aspirations to become a Hollywood writer and college basketball player, respectively. The story is told from an adolescent perspective, enabling, as actor Turman explains, a different type of emotional drive for the characters that was markedly in contrast to the stories of hardened criminality or adult gangsters: The message of loving life was unique to our story, especially considering the movies that were coming out at that time. It’s what sets Cooley apart from the movies that have been copies of it to this day. But the thing that is always missing in those movies, that Cooley had, is how much those kids love life. They glorified life as opposed to glorifying the deaths, so that when the death came it was a true tragedy, even for the bad guys (in Martinez et al. 1998: 188).

Cooley High was one of few films during the blaxploitation era about black teenagers; (Youngblood [1978], a •

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film Cheeba appreciates, was another). Cooley High was uniquely representative in that the characters were, like Cheeba and Suede, facing all of the multifaceted issues tied to the experience of black male adolescence, whether it was in the ’70s or twenty years later. In the early 1990s, Cooley High was a key part of cultivating Cheeba and Suede’s nostalgia-without-experience for the blaxploitation era, and the two young men emerged from their VHS viewings with not just analogs of themselves— Preach and Cochise—but, more importantly, a deep appreciation for the relationship between the two lead characters. This appreciation would go on to shape the duo’s creative and collaborative process: What did it for me was, you know, that Cooley High was so crazy to me at that time. We were around the same age [as Preach and Cochise]—it is probably why I identified with it so much. Them dudes being high, you know what I’m saying, everything that goes on in high school, in the hood, at home—and how it ended. You never expected your man (Cochise) to not make it to the league. And the street grab your man like that. It’s a true story—the storyline is so familiar and honest. So, I prefer that flick.

Cheeba was fascinated by the depiction of black teenagers bonding over activities and in spaces that were familiar to him. Growing up as a black male child in the 1980s Bronx had plenty of parallels to the 1960s Chicago depicted in the film. Pranking and chasing girls were as common in both decades and places as street violence and drugs, particularly when they impacted those with the abilities to improve their life chances. The familiarity •

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of the story and the relationship between the two main characters also made the movie special for Suede, who summarizes the significance of Preach and Cochise: “it’s that pact, it’s that brotherhood, man. And the loyalty.” It was Cooley High’s unique promotion of black male friendship and comradery that spurred the development of the Camp Lo ethos, and the cinematic musical world of “Coolie High.” Camp Lo’s first single was “Coolie High,” demonstrating the early influence of Cooley High in the group’s development, yet the debut album ultimately took the name of a different film: Uptown Saturday Night. Uptown Saturday Night was the first in a trilogy of comedy films directed by black cinema icon Sidney Poitier starring the director himself alongside the then-consummate black entertainer but now infamously inimitable Bill Cosby; Let’s Do It Again (1975) and A Piece of the Action (1977) completed the trio. This reference reveals an evolution in Camp Lo’s conceptual ambitions. Cheeba and Suede’s shared adolescent experience in the Bronx meant that they deeply related to Preach and Cochise, and it was this feeling of kinship with these two young characters that led to the creation of “Coolie High.” Yet, as they continued to craft their creative partnership as a 1990s rap group, Cheeba and Suede began to see themselves as a more culturally impactful combination, moving beyond the adolescent storyline of Cooley High to engage with the adult characters and roles taken on by Poitier and Cosby: Those particular flicks always [played a big role] because of Bill Cosby and Sidney Poi[tier], the duo. Like our •

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whole thing was I got to be the Poitier and Suede the Cos[by]. That’s just what it was.

Camp Lo found inspiration in Poitier’s trilogy, whose plot centered on the collaborative repartee and relationship between two friends. By contrast, it was the vice-driven blaxploitation characters who continued to be the predominant references for gangsta rappers of the time. Oakland rapper Too $hort aligned his pimp persona with that of Max Julien from The Mack; the self-produced track “Pimpology” from his album Short Dog’s in the House (1990) begins with and continuously weaves in sampled Max Julien statements from the film. Contemporaneous with Lo, a Brooklyn rapper named Christopher Wallace was blowing up on the New York hip hop scene, and giving Poitier’s film world its due in a different way. Wallace’s official releases were imprinted with the name The Notorious B.I.G., but he was alternatively known as Biggie Smalls—an allusion to the gambling impresario/gangster portrayed by Calvin Lockhart in the aforementioned Let’s Do It Again. Biggie and Too $hort exemplify 1990s rappers that wanted to present themselves as gangsta, and thus championed and paid homage to blaxploitation characters that emitted street credible personas—even if they were secondary characters in the film. Cheeba and Suede, however, saw the relationships between Poitier and Cosby’s lead characters in the trilogy as a key part of what they wanted Camp Lo to represent, citing the working class and good time seeking Steve Jackson and Wardell Franklin, the religiously community-driven and clever Clyde Williams and Billy Foster, and the slick •

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talking and high-class criminality of Manny Durrell and Dave Anderson as key influences to the duo’s attitude. A glimpse into the group’s discography as they aged as individuals and together reveal that many of those character attributes have been defining features of the Camp Lo persona and lyrical content. Camp Lo’s references to Poitier are—unlike Biggie’s—not glancing, but, instead, an involved and sustained series of allusions that betray just how much the group owes—both aesthetically and thematically—to the cultural content of the blaxploitation era. The concept of “post-soul” comes from Nelson George in his collection of essays Buppies, B-Boys, Baps & Bohos: Notes on Post-Soul Black Culture (1993). The essays label and document the contemporary stream of black popular culture that emerged during the blaxploitation period and proceeded through the first generation of black culture creators living in the wake of civil rights legislation. Approximately a decade later, Professor of Black Popular Culture Mark Anthony Neal sought to detail the strategies and perspectives of those creators in Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (2002). He was pursuing methods that would help him comprehend the cultural themes that are understood, utilized, or tossed aside by post-soul black culture creators in order to comment on the dynamics of the world in which they live. Neal referred to this generation as the “children of soul”: those that had matured during the Reagan era. These children of soul came of age at a time of deindustrialization, desegregation, the corporate annexation of black popular expression along with the general commodification of black life •

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and culture, and, most importantly, the lessening of essential black identities. They disregarded a “nostalgic allegiance to the past”—particularly Harlem in the 1920s or the African continent—and created an era of aggressively expanding media and connectivity. From its inception, hip hop as a culture and music was a model of post-soul culture: it was born and bred in the wake of urban deindustrialization and increased surreptitious black persecution, and its primary characteristic was the meshing of various cultural signs (musical samples, lyrical references, fashion) without regard for a stable concept of blackness. An understanding of post-soul aesthetics is integral to Camp Lo’s story and the making of Uptown Saturday Night. Suede, Cheeba, and Ski were all born between 1969 and 1977 and grew up in black working-class circumstances specific to the post-Civil Rights era, situating them physically and temporally in a space that was immersed in 1970s black culture. They were from marginalized areas, but what they created was commodified and immediately sold back to people like themselves. As they navigated a corporate system engaged in annexing the latest black popular expression, Camp Lo juxtaposed distinct periods and constructions of blackness in the music they sourced and sampled, the lyrical flows they used, their wardrobe, their music videos, and their album cover artwork in order to exhibit “difference through the familiar.” As explained by Neal, “… this sense of familiarity is a key component of the post-soul aesthetic, a familiarity that is exploited by post-soul artists to convey their own sensibilities in a way that heightens the sense of fracture and difference, •

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generationally at least, experienced within the black community …” (Neal 2002: 15). Camp Lo integrated familiar aspects from 1970s black culture into their 1990s hip hop sensibilities, and it is this very contrast that highlights the ways in which their current experience of blackness both owes to and yet has diverged from that of the past. Camp Lo’s exposure to and embrace of blaxploitation ensured a connection to previous expressions of blackness, but also highlighted the particularities of black expression that were tied to hip hop in the 1990s. Their sensibilities were hip hop, but they also echoed that of an important black artist from the 1970s. Painter Ernie Barnes, whose work was prominently featured on the show Good Times, used for the cover to Marvin Gaye’s 1976 album I Want You, and sampled for the cover of Uptown, explained that his art “not only defined how, and in what ways, black was beautiful but it gave a sense of pride, a sense of community” (Price 2004, 01:27). Cheeba had a very similar regard for art’s (in this case, specifically hip hop’s) role in building community: “You see us have a good time. When you see it or hear it, it’s supposed to give you a good feeling rather than you being in the ’hood and wanting to do somebody dirty.” Camp Lo effectively used their blaxploitation references to present a black nostalgia and a contrast to the gangsta personas and imagery that dominated hip hop in the mid-1990s. We were friends, a long time ago. Laughin’, rappin’, chasin’ girls, obeying no laws, except the law of caring. •

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Basketball days and high nights, no tomorrows, unable to remember yesterday. We live for today …

Following Cochise’s death in Cooley High, Preach reads the above poem at his friend’s graveside. Discussing the concept of “Coolie High” in regard to Camp Lo, Suede emotionally responds to the scene and the poem: It’s the symbolism of brotherhood and times bein’ rough, but we gon’ make it. And even with times bein’ rough, we still fly. It’s that pact, it’s that brotherhood, man. And the loyalty. Cochise was goin’—had that basketball scholarship. Preach was gonna go off to be a big Hollywood writer. So even though we still in these circumstances, we still got dreams that we’re fulfillin’ and we’re brothers and we’re fly, and we’re gettin’ girls and havin’ fun, you know what I mean.

Ultimately, “brotherhood,” “loyalty,” and “dreams” would be concepts as key in the creation of Camp Lo as the blaxploitation films of the 1970s. As a pair—as Saladine and Salahadeen, Geechi Suede and Sonny Cheeba— Camp Lo would develop a similar bond to that of Preach and Cochise or Steve and Wardell over black culture, good times, aspirations, and their shared experience of life in the Bronx.

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Bronx Vigilantes

Bronx vigilantes, call us big wheelers, Diamond crook avengers, sheeba doll stealers

Origin stories are the best part of comic books. The same can be said of the origins of emcees, who often construct their larger-than-life rap personas in the mold of comic book heroes they admired as children. But those personas only ring true with fans if they extend from the real life personality, place of origin, and story behind an emcee and their government-given name. Camp Lo was born in New York City’s northernmost borough, the Bronx—a borough with a rich cultural history and one that has seen its share of economic adversity as well as criminal activity. In the 1920s, Italian and Irish gangsters moved illegal whiskey into Bronx speakeasies. Nearly a century later, Ski and Suede’s former locale, Valentine Ave, was nicknamed “Heroin Ave” by the NY Daily News after a local cartel’s drug business exploded there in 2010. The mid-century development and expansion of nearby suburbs resulted in many of the Italian, German, and Jewish immigrants fleeing the borough—one of the consequences of government policies and subsidies •

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that greatly advantaged whites in the post-war era. In the 1960s and 1970s, massive waves of migration into the Bronx saw a demographic shift toward black, Jamaican, Puerto Rican, and Dominican populations in many parts of the borough. “Urban renewal” projects, like Robert Moses’s neighborhood-slashing Cross Bronx Expressway, were anything but, devastating communities by codifying neighborhood boundaries and instigating targeted policies that both overwhelmingly degraded the life quality and stunted the opportunities of poor black and Latino New Yorkers. People that did not (and could not) leave for the suburbs braced themselves for the effects of deindustrialization and the gash of economic blight caused by both deep recession on a national level and New York City’s bankruptcy in the 1970s. Surveying an enormous blaze in the south Bronx outside Yankee Stadium in 1977, news anchor Walter Cronkite once told America: “Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning.” In many ways, hip hop was the cultural phoenix that arose from the ashes of the Bronx’s seventies fires. Woke up, counting roaches on the wall Cheeba from the 183rd, so fuck y’all —Sonny Cheeba, “Cold Retarded” (2015)

As a member of Camp Lo, Salahadeen Wilds initially went by the name of Cochise, after the Lawrence HiltonJacobs character in Cooley High, before settling on Sonny Cheeba, a name inspired by Japanese actor and martial artist Sonny Chiba. Cheeba’s early years, in the mid-tolate 1970s, were spent in a Muslim household in the Bronx: “Yeah, born in the Bronx. Lebanon [Hospital]. •

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It was like, you know, as a kid, as far as Islam, yeah, no Christmas trees in the crib.” Cheeba’s earliest memories of hip hop culture were not related to the music itself; he was “probably more [into] the fashion. The jettas and the Gucci visors and the Louis Vuitton male purses and all of that, you know what I’m saying. You could get away with that at that point (laughs). Plus they had the toast [gun] in it, you know what I mean.” In regards to music, Cheeba identified more with soul than hip hop at a young age: As far as the hip hop thing was, you know what I mean, pop locking [b-boying: breakdancing] on the block, that was as far as it went. It was not really on the music side, I never felt like, “I need to be rhyming,” you know what I’m saying. I’m really more of a R&B dude, when it comes to that.

Cheeba’s nostalgia for his childhood experience with the black music of the seventies is evident: “Coming in the 70s, the 7-O, you know what I’m saying, great feelin’, if that’s the time you were born in, that’s the feelin’ you’re going to have, you know what I’m saying. And then when I hear it like, ‘yeah, man they got that.’” The Temptations, Curtis Mayfield, Eddie Kendricks, and Marvin Gaye were some of Cheeba’s favorite artists, and the personal and cultural memory of that music permeates Uptown Saturday Night. Similarly, Cheeba’s thickly drawled insider slang was in keeping with what he saw as a way of life in the Bronx streets, as well as at home: The slang game is straight Bronx heavy, clique heavy, you know what I’m saying. It’s like, you could be—let’s say •

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183rd and Tiebout [Avenue], there may be just a slang that we all use, you know what I’m saying, just for that block. Not to mention my pops was on it like that, and my moms had slang terms for damn near everything.

Sonny Cheeba (left) and Geechi Suede, photographed in front of Samuel Gompers Vocational High School in 1995. •

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That slang, influenced by and reminiscent of the wordplay both in the Wilds household and on the block, would play just as critical a role in Cheeba’s later career in Camp Lo as his father’s interest in blaxploitation films and his uncle’s extensive collection of soul records. This early, close-knit environment of soul music and ’70s films would influence Cheeba’s aesthetic into his teenage years at Samuel Gompers Vocational High School (a school his father had also attended). It would also be there that a school friend would introduce him to his future creative companion. Cheeba from the 183rd, so fuck y’all Suede-a from the 197, lick the balls —Geechi Suede, “Cold Retarded” (2015)

Saladine Wallace, better known as Geechi Suede, has a similar origin story, with a detour down south during his high school years: “I grew up in the Bronx, born and raised in the Bronx, 197th [St] and Valentine [Ave], and then I had moved to Virginia. I went to school there for about five, six years, and I came back when I was 19.” Suede (known as Sala as a youth) recalls music in the house: “moms was definitely playing Stevie Wonder around the crib, Michael Jackson. I remember that (singing) ‘On the wings of love!’ Jeffrey Osborne and shit (laughs).” Being the youngest member of the crew, the sounds of early-to-mid ’80s hip hop were also vital to Suede’s youthful consciousness: “My era, growing up in that era was the best, man. Kurtis Blow, the Fat Boys, all of them, man. But Melle Mel, definitely, I’m a say … still to this day is my number one dude.” •

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It was an era of innovation and experimentation into musical terrains that were newly being codified as “hip hop.” Suede’s older brother Hassan, known as Jungle Brown on the mic, describes a few specific Bronx moments in the 1980s when the immediacy of hip hop made an impact on him: I was b-boying. I was doin’ that forever, though. But ’82, I believe that’s when [Afrika Bambaataa and the Soul Sonic Force’s] “Planet Rock” came out, and Wild Style. Once I saw Wild Style, it’s over, like, “wow, this is a culture! A movement.” It’s just larger than life. And if you think about it, it was all goin’ on on my block. So b-boyin’, “Planet Rock,” lovin’ the culture of the music, I was bombin’ (graffiti), I was interested in deejayin’, I didn’t actually deejay yet. When I heard Rakim, that’s when I heard hip hop. Like before that, “Planet Rock,” I heard the music, playin’ it, but when I heard Rakim, it got my attention and made me focus in on lyrics and what somebody’s sayin’ in hip hop.

Suede, too, “was b-boyin’, dancin’ at that time,” and in 1987 he first heard “I came in the door / I said it before / I never let the mic magnetize me no more / But it’s biting me, fighting me, inviting me to rhyme …,” Rakim’s ice-cold opening to “Eric B Is President.” (“That shit had everybody goin’ crazy!” Suede recalls wistfully.) Jungle remembers that Suede (then Sala who rapped as “Divine Child”) started rhyming seriously in the early 1990s, coached by his uncle Shaheed while in high school in Virginia:

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Shaheed would bang on the wall, or Sala would bang on the wall, and Sala would just go. And what was impressive about Suede, was that he could freestyle, like he could just go for a good half an hour, just freestyle off the top of his head. Rockin’ every day with my uncle after school just developin’ his style, his infamous flow was developed practicin’ with my uncle. He worked with Sala and helped develop his talent and his flow. But his freestyle, Suede’s freestyle was incredible.

Both Suede and Cheeba were definitively Bronx babies, but Uptown Saturday Night also owes its creation to another figure whose origin story begins outside of New York City. While Camp Lo’s producer, Ski, would eventually become an integral part of the New York hip hop scene, he grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina. Ski recalls his mom’s record collection having an impact on him in his early years: My mom had a bunch of 45s. All the Motown stuff, all the Michael Jackson stuff, the Marvin Gaye kind of stuff. She had, you know, tons of 45s. And back then they didn’t have turntables, they had component sets—you know, the whole stereo thing with everything in it. So I used to go through her records and just listen to that. I was actually diggin’ [in the crates] back then not even knowing I was diggin’. And my moms played piano and she was always like in the church choir—she was the choir director—she always had us in church singing and stuff like that. So I was always around music.

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Ski’s mother tried to teach him piano, but it was something else he first witnessed at home in 1979 or 1980 that would be critical to his direction and career: I was in my bedroom with my brother and his friend. My brother, he had this record called “Just a Touch of Love” by Slave (singing). He had that record, and we used to have the cassette, you know, the cassette piece. And so what he did was, he was making a pause tape. Catching the first part and looping it over and over. And they would play that tape for three minutes for him and his friend that were trying to rap, and trying to write rhymes, you know. And that was the first time I was like, “yo, what are y’all doin’?” “Oh, we rappin’, we rappin’!”

Ski was instantly hooked on the music, and a trip north only solidified hip hop as the direction for him: I started rapping that day. When I heard them rapping and I’m like “what are y’all doing,” “we’re writing rhymes.” And I’m like “what’s that?” And I heard them and I was like, “that’s cool!” And then I started writing some like raps down and stuff. I was the only one that kept going. And I think what really triggered me was I spent the summer with my uncle, he lived in Baltimore. Not in New York, in Baltimore I got exposed to hip hop crazy. I went to this little festival that they had in the harbor and I seen’t these kids, just mad b-boying and breakdancing, deejaying and some guy just walking around rhyming in the streets. And I’m like, “yo, this is it!” It just like hit me, “this is what I’m supposed to be doing, this shit right here …” •

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Back at home, in 1987, he started rhyming as MC Will Ski and founded the Bizzie Boyz with Andreao Heard (Rhythm Fanatic) and Dana Mitchell (Mixmaster D)—they released their first single, “Call It Anything,” that year. In 1989, the Bizzie Boyz’s third single, “Droppin’ It,” was a local hit in North Carolina. The single got some buzz in NYC but wasn’t a career changing record. At the time, Ski was a rapper in the group, not a producer. It wasn’t until later that Ski’s friend and group mate Rhythm Fanatic introduced him to beat making through the E-mu System’s SP-1200, a 12-bit sampler/drum machine released in 1987 that became the standard tool for beat making: He showed me how to rock that. It’s funny because I was at his house when UPS brought the SP-1200 to his crib. And so, we open the box up. I had the book. I’m reading the book and he’s pressing the buttons. “Press so and so to sample,” and while he’s learning how to do it I’m kind of learning at the same time. And then he started to get the swing of it and he showed me some stuff and boom. That’s how I got hooked on making beats. Right there.

As far as records, they were sampling 45s: “James Brown, Hank Ballard, Dusty Springfield, Bobby Byrd, any jazz, any funk, any soul. Whatever we had, we went to everybody’s mama’s house, every record store. Everywhere, just collecting crates and looking for grooves.” Ski details working on his craft (sound effects and all): Back then you would just start by dropping the needle. I just grab some records, get in the vibe like, “oooh I like that sound” or “I like that loop” or “I like this, sample •

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that,” boomp. Sample it, get a little groove going, I’m like “aight” boomp, “add some drums to it”—tossk tossk tossk tossk (hi-hat)—“aight, that’s dope”—dum, dum (kick). “Throw a bass on it”—uhm, uhm, uhm—“ahh, break down”—dun, dun, dun-dun, dun, dun (putting it all together). All we need is to get somebody to rap on it, that’s the song—boom. Then we out.

In 1990, after Queens-based Juice Crew rapper Craig G reached out to him because of “Droppin’ It,” Ski moved to Englewood, New Jersey to pursue a hip hop career. He started making beats for rapper Suave Lover (Paul Reevers) and, shortly after, they decided to pursue the music business together as a duo; the two formed Original Flavor and recorded a demo. Atlantic Records A&R DJ Clark Kent heard the demo and invited Ski to a meeting that changed his life: So it was like ’91. Boom, as soon as we get there (NYC), hit the ground, go to Atlantic Records. Walk into Atlantic Records, Clark Kent is right there (points). Dame Dash right there (points).“Yo, Clark what’s up.” “Congratulations man. You ready to do this, we’re going to sign you. This is what we going to do. … By the way this is Dame Dash and Darien Dash, they heard your music and they want to manage you.” Around that time, that was when I met Jay. That’s when Clark found Jay-Z and was like, “yoooo, got this kid. He’s the best kid in the world. His name is Jay-Z, check him out!”

This was the beginning of Ski’s creative and personal connection with Jay-Z, a connection which led to a series •

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of collaborations that would make both Original Flavor and Ski, as a producer, a household name in hip hop. Original Flavor (then Ski and Suave) released This Is How It Is in 1992. But when things fell apart between Ski and his partner Suave, a new member joined the group: Now, mind you, during that time, during Original Flavor, Tone Hooker always been around, because Tone Hooker was an artist that I was going to produce and bring up next. But me and Suave started having, you know, internal things. So, you know, I said “instead of just breaking up Original Flavor, yo Tone, why don’t you just take Suave’s place.” So that’s what Tone did, and then, you know, we dropped the second album with “Can I Get Open,” featuring Jay-Z, in ’93. But around that time I was living in the Bronx, on Valentine Avenue.

And here, the story of Camp Lo and Uptown Saturday Night begins.

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Coolie High Gotcha Wide1

Time: Early 1994 Place: Valentine Avenue at 191st, Bronx, NY

“I met Suede in the Bronx, when I was living on Valentine Avenue,” recalls Ski. At the time, Original Flavor was gaining traction and becoming a name in hip hop. In late October of 1993, “Can I Get Open” featuring Jay-Z, the lead single off their second album Beyond Flavor, was released on Atlantic Records. Ski produced the record and rapped the first verse. Progressing from “Droppin’ It,” the video for “Can I Get Open” was getting airplay on Video Music Box and NYC radio shows, leading to the critical first meeting in the Camp Lo origin story. The video had made Ski a Bronx celebrity: “I was with Original Flavor, we had a fucking video out on Video Music Box. So I was that kid from the neighborhood that rapped, you see what I’m saying. So every time I came outside, everybody was like, ‘Yo, we seen your video!’”   This chapter is best experienced with a copy of On The Way Uptown: The Uptown Saturday Night Demo (Persia Records 2017). 1

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Suede remembers that his older brother Hassan (Jungle Brown) “had told me to look out for this video that was playing on BET, and that the guy that was in the video lived on our block. So, at this point, my brother’s in New York, and I’m still in VA going to school.” At the time Sala/Geechi Suede was still rapping as Divine Child. He met Ski by chance one day on Valentine Ave, having recently returned from Virginia, and gave a spur-of-the-moment audition: “I bust a little rap. Not confident at all, but I still busted it anyway, and Ski was like ‘Aiight shorty, aiight.’” Ski and Divine Child (Suede) didn’t start working together that day though. Suede went back to recording demos with a local producer named Owen who had a massive record collection, until one day Owen cancelled a session, leaving Suede with nothing to do: As luck would have it, I turned the corner, and there was nobody outside, just Ski. And Ski was [like], “What’s up shorty! Rhyme for me again.” So I jumped up on a car, and I started bangin’ a beat, and started rhymin’. And he was just sittin’, looking, “oh, word!” And then the next day he took me to Clark Kent’s house, and that’s how me and Ski got started. That day I met Jay[-Z]. As soon as we came in the room Clark Kent was like, “yo, Ski, listen to this.” He hit the SP[-1200] pad, and then Jay just started goin’ in—and I’m just sittin’ there like, “Wow.” And he was like, “who’s this, Ski?” And Ski was like, “that’s my little boy right here.” And Jay was like, “you rhyme, shorty?” And I was like, “yeah.” And he was like, “you wanna battle?” And I was like, “naaaah” (Suede laughs heartily). •

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C oolie H igh G otcha W ide

The relationship was business at first, but, as Ski discloses, a friendship was building: “And all that time I’m doing Original Flavor, [I’m] still saying what’s up to Suede and Hassan on the block, going by their house every now and then, chillin’, watching TV, hanging out, you know, we still keeping the connect alive.” The last connect would actually become the strongest link. Suede is two years younger than Cheeba, so, as a result, it was his brother Hassan/Jungle Brown that was initially hanging out with Cheeba. Though Cheeba and Suede were connected in various ways in this small world that was their neighborhood, they surprisingly didn’t officially meet through Hassan. Cheeba’s fortuitous meeting with Suede was instead instigated by another common friend (and a shared first name), as Suede describes: Before I saw my brother and Clive running around with Chee, me and my girl Ayanna was walking through the hood. And Ayanna used to go to the same summer school or night school with ‘Sal’ [Cheeba]. And I just seen this nigga comin’ down the block in these bright colors on a mountain bike, and it hit her at that moment—as she seen him coming more and more into focus—that we had the same name. She was like, “Sal, Sal, oh shit!” And she stopped him on the bike and said, “what’s up, Sal, I want you to meet my friend Sal. Y’all both got the same name!” And he said, “oh word, you Muslim?” And he was like, “yeah my name’s Salahadeen,” and I was like yeah, “I’m Saladine too.” That was the first time we ever met.

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Jungle Brown and C-Smoke completes the Lo official

Soon, Hassan, Suede, and Cheeba began to see each other more frequently, and the kickin’ back, chillin’, and engaging in disparate activities would eventually initiate the insight, ideas, and interactions necessary for their creative work. Jungle Brown and his friend Clive, who went by C-Smoke, would bring Cheeba (then just Sal Wilds) over to their apartment to hang and play Double Dribble on the Sega Genesis. In an adjacent room, separated by a small curtain, Suede worked on his rhymes, occasionally asking Cheeba’s advice: “So I would spit him what I was workin’ on and stuff. And that turned into him givin’ me ideas and givin’ me vinyl and stuff like that to give to Ski to sample.” Vinyl is the physical substance of hip hop music. As banal an image as it is to evoke, there is no denying that the material history of hip hop production can be traced to rows of crates stacked in bedrooms, musty closets, and basements throughout the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, and other New York boroughs, as well as in home studios across the country. The roots of many classic hip hop loops live in somebody’s uncle’s, parents’, or older relative’s record collections. Of course, the sample itself is key as both the actual sound material and interpolated cultural memory, but equally important is the moment of inspiration and connection—when original material suddenly has the potential to evolve into something other than itself. It is when emcees hear and imagine how they would flow over a sample that a beat has a chance of making it out of a box full of SP-1200 disks, flash drives, or beat tape cassettes to become a song and a record. •

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Knowing this, in addition to advice and encouragement, Cheeba started offering records for Suede to bring to Ski: “My uncle had a big collection of vinyl, and he had it all in the basement. He was the super of a building on 194th. I used to come through and he would be like, ‘come downstairs and check out these recs!’” Armed with advice from his new friend as well as new vinyl source material, Cheeba continued to write and record as a solo artist. At a certain point in 1994, however, Suede grew weary of recording solo demos, and asked another friend to join him in a group. When that didn’t work, he remembers: Chee kept giving me ideas for stuff. And then, we was on Fordham Road in the Bronx, looking in the window at the latest sneakers and stuff, and I was like, “Yo, man, you always giving me ideas and shit, why don’t you just try this shit with me?” ’Cause he would sit in our little circles and write [rhymes] with us, and stuff like that. I’m like, “why don’t you give it a shot?” He was like, “I’ll try it.”

Cheeba was open to being a lyricist: “Suede was rocking with Ski, you know. He said he didn’t want to rhyme by himself no more. So he was like, ‘yo, you feel like testing out the waters?’ And I said ‘I’ll test the waters out,’ you know what I’m saying.” But, before the duo started working with Ski, they honed their ideas with another producer. “We went to Cheeba’s block,” Suede recounts: 183rd and Tiebout [Ave], and there was this guy there, Danny Dan the Beat Man. And we started going [writing and recording] over his production. So we were sampling •

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stuff like (singing) “Come live with Me [Angel]” by Marvin Gaye, we were sampling (singing) “Let me show you, let me show you the way to go” by The Jacksons, but when we got to Stevie Wonder—it’s off that album, what’s it called, Innervisions? There was something about that joint. We sampled that, and it was the first time that we ever went 4 and 4 bars a piece. Everything at that point was like, long verses we were writing. I don’t know where that came from, but we just decided, “I’m a go 4, and then you go 4.” And we started goin’ back to back like that. And we really liked how that felt.

With a rhyming rapport established—going “back-toback” in an established, four-bar pattern—they headed to Ski, who remembers Suede coming to him with the group idea right after he had recently moved again (Ski moved apartments five or six times during the mid-1990s): Suede came, you know, he said “yo bruh, yo, where you at.” This is before he knew I moved. Tone [Hooker] was there. So me and Tone chillin’ in the crib, you know, knock on the door, Suede whatever. I let Suede in—he with Cheeba. I’m like, “who is this funny lookin’ nigga?” (laughs). “What’s up, what’s up, this my man Chee.” “Aight, what up,” you know Chee (imitating Cheeba’s deep, gravelly voice), “yo, whaddup.” His voice is ill. So, Suede was like, “yo dude we been puttin’ together a group, Me and Chee.” So then I think they played a song, and the song was whack—but, how they sounded together. And I’m like, “what are y’all talking about?” He’s like, “yo, you seen the movie Cooley High, and Cochise?” And •

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then they laid [the concept] out. And somehow my brain automatically, instantly knew where to go. That night we did five songs.

Ski’s new address is vital to this story. In mid-1994, Ski moved down to Harlem to be in the same apartment complex as his then-manager Dame Dash on 110th Street: “What happened was, we were starting to take off. So Dame was like, ‘yo, you need to be over here. You need to come to Harlem. They got an apartment in my old building, come through.’ And that’s when I moved to 1199 [Housing on] 110th Street and 1st Ave. My building was here, Dame’s was there, we were in the same complex.” Ski’s brief tenure at this apartment yielded many of the tracks for Uptown, as well as Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt, a single for Bahamadia, and other standout tracks. On the 29th floor, Suede and Cheeba recorded “Bust Ya Down,” their first demo as a group. This apartment soon became a creative locus for Ski and Camp Lo, as well as Jay, Dame Dash, and a host of emcee hopefuls. For Ski, it was his move away from rapping and the development of his home project studio that made this possible: I had that Akai 12-track thing with the little beta tapes, that’s what I was recording vocals on. I had a little Mackie mixing board that I was running everything through. I had my SP-1200, now I got the fuckin’ [Akai S]950, you know, extra sample time, boom boom, I got that poppin’ off. Dame Dash in the same complex. So, boom, now I’m making beats and now it’s for a different purpose because now I’m living there and now Jay-Z is coming •

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to my house everyday, and now I’m making songs with Jay—Sauce Money over here, Jaz over there, you know, we all laughing, whatever whatever, making music and shit. Creating Reasonable Doubt without even knowing we making Reasonable Doubt. Just making songs, you know what I mean. Mad songs with Big L, Ma$e, Outsidaz, Rah Digga—all that shit right there, you know what I mean.

Camp Lo were by no means the most privileged members of the assemblage at Ski’s, as Jungle Brown recalls “goin’ to the 29th floor and there just bein’ like wild dudes in there. Just bein’ packed, everybody on the floor. And we would just be there for hours. Ski could be workin’ with Jay-Z, he could be workin’ with Jaz-O, whoever at the time. And you would just have to wait ’til he got around to doin’ your beat and all of that.” However, as Suede continues, they were significant members none the less as they garnered the first chart placement. “We kind of came in last, in terms of everybody that he was already workin’ with. We were the last ones to come in, but we were the first ones to take off.” Having a developed, defined, and distinct approach to flow and rhyming perhaps gave Camp Lo an advantage in crafting recordings and set them apart from their contemporary emcee hopefuls. Before their first track even had a beat, for instance, “Bust Ya Down” was percolating from a eureka moment Suede had; a flow came to him in a staccato rhythm while working as a hospital dishwasher during a stay in Virginia: I was at a hospital in Danville and I was down there washing dishes. I used to serve the patients their trays, •

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in the afternoons I would have to collect them and wash them. So, I’m down there washing dishes, and this rhyme just came out of nowhere, this flow came out of nowhere, and it was like, “my camp is blending / ready to do some brick bendin’ / diamonds is spinnin’ / matter how, keep the pockets grinnin’.” And it was the first time that I had ever flipped words like that. I don’t know where that rhythm came from, that [rapping staccato] “da-da-dada-da, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da.” And I was like, “oh shit!”

This pattern of alternating five and nine syllable phrases in staccato, syncopated lines was a shift from his previous, more nonchalant type of rapping, and an important breakthrough in the development of Suede’s style: I knew I had somethin’ with that fuckin’ flow. And I was wild excited when I got back up to New York. I got up with Chee, and I spit him the flow, and he followed it. ’Cause we was goin’ back and forth we established that the going back-to-back shit was working for us, so we laid it down. T-Strong [Tone Hooker from Original Flavor] was in the studio that day, and the first thing they noticed was my flow and Cheeba’s voice.

The grizzled tenor that came from Cheeba’s mouth was more appropriate for a middle-aged man than a nineteenyear-old rapper, and it caught everyone’s attention. After Ski heard “Bust Ya Down,” he and Tone Hooker (then known as T-Strong) sat Camp Lo on the couch, and told the pair that they had something special as a group. Tone describes: •

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I was like, “yo, man, I want to try to get you guys a record deal.” And I’ll run around. I believed in them that much that I was like, “I’ll run around and try to get y’all a record deal when I’m out and about, if y’all put a demo together. Once they got like three, four songs together, I hit the road.

And so, they recorded a number of tracks at Ski’s 110th Street apartment that would end up on their demo, including “Short Eyes,” “Sugar Streets,” “Cotton Comes to Harlem,” and “Sugar Love,” experimenting with different flows and rhyming back-to-back on beats crafted from Ski’s record collection, as well as others that Cheeba brought from his uncle’s collection. It was around this time that they sat down and set the group’s concept in stone. According to Suede: When we saw ourselves getting to the point where songs were really starting to accumulate, we was at C-Smoke’s house and we sat down at the table. Jungle Brown sat down with us, and we all started talking about how could we—like, what was going to be our approach? What was going to be our names, what’s gonna be the name of the group, how we gonna look? And stuff like that. And then Cheeba introduced the black exploitation, the ’70s idea. And I just wanted to rhyme, I didn’t really pay that much attention to detail of those things, but I still thought it was a dope idea. If anything, I was more of a cosmic type of dude, but I still thought the idea was dope. And I started fucking with it. We were just going to video stores every day, researching ’70s flicks and incorporating movie titles and all of that stuff into the music. •

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While New York hip hop was veering toward the gully and grimy, Cheeba saw the potential for an aesthetic centered around black cultural memory, nostalgic celebration, and soulful vibes that would set the group apart and provide relief—“a breath of fresh air”—from dominant contemporaneous approaches. Anyone who has ever had a conversation with Cheeba could not imagine any other direction he could have suggested. There is no distinction between Sonny Cheeba on the mic and Salahadeen Wilds in conversation, and the world of “Coolie High” is an extension of him. The night they pitched the idea to Ski, he entered “Coolie High” and began to seek out the samples and general vibes to align with the concept. Both Cheeba and Suede understood how they were going to distinguish themselves aesthetically. As rappers, though, regardless of how fresh and new they looked, they were going to be judged on how they sounded and rhymed. As a pair, Suede and Cheeba’s distinct vocal timbres put them in the spectrum of rap duos like Q-Tip and Phife, Chuck D and Flavor Flav, Nice & Smooth, Posdnous and Trugoy, and Tek and Steele that gave listeners two different tones on each track. Contrasting vocal styles, in and of itself, would not be enough to set Camp Lo apart. While their vocal timbres and flows clearly resonated from their individual personalities and bodies, hip hop, after all, never happens in a vacuum. All emcees draw influence from each other, a communal network that spans recordings, local cyphers, and friends trading verses. Camp Lo are heralded for their originality, but influence from prior and contemporaneous rappers can be traced in their lyrical style, as it can in •

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all rappers. Russell Myrie identified how trajectories of influence are common in emcee culture: Just as hip hop production developed more rapidly during the mid eighties, so did the vocal styles. At the close of the decade Ice Cube would comment to Chuck [about his influence] … when it came to a particular cadence and flow. Chuck responded by saying he got it from Schoolly D and Mr. Magic. When I brought it to Schoolly D’s attention, he admitted he was influenced by Melle Mel. —Myrie 2008, 44

In a way similar to how Myrie locates a ten-year trajectory of one flow from Melle Mel to Schoolly D to Chuck D and then Ice Cube, we can trace Suede’s flow and vocal approach from a variety of early influences: Kane, Melle Mel, and obviously Tribe. But it was Digable that took me to outer space, literally. They really did, like Digable, that whole album for me. But the song “Spiddyock” (raps Ish’s verse). That was my shit.

“Last of the Spiddyocks” is the seventh track on the 1993 Digable Planets album Reachin’ (A New Refutation of Time and Space). After learning that Suede was inspired by his flow on that record, Digable’s Ish/Butterfly himself then traced the source of that particular cadence: “That loop is what made that flow come.” Ish’s flow on “Spiddyocks” had been influenced by the syncopation of the song’s muted trumpet sample looped in the background. The rhythm of his delivery is “almost like a horn player, and the way that they put their accents.” •

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Suede remembers three emcees (including Ish) who had a strong impact on him, and identifies how they each played a role in his personal formula during the early years of Camp Lo: I wanted Ish’s voice, I wanted Nas’s lyrics, and I wanted T-Strong’s flow. T-Strong had the best flow in the world to me (rapping quickly): “I’m really beginning to pick up the mic and deliver the radical rhythm / the people be telling me that I be ripping the jam / damn, check out the rhythm” in one line. He was my favorite nigga when it came to flows. I wanted his flow.

Of these three emcee influences, T-Strong and his distinct flow was arguably the most important, as well as the closest to home. T-Strong was Ski’s rhyme partner in Original Flavor, and would also go on to co-manage Camp Lo for a time. An unsung figure in the general Camp Lo narrative, as well as a key member in the early years of Roc-A-Fella Records (a seminal independent hip hop record label founded by rapper Jay-Z, Kareem “Biggs” Burke, and Damon Dash), Tone/T-Strong recalls Suede’s appreciation for his work, and detailed how he approached his own flows: They always gave me props as far as my verses that I did on Original Flavor album. ’Cause I always try to switch up my flow every song, I tried to never have the same flow or the same rhythm. ’Cause I was always cautious to not sound monotonous. I like people with different types of off-beat flows, and on-beat/off-beat flows. Super Lover Cee & Casanova Rud was one of my favorite, •

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inspiring artists that a lot of people may not know of right about now. But yeah, [Suede] was around when we was recording. They always listened to Original Flavor.

Suede offers further details. “That’s why on the back of Uptown, I say ‘thank you to T-Strong for the newfound flow,’ because every time I heard T-Strong rhyme, he had the best rhythm. I loved Nas’s lyrics, Biggie, Ish, I loved all of their lyrics, I loved their flows too, but T-Strong had the best flow in the world to me. So that was pretty much my design.” Original Flavor (and T-Strong in particular) was just one of many crews and styles that resonated with Suede. Around the time of Uptown Saturday Night, the Camp Lo rapper also kept a cassette of his favorite tracks from three recent albums: I made a little tape where I has a couple of joints from [B.I.G.’s] Ready to Die, I had the Digable on there, and I had the Nas [tracks from Illmatic]. And that was my tape pretty much as I was writing Uptown.

Unlike Suede, who had been crafting his rhyme style throughout high school, Cheeba had only started rapping seriously in 1994. He recalled different inspirations: I ain’t gonna lie. The cats that I did admire at the time was Method Man and Derek [Sadat] X. It was something about Method. When he come on, you know exactly it’s him, you know what I’m saying. You can’t make no mistakes about it. And then it was Derek X, right—the fact that your man didn’t always rhyme. So, I like the •

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not rhyming shit without having to sound like it’s not rhyming and I also like the Method Man, the fact that when he come on you know it’s him.

In addition to other prominent emcees and mentors like T-Strong and Ski, Camp Lo also drew influence from their inner circle, particularly from the whisper flow of Jungle Brown. Instead of an aggressive, full-throttle vocal attack common to most rappers, Jungle spoke softly, which was generally unheard of in the testosterone-driven, braggadocio-laden world of hip hop. As Suede explains: We realized how he was on a certain style of rhyme way before cats knew. ’Cause he was doin’ the (rapping Jungle’s “World Heist” verse softly) “the Coolie High niggas / for the spy niggas / get fly, niggas / na-na-nana niggas.” He was on that shit unconsciously. And that became how niggas started rhymin’! Like for a long time, that was his style, you know what I mean?

Suede and Cheeba’s verses on “Sparkle” exhibit the influence of Brown through the soft vocals used to deliver their lyrics. When asked if he could hear his influence as well as the influence of Method Man and T-Strong on the group’s style, Jungle replied: Yeah, listening back to it, I see all that. You can see where, especially listening to that first album, where you do start influencing each other. Chee with the slang, and with the style, like real distinctive, his voice, and he’s like 19, 18 with a grown man voice. He really just sound like a •

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throwback. Like he was reincarnated, crazy. My brother had the flow. And I wanted to be distinctive too, but I still wanted to be myself, and just that whole mellow, softspoken. So it was a mixture of that, and there’s a little bit of the shy guy shit in there too. Just tryin’ to make it seem like I’m just laid back and I’m soulful. That was part of my mental makeup.

At this point, the duo (Suede and Cheeba) were individually considering a number of emcee names. For Suede, Divine Child would soon be Geechi Dan, then Geechi Grace, and finally Geechi Suede. Meanwhile, Cheeba had previously rhymed as Cochise and then Bamboo before settling on his moniker. For the group name, the popular dice game, cee-lo, was considered until it was determined that another emcee (Cee Lo Green, then of Goodie Mob) was using that. Rather than scrapping the idea, they brought in “Camp,” a common slang term for crew. So, “Cee-Lo” became “Camp Lo.” Their first demo cassette, received by one of the authors of this book, Will, from Tone Hooker in early 1995, was labeled “Camp Lo (Geechi Dan and Cochise).” And so, after that meeting at C-Smoke’s house where the group had laid down their concept, Camp Lo had committed to a group name and were each solidifying their individual rap personas. And, they had a demo. The concluding step was committing to a look. Suede was aware of 1970s fashion but had to borrow into the visual style of Camp Lo, unlike Cheeba and Jungle Brown who had long embraced retro aesthetics: “Nah, I mean, Chee had that leather and he had given me a leather [jacket]. It was like a black, worn, Fonzie type of leather. I loved •

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that leather. But he was on it, him and my brother, they was definitely on the [’70s] threads.” That retroinfused fashion and old-school slang had been incubated in Jungle and Cheeba’s friendship long before Suede and Cheeba began recording together. In fact, Jungle recalls shopping for threads in the early ’90s at vintage clothing stores like Cheap Jacks and Unique downtown, in Greenwich village: I was dressin’ on some ’70s shit first, like goin’ into thrift stores, wearin’ the skippers, wearin’ the big hats, the throwback peacoats, I was already stylin’ it like that. But Cheeba was actually talking like he was from the ’70s. Like early, he was using slang from the ’70s. Talkin like that, “yo, you seen this movie?” And he just talkin’ bout all of the soul cinema, all of them flicks from the ’70s.

Cheeba was a connoisseur of the films of that era, and several 1970s films played a role in shaping the group’s style and slang. But, it was the 1975 film Cooley High that inspired Camp Lo’s first single, and established the ethos of the group. It’s the symbolism of brotherhood and just, times bein’ rough but we gon’ make it, and even with times bein’ rough we still fly. It’s that pact, it’s that brotherhood, man. —Suede on the world of “Coolie High”

It was appropriate that the first Lo single sampled the movie title Cooley High. In order to properly encapsulate the Camp Lo concept, the crafting of “Coolie High” •

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proceeded through a few demos. It started in the latter part of 1994 with a two-bar loop of Michael Jackson’s 1982 song “Lady In My Life.” Suede describes the conditions and process of creating the first version of “Coolie High” at Ski’s 110th Street apartment: We were broke as hell. So cats was hopping trains, we had food stamps and we would go to the grocery store and get food for the weekend, ’cause a lot of times we would go over there, crash out for the weekend and just record as much as we could. And it was just another one of those days where we was going through crazy records and shit like that. And that moment is kind of like, surreal ’cause, you know it, like as soon as he dropped the needle on it, and he hits that “Whoooo!” We knew it was about to be something. From the first couple of notes. He had the SP-12[00], he had the Akai [S]950, he started choppin’ that shit up. Yo, we just started writing, while he was still makin’ the beat, we was already getting it together.

Jungle recalls his first time hearing it: “I remember, it just sounded wild soulful to me. All of the beats that they was pickin’ at the time, beats that Ski was comin’ up with, it was hip hop, but so soulful.” A listen to “Coolie High Is Life” from On The Way Uptown is suggested; it is definitely worth your undivided attention. “Now if you’re in your Legend, shoot this up to ten,” half-whispers Geechi Suede as the track begins, evoking an air of secrecy while displaying the impact that Jungle Brown’s whisper flow already had on the group. “The airwaves belong to disciple and the war chief men,” •

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he continues, inviting the listener into a different world, a way of being—that “Coolie High” life. The chorus alternates between clips of Michael Jackson’s sped up vocal adlib and the varied repetition of one idea: “Coolie High gotcha wide” or “keeps you wide.” For Suede, the song’s chorus was the group mantra: Yeah, Coolie code of conduct, and all of that. That’s us. That [film] is our number one joint. So we just decided that we was gonna use “Coolie High” and we wondered, “‘Coolie High’ what?” And then it was like, “‘Coolie High,’ we got niggas open, we got cats open.” But, we can’t use the word “open” though, ’cause Black Moon had that “I Got Cha Opin” [in 1993], So we switched it to “wide,” like wide open.

After four bars of Suede, Sonny Cheeba enters in a slick drawl—“Diggin’ on the Sheba, tappin’ on the Cheeba, sayin’ you want som-shin’, cotton you want nuh-shin’”— telling any “cotton” (soft) competitors they don’t want any drama (“nuh-shin’” = “nothing”), and to let him enjoy the “Sheba” (lady) he’s digging on. It’s a quintessential example of that back-to-back approach and the enigmatic lyricism the duo would soon perfect. Camp Lo had found their slang and their aesthetic center as a group, and this demo was the first scene of the musical story they were about to tell—a story unlike anyone’s around them. In addition to the original “Coolie,” “Black Connection,” “Sparkle,” and other Uptown highlights came from the 29th floor of Ski’s 110th Street apartment, as well as numerous unreleased Lo gems that are now available on On the Way the Uptown. The album’s original title track, •

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“A Piece of the Action,” is one of those unheard gems; it marries Suede and Cheeba’s nocturnal heist rhymes with Ski’s precise jazz samples and hard drums. Unfortunately, the track was shelved due to sample clearance issues. Another recording session in the Harlem apartment produced “Feelin’ It,” a track initially featuring Ski and Suede rhyming instead of Jay-Z, and a close female friend Mecca singing the chorus. This track would ultimately end up on Jay-Z’s breakout album Reasonable Doubt. But of all the unreleased Camp Lo tracks demoed on the 29th floor, “Bubblin’” was perhaps the strongest (and is also on On The Way Uptown). “Bubblin’” is very much a part of the Uptown story—a smooth but boom-bap track that samples Anita Baker’s angelic vocalese from “Caught Up In The Rapture”—and might have been Camp Lo’s first single on Profile if that particular sample had a chance of being cleared for legal use. Suede was sitting in the 29th floor apartment when Ski found the inspiration: I’ll never forget that, he picked up that Anita Baker record and threw that shit on, like “Yo!” And then he started choppin’ it up. That was real dope. I’ve always been a fan of the smooth tracks. That’s always been my thing. But to have that switch where you’re comin’ with some rugged shit, like, what you talkin’ about is rugged— that was a twist to it. I was actually talking to Mecca that day. You know, Mecca who is on “Feelin’ It.” The beat is playin’ in the background, I’m tryin’ to write a rhyme while talking to her and shit.

Suede and Cheeba had been developing co-writing strategies when the song’s opening came about: •

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We’d be like, “first two lines you get, let me hear it. Or vice versa, if I get two rhymes first, I’ll let you hear it, [and we’ll] build it from there.” Somethin’ about that Rob Base shit had popped into my head, and I just thought it would sound dope in there. Like (rapping) “I wanna rock right now / I brought my alliance and we all Bronx-bound.”2

“Bubblin’” had a champagne-poppin’ chorus—a toast to … well, toasting bubbly in brotherly celebration. It’s a lyrical theme that recurs in other Lo tracks, such as “Sparkle,” but “Bubblin’” declares the motif with Cheeba’s first recorded, half-whispered rundown of folks “sippin’ amaret-tah”—a line that attained rap quotable status when he reprised it at the end of “Luchini.” “Bubblin’” was a single contender, but wasn’t meant to be for Profile. Camp Lo’s management, at that point the co-managing team of Kristi Clifford and Tone Hooker, negotiated a contract for a single release with the label, and aimed for a new version of “Coolie High” as fulfillment rather than “Bubblin’.” In August 1995, the single was released, backed with Jungle Brown’s debut with the group, “World Heist.” Suede recalls how the “Coolie High” B-side came about during the demo recording process with another vinyl jackpot:   Suede was just referencing a hip hop classic, without consciously making the label connection; as it were, Rob Base & DJ E-Z Rock’s “It Takes Two,” which opens with the rap quotable “I wanna rock right now,” was released on the label they were in the process of negotiating with: Profile Records. 2

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Yeah, Chee might not remember that, but I do, because my next door neighbor Bob had an ill record collection. So I went over there, and I got wild records from Bob. And I can’t remember what record it was, but “World Heist” was in that batch. I took it to Ski, and he flipped it. Jungle was with us that day, Cheeba was sick, but we knew we had to get it in anyway.

Ski remembered that it was a Deodato sample that he chopped up and filtered on the Akai S950, attenuating the high frequencies to accentuate the bass. It was a technique that was becoming increasingly popular, and one that Ski credits specific producers with popularizing at the time: “Pete Rock and Beatminerz. You listen to all that Black Moon shit, they filtering game is dope.” With the group supporting each other’s ideas and a network of emcees to inspire them, everyone was certainly trying to make it as a recording artist, and “get signed.” But forcing commercial hits wasn’t the vibe in the Ski’s apartment. Jungle explains: The last thing we were in the studio thinkin’ was “yo, we gotta make a hot single.” Nobody was thinkin’ like that. Everybody was just tryin’ to—on every song—tryin’ to pour they heart out, and sound the dopest. So, we wasn’t thinkin’ outside of our circle, and all of that. And that’s what makes it so much more beautiful. That we did it like that, came from a pure place, you know what I’m sayin’, from the heart, soul, whatever you want to call it—and how people embraced it. It’s somethin’ you gotta decipher, the shit Chee or my brother or what I was sayin’, years later. But it was a feeling, it was a vibe … •

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Thus, Camp Lo felt free from the expectations and commercial pre-meditations that weigh so many down in the industry. Free to be different, free to be weird, to be themselves, to make something they’d like. And, through the music’s soul and genuineness, make something that would draw others to their sound. In keeping with this vibe of self-confidence and originality, Jungle Brown opens “World Heist” in a slick, abstract, whispered flow with an Islamic twist: Bish me Allah, it’s the chocolate star Bless the vain, and kiss the pain It’s the superfly jungle god Allah Love to Soulaguard, pumpin’ fruit from the yard

And with a shout out to MC Soulaguard (his Virginia uncle Shaheed who had helped Suede develop his rhyme style), “World Heist”—in tandem with “Coolie High” and “Bubblin’”—instituted the three lyrical themes that would permeate the group’s debut album: 1) that Coolie High life; 2) bubbly champagne celebration; 3) the adventures of the diamond crooks on a world heist. Profile took the bait, and so, with a new record deal, Camp Lo entered the studio in May of 1995 to re-record their “Coolie High” and “World Heist” demos and begin work on an album-length release. Over the next year, D&D Studios, the central locus of activity for New York hip hop production in the mid-1990s, became their second home as they recorded Uptown Saturday Night.

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The Diamond Delegates at D&D Studios

The concept of a hip hop “golden era” is embedded into our understanding of the culture’s history. Devout enthusiasts are aware, and casual or young listeners are made aware, of a period of time when the creative potential of hip hop music first crested. Bookended by 1988 and 1993, the golden era was a fertile period for innovative lyrical flow, beat construction, fashion, and persona. Though vital to understanding the development of hip hop music, the cultural weight of the term “golden era” has the potential to hinder the recognition and appreciation of other poignant crests in hip hop music creativity—particularly the subsequent era of the late 1990s into the early 2000s. In the documentary Beats, Rhymes, & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest, for instance, music historian, hip hop ambassador and The Roots’ drummer ?uestlove posited November 9, 1993 as “… the last great day in classic hip hop” (Rapaport 2011). On that day, Midnight Marauders, the third album by A Tribe Called Quest, and Enter the 36 Chambers, The Wu-Tang Clan’s debut album, were both released. These •

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two recordings represent a style and creative ethos for hip hop that were subsequently supplanted by a different, though no less innovative era. The classic hip hop referenced by ?uestlove endeared itself to contemporary enthusiasts because of its real and perceived independence from the major music industry. While significant major label participation in hip hop music had already begun in 1985, the run of late 1980s to early 1990s pop chart hits by Run-D.M.C., DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, Tone Lōc, MC Hammer, and Vanilla Ice were what really showed that rap music could be a lucrative investment for major music and entertainment corporations. In 1992, Polygram, one of the “Big 6” music companies at the time, purchased Def Jam Recordings, while the remaining five major labels spent the next few years establishing urban divisions within their corporate structures to create opportunities to find a hit with rap music (Charnas 2010). In keeping with ?uestlove’s bookend of the era, it is fascinating that just two weeks later, on November 23, 1993, Snoop Doggy Dogg’s debut album Doggystyle was released and immediately claimed the top spot of the Billboard 200. “The gangsta gold rush,” as coined by Marcus Reeves (2008, 149), had begun, as the major labels—wanting to ensure a stake in the next multiplatinum rapper—allotted more resources towards slickly produced gangsta rap that could be embraced beyond the urban market. This transition is sometimes problematically historicized as the beginning of the end of good hip hop. But as ?uestlove stated, it was in fact just the end of a classic permutation of hip hop culture and music. Though the quality of the music did not decline, one could •

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argue that there was a general homogenization of the rapper persona. Even that statement can be reductive, however, as there are undoubtable nuances between the seemingly similar hardcore/gangsta personas of Nas, Warren G, Lil’ Kim, Jay-Z, Craig Mac, Redman, The Wu-Tang Clan, Smooth, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, and the Notorious B.I.G. Yet, by the fall of 1994, as the budgets for producing and promoting hip hop were growing, it was undeniable that the hardcore/gangsta persona was what dominated hip hop culture. Sean C was a producer and A&R at the time, and he fondly remembered that era: “I went to Loud [Records] in ’96, so that period of time was just fucking dope. The music industry was insane with money and everybody was eating and everybody was making good music. It was a really dope time.” Even De La Soul, luminaries from the classic era, acknowledged and critiqued the elevated status of the genre, and the changing playing field of hip hop, with their album Stakes Is High (1996). Camp Lo and the world of Coolie High were formulated during this period. And, while it is important to define and understand Suede and Cheeba on their own terms, they, like any other musician at the time, could not exist outside of this contemporaneous hip hop scene. Both were deeply aware of their surroundings and their place within the current cultural environment. Cheeba recalls their explicit desire to avoid conformity: When cats [Camp Lo] came through, for the most part, we would be only us … rather than trying to sound like anybody else that was out or dressing like anybody else— hoodies and armies [fatigues] and all that. •

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All types of rappers in the mid-1990s made songs about having a good time (and were frequently documented having a good time), but overall, the shelves and walls of a local Sam Goody and the videos played on MTV and BET were largely saturated with images that conjured up anything but that; as a climate, the late ’80s/early ’90s jovial and lighthearted rap wave of Salt-N-Pepa, Kid ’N Play, Kwame, and Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince was long gone. Cheeba reflects on the contemporaneous moment of mid-1990s hip hop and the way Camp Lo chose to react: Right, at that moment, the projection is, you know, “I had a hard time,” “I need to get out the hood, by any means necessary,” right. We also had the other cats talking about what’s keeping us in the hood, then you had the other cats talking about stickin’ dudes up. You know, it was all kinds of different ways, “I’m going to get paper this way just to get out the hood.” Instead, we seen it to bring it on the up, where you see us have a good time. When you see it or hear it, it’s supposed to give you a good feeling rather than you being in the hood and want to do somebody dirty after you hear what we brought out.

Though the mean mugs and dreary depictions of ’hood life were soon joined with exhibitions of jiggy and bling, fewer rappers decided to “bring it on the up.” Tales of street strategy, endurance, and conquest were the zeitgeist of mid-’90s hip hop. It was a time when the children and young adults reared during the crack epidemic of the 1980s were presented an opportunity to transition from the informal economies of the hood •

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into a music industry that was eager to promote (and, to some degree, exploit) their experiences of poverty and hardship. Suede and Cheeba were certainly not Scarface, Biggie, or Snoop, but on the flip-side they were not directly comparable to the afro-centric Native Tongues collective (De La Soul, Queen Latifah, A Tribe Called Quest, and The Jungle Brothers) either. Similar to acts like Busta Rhymes, OutKast, and Dr. Octagon—an alter ego of Ultramagnetic MC’s rapper Kool Keith—Camp Lo carved out a space in commercial hip hop where you didn’t have to construct a rap identity on quintessential ’hood experiences or socio-political thought, and set themselves apart with their accentuation of older black aesthetics. Their persona was distinct and dated but cool, offbeat but approachable. As Technician, Camp Lo’s tour deejay, remembers, “They had certain people [at shows] dressing like them. It was just like a breath of fresh air, something different.” Craft a persona, create a vibe, and privilege lyrical ability: these were some of the primary steps toward getting “put on,” or signed. By the mid-1990s, regional styles of rapping were established around the United States and the world, expanding the range of lyrical techniques and aptitude heard on hip hop recordings. In New York City, though, the rhyming standard was particularly high. Innovative technique and flow, intricate rhyme schemes, and comprehensive word play were prerequisites to be acknowledged in the birthplace of hip hop. The golden age is fondly remembered for establishing fresh styles of rhyming, but consider the stable of just New York-area rap talent that debuted recordings •

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around 1995: Biggie, Nas, Big Pun, Foxy Brown, Mic Geronimo, Big L, Mr. Cheeks, Smoothe Da Hustler, AZ, Ca$h Money Click, a very young Mos Def, The LOX, Busta Rhymes, Mobb Deep, Ma$e, Capone-N-Noreaga, the solo acts of the Wu-Tang Clan. Combined with acts from the turn of the decade that were still active—A Tribe Called Quest, Das EFX, Brand Nubian, Digable Planets—Camp Lo’s distinct persona alone was not going to allow them to thrive in that same environment as hip hop artists that are now icons of the culture. They had to show and prove on the mic. It was the meeting place of the Gods. —David Lotwin on D&D Studios

D&D Studios opened for business in 1985. The name of the studio came from its founders Douglas Grama and David Lotwin, childhood friends who focused on music at an early age. “It was always kind of our vision to get in the music business one way or another,” explained Lotwin. After trying college, they decided on a more direct way: We left school and moved back home and opened an 8-track [studio] in the Bronx. [We had] a very small little Tascam, ½-inch tape track. We got the back of a garage that during the day did collision work. And at night we did music out of there.

In 1987, they moved the studio to the fourth floor of 320 W 37th Street, closer to the hub of New York City record making. Following the move, D&D studios •

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was initially a home for reggae music. As the midtown location was building a reputation, Peter Tosh, Dennis Brown, Beres Hammond, and Augustus Pablo recorded at D&D. The studio’s moneymaker, though, was Latin freestyle: “we used to do all that, like Tony Moran, Latin Rascals, Coro, and TKA. That’s what we were doing up there.” Rap music was growing in popularity, but with the exception of Mr. Magic’s Rap Attack on WBLS and Kool DJ Red Alert’s KISS Master Mix Party on WRKS KISS-FM, rap did not have a prominent profile on NYC radio stations. In 1993, WQHT Hot 97 became the first NYC station to switch its formatting to 24/7 rap music. The switch was from Latin freestyle, which had been as lucrative to radio programmers as it was to Doug and David. This radio formatting change in NYC aligned with the clientele coming to D&D. “When Hot 97 did their transformation we did our transformation, because we were like the local studio that those cats were coming out of.” It was in tandem with Hot 97 that D&D truly transformed into a predominantly hip hop recording studio, but the space had already been building a discography within the genre. T La Rock was one of the first rappers to record in the studio, as were The Fat Boys, who utilized D&D to record three of their late 1980s albums. From Lotwin’s perspective, the first wave of hip hop artists were attracted to the studio because it was more than just a studio, it was a natural spot to hang out with other hip hop creatives: It was the sound, it was the environment. We definitely had a cool space, it was conducive to hip hop music. It •

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wasn’t corporate, a pool table and, you know, it just had a great vibe—pinball machine, arcade, very laid back; there was graffiti on the walls. And also, you know, it was a meeting place.

The turning point for the studio had occurred in 1991 when Lord Finesse and Showbiz from the Diggin’ In The Crates (D.I.T.C.) crew decided to record a remix at the facility instead of at Jazzy Jay’s studio in the Bronx, where the majority of Lord Finesse’s album was recorded. It was during that session that DJ Premier was introduced to the sound and environment that would define mid-1990s hip hop: I was doing a remix for Lord Finesse’s album, Return Of The Funky Man … and for that I went to D&D. He wanted me to do some scratches on it, and after I was done he gave me a cassette copy which I played in my sound system in my car, and it sounded so good that I thought “Man, this is where I need to start doing my work.” It became a really beautiful situation where my sound was the strongest, and I continued to work there … —DJ Premier, quoted in Tingen 2007

Gang Starr, a seminal hip hop group comprised of Premier and the late rapper Guru, recorded their sophomore album Step in the Arena at Calliope Studios, located a block away on 37th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues. After the session noted above, though, Premier moved all Gang Starr production and recording to D&D. As a result of the growing popularity of his production work, Premier soon established D&D as the place to •

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make hardcore New York City hip hop. The equipment at the facility further distinguished D&D from the other places recording hip hop. According to David, the studio “had MCI consoles. MCI 636 in our A and our B rooms … every other room in Manhattan at that point was Neve, Studer, or SSL. So we weren’t competing with that, we had our sound, our niche.” The sonic signature provided by the MCI’s treatment of bass frequencies and digitally distorted samples that attracted DJ Premier to the studio was a defining characteristic of his productions, which became a flare to New York rappers looking for the proper sound. Following the 1992 release of Step In The Arena, the halls of D&D welcomed KRS-One, Mobb Deep, Jeru the Damaja, Black Moon, Nas, Black Sheep, Nice & Smooth, Das EFX, Bahamadia, Smif-NWessun, Jay-Z, The Notorious B.I.G., among others that represented the rugged in contemporaneous hip hop. Dope, dope, dope times. D&D, it just felt like essence, nothin’ but quality, high quality, but still had a certain grit to it, real hip hop grit to it. —Geechi Suede

DJ Premier and the MCI consoles provided the sound of D&D Studios, but the vibe of the place was a result of Doug and David’s design decisions that, in a sense, recreated the original creative atmosphere of hip hop culture in a compact, less public area. A pool table, vending machines, video games, graffiti on the walls, holes in the walls, a lounge, and a lack of commissions from marketing companies created a cultural oasis away from the growing corporate involvement with hip hop •

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music, and bred great records. By 1996, everyone in hip hop in NYC was working there because everyone in hip hop was working there. But because there were only three recording studios, the place also became legendary for the extra-curricular activities that proliferated, as Lotwin remembers: Well, half the time people were playing cee-lo, and we had some pretty intense, big money games up there. Then it became, even if you weren’t working but you were one of our regulars, you’d be up and hanging and rolling dice. Just kind of building with people. It was a great environment.

The environment also featured casual weed smoke and many of the best rappers from the era standing around a pool table while Jay-Z hustled the room. In the next room, epic Sega Genesis marathon challenges on NBA Live 95 or Mortal Kombat passed downtime, as sessions often lasted until four in the morning. The vibe of the studio was conducive to collaboration, often centering around producers. After getting into D&D, Ski transported the hip hop incubator that was his 110th Street apartment to the studio: We got from recording Jay-Z in the bedroom of my crib, now we’re at D&D studios, you know what I’m saying. But keep in mind, while all of this is going on—while Jay and Camp Lo are poppin’ off—I’m still producing Bahamadia. I’m still in the studio, I’m still around all these people because, you know, now we’re recording. •

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Even David recognized Ski’s importance at the studio: “I remember Ski being in there a lot. I mean, you know, right at that moment he was on fire. He was definitely one of the hot cats … he did a bunch of stuff and kept us real busy.” Ski’s stature at the studio can be understood from his detailing of one interaction: I remember being outside D&D studio. Biggie sittin’ in a truck. (imitating Biggie’s voice) “Yo Ski, come here, come here. Yo, you did that new Camp Lo record? ‘Luchini’?” I’m like, “yeah.” He was like, “can I get a beat like that?” I’m like, “I got you.”

D&D Studio’s great sound, good time, and camaraderie did not suppress the innate competitiveness that drives great rappers. While there were arguments, disagreements, and some physical confrontations at the studio, most of the competition was constructive, in that it derived from outdoing what you heard bleeding through from the room next door. The competition also involved producers and beats, as Ski explained: I’m in the studio with Jay, we’re recording music. I remember making the beat for “Streets Is Watching.” I play it for Jay. Jay was like, “do me a favor, go into the Biggie session and play it for him.” I’m like, “aight.” So I take the CD over. “Yo, Jay want you to check this beat out.” “Aight, put it on.” Biggie looking at me like, “that’s Jay beat?” I’m like, “yeah” (imitates Biggie’s face of reluctant acceptance). But they had like this little battle thing. Biggie would send me over to play shit, you know what I mean, it was just weird. But it was dope. •

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Knowing that on the other side of the wall could be the track that would bury your record ensured that every rapper at the studio produced the hottest rhymes and coldest flows. Suede and Cheeba hung out at the studio, played video games, and fraternized with everyone there. On any given night in late 1995 or early 1996, Jay-Z would be in the A room laying down vocals for Reasonable Doubt, while Camp Lo were recording in the B room crafting Uptown, with tracks produced by Ski. Meanwhile, DJ Premier may have recorded B.I.G., Nas, or Gang Starr in the same room just a few hours before (Premier would later buy the studio and fittingly rename it HeadQCourterz). Suede studied the flows of the best rappers coming through the space, but Camp Lo were outsiders who were inside. Their persona, image, and sound were distinct from the other rappers that frequented D&D. As such, they did not see themselves as directly competing with everyone at the studio, as Cheeba states: I never felt that competition factor like that. It didn’t resonate like that with me. It felt more like friendly competition than I got to outdo you. Because what I’m doing basically don’t sound like what you’re doing. That’s what I mean by that form of competition. I know that what I’m talking about you ain’t talking about, the avenue I’m coming from, you ain’t coming from there. So I didn’t really look at it like that.

Recorded in one of the iconic spaces in hip hop history—a space responsible for a sound that has become synonymous with a specific style of New York City hip •

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hop—Uptown Saturday Night is undeniably impacted by the vibe of D&D, the artists who worked there, and the sounds of their contemporaries. As the tracklist takes the listener through the world of “Coolie High,” it becomes clear that though Camp Lo’s unique setting and ethos were their own, they assimilated that D&D vibe into the narrative and feeling of Coolie High. Not only did the competition push Cheeba and Suede to make the best music they could, but the comradery of hip hop creatives and good time vibes were also a part of the album’s very core.

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Blazay, Blazay, Blazay

Purchase, download, stream, borrow. Do whatever you need to get the album. If you sip “Amaret-tah” (Amaretto), pour a glass. Get your headphones or turn your speakers up. Press play. If you’re new to the album, give yourself fifty-five minutes, listen from beginning to end and come back to this page. If not, what follows is a track-by-track exploration of Uptown, in album order. Krystal Karrington On and on and some try to do this, Yes, y’all, to the Camp-ah Lo-ah

As the range of hip hop production expanded in the early 1990s, the idea of using a beat and an album to invoke a visual narrative was becoming commonplace in hip hop. The thriller film New Jack City (1991) underscored key scenes with its rap soundtrack; conversely, Biggie’s debut album Ready to Die (1994) was a birth-to-death narrative told through rhymes. While Uptown is not a linear narrative, each song was constructed to portray its own specific tale within the world that Suede and Cheeba •

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had imagined. “Krystal Karrington” set the stage for Uptown Saturday Night, opening dramatically with a low bass trombone (“blahdomp”) and a muted electric guitar pulse—strains that often signal adventure and intrigue in cinema. Ski remembers hearing the sample and immediately reaching for the SP-1200 to catch it: “That’s Jamie Summers, that’s the Bionic Woman. I remember making that beat. Think about it, a lot of these records from Camp Lo were still with the SP [1200]. I was watching the Bionic Woman on VHS, and I’m like …” (smiles).1 Ski sampled the section from the VHS machine into the SP, chopped the guitar into individual hits, and shaped a thumping drum pattern to complement the sounds. It was the perfect beat—a minor key excerpt from the score of a dramatic adventure show—for a track that aimed to evoke a vibe of mystery and tension. Cheeba compares the drama and dangerous aura of “Krystal Karrington” to another Ski track from that period, Jay-Z’s “Streets is Watching”: We didn’t have nothing that sounded that criminal on the joint other than “Krystal Karrington.” “Streets is Watching” was a whole different feel. It sound like a movie. The beat for “Krystal” was crazy because it was just—that (sings the horn line). It was that, you know, that cinematic feel.   Jerry Fielding, a legendary movie and TV composer, wrote the theme for the 1976–7 run of Bionic Woman. Similar to the soundtracks of Blaxploitation films, 1970s television shows featured iconic themes for shows like Taxi, The Jeffersons, and Happy Days. 1

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“Krystal” has a harder edge in comparison to the album as a whole, and, as Suede recalls, was intended strictly for the streets, as a contribution to “a mixtape—just initially a little freestyle with DJ Chubby Chubb for his mixtape.” When the track showed promise to be something spectacular, however, the group expanded it into a full song. The title comes from the opening lyric, which, for Suede, was an attempt to have rhymes like one of his favorite emcees: “That ‘I get Krystal Karrington,’ I wanted rhymes like Nas.” Reminiscent of Nas’s work, it’s a stream of consciousness lyrical flow that coins a slang for “gritty” (as in “rock” or “crystal”) as “Krystal Karrington,” referring to the character from the 1980s drama Dallas. But this reference (the importance of the specific character) is less meaningful than the sound and syllables of the words themselves, the slickness of the slang, and free association of ideas. Cheeba considers that to be part of the magic of Lo’s style, that free association stream of signifiers that some have taken to calling “Black Dada” after the Surrealist Dada artistic movement: I don’t know if you partake in fruit or flowers or produce [smoke herb], but if you ever sat down and listen to what’s going on you’ll be surprised how many different areas and things that’s pulled from, like movies and TV shows. It’s crazy—commercials, whatever. It could be a saying from here or there, whatever. It’s a lot of shit pulled into that Lo.

Thus, Suede’s first line shifts from the “Krystal” wordplay to his noting his “Carlito influence” (after Al Pacino’s •

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character in Carlito’s Way) leading the way to Cheeba’s verse, marking “Octopussy” and “she call me Bond (first name Cheeba)” arching to “Sea World,” a slang referring to his cunnilingual skills at, ahem, pleasing the divas. Technician—who served as Camp Lo’s live deejay for many years and also deejayed for hip hop heavyweights Rakim, Ghostface, Jadakiss, and others—singles “Krystal Karrington” out as an Uptown standout for its street appeal: “as far as an album cut, ‘Krystal’ would probably be my favorite, because that was like a hard record for them. Like for what you would call hardcore.” Luchini AKA This Is It Now pop the cork and steam the Vega and get lit What, what, what

The second track on the album, “Luchini AKA This Is It,” is the Camp Lo anthem. It starts with a sample from Los Angeles R&B/funk group Dynasty. “Adventures in the Land of Music” was the title track to Dynasty’s 1980 album which included their highest charting single “I’ve Just Begun to Love You.” Although the lyrics to Dynasty’s “Adventures” have no role in “Luchini” or Ski’s sample choice, they resonate with the ethos of Camp Lo: an adventurous journey through an alternate universe, starting with Ski’s needle-dropping—searching through stacks of records for the right sound. If you’re reading this and haven’t heard the Dynasty record, find it, put it on, and let it ride. Everyone “swore up and •

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down” to Cheeba that the “sample was Earth, Wind and Fire,” but it was Ski finding that Dynasty record and using a newly acquired AKAI MPC 3000 (which offered far greater sample time and quality than the SP-1200/ AKAI S950 combo) that made it a Camp Lo staple. Ski contrasts using well-known samples to the more adventurous process of blind crate-digging: “Yeah, those are no brainers, like I know what this sounds like and I know if I loop it and throw some drums, it’s going to be fresh; especially if they rap to it. But then when I’m looking— like with ‘Luchini’ when I’m dropping needles and trying to find shit, that’s totally different.” By then, Ski had moved from the Spanish Harlem apartment on 110th back to the Bronx, and was living in an apartment at 1520 Sedgwick Ave. You know, that building where DJ Kool Herc threw parties in 1973 with Coke La Rock rapping and set off this whole hip hop thing? But in the mid-1990s, people were just starting to meditate on the historiography of hip hop, and the “Sedgwick and Cedar” t-shirts didn’t exist yet: 1520 was just another address. Ski recalls folks mentioning it to him at the time, but the implications didn’t hit him: “I remember a couple of them saying, ‘you know Kool Herc lived in this building.’ I’m like ‘word?’ I ain’t think nothing of it, but I think I caught some incredible hip hop spirit in that building.” The spirit was certainly with Ski that day at the Sedgwick Ave apartment when he dropped the needle on the Dynasty record: I remember [A&R] Will saying, “yo, the album is dope but we need one more, we need something crazy.” It was like 9th inning shit, “we need something crazy man, we •

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need something that’s dope, that’s going to take the shit over the top.” And the fucking universe gave me the beat, I was like, “yo, this is dope.” I heard it—when I dropped the needle. And I’m by myself. Think about this: I’m by myself and I drop the needle and it’s like, (sings the “Adventures” intro). I looked around like, “what?” Just to make sure I wasn’t trippin’, I’m like, “this shit right heeeere!” All I did was threw some—the Mary Jane Girls [“All Night Long”] drums behind it and threw a little piano (he sings the eight note chords), and I said that’s it.

A combination of hard, syncopated horn stabs, a flowing muted trumpet melody, and the snap of Ski’s monster truck snare (which resulted from combining the Dynasty snare with the snare from the club favorite Mary Jane Girls single “All Night Long”) created sample magic. After adding a bassline from “the test tone that comes with the [Akai S]950” triggered on a MIDI keyboard, Ski knew it was ready and called Suede and Cheeba to let them hear it. For Suede, “that’s the day that you never, ever, ever, ever forget, you know what I mean. And I was like in a deep like coma sleep from hanging out all night, and Ski hit me. It was pretty early in the morning and he was just like, ‘yo, listen to this.’ That was the first thing he said and, wow. I think, like I was at his crib—like my brain or my spirit may have still been on the phone but like physically I was knocking on his door like, ‘yo,’ you know what I’m saying. And yeah, the same thing with Chee[ba], he called Chee right after and we were just—we were over there immediately.” Cheeba similarly recalls an instantaneous reaction to Ski playing him the beat over the phone: •

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He called and soon as, you know what I mean, the phone dropped and it was (imitates beat to “Luchini”). Me and your man Suede got there and got that same feel, you know what I’m saying, like “what the hell was that.” “What is that?” You know what I’m saying, that’s what you’re thinking like, “what!” So [we] got over there and knocked it down.

Suede remembers him and Cheeba pacing in Ski’s apartment on Sedgwick Ave, formulating their flows: “So, we was walking around—I just remember we were just really, really, really, excited. We were really excited— we were just bouncing through the crib writing the verses and stuff.” One of the flows used several times in “Luchini” verses would provide the rhythm of the hook. It was something Suede refers to as the “stop-andgo” flow, signaled by a quick run of rapid-fire syllables, a pause and suspension on one syllable, followed by another rapid-fire run of syllables: That beat definitely brought it out. That was the first time that I played in that dimension of things where it was like—me and Chee[ba] call it like the “stop-and-go” where you speed it and slow it down type of stuff. Just like from the introduction, (accenting each syllable) “Intro-du-cin,’” holding the introduction like that [the “stop”] and then (miming the rapid-fire flow of the first verse) “de de de de de …” [the “go”] you know what I mean. Yeah, it was definitely that beat that made me play with the flow more. That was a great, great day man.

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When it came time to develop the chorus, Ski heard something special in part of Suede’s “stop-and-go” verse: “Ski had sampled my flow from one of the verses, (rhyming) ‘I-played-the-thief—What! Sen-sa-tionsat-the-Mardi-Gras-[be-screa-ming-Chee—Ba].’” Ski’s sample of Suede’s rhythmic flow—“I-play-the-thief— What!”—with the Dynasty sample resulted in Camp Lo’s anthem. Ski, Suede, Cheeba, and Darien Dash (Damon’s cousin and Ski’s co-manager) were there in Ski’s Sedgwick Ave apartment as the group was considering different ideas for the hook. They all knew there was something special about that rhythmic arc “I-play-the-thief—What!” and Ski tried to develop a hook out of it with the lyric “This-is-it.” Suede recounts: “and at first Ski had ‘y’all’” (rhymes “This-is-it—Y’all” in the basic rhythmic phrasing of “I play the thief, what!”) “We were like, ‘ummm, that sound a little too dated or whatever right there,’ with so many classic old school catch phrases like ‘yes y’all’ around.” With “What!” drawn from his earlier verse phrase in place of “y’all,” however, the hook started to take shape. And as for the title, Suede credits Jungle Brown for the word “Luchini,” the Italian-esque slang for money that would graduate from Camp Lo’s single to the Urban Dictionary: “I know that Jungle was the first person I ever heard say ‘Luchini.’ He brought the word ‘Luchini’ to the table.” This-is-it—What! Lu-chi-ni-pour-in’-from-the-skyLet’s-get-rich—What!

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If the mix on “Luchini” stands out on the album, it’s because it was the only track mixed a second time by a different engineer. Joe Quinde, the D&D engineer on most of the album, had originally mixed the track, but Ski knew that the song needed something different— the sonic spectacular—to accentuate its vibrant character. With consideration for each Camp Lo track as a fictional and aural space within the world of Coolie High, “Luchini” glitters with sound drawn from the two-bar Dynasty loop—a legato melody hovering above an airtight staccato groove. They brought the track to engineer Kenny Ortiz, who had been mixing a number of standout hip hop singles at Quad Studios, including Junior Mafia’s “Player’s Anthem.” In fact, Ortiz was in a session at Quad recording with Biggie and Junior Mafia in November 1994 the night that Tupac was shot in the lobby downstairs, an injury that, while by all accounts unrelated to Biggie, triggered the infamous drama between the two rap legends and their respective coasts. But no drama occurred the night “Luchini” was mixed at Quad on April 10, 1996. Or rather, the only drama was the dramatic transformation of the mix: Ortiz’s intuitive decision to add a chorus modulation to the horn sample and vocals to make them sonorous and vibrant and just the right brickwall compression to the snare and two-track mix to accentuate the vital sonic details for the listener. Each horn hit now burst from the track and the drum pattern was accentuated with a cracking snare. Now, “Luchini” was ready to go. Since anyone who heard “Luchini” in those early days immediately commented on the beat, it was no surprise that Dame Dash was interested in getting the beat for •

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Jay-Z instead, to use for the D&D sessions that would become Reasonable Doubt. Dash approached Ski after hearing the track backstage at a Howard University concert of Goodie Mob, Jay-Z, Jaz-O, and Camp Lo. Luckily for the group, the label had already paid Ski for the track, as Camp Lo had the foresight to be worried that the anthemic chorus hook would get poached by another group. Cheeba recalls that, “once we got that hook down, we didn’t want nobody at the radio stations to hear it” while they were touring around, promoting “Coolie High.” And they were right. The single was released, and it made an impact that has resounded for decades. Park Joint This is how we do, this is how we do Check it, check it out y’all, this is how we do

Hip hop culture didn’t just develop in apartment complex recreation rooms like that of the famous 1520 Sedgwick Ave, or at local community centers; it also owes much to NYC public parks in the Bronx, Harlem, and other boroughs. It was the ingenuity of electrical engineering students who drew power from streetlamps to makeshift sound systems—providing power and amplification to the park parties of deejays like Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa, Jazzy Jay, Grand Mixer D.ST, and others—that made the park jams possible. Happy Warrior Park on W. 98th Street and Amsterdam Ave, for instance, hosted a number of events over the years for the Rock Steady Crew, a b-boying (breakdancing) collective, •

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and is more commonly known as “Rock Steady Park” to hip hop fans. Hip hop was set out in the dark, they used to do it out in the park —MC Shan, “The Bridge” (1985)

For Suede, Cheeba, and Ski, the park jams uptown were part of their youth consciousness and served as a foundation for each of their relationships to the culture of hip hop. Of course, Suede was a b-boy before he was a rapper, but they all related to the feeling of the park and what it meant to the early history of hip hop and participating in the culture. In “Park Joint,” a sparse sample of a Deodato electric piano riff and Ski’s turntable scratch set off a sticky drum pattern reminiscent of early Boogie Down Productions beats from the late 1980s (see “South Bronx”). Cheeba describes the feeling of the song: “‘Park Joint’ gave you that, I don’t know man, it was just this feeling that was exactly that, the park joint. You thinking that as you walking to the joint.” Suede recalls the day the song came together: Yeah, that was a dope day, that was dope vibe because— it’s funny because, ok he was on Burke [Ave in the Bronx], I don’t even think [Ski] ever really put furniture in that Burke crib. I think it was just like equipment in the back room and the living room it was like a TV that was on the floor. There’s no sofas, and none of that, and at this point we’re doing well. Something was airing of ours [the “Coolie High” video], on BET the day that we were working on Park Joint. And so, that kind of a little—I was focusing in on that, excited to see when it came on. •

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While he would be the first to note the importance of seventies music culture in his consciousness, Cheeba would also rightly argue that Camp Lo, and Uptown specifically, have been too often pigeonholed as referencing only seventies and blaxploitation culture. All of the dope cats pegged us for the ’70s because of the visuals. A lot of those songs on there don’t really take you there. “Park Joint” kind of got that [’80s feel]. You know what I’m saying, all of those joints are not really ’70s per se.

These ’80s themes are not just limited to outdoor park jams. The album as a whole resounds heavily with 1980s New York signifiers from Suede and Cheeba’s childhood, like the films Wild Style and The Warriors, and the thick, loping drum patterns of Marley Marl beats. “Park Joint,” then, is just one of Camp Lo’s tributes to the 1980s. B-Side to Hollywood Yo where the party at With Lo-ah, Lo-ah Yo where the party at With De La, De La

Ski produced nearly every track on Uptown; “B-Side to Hollywood” was the exception. Camp Lo were virtually unknown as emcees a year before, but by the spring of 1996 they were in the studio trading phrases with Dave “Trugoy the Dove” of De La Soul over one of his tracks. “B-Side” was a result of Camp Lo’s collaborations with •

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Dave that came about during one of Lo’s first tours. Dave recalls: We toured a bit and they were supporting us at that time. Opening up for us. And, what’s the name—[“Coolie High”] had been out. So we heard that, and of course we kind of felt the vibe. We kinda really felt like what they was doing was cool. A short run was booked and they were opening.

De La Soul’s Stakes of High tour crossed the U.S. in early 1996 in preparation for the June release of the album. Meanwhile, Camp Lo were still promoting “Coolie High,” which had been released in August the previous year, and constructing Uptown. Suede remembers the first day of the De La tour: It’s the first day of the tour and I take the elevator up to the hotel room, and I’m about to walk into the room and I run into DJ Maseo, it’s my first time meeting him. And so we introducing ourselves and he was like, “yo, I saw y’all video on BET, on Rap City, and I thought y’all were really, really dope. So I suggested y’all to the rest of the group to be the opener for this tour.” So they basically reached out to us, you know, based on “Coolie High” getting some good love on Rap City and BET in general. They reached out to us and I can’t even tell you how incredible that was …

Dave recalls how the friendship came about: De La, we like to see what’s happening, we like to see who’s opening, and we went and checked them out and •

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they had a great show, and great music. And it was just a natural vibe, you know, young dudes who just looked like they had energy and excitement about doing this rap thing, and showed their respects and love for what we did, and it just became a friendship. Like, the first night, we just clicked, and they just became good friends from that point on. Just watchin’ their show to hangin’ out in the dressing room talkin’ and hangin’ out in each other’s hotel room.

There’s considerable downtime during tours, both on a tour bus or in hotels, a consequence of touring that often drives musicians to boredom, and then the cliché of drugs, sex, and mayhem. For De La Soul and Camp Lo, however, tour downtime provided a great creative space, fueled by the camaraderie of musician friends and the nightly interaction with crowds and music. Dave mobilized an entire MIDI studio with him when he went on the road: It was the SP-12[00], [Akai S]950, obviously had a turntable and a monitor. And maybe a couple—maybe a rack of just a few effects here and there. Nothing computer based at that time. Really was just working off of MIDI from a machine to sampler. Literally, I think I had probably six cases: for a monitor, turntable, a case for a mixer, a case for SP, a case for the Akai 950. And I would just drag that stuff into the room every day, set up, and break it down every day. Yeah, there’s a lot of waiting around, there’s a lot of downtime. Showtime is usually 8:30. It all wraps up around one, and then you got this hour, the vampire hour where you’re up. There’s a lot •

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of downtime to work on music. We did the same thing traveling with Tribe and Large Professor. We’d just all be in a room together and make beats. That’s how it was with Camp Lo.

Making beats in a travelling hotel studio led to the inception of “B-Side to Hollywood.” Suede pinpointed where they were when they first heard the beat: We were in St. Louis. And we had went out to get something to eat and we coming back to the room—it was a day off—and when we getting back to the room. Dove’s room was right across from ours and we heard the beat playing through the door. So we scooted up closer to the door, put our ears to the door and shit, looking at each other like, “shit is hot.” So then we knock on the door and we were like, “yo, that shit is crazy.” Dove like, “y’all want that,” and we were like, “yeah,” “aight, no problem, when we get back we get it goin’.” It was like wow.

The track begins with Dave sampling Eddie Bo’s “Hook and Sling,”—a favorite sample record of producers, in part due to its opening call and response (“Are you ready?”—“Yeah!”)—triggering guitar hits in different pitches on the SP pads. Reconstructing how the choppy beat came about, Dave remembers: It started with the intro, I wanted to do something that was kind of like, would set the record off as best as it could. Back then, that’s what it was with the SP, trying to get a launch to the record. That whole (imitating sample •

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chops) “dun-dun-dun-dun”—it was just like, gettin’ the record started.

After they returned from the tour, Camp Lo visited Dave at the late Guido Osorio’s Homeboy Recording studio on Long Island. It was a casual affair; their respective record labels or managers had no involvement in setting up the collaboration, and Profile was simply provided with a DAT (digital audio tape) of the mixed recording after the session. Dave finds this symbolic of how organic their friendship and collaboration were: They came out one day—I booked a session in Long Island to put some music down—and listened to a couple of things, and they actually chose that. And yeah, we laid it down, and we constructed a song to it. It was that easy, it wasn’t about anything on an executive end, “how do we do it? Who connects us?” Contracts, and all that stuff. It was actually just folks who met each other, got into the studio and made some music. That’s really how it went down. It was that easy with them. They came to the crib even after all of that happened to work on beats with me. From inception, it was always hookin’ up and makin’ music.

You can hear the ease and immediacy of this friendship in the track’s natural energy. Dave recalls that he was “into doin’ hooky choruses at that time, I was writin’ them a lot. And it just felt natural, again, we sat in the studio, and they kinda liked it, and was like ‘yeah, let’s roll out with it.’ And we actually wrote then and there, right at that point. We sat down and said ‘here’s the intro, how •

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shall I start it? Should I say this? Should we try that?’ We formulated the song right there on the spot.” Camp Lo and Trugoy trade verses over the chopped sample, and the rest is collab history. Killin’ Em Softly Ja, murk with me I just finished puttin’ heat in this Mercury But he was screechin’, my aim wasn’t accurate Off two degrees

“Killin’ Em Softly” is a significant departure from the free flowing lyrics of most tracks on the album, and features more violent content than the others. Suede recalls that: We did “Killin’ Em Softly” too on Sedgwick Avenue, and that was probably the first time that we got into storytelling mode and then we would continue with “Black Connect[ion].” And that was like our way of kind of deviating from just—like, “ok let’s make these joints about something,” even though it was still difficult for cats to follow along with. But, I mean, you got it, you knew that it was a story about, you know, international jewel thieves and getting caught up in situations where one has to come and rescue the other.

Indeed, the group’s insider slang is so thick (“drenched” means drunk, “got them Andre Crouch-in’” means “got them ducking from gunfire”) that the crime story is almost impenetrable to the casual rap listener. •

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Suede starts his second verse with the rhyme “up at E.S.S.O.’s with espressos.” It is one of Uptown Saturday Night’s few direct references to the contemporary scene, referring to one of the key networking locales of 1990s hip hop, the west side Manhattan Club E.S.S.O.’s, where Maria Davis’s “Mad Wednesday” parties helped showcase the latest rap talent (Davis is immortalized on the Reasonable Doubt track “22 Twos”). “Killin’ Em” merges fictional characters drawn from blaxploitation films (Cheeba name checks Superfly, Black Caesar, and Black Belt Jones in the second verse alone) and Madame Zenobia’s club in the film Uptown Saturday Night (1974) (“Zenobia is runnin’ all them broads and chicks / While she directin’ flicks) with E.S.S.O, their contemporary space. This was more than a retrospective nostalgia, as they were actively engaging with a bygone culture in a contemporary space. As fictional diamond crooks in the real-life music industry, Suede and Cheeba lyrically amalgamate black cultural figures and spaces into a distinctly Camp Lo setting: the fantasy club life of Zenobia’s and the actual club life of E.S.S.O.’s. Sparkle Diamante catch reflect off the chrome rim Private stock drenched me I can’t stop from bubblin’

Gabriel Machado’s bongo rhythm and Pete Levin’s piano comping set the pace, as strains from Ski’s drum loop filter ambiently in the mix. Cheeba half-whispers the layered, champagne-infused chorus as vibraphonist Bill •

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Ware plays an opening phrase. Following the “boom – boom – - boom bap” from the SP, Cheeba sets it off with a slick first verse: Diamond runners, strangers in paradise, Hobo flats, sugar cane alley-scats, Lo in parade

Cheeba remembers “Killin’ Em Softly” as “one of my least faves when it finally hit the album,” but “Sparkle” was a favorite of everyone involved in Uptown, and the only song to appear in two versions. The track began with Ski’s sample from a 1964 Cal Tjader record—a four-bar Afro-Cuban jazz loop featuring a descending bass phrase and Tjader’s resonating vibraphone—and thick SP-1200 drums. During the early production of the track there were a number of versions and recording sessions, including one demo version highlighted by what Suede praises as a “killer verse” by Ish from Digable Planets. When the song’s Cal Tjader sample could not be cleared, Ski sought to create a similar vibe for the song by bringing together live musicians to create a groove with a comparable sound. But rather than a simple replay of the parts, the live version of “Sparkle” far outdid the original. Joe Quinde, the album’s primary engineer, played an electric bass, alternating between a descending progression in single notes and soulful chords. Bill Ware (of the Jazz Passengers, Groove Collective, and Giant Steps crew) performed a vibraphone groove inspired by Tjader’s original but with his own improvisation. Veteran Cuban percussionist Gabriel Machado, who has played with everyone from Dizzy Gillespie to Lionel •

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Hampton, provided a conga pulse, while Pete Levin, a former sideman to Gil Evans, played the piano in D&D’s C-room. “It was hip hop music,” Jungle Brown stresses, emphasizing the production of the only track on the album built from traditional instruments. “Sparkle” featured musicians that collectively participated in thousands of notable sessions and performances in jazz, rock, and other genres, and still continue to perform and record at the time of this writing. Among the multiple versions of “Sparkle” from the session with the live band that are unreleased, one is a full-blown jazz jam session with Ware trading solos with a trumpet player. Like the “Bubblin’” demo and “Luchini,” “Sparkle” is a celebration of sparklin’ wine, or rather, of the celebration of sharing wine in brotherhood. For the chorus, Cheeba employs a multi-layered vocal approach—a technique with a specific inspiration: a Marvin Gaye vocal technique that Motown scholar Andrew Flory terms “vocal composition” (Flory 2006: 188). Cheeba remembers: “I had jacked your man for the hook, though, quiet as kept. I can say it now, but it don’t really much matter. Your man Marvin, B. That’s why R&B is not bad when you conjuring up what you’re conjuring up. That hook was a Marvin jack [steal], because I was trying to layer three things at the same time, and I know Marvin, you know, he’s the king of that—that ‘be saying something and then saying something, and saying something else at the same time.’ Layering but it don’t clutter, you know what I’m saying.” “Vocal composition” is exemplified on “I Want You,” when Gaye stacks multiple layers of melodic vocalese into a blues riff. To this, he layers a track repeating “so •

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good, so fly” and a syncopated “whooo,” the three parts interjecting phrases in tandem. In keeping with this technique, Cheeba’s “Sparkle” chorus stacks Cheeba in three complementary tracks: 1) “got the bubbly pourin’ through me”; 2) a whispered “Lo-ah, Lo-ah”; and 3) “Sparklin.’” At the end of the track, two more tracks add layers of Cheeba’s freestyled adlibs, one of which ends with a hearty laugh, which remained in the mix. Jungle considers the importance of that laugh: “what I love about that record when I listen to it, is Cheeba laughin’. And that song is just so nostalgic in that, we was havin’ fun. It was so much fun. Just that atmosphere was allowin’ us to feel free, and to express ourselves.” Black Connection Calling up the diamond delegates … For the Sonny Cheeba and the Suede … Got the Bronx, Brooklyn, and the Harlem … All the Triborough got the back of Black Connection

Grandeur and regality. In many world societies, robust horn arrangements are used for royal processions, military exuberance, and national anthems. For Camp Lo, this signifier is utilized as a backdrop for high-class criminal activity. A lyrical trumpet melody floats over a synthesized bass as Cheeba introduces the first in a series of Camp Lo capers: “Peep the story / Sonny Cheeba, Geechi Suede / Check it out / Volume 1 of this joint.” “Black Connection” is an archetypal combination of Ski’s head-nodding groove and melodic sample arrangement, Suede’s surreal lyrical collage of foreign locales and •

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opulent living, and Cheeba’s grounded tale of street strategy. According to Suede, the song began “another time when Ski dropped the needle on the record and after the first three notes we knew we had something. As soon as we heard the (sings the sample), like we knew that was it.” Ski had heard the overture-like introduction to “Love is the Answer” by Van McCoy & The Soul City Symphony. He recalls sampling it at 45 rpm, creating a high-pitched, cartoonish, and surreal timbre for the trumpet. Emphasizing high-pitched samples was becoming increasingly popular with RZA, Ski, and a few others in the 1990s, before becoming a sonic staple of Just Blaze, Kanye West, and The Heatmakerz at the turn of the century. Yet the sample itself was more representative of a popular sound from the 1970s—funky grooves combined with lush orchestration that you’d hear in Barry White productions featuring the Love Unlimited Orchestra, or in releases from Philadelphia International Records featuring house band MFSB. For Ski, the four-bar legato trumpet melody elicited the emotions that attract his soul to music: “I just love music, it’s dope.” For Suede, it conjured images of locations he longed to see: Like, that was how it [the sample] made me feel. All those places that I always dreamed about going, those horns made me feel like France, they made me feel like Italy, you know what I mean, made me feel like those glamorous places, foreign places and stuff like that— Spain, you know, it made me feel like that. 2Pac was the first one I heard say, you know, what you put in song  100 •

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actually realizes in life. So when I heard him say that, I said well I just want to go to different places. And so I put different places all throughout the album—Acapulco, you know what I mean. “Paraphernalia from Australia,” you know what I’m saying, I just put places all throughout my lyrics.

Touring provided Suede the opportunity to live out his youthful fantasies of travel and extravagant living in foreign lands, but the group only later realized that those were their aspirations. As Cheeba recalls: “We discussed it after the fact. You know what I’m saying, because we were really big on whatever you write, chances are it’d happen. So it was like, ‘yo, we was here, we was there,’ you know what I’m mean. Everything we basically talk about we wound up being at. But we figured that out after the fact, we wasn’t thinking about it going in.” For the listener unaware of the personal motivations that inspired the geographical tour in the lyrics of “Black Connection,” the result is purely cinematic. The Black Connection is an all-black criminal syndicate of sorts, “diamond crooks” (Lo’s international black gangsters) pulling high-level heists. Suede plays a member enjoying the spoils of being a jewel thief— globetrotting and enjoying spirits with beautiful women. Cheeba’s character is conducting the street-level aspects of the operation until he is set up and robbed by a “dime named Sunshine” that resembles entertainer Lola Falana. Suede, enjoying the jetsetting life, ignores the distress call from Cheeba—“I don’t understand what the fuck is up with my man”—who then decides to go it alone to retrieve “the goods” that were snatched. After  101 •

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enjoying the pleasures of his female companion, Suede proceeds to find out “who pulling shiest maneuvers on my camp,” but gets caught in a hairy situation himself and calls Cheeba “in need of assistance right now.” They reunite in a shootout with the “crooks,” prevailing at the end—“And we ride on.” The story is serviceable for a four-minute song, but it’s four minutes that are rendered esoteric by the group’s dense slang. For Suede, the creative language came from their fondness of ’70s film dialogue but also from their boredom with the everyday ’hood stories that dominated hip hop. Only in retrospect did he understand how “far out” and indecipherable their slang was from the mainstream: Well, some of it is cinematic, you know, that we get from the movies. We say Coffee, that was a movie with Pam Grier. So, Coffee for us was just a female in general. Not just one female, but females in general. You know, when we would say coffee or spliss, you know the word spliss, which mean to—like when you spliss somebody you like sweating them or like you’re infatuated with this person or whatever the case may be, you know what I’m saying. And that would just be some Bronx shit that we just came up with, you know what I mean. And then some of it is cinematic. And, it took me a while because I’m like, “yo, I don’t understand why it’s so difficult to understand.” But later I understood that it’s not (imitating a generic rapper) “I ran down the block, I had a glock,” and, you know, “crack in my sock. Stopped on the corner, I looked at shorty and was like, ‘he’s going to be a goner.’ And he just got out the sauna.” You know what I’m saying, I understand that now,  102 •

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that we’re not saying it like that. It took me a minute to get why people didn’t understand what we were saying because you’re not actually saying sentences like that.

To Cheeba, the song represented an imagined blaxploitation film: “Black Connection is our flick. There’s no flick that I know of.” Cheeba may not have been aware of the similar plot to The Black Connection … Run Nigger Run (1974)—a film about a black racketeer in Las Vegas who needs to link up with a black connect for support in his struggle against two Italian mafias and the man. For him, the title and chorus were likely signifying the 1971 William Freidkin thriller The French Connection, reenvisioned for the diamond crooks. “Black Connection” inaugurated an ongoing series for Camp Lo: the duo recorded part II in 2002, and part III in 2009. In 2016, they released an EP that includes all three versions, with some unreleased, Ski-produced jewels, in honor of their international Black Connection tour. Swing Don’t give me your swing I got mine and that’s the thing Blazay Blazay Blazay Who name bell ring?

The chorus for “Swing” captures the essence of Suede and Ish’s collaboration. At the time, people had commented to both emcees that Ish, a Seattle-born, Brooklyn-based rapper, influenced Suede’s flow. Just as an up-and-coming Nas once had to distinguish himself from Kool G Rap in  103 •

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1993, there’s a moment of transition (word to Harold Bloom and The Anxiety of Influence) where an emcee comes into their own style while acknowledging their influences. And, just like Nas and G Rap united on “Fast Life” in 1995, it was appropriate that Suede and Ish shared a track. For Ish, an emcee finding one’s individuality was paramount, particularly during that period: The good part about that time was, you knew you couldn’t mimic. You had to take what you got, and absorb, and re-form it into something that was bent your way. And have some uniqueness to you, ’cause at that time, bitin’ was a real—was a fireable offence. You could lose it all. So we operated under the pressure of that.

Cheeba remembers telling Suede it would be good if the two got together on a song: “I was like ‘y’all need to!’ at some point. I was like, ‘yo, it’d be good if y’all hopped on a kite [song].’ So they could see the differences rather than seeing the similarities.” Ish recalls the day he met Camp Lo: “We was on 95 South, and we met at a gas station. They was gettin’ ready to go on tour, and I was gettin’ ready to go down and check my grandmother in Philly. And they pulled up, and they came out the truck, and I seen’t them, and that’s when we met, right there. At the gas station, on the turnpike. We just exchanged numbers, and stayed up.” In Suede’s recollection, the encounter was meant to be, but initiated by him: We stopped somewhere in Jersey at a gas station and I’d bent down to tie my shoes, put my shoes back on, and  104 •

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Chee was like, “yo, yo yo yo yo yo yo yo,” and I’m like, “what happened?” I got a little nervous for a second, and he was like, “I think I just saw ya boy.” And I’m like, “who?” He’s like, “I think I just saw ya boy.” I’m like, “who?” He said “Butterfly.” Before he could get the “–fly” out of his mouth I was running out of the van looking for him. He was (with emphasis) Just–About–To–Pull–Off in a drop top black beamer—just about to pull off. And I was like, “yoooo.” He turn’t around and I was like, “yo, I’m a fan, ah ah, woop, woop.” He definitely got startled, you know what I’m saying, because the excitement was definitely really, really high. And I don’t know if he thought I was trying to run up on him with drama.

Ish’s reaction is understandable; if someone runs up on you in a gas station in Jersey, it could go the wrong way. In addition to exchanging numbers that day, Suede gave Ish a copy of the cassette single of “Coolie High”: “He took the tape home, he listened to it—he loved [the b-side] ‘World Heist.’ And then after the tour we got together, we had a show at F.I.T. [Fashion Institute of Technology] and he came through and we just hung out that day, and got to know each other and stuff.” They ended up collaborating on a few different tracks before “Swing.” Ish recalls: “We did a mixtape song. I don’t know if it was before or after. I think it was a Silva Surfer joint we did together. ‘Swing’ was the main one ’cause they was already finished—you know, Ski was doin’ it.” As for the hook, Ish recalls: “I just remember we was comin’ up with the hook, and I was saying that to him—I don’t remember who came up with the ‘don’t give me your swing, I got mines and that’s the thing’—but I  105 •

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remember when I said ‘blazay, blazay, blah,’ he thought I was saying ‘blazay, blazay, blah’ just as a filler.” Suede also remembers the day at Platinum Island studios when the hook came together, and credits Ish for the idea: Ish calls me to the back, to where the mic booth was, he calls me back there and he’s like, “yo, this is what I came up with for the hook,” and he’s like “don’t give …” (sings the hook). And I was like, “oh, that shit is hot.” I said, “but what you gonna put right there, with the blazah, where you put the blazay, blazay, blazah? What’s going to go right there?” He was like, “nah, that’s it.” I was like, “oh shit, that’s hot. That’s hot.” He was like, “aight, yeah, you fucking with what I say,” I was like “hot, I’m going to lay it down.” Yo, craaaazy.

At the time a more established rapper, Ish had been hearing about the similarities in the voices and rhythmic “swing” of his and Suede’s flow even before meeting him. Yet he too heard something unique about the younger emcee: People used to say, when “Coolie High” came out, “yo, that guy sound like you.” I heard it at the time, but I also could tell, on some rapper shit that, “nah, this dude right here, he got his own thing more than anything else!” And I always understood any similarities as something that he fucked with me, but I always knew that he was really capable of really going beyond and having his own style.

In the summer of 2016, Suede and Ish linked up again when Camp Lo toured the U.S. with a reunited Digable  106 •

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Planets. “Swing” was a collaboration that highlighted the pair’s individual nuanced sound and style, as well as the distinct way in which they sounded together. Rockin’ It AKA Spanish Harlem And foxy bonita, cha cha cha, Sonny Cheeba Excella Mardi Gras, and we funky valentine I’m sex-posed to your voodoo see you peek-a-boo Love American style

“Mira, listen. Uno papi chulo 69 position and switchin’,” Suede flows at the beginning of Uptown’s ninth track. This bilingual introduction to “Rockin’ It” was inspired by Ski’s sampling of the salsa montuno-like groove from “A Little Spice” by ’80s R&B/jazz group Loose Ends. Salsa was not some far off exotic music for Camp Lo; rather, it was very present in their Bronx consciousness. After all, hip hop culture itself, while often reduced into simply a black cultural artform, was primarily the product of intertwining black and Puerto Rican cultural forces in the Bronx (see the film From Mambo to Hip hop and the book From Bomba to Hip hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity for more on this). For Cheeba, his reaction to the music relates to his synesthesia between sound and color, as well as to a dose of cultural memory and signifiers: I mean, listening to that, it was just fun feel. Like when you hear that it just give you, you know what I’m saying, colors. I like to say—I don’t want to say I’m crazy man— but I see damn near everything in colors man. And that  107 •

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right there was like, I don’t know, it just feels good. Like a beach, the sun going down, that red and orangey-like color. That’s what I see with that “Spanish Harlem.”

For Ski, the song’s juxtaposition of Latin music and a sound from MC Shan’s “The Bridge” was natural, as “this is the influence of hip hop, everything that we listened to. It just reminded me of being in the Bronx and the Puerto Rican people playing music all day and all I hear is (sings a salsa montuno).” After all, while Ski was deep into the recording process of Uptown, he was situated on 110th and 1st Ave, right in the heart of El Barrio, or Spanish Harlem. The recording of the track did not happen in the barrio, however, but one day when they were all listening to records together at Ski’s Brooklyn apartment on South Portland Street. (Ski’s new address was only a few blocks away from Jay-Z’s address at the time, the now famous 560 State Street.) Suede describes the scene: The majority of the time, we were sitting there going through all of the records, you know, with him and stuff like that. “Spanish Harlem” was another day like that in Brooklyn where we were just going through a bunch of vinyl and then he hit that and he was like, “oh, hold on, hold on, hold on!” Spun it back, played it again, like “oh shit!” He started looping that up and we were like, “yo, this was just,” that salsa vibe was crazy man.

“Rockin’ It” became a group favorite. So much so that they thought it should have been the third single, following “Luchini,” rather than “Black Nostaljack.” In  108 •

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the context of hanging around Spanish Harlem and the possible appeal of the song to local Latinas, Cheeba jokingly considers personal ramifications of the decision: “It just be that feel. Especially being around the BX too, you know what I’m saying. That’d been crazy. But, you know, chances are cats would have had like ninety kids, you know what I’m saying. But that’s a different story.” Say Word (feat. Jungle Brown) Bronx ice, cross silver skies, alleys, parkways Leavin’ strays, all over the stairways Cheeba Cheeba …

Just another day of diggin’ in the crates for Ski. Another stack of records. Inspiration arriving in the form of Thelma Houston and Jerry Butler’s 1977 AM radio favorite “If You Leave Me Now.” A piano and bass stab sampled into the SP. Then, a short sample of the vocal “Ooo-oh” filtered and arranged in a series of choppy patterns before being joined by a syncopated kick, crackin’ snare, and swingin’ hi-hat that rendered the original recording practically unrecognizable. Suede recalls the day, and how his rhyme style and “froggy” vocal timbre came about: We was there for the making of that beat. Rolling up dutches [blunts made with Dutch Masters cigars] and all of that, going through records, and I remember that loop, because a matter of fact I heard the loop. There wasn’t even no drums to it, it was just (sings it). We hadn’t even added any drums, we were already writing to it. The  109 •

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momentum, we was flowing already, the momentum was high, man. So lines was coming real quick, and once I knew that cats was—I mean had I already had the “Frog,” which is another thing because we would really get into character. I think, for me, “Krystal Karrington” was the first time I had like really, really—like we used to call it the frog. Chee started calling it the frog where I would like, you know, make the tone a little bit robotic or whatever. For “Say Word” I had turned it up a few levels on the robotic-ness (raps a line from the song). And I think that was also some inspiration from your man Bone[s], cause his thing was just so crazy man. So I came at it with my own version of that. And I just remember playing it after it was done, the demo version, and just crying laughing with my friend, we smoked out one day, “Cheeba, cheeba yo, …” (continues verse).

Lo were experimenting with vocal techniques to fit each song with specific characterizations in mind. Cheeba laughs, “I blame it on G.I. Joe, man,” recalling giving each of his G.I. Joe action figures distinct voices as a kid. Meanwhile, Jungle Brown’s vocal timbre and style, which had been influential to Lo, appears on the hook. Cheeba notes: “The whispers, because he got that whisper voice, right. That (imitates Jungle), you know what I’m saying, he got the whisper voice. If it was G. I. Joe he’d probably be Low-Light, or something like that.” Negro League (feat. Bones and Karachi R.A.W.) One’s for the Cheeba, Deuce for the Slim Jim  110 •

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Tre’ for the G Suede and Quad for Karacha

The posse cut has a long tradition in hip hop. In some ways, tracks like “Live at the Barbeque” by Main Source and “the Symphony” by Marley Marl more accurately reflect the primary mode of communal rhyming in emcee culture—the cypher—than three-minute songs of alternating verses and choruses. Uptown’s posse cut came as a result of the community of struggling rappers who all were recording at Ski’s home studio. Suede remembers the beginning of the Negro League: In those 110th St times, coming in and sitting there waiting our turn to do our joint, we would hear everybody laying their shit down. And the first time I heard Karachi, the first thing I paid attention to—him and Bones for that matter—was the voice, you know what I’m saying. Karachi’s voice was real aggressive. He was just dope, and he was a cool cat on top of that. He was a street dude for sure. And I fucked with Bones also because he was the first one I ever heard say ruga and he was the first one that I heard bend a line like that. He was like (imitating Bones’ voice), “I wake up to smoke buddha. Go to sleep to wake up to smoke buddha, laughing at John as he drops the ruga.” And I was like, “ohhhh, laughing at John as he drops the ruga.” I just like, I know I sampled that little piece right there and created a whole dynamic from it as well, you know what I mean.

As was the case with “Krystal Karrington,” Ski found the sample while watching a VHS tape: “Yeah, I was  111 •

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watching this Twilight Zone episode and I caught that!” Suede continues with the details of observing Ski’s process: He went through movies or whatever, and he heard that little part right there (sings the sample). And he was like “ooh.” And sometimes Ski can hear something before you catch on to what it is, you know what I mean. Like it just be some sounds and you’re like, “ok, I hear the sounds or whatever.” But once he start throwing the hi hats and, you know, putting it in to where it has a rhythm and you’re like, “oh shit,” you know what I’m saying. So we just thought that shit was some dark creepy, gritty, gritty shit.

Suede and Cheeba, Bones (aka Stunna, aka Slim Jim), and Karachi R.A.W. had formed their bonds on the floor of Ski’s 110th Street apartment as they waited for their turn at bat, so to speak. Thus, the “Negro League” concept made perfect sense. Suede saw the track as a partial fulfillment of “an agreement that whoever was to get on first, we would throw the next person on as a feature.” Nicky Barnes AKA It’s Alright (feat. Jungle Brown) Y’all say Priest, but I see the Sonny Cheeba Sip Iceberg Slim, smoke the Goldie reefer

For an album so closely associated with 1970s blaxploitation culture, it’s perhaps surprising that only one song on Uptown includes a sample from the vibrant film  112 •

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soundtracks of that period. “Nicky Barnes,” the last song recorded for the album and the only track with a verse from Jungle Brown, features a sample from Isaac Hayes’s Shaft soundtrack. The Hayes composition “Walk from Regio’s” was written to accompany John Shaft leaving Cafe Regio’s after his meeting with the mob in Greenwich Village. Continuing the Camp Lo aesthetic of refreshing and paying homage to their black cultural past, the title “Nicky Barnes,” culled from a lyric in Jungle Brown’s verse, relates to the real-life Harlem drug dealer who became a cultural icon in the mid-to-late 1970s. Suede was visiting family down south when Jungle and Cheeba started the track with Ski: So I was in VA when they recorded “Nicky Barnes.” They had came up with the beat and they already had laid their verses and stuff, and they was like, “yo, we just waiting on you.” So when I got back everything was pretty much done, and was just like, this shit is fire. Jungle had moved his verse over from the Frankie Beverly track we were doing, and I think I also used my verse from that. And Chee came with something new and they came up with that hook.

The track was initially one of the contenders for an Ish feature, which led to Jungle shouting him out in his verse, as he remembers: What was interesting about the “Nicky Barnes” joint is I remember layin’ it—oh, Ish, Butterfly, was supposed to have been on it. And I had wrote my verse first. This is why I was like “with these creamy spies.” If you listen  113 •

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back to it, I kinda shout him out. I thought he was gonna be on the song. That’s what my brother told me. So I kinda shouted him out, and all of that.

As for the chorus, Jungle recalls the similarity in writing process to that of an earlier track: “Chee came, he was lovin’ it, same process as far as the ‘World Heist’ thing— just goin’ back and forth, as far as the hook. He came up with a line, I came up with a line.” Black Nostaljack AKA Come On But who he? You know it only be the Sonny Chee And who that? The kin to Errol Flynn Geechi Suede

Much of popular music lives in an impossible, imagined space-time. Bob Dylan’s early albums, for example, sonically evoke a simpler time of acoustic folk performance à la Woody Guthrie, like a depression-era farmer with an acoustic guitar. But young Robert Zimmerman had grown up on Elvis and 1950s popular culture, and imbued his poetic lyrics with the worldly vocabulary of the collegiate beat poets and Baudelaire. Similarly, though the imagined space of “Black Nostaljack” may seem a time machine to the sound of the 1970s with a lush Curtis Mayfield sample, Camp Lo had been raised on LL and Rakim, and were contemporaries of Biggie and Nas. While the Ernie Barnes album cover for Curtis Mayfield’s Something To Believe In looks distinctly mid-seventies, and the lyrical orchestration and Mayfield falsetto evoke the sound of an earlier era, the sampled  114 •

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record “Trippin’ Out” was actually released in 1980. Will “brought the record to Ski and he made the beat.” While at first listen, Ski’s version may sound like a simple four-bar loop of Mayfield’s “Trippin’ Out,” Ski carefully chopped the sample into beat long fragments and triggered them on the MPC to create a tight loop, and programmed a syncopated kick drum over the sample to give it a new swing and greater dancefloor, club play appeal. Suede discusses the track: “I loved that beat immediately. I was all for it, you know, coming after ‘Luchini’ as a single.” When the label chose “Black Nostaljack” as Uptown’s third single, Ski and Will returned to the studio, incorporating live violins (arranged by musician/composer Larry Devore) and bass by Joe Quinde, for what was termed the “Xenobia mix.”2 The song’s lyrical nostalgia includes references that span from the icons of ’70s flicks to Lo’s own early ’90s memories as young Bronx hip hop fans. Suede’s lyric, “I used to rock a bubblegoose while trottin’ to the Fever,” references his experiences at Sal Abbatiello’s Bronx club The Fever II (notably, both Original Flavor and Nas performed there in May of 1994). The club is named after the Abbatiello’s earlier hip hop nightspot, Disco Fever, which was open from 1976 to 1986, and is arguably the most important locale in hip hop history after 1520 Sedgwick Ave.   This was in reference to Madame Zenobia’s club from the film Uptown Saturday Night. A sophisticated, high-class night spot that Poitier’s and Cosby’s characters conspire to enter and where they are eventually robbed. 2

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Coolie High Cleopatra in the casino wit gold sugah Dig my harlequin and drench you with my Donald Goines

You now know the penultimate track on Uptown as Camp Lo’s first single (released August 1995), and the vehicle by which the group’s mantra was delivered to their listeners. In January of 1995, LL Cool J had dropped “Hey Lover,” a song with the same Michael Jackson sample as the original “Coolie High” demo—a common occurrence in 1990s hip hop that sidelined a lot of recordings. It was a disappointment, but while Lo and Ski were mad that they were scooped on the “Lady in My Life” loop, a decision had already been made by Profile, an independent label, that clearing a Michael Jackson sample from Thriller was impossible. Instead, a new version of the song was demoed, keeping only the chorus refrain “Coolie High gotcha wide.” It was Ski’s friend Jocko who provided the new instrumental using an Ensoniq EPS 16 sampling keyboard and a sample that kept it in the Jackson family. In place of the MJ sample, a two-bar loop from the breakdown section of Janet Jackson’s 1986 quiet storm favorite “Funny How Time Flies (When We’re Having Fun)” was chosen, which featured Janet’s breathy adlibs and whispered chorus vocals, synthesized electric keys, smooth guitar, and light digital percussion. Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis’s slick production is simultaneously ethereal and sexy; electronic and warm. Like the Anita Baker sample in “Bubblin’”, the Janet song  116 •

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was a familiar sound to all involved—an R&B radio favorite in 1986 when the group were approaching their adolescence. Jocko created a track based on two loops from the breakdown vamp of the song. Suede details how the new version started in Harlem before Ski moved uptown, and led to a new “continuous motion” flow: Ski brought Jocko in, and Jocko was playin’ a lot of stuff for us, he brought that Janet sample, and we started goin’ crazy for that, but the first time we tried to record it—every time we tried to record that record, something happened. The ADAT would fuckin’ die or shit would happen. Jocko came back through, you know, however long later. And maybe it was meant to happen, because by the time we got to layin’ it down, I don’t know what happened that day, but that—(rapping) “from borough to borough in a Montero spittin’ it thorough”— that continuous motion came out. I guess I needed that necessary time when things kept happening [while] making “Coolie High,” because by the time we got to do it, that was the first time that flow ever came out. And it’s been my signature ever since.

The conclusion to the first verse of “Coolie High” became a highpoint of Camp Lo’s live performances, and a flow that Suede would return to on other tracks. For those listening along at home, hold your breath, and try this flow: From borough to borough in a Montero slidin’ in thorough,  117 •

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With bottles of Asti Spumante to tranquilize my heaven Count seven, we gettin’ spliffs and shootin’ sugar to the shorties, Luchini to spare, let me see your ’istols in the air Word life

(Now breathe.) Suede’s “continuous motion” flow developed for “Coolie,” like the “stop-and-go” flow he employed for “Luchini,” was a product of the demo sessions at Ski’s, and both would become important parts of his rhyming arsenal. But the group still felt the song needed more of a hook than the intermittent “Coolie high gotcha/keeps you wide.” As necessity is the mother of invention, the eureka moment that finished the single’s hook occurred backstage before a big debut performance in the spring of 1995. Suede tells it: We had our first show ever with Jay-Z, and Kid Capri was deejaying at Stony Brook [University]. And we was backstage and we gettin’—got the jitters and all that. We tryin’ to figure out what we gonna do, this is our first time on stage. T-Strong is back there with us, coaching us and stuff like that. And so, we were doin’ “Coolie High” that night, and then he was like, “Yo, it needs somethin’ else, it’s just too open after that. It needs something else to give it that UH!” So we was sitting there, the room just got quiet, and then like ten minutes later he was like “you need to come inside and check Lo, relax yourself and let the sugar love flow.” We was like “oh, shit!” We had the other part of the hook. Just before the show.  118 •

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T-Strong had helped turn the hook into a call-andresponse between the two emcees that favored their strengths; Suede’s strong rhythmic cadence of “you need to come inside” matched with Cheeba’s maple syrup drawled “got–cha wiiiide.” The basic songwriting was now complete. The Janet sample, however, was still out of reach for an independent label like Profile, in terms of both finances and clout. Alternatively, Manhattan engineer and musician Joe Mendelson was called in to create a cover of the instrumental parts, layering live guitar, keys, and drum machine tracks, with up-andcoming singer Tracey Amos emulating Ms. Jackson’s ad libs under the direction of Jocko and Ski. A highlight in the mix is the iconic snare from “It’s A New Day” (1973) by Skull Snaps. At the time, May and June of 1995, the group had demo fever. Enamored with what they had produced, they had a hard time replacing Jocko’s samplebased version with the replayed version. Audiences likely had no idea, and “got wide” indeed to the world of Lo. Sparkle (Mr. Midnight Mix) Now check out the con Comin’ from the island of ice No contact with shiest Bubblin’ with Mr. Midnight

A standout performance on the live instrumentation version of “Sparkle” is Quinde’s bass. It was so affecting that a drumless mix of bass and vocals was cut, only supported with the reverb return from Ware’s vibes. Suede’s whisper flow and Cheeba’s equally whispered  119 •

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hook floated over Quinde’s expressive bass chord comping, which made an impression in the control room during playback as the track was mixed at D&D. This version was ultimately featured on the album as the last track, the “Sparkle (Mr. Midnight Mix),” after Cheeba’s nickname for his young son. Everyone’s favorite album cut was too important not to have a reprise. This version remains one of just a few rap recordings (and perhaps the first) mixed without drums. Even Method Man’s dystopian and ambient “Sub Crazy” from his debut album Tical (1994)—which inspired Uptown’s A&R Will in mixing a pared down version of “Sparkle”—has a filtered drum track fading in and out. Those familiar with Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly (2015) will recognize a similar mix and vibe heard on “These Walls.” During the third verse, the drums disappear as Kendrick’s subject matter morphs from a metaphor for feminine anatomy to a streamof-consciousness narrative about prison walls, his voice turns to a dramatic whisper as bassist Thundercat layers bass chords in stereo, recalling the depth, space and intimacy of “Mr. Midnight.” It would be worth it to inquire about Kendrick and Thundercat’s understanding of Lo. Or, perhaps they were just wandering through the same black cultural space and decades of jazz troping that surfaced in studio experimentation of a similar nature.

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Somebody pulled a heist, but they just don’t know who I wonder how we do, heisting jewels, how we do

This is it. By June of 1996 the debut album from Camp Lo was roughly sequenced from beginning to end. A cassette dated June 27th presents the project as A Piece of the Action, and consists of all the album tracks. Chosen by Cheeba, the title was an explicit assertion of their diamond crook personas looking to get in on the high-stakes hip hop hustle (the title references the final film in the Poitier/Cosby trilogy where the principals play international jewel thieves). Three months before release on January 21, 1997, however, Uptown Saturday Night was installed as the official title instead. “Yeah, that was on me,” pleads Cheeba, “I’m thinking [I changed it] because Uptown came before that.” Imagining the prospect of subsequent albums, Cheeba aspired to parallel the order of the Poitier/Cosby film trilogy. The change was appropriate. As Camp Lo moved around the hip hop scene, and as visual accompaniments to the album were created, the pursuit of good times that formed the core of Uptown the movie was already a core  121 •

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of Camp Lo’s ethos and was spiritually bestowed to Uptown the album. With the aural experience of Lo mostly completed, the months leading up to the release were used to validate and accentuate the Lo visual experience. Constructing the Camp Lo visual began with the concept meeting at C-Smoke’s house, but the process of communicating an ethos and image needed institutional and financial support. In mid-1995, the group signed a single deal with independent Profile Records valued at $12,500 to prepare a single. At least the institution was behind them: I recall that—to everyone involved—the one thing Camp Lo really had in spades was a LOOK that would come across well to an audience! Luckily, the group and management agreed and we were all very dialed in to making sure the audience would be exposed to Camp Lo visually—via a music video—as a very key part of promoting them. The video for “Coolie High” was inexpensive for the time but it perfectly captured and highlighted their look and the vibe for the song, and it went a long way towards setting the stage for them in the figurative and literal eyes of fans and tastemakers alike.

Jim Mahoney was National Director, Marketing & Promotions at Profile from 1994 to 1997 and was intimately involved with the label support for Camp Lo. The group immediately had an impression on him personally: “Their first single, ‘Coolie High,’ was one of the finished songs [I first heard] and I loved the whole vibe of it. I was instantly hooked and remember telling the guys shortly after that, in my first meeting with them,  122 •

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that I was an absolute fan and was totally committed to doing whatever I could to helping make them a success.” The “Coolie High” single was released on August 22, 1995. Success is a relative concept, but Camp Lo’s first video had an invaluable effect on the group’s career. Warm colors abound and timeless headwear attracts the viewer, as two clean-shaven rappers effortlessly spit enigmatic rhymes into the camera while in a restaurant with two women, in a hallway illuminated cool blue, and in a nighttime scene under a tree. With a small budget, the remaining shots for the “Coolie High” music video feature B-roll footage of Suede and Cheeba showing off their dancing skills, two women leaving two men to go “inside and check Lo,” and appealing young ladies miming the recreated Janet Jackson sample and traversing a staircase. Taken in combination with the saturated look reminiscent of 1970s film and the softlight cinematography, the video attempts to frame Suede and Cheeba as blaxploitation male leads—appropriately surrounded by shapely women and enacting the boss role with cigars and champagne at a large table in a restaurant. “It was just a big moment to me, like, ‘wow, this is really, really happening.’” For Suede, the video for “Coolie High” was an emotional and mental turning point for him as an artist. It also was a career-changing moment for the group as the single was not shooting up any charts before the video was released. “There was solid underground support for the song by mixtape deejays and college radio,” explains Mahoney, but the video on the other hand “was almost immediately enthusiastically embraced by key outlets—BET’s Rap City, MTV’s Yo! MTV Raps, The Box, and WNYC’s Video Music  123 •

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Box—and the group also captured the support of print media outlets.” While Cheeba and Jungle were key to the look of the group, their ideas were translated and brought to life for the screen by Tisha Brown (now Brown-Kavanaugh). Tish was an aspiring stylist who worked at her family’s deli at Lafayette and 4th Street in Manhattan, around the corner from the Profile offices. Several Profile artists and employees frequented the deli, but it was her conversations with Will that led to her first opportunity in the music industry with Smoothe Da Hustler, and then Camp Lo: One thing I have to say, my experience working with those two artists ruined me for really getting into working with other entertainers. Camp Lo, like they’re from the Bronx, I’m from the Bronx, so it was like an instant connection. And they were just so open and so cool. We could come together and collaborate. And I was able to help them see their vision through.

Tish’s contributions were not overlooked. Suede states, “I was a big fan of Tish, who was styling things. She’s always a sweetheart. And we would tell her what we liked and once she knew, she could run from there, you know. And she did.” Tish personally knew people that thought Camp Lo “dressed weird” or that their look was a “gimmick,” but she quickly learned that their look was not a novelty or a schtick. Thus: I didn’t want them to seem so costumey. With the extras you kind of want to play it up because you wanna make  124 •

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it appear to be in that period, which they wanted. But at the same time they were into vintage styles. So it was something they had to carry, not look like a costume and still look modern in a way. So that was the goal, keep them looking cool, you know, but push the boundaries of what was thought of as hip hop.

In retrospect, the “Coolie High” video was a quality introduction, a proof of concept for the reimagining of 1970s black visual culture in a contemporary context that was going to be provided in the subsequent music videos. It was also the springboard for their life in the music industry. In the fall of 1995, following the strong reception of their first video, Profile picked up the album option on Camp Lo’s contract and supplied them a budget of $65,000. Serendipitously, Maseo pitched Suede and Cheeba as a De La Soul tour opener after seeing the “Coolie High” video. Up in E.S.S.O.’s with espressos

All of the visuals for Uptown—music videos, live performances, marketing materials, and the mental images provoked by their music—had a similar message: they promoted a celebration of black life with aspirations for better living conditions. Fittingly, Camp Lo’s emergence from Ski’s apartment, the successs of their “Coolie High” single, their tour performances, and their work at D&D had now afforded them opportunities to socialize with hip hop’s finest at places like Club E.S.S.O. In the April 6, 1996 issue of Billboard magazine, writer Havelock Nelson described the club as a place “where black  125 •

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business, culture, politics, and activism mix with cocktails, collard greens, and fried chicken.” Black was beautiful at E.S.S.O.’s, and in 1994, club promoter Maria Davis inaugurated her “Mad Wednesday” parties. By 1996, every up-and-coming and established hip hop act had to show out on Wednesday. Suede and Will reminisce about the atmosphere: Suede: Chee was always more of the party head, more than me, you know what I’m saying, but E.S.S.O., I definitely remember that. Those were really, really fun times. We were performing one day with Jay there and Biggie was coming in to do the record, “Brooklyn’s Finest” with Jay. And he walked in before me, like I was walking behind him up the stairs. That was really, really, really trippy. Will: I remember there being one night, y’all were there, Jay was performing, AZ was there, Biggie was there, there was a bunch of R&B singers there. Biggie and Puffy were there in these gigantic fur coats, their sunglasses low, staring at every girl in the spot. Smoothe [Da Hustler] was there, Trigga [Tha Gambler] was there, it was like you look back at it now and it’s like Goodfellas or something, you know. But back then that was crazy. Jay had a like a glass of champagne onstage, you know how Jay used to do the whole Rat Pack thing. Suede: Yeah, they were passing out Cristal bottles that night (laughing). They were just passing them shits out. Wow, that was a good one.

Other clubs in Manhattan that Suede, Cheeba, and the hip hop scene frequented were the Palladium, Country  126 •

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Club, and Nell’s on West 14th Street. The good times and feelings had at those clubs were funneled directly into Camp Lo as they pursued to hit on their own terms. The single and video for “Luchini” provided proof to themselves and to the industry that Camp Lo had arrived. It’s Lo, it’s life, and we can’t get enough of this

“It was wild. It was really, really incredible. Surreal, very surreal. Humbling, very humbling, it was dope,” utters Suede as he attempts to find the words to explain the experience following the success of “Luchini”—“At that point it was girls fainting at the shows, it was girls crying, you know what I’m saying, fans chasing you down the block.” For Suede, the post-“Coolie High” experience was “mind-blowing,” but paled in comparison to the response to “Luchini.” Everyone around Camp Lo were aware of how special “’chini” was. The single and promotional video were serviced to radio and video outlets in advance of the commercial release on October 29th, 1996. “I actually don’t remember when I first heard the song but I know that I absolutely flipped for it,” describes Mahoney, who was in charge of pushing the record, which didn’t touch the NYC streets immediately: I remember that there was a time when our head of urban radio promotions had a full on meltdown in our office, crying and flipping out, that we were going to lose the record at radio. Again, the video was strongly embraced by the national outlets and the group had wide support from mix show deejays and the “crossover radio” stations  127 •

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like WPGC, WOWI, KKBX, KMEL, KKPR, KKBT and Hot 97 in Atlanta. In terms of commercial radio, NYC was the last market to fall. We had a very tough time getting Funkmaster Flex on any of our [Profile] records, including Camp Lo. But the support from the city’s underground network of radio stations and deejays combined with non-stop efforts from the group’s manager and the label staff, and the video’s regular airing, finally compelled Flex and Hot 97 to support the record.

Like the “Coolie High” single, it was the video that exposed “Luchini” to a larger audience. And, the video provided a full exhibition to the blaxploitation, post-soul, Coolie High, Camp Lo visual aesthetic that separated them from their contemporaries. The “Luchini” video can be read as the realization of the 1994 meeting at C-Smoke’s house. Everything that was discussed at the table that day was worked in. A diner in Brooklyn was chosen to be like Martha’s, the diner from Cooley High where Preach and Cochise hung out. Not everyone, however, was convinced at first of the setting. “I remember walkin’ into the restaurant, and lookin’ at it like, ‘this is where we gonna shoot it?’ At first, I didn’t see it to be honest with you,” admits Jungle Brown. “Once we started, everybody was in place, everybody was in position, and we started rollin’, it just made perfect sense. Once everybody was dressed up in the ’70s shit, it kinda felt like Cooley High or an episode of What’s Happening!!” Getting everybody into the appropriate dress—with about a $300 budget—was Tish’s job. Luckily, “I had a lot of good resources in the vintage network in New York—I was good friends with  128 •

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the staff at Screaming Mimi’s. So I would get a lot of stuff for sale.” Tish also built a wardrobe at Andy’s Chee-Pees and Cheap Jack’s, a store that Suede, Cheeba, and Jungle also frequented. But to dress a large cast she headed to “Domsey’s [Warehouse Outlet], that was my favorite. It was more of like a warehouse thrift store in Brooklyn, in Williamsburg. You could go and just buy stuff by the pound, it was friggin’ awesome.” While the action itself is staged, the good time seen in the video is the result of the very natural interactions of the close-knit cast. As Suede details, everyone in the video was actual family or friends from the block: I’ve always been family oriented and stuff like that. So when I knew we were shooting I was like, “we about to shoot this, you know what I mean. I can’t pay for everybody to get out there, but y’all could drive up [from Virginia] or whatever. This is the day, this is the location.” And they were like, “we up there, we up there.”

The mother of Suede’s oldest son plays his love interest at the diner, whereas Cheeba’s love interest is Suede’s aunt Monique. Suede’s cousins Nicki and Rondu play the waitress and busboy respectively. From the block, road manager Hassan “X” Harper and Lo affiliate Mahogany are seen hanging out in the back, while Chee’s friends from Tiebout Ave shoot dice. And, if you look to the right of Cheeba and Monique, there is Ski in a brown wide-collar shirt, plaid mod newsboy hat, and a large cross around his neck. The wardrobe and setting effuses nostalgia. The composition of the whole video, though, may seem  129 •

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disjointed chronologically. On the one hand, the viewer is transported to the 1970s in a diner from a film set in the 1960s. In contrast, we see Suede and Cheeba robbing a bank and escaping in an unmarked van. While from a critical perspective this was much in line with how post-soul artists were approaching black cultural heritage, the juxtaposition of what could appear to be versions of themselves from different cinematic worlds was not lost on the group: Chee had actually thought about that idea because we was already diamond crooks and we wanted to somehow incorporate that into the video. (Imitating Cheeba) “Yo, we should be pulling a heist.” And then we parted ways that day, and then the next day he was like, “yo, what about Point Break? You know what I mean.” He had said that and we also wanted to do the Dead Presidents painted faces. It was supposed to be Point Break and Dead President faces.

The vibe, look, and language were 1970s, an homage and present-day accent to a period they loved. But the use of contemporary heist film iconography informed the viewers that the diamond crooks were here to get theirs now—exemplified when the thieves in their Point Break-inspired masks escape in a van and reveal a third accomplice, Ish from Digable Planets. He tells it: I remember at first, I didn’t want to be in the video. Remember back then you had to get clearance from whatever label you was on to do something, and they might try to charge money. So I didn’t know if me being  130 •

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in the vid was gonna cause any type of controversy, so we came up with the mask part. But then, at the end, we was like, “fuck it, it’s gonna be a smash if we’ll take the mask off, and blazay blay!” It just happened in the mix. This Coolie High-jack pack from the Sugar Shack

As the year 1996 was coming to an end, all of the elements of the album were coalescing. It was the year that the Camp Lo visual entered the hip hop zeitgeist, and the cover art was the final step in aligning the sound and image of the group. Just prior to the release of “Luchini,” graffiti artist DR. REVOLT—a visual contributor to the classic hip hop films Wild Style and Style Wars—was contracted to paint the homage to Ernie Barnes’s “The Sugar Shack.” The Beauty of the Ghetto was an exhibition created by Barnes featuring his style-defining neo-mannerist paintings of poor and working-class black life. From 1972 to 1979, the exhibit toured major U.S. cities with thirty-five paintings that provided, as Barnes declared, “a pictorial background for an understanding into the aesthetics of black America” (www.erniebarnes.com/ biography). Featured paintings included depictions of recreation, celebration, aspiration, and jubilation— celebrating the physical and spiritual beauty of black people while drawing attention to the dilapidated conditions of the black ghetto. As Barnes maintained, “It is not a plea to people to continue to live there (in the ghetto) but for those who feel trapped, it is … a challenge of how beautiful life can be” (ibid.). “The Sugar Shack” is one of the better-known paintings of the exhibition. For Barnes, the unrefined  131 •

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yet stylish setting and human motions captured in the painting “transmits rhythm so the experience is re-created in the person viewing it. To show that AfricanAmericans utilize rhythm as a way of resolving physical tension” (ibid.). Marvin Gaye first requested permission to use the painting for the cover of his 1976 album I Want You. DR. REVOLT brought the sugar shack to the Bronx and made it hip hop with the likenesses of Suede and Cheeba in the foreground wearing white, shelltop Adidas. With word art modeled after the poster for the 1973 blaxploitation film Black Caesar, the painting became the cover art for the album, now titled Uptown Saturday Night. The cover of the album provided the visual inspiration for Uptown’s final music video. Gaye’s use of “The Sugar Shack” is well known, as is the painting being featured during the credits of the sitcom Good Times. Following the completion of the album cover, the concept of doing a Good Times-themed music video became an aspiration. “By this point we are bona fide stars, you know what I’m saying. So, rolling up to your third video you feeling so starred out,” discloses Suede as he discusses the group in the wake of “Luchini,” but “humbled because, you know, we used to come home every day and watch Good Times.” For the video, Jimmy Walker and Bern Nadette Stanis reprised their roles as Good Times siblings J.J. and Thelma Evans, respectively. “Black Nostaljack” is arguably the most focused of the three music videos for the album because of its adherence to a specific source material. Shot in one day in early April, 1997, the video featured a built out set of Evans’s living room constructed in a downtown  132 •

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Manhattan loft. Staged like an episode of Good Times, it starts with the opening credits that trade a panoramic shot of Chicago’s Cabrini-Green projects for one of NYC Housing projects in the Bronx and substitutes the fade out shot of “The Sugar Shack” for the Uptown cover. The next shot is the Evans’s living room with Thelma and J.J., interspersed with performance shots of Camp Lo. The video is presented with a film grain reminiscent of the mid-1970s, and when J.J. opens the door the song proper begins and Suede and Cheeba enter the world of Good Times. During the first two verses, they are performing their rhymes while engaging in the plot of the show—a house party similar to the last scene in the famous “Rent Party” episode. The party begins in the third verse. During the previous verse, Suede installs a red light bulb and Cheeba shuts off the main lights as the chorus ends revealing arm-flailing silhouettes that evoke the Uptown cover via “The Sugar Shack” painting. It’s a brilliant transition that also displays the style evolution of Camp Lo over two years and three music videos, particularly their embrace of the more eccentric looks of the 1970s. Tish is aware of how Suede and Cheeba were maturing in their adherence to the style and ethos of “Coolie High”: Overall, their confidence grew to just wear and own whatever, day-to-day. In the beginning it was more of an accessory, like wearing a hat, but then I saw the progression to like rockin’ ponchos, like really getting into the time period. So I would say their confidence just grew with them embracing the style.  133 •

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The party scene was filled with family and friends. One of the people getting down is Jungle Brown: “It was just all so dreamy. And of course when I met Thelma and J.J. and all that, it was just like, ‘yo, we made it.’ Just meetin’ up with these childhood heroes, it just felt dope, payin’ respect to where we came from.”

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Epilogue: Sippin’ Amaretta

Love it, leave it, but bless the war chief for his pricing Get it, got it, the Lo will forever be nice and

We always know it’s coming, but the end does not r.s.v.p. “I remember the owner dismissing any arguments about tightening the purse strings, arguing that he ok’d a budget for a third video, but said at some point it’s futile to ‘continue to spend good money.’” Mahoney and his staff were surprised that “Black Nostaljack” was not well received upon release. Major change was coming to Profile and there was no budget committed to give the record an extra push. On the continued success of “Luchini” and Uptown, Camp Lo toured into 1998. In October of that year, Arista acquired Profile Records. The transition came just as the follow-up to Uptown was taking shape at Battery studios. In record label limbo, there were only drips of Camp Lo material until their second album Let’s Do It Again, released in 2002, restarted their recording career. For the foreseeable future, Uptown Saturday Night will remain the quintessential Camp Lo album. Suede and Cheeba have become better lyricists and songwriters and  135 •

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Ski is a 5th-level blackbelt in production, but replicating the journey, the moment, and the impact that Uptown had on hip hop music is a tall task. Uptown has a legacy that has and will continue to sustain the efforts and skills of the people involved in its making: Cheeba: Yeah, I enjoyed hearing that album from beginning to end. Because that’s what I used to do in the crib, I used to play it from beginning to end to kind of figure out which songs was sticking out the most, you know what I’m saying. But actually, I was able to play it from beginning to end. Ish “Butterfly”: I really dug it as a whole, I thought Ski was on the top of his game. I thought Camp Lo was a breath of fresh air that also had its foot planted in the history of it. They really had a new approach, but you could tell that they were grounded in the substance and the essence of the artform … also, a lot of the newer styles owe a lot to the way they came on that record lyrically. Jungle: Undeniable hip hop classic. And one of the reasons why it is classic, it is soulful and eclectic. The music was wild soulful. How they was rhymin’ is still— nobody ever been able to do that, nah. I think it’s just a timeless piece. It was just so out the box. If you look back at that time, if you look at the way everybody is dressin’. Everybody’s hardrock, everybody’s Carhartt, Tims. After that, you see everybody’s dress code start to change. Ski: To me that Uptown means creativity, originality, and not being afraid, you know, to express who you really are. As opposed to going with the grain, they went so much  136 •

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against the grain when they dropped that album with the whole lyrical style and choice of music. Basically, it withstood the test of time, man. You can play that album to this day and it still has that original quality to it, like nobody sounds like Camp Lo. Nobody brings that vibe to the game. Nobody dresses like, nobody talks like, nobody walks like Camp Lo. Tish: Game changing. It was different from anything out there and if you weren’t really into, you know, hard core, street hip hop or the party bling hip hop you actually had artists that you could support that were creative, talented, lyrically talented, that had great production—it was just such a great album. Tone: My favorite song of course is still, all time, “Luchini.” I couldn’t believe they made that song. That was the best song, ever, on the planet. To this day, there’s not a song that’s like that. There’s not a song in hip hop that could remind you, or make you think “that sounds some’n like that ‘Luchini’ verse.” Like nobody to this day even flows remotely similar to that. To that song and the way that they did it. That’s like a legendary one of one. Those guys are special for that. Suede: When you’re right up in it, you can’t really see anything outside of what’s right in front of your eyes. But as that shit pulls back a little bit you can see more of the atmosphere and the impact—it’s really, really, amazing. I get a little choked up when I think about Uptown because obviously it put me on a path to be able to continue to do this thing I love for the rest of my life. And, you know, you hear the word legend and legacy and  137 •

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stuff like that, and so many amazing stories. Every time I hear somebody say something about that album, they were at a good place in their life. It enhanced their life in some sort of way. It’s connected to fond memories and good time, no pun intended, you know what I’m saying. And even if they were going through bad things, that album lifted their spirits. So it’s just an amazing thing to be a part of now, because then you’re just a kid trying to get a deal and get heard, you just want to rhyme and get out there or whatever. But later on in life, like I said, you really, really see the impact that it had and still has twenty years later.

At the time of this writing, Camp Lo continues to record and tour extensively. They have released six albums in the last twenty years as well as numerous EPs, mixtape albums, and singles. In 2016, the Black Connection tour took them to Johannesburg, South Africa as well as throughout Europe, promoting their 2015 album Ragtime Hightimes and their 2016 EP Black Connection. An album is the end result of a process that directly and indirectly involves more people than can ever be represented in this book. Geechi Suede and Sonny Cheeba have achieved a level of notoriety because we heard and saw them on Uptown. Ski has become more respected and sought after for his skills and catalogue. But the essential people that participated in or inspired Uptown and animated the stories offered in this book have also remained involved in hip hop and entertainment. In summer of 2016, De La Soul released a new album, Ski deejayed on a world tour for Mobb Deep, and Technician was on tour steadily as deejay for Rakim and Styles P. Meanwhile,  138 •

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Camp Lo toured with a reunited Digable Planets, and returned to the studio with Ski. The saga continues with another diamond crooks adventure brought to you in cinemascope, and coming soon to a theater near you. Lo got the streets, suckahs! Can you dig it, ja? In another millennium, blow the dust off these jewels

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Works Cited

Boyd, Todd. 2007. The Notorious Ph.D.’s Guide to the Super Fly ’70s: A Connoisseur’s Journey Through the Fabulous Flix, Hip Sounds, and Cool Vibes That Defined a Decade. New York: Harlem Moon. Flory, Andrew. 2006. “I Hear a Symphony: Making Music at Motown, 1959–1979.” PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. ProQuest (3212464). George, Nelson. 2001. Buppies, B-Boys, Baps & Bohos: Notes on Post-Soul Black Culture. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press. Martinez, Gerald, Martinez, Diana, and Chavez, Andres, eds. 1998. What It Is … What It Was!: The Black Film Explosion of the ’70s in Words and Pictures. New York: Hyperion. McGee, Henry W. 1972. “Black Movies: A New Wave of Exploitation.” The Harvard Crimson, October 10. h t t p : / / w w w. t h e c r i m s o n . c o m / a r t i c l e / 1 9 7 2 / 1 0 / 1 0 / black-movies-a-new-wave-of/ Myrie, Russell. 2008. Don’t Rhyme for the Sake of Riddlin’: The Authorized Story of Public Enemy. New York: Canongate. Neal, Mark Anthony. 2002. Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic. New York: Routledge. Price, David. 2004. TV Land’s Here’s the Story: Ernie Barnes. Tracey Crooks, prod. https://vimeo.com/14778844 Price, David. 2004. TV Land’s Here’s the Story: Ernie Barnes. Tracey Crooks, prod. http://teamjaded.com/2010/05/tv-lands-heresthe-story-ernie-barnes.html/  141 •

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Rapaport, Michael, dir. 2011. Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest. Santa Monica, CA: Rival Films, DVD Reeves, Marcus. 2008. Somebody Scream: Rap Music’s Rise to Prominence in the Aftershock of Black Power. New York: Faber and Faber. Tingen, Paul. 2007. “DJ Premier: Hip hop Producer.” Sound on Sound, July. http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jul07/articles/ djpremier.htm/

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Also available in the series:

1.

Dusty Springfield’s Dusty in Memphis by Warren Zanes 2. Love’s Forever Changes by Andrew Hultkrans 3. Neil Young’s Harvest by Sam Inglis 4. The Kinks’ The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society by Andy Miller 5. The Smiths’ Meat Is Murder by Joe Pernice 6. Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn by John Cavanagh 7. ABBA’s ABBA Gold: Greatest Hits by Elisabeth Vincentelli 8. The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Electric Ladyland by John Perry 9. Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott 10. Prince’s Sign “ ” the

Times by Michaelangelo Matos 11. The Velvet Underground’s The Velvet Underground & Nico by Joe Harvard 12. The Beatles’ Let It Be by Steve Matteo 13. James Brown’s Live at the Apollo by Douglas Wolk 14. Jethro Tull’s Aqualung by Allan Moore 15. Radiohead’s OK Computer by Dai Griffiths 16. The Replacements’ Let It Be by Colin Meloy 17. Led Zeppelin’s Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis 18. The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. by Bill Janovitz 19. The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds by Jim Fusilli 20. Ramones’ Ramones by Nicholas Rombes

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21.

Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces by Franklin Bruno 22. R.E.M.’s Murmur by J. Niimi 23. Jeff Buckley’s Grace by Daphne Brooks 24. DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing….. by Eliot Wilder 25. MC5’s Kick Out the Jams by Don McLeese 26. David Bowie’s Low by Hugo Wilcken 27. Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. by Geoffrey Himes 28. The Band’s Music from Big Pink by John Niven 29. Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane over the Sea by Kim Cooper 30. Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique by Dan Le Roy 31. Pixies’ Doolittle by Ben Sisario 32. Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On by Miles Marshall Lewis 33. The Stone Roses’ The Stone Roses by Alex Green 34. Nirvana’s In Utero by Gillian G. Gaar 35. Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited by Mark Polizzotti

36.

My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless by Mike McGonigal 37. The Who’s The Who Sell Out by John Dougan 38. Guided by Voices’ Bee Thousand by Marc Woodworth 39. Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation by Matthew Stearns 40. Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark by Sean Nelson 41. Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion I and II by Eric Weisbard 42. Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life by Zeth Lundy 43. The Byrds’ The Notorious Byrd Brothers by Ric Menck 44. Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica by Kevin Courrier 45. Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime by Michael T. Fournier 46. Steely Dan’s Aja by Don Breithaupt 47. A Tribe Called Quest’s People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm by Shawn Taylor 48. PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me by Kate Schatz

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49. U2’s Achtung Baby by Stephen Catanzarite 50. Belle & Sebastian’s If You’re Feeling Sinister by Scott Plagenhoef 51. Nick Drake’s Pink Moon by Amanda Petrusich 52. Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love by Carl Wilson 53. Tom Waits’ Swordfishtrombones by David Smay 54. Throbbing Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats by Drew Daniel 55. Patti Smith’s Horses by Philip Shaw 56. Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality by John Darnielle 57. Slayer’s Reign in Blood by D.X. Ferris 58. Richard and Linda Thompson’s Shoot Out the Lights by Hayden Childs 59. The Afghan Whigs’ Gentlemen by Bob Gendron 60. The Pogues’ Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash by Jeffery T. Roesgen 61. The Flying Burrito Brothers’ The Gilded Palace of Sin by Bob Proehl

62. Wire’s Pink Flag by Wilson Neate 63. Elliott Smith’s XO by Mathew Lemay 64. Nas’ Illmatic by Matthew Gasteier 65. Big Star’s Radio City by Bruce Eaton 66. Madness’ One Step Beyond… by Terry Edwards 67. Brian Eno’s Another Green World by Geeta Dayal 68. The Flaming Lips’ Zaireeka by Mark Richardson 69. The Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs by LD Beghtol 70. Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s Facing Future by Dan Kois 71. Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by Christopher R. Weingarten 72. Pavement’s Wowee Zowee by Bryan Charles 73. AC/DC’s Highway to Hell by Joe Bonomo 74. Van Dyke Parks’s Song Cycle by Richard Henderson 75. Slint’s Spiderland by Scott Tennent

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76. Radiohead’s Kid A by Marvin Lin 77. Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk by Rob Trucks 78. Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine by Daphne Carr 79. Ween’s Chocolate and Cheese by Hank Shteamer 80. Johnny Cash’s American Recordings by Tony Tost 81. The Rolling Stones’ Some Girls by Cyrus Patell 82. Dinosaur Jr.’s You’re Living All Over Me by Nick Attfield 83. Television’s Marquee Moon by Bryan Waterman 84. Aretha Franklin’s Amazing Grace by Aaron Cohen 85. Portishead’s Dummy by RJ Wheaton 86. Talking Heads’ Fear of Music by Jonathan Lethem 87. Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson by Darran Anderson 88. They Might Be Giants’ Flood by S. Alexander Reed and Philip Sandifer 89. Andrew W.K.’s I Get Wet by Phillip Crandall

90.

Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II by Marc Weidenbaum 91. Gang of Four’s Entertainment by Kevin J.H. Dettmar 92. Richard Hell and the Voidoids’ Blank Generation by Pete Astor 93. J Dilla’s Donuts by Jordan Ferguson 94. The Beach Boys’ Smile by Luis Sanchez 95. Oasis’ Definitely Maybe by Alex Niven 96. Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville by Gina Arnold 97. Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kirk Walker Graves 98. Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album by Charles Fairchild 99. Sigur Rós’s () by Ethan Hayden 100. Michael Jackson’s Dangerous by Susan Fast 101. Can’s Tago Mago by Alan Warner 102. Bobbie Gentry’s Ode to Billie Joe by Tara Murtha 103. Hole’s Live Through This by Anwen Crawford 104. Devo’s Freedom of Choice by Evie Nagy

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105. Dead Kennedys’ Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables by Michael Stewart Foley 106. Koji Kondo’s Super Mario Bros. by Andrew Schartmann 107. Beat Happening’s Beat Happening by Bryan C. Parker 108. Metallica’s Metallica by David Masciotra 109. Phish’s A Live One by Walter Holland 110. Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew by George Grella Jr. 111. Blondie’s Parallel Lines by Kembrew McLeod 112. Grateful Dead’s Workingman’s Dead by Buzz Poole 113. New Kids On The Block’s Hangin’ Tough by Rebecca Wallwork 114. The Geto Boys’ The Geto Boys by Rolf Potts

115. Sleater-Kinney’s Dig Me Out by Jovana Babovic 116. LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver by Ryan Leas 117. Donny Hathaway’s Donny Hathaway Live by Emily J. Lordi 118. The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy by Paula Mejia 119. The Modern Lovers’ The Modern Lovers by Sean L. Maloney 120. Angelo Badalamenti’s Soundtrack from Twin Peaks by Clare Nina Norelli 121. Young Marble Giants’ Colossal Youth by Michael Blair and Joe Bucciero 122. The Pharcyde’s Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde by Andrew Barker

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