this wasnt on youtube either, so this janky live performance will have to do. it should start at 6 minutes, but if it doesnt…go to 6 minutes haha

you need to know everyone on this song (you see that merch booth to your right!) , so ill break down the order for those who dont know who is who:

first mc:  jermiside of the red giants

second mc:  che grand

third mc:  donwill (lol @ the video i used for don)

fourth mc:  elucid

fifth mc:  von pea

sixth mc:  spec boogie

seventh mc:  ilyas

producer:  brick beats of the red giants

these guys make up some of the lessondary crew. we took this beat and kicked it in the balls and threw it down a flight of steps. the end.

back in 1996 id heard “mind power” by a tribe called quest and listening to that beat, id decided “hey, i think i can do that!”

one thing i knew about hip hop producers is they all could dj. i also knew that they all had mpcs and an mpc costs 2g’s…therefore, i had no mpc.

i did have parents that could afford to get me a beginners dj package though…gemini bd10′s and a trickmaster for 299 at music factory! believe it or not, i had no idea i needed more than 2 turntables and a mixer. didnt know i needed an amp and speakers etc…at that point my god-brother jamel wanted to dj too and he had speakers and an amp so we became partners. if you started with serato you have no idea about paying 5 dollars for a 12″ single of a song you dont even like just so you can throw it on for 2 minutes at the next house party…people wont even buy songs for a dollar now! we used to buy ONE song! okay, it came with the instrumental too and a b side most of the time. long story short most of our records were purchased from beat street records…a legendary record store located downtown brooklyn. now its a 5 dollar shoe store.

*sad face emoticon*

don and i were driving around cincinnati one day when we tried to go to record arcade (the local record store that don grew up shopping in). it was all boarded up.

*mad face emoticon* (guys shut up, im being cute for the bitties. lol smiley face, n*gga!)

so around that point was when we decided to lay this down in song. aeon had sent like 9000 beats that i (happily!) sat through looking for not the best beat, but the perfect track that fit with the rest of the album and at the same time filled a void/mood that the album needed but didnt have yet. a lot of people listen for the “hot beat” when picking tracks but its not about that. this track was so sad sounding and kind of eerie. at first i was thinking maybe a follow up to “she moved outta cincy” but somewhere along the line it took a turn and became what it is today. if we’re lucky aeon will be on the next tanya morgan album too…i know he has a few songs on our SOLO ALBUMS COMING IN 2010 *plugplugplug*

id originally sung the hook but ilyas said phonte should do it, he heard phonte on the hook more than anyone else. i sent it to him but he didnt like the way he sounded singing the hook i’d written so he did a rewrite and it turned out even better. ilyas’ verse isnt about record stores as much as its about a specific album. people like to act like common (one of my favorite mcs btw) invented using a woman as a metaphor for a non-human thing so we get stuck with this being another “h.e.r.” but this song is NOT about hip hop being a woman. its about our relationship with where we GOT the hip hop from….

p.s. Brittany, im sorry again. We have to do a real song!!!!!!!

like i said before, i used to think this was apart of the alleye need beat because of how they seemed to blend on the beat tape. when this was “part two” it turned into this kind of sung chant freestyle jam. id wrote a whole song that was sung, it wasnt verses as much as it was 3 hooks. kind of like that singing joint on mos def’s first album. (i dont have the tracklisting right now sue me) i thought it was the coolest thing ever, especially after i sent it to ragen fykes and she not only liked it but thought i could even sing a little!!!!!! (i was gassed haha)

I had no plans of really singing it, so we’d got peter hadar to come in and mess around with it. at that time the idea
changed because we’d realized we didnt have a song that really drove home the point that brooklynati was this fake city we lived in. this track then became a commercial for the town, almost like a commercial youd see on local tv advertising a new gated community or something like that. i did the album sequencing, and i still operate on a “side a/ side b” mindstate, so plan b was the end of the first half of the album and without you begins the second half, or “side b”. this was the tape being flipped over.

and for those that dont know, thats don doing the voice of dj jurx!

this one doesnt have much of a story. went to brick beats’ house, he played a bunch of beats, i said “skip that one” and donwill said “hold on go back to that…”

he loved it, but i didnt “get” it until later. one day we were in the knitting factory and don was like “yo…we need to do a song about what we’d be doing if not this, to that one brick joint”. he wrote a hook and i asked my friend kristy if her brother would be on our song for the lp. i forget people know/like us sometimes so i was afraid to ask but napoleon said “of course!” and he bought it home. of course the main event of this song is ilyas’ verse. those that know us personally know that tanya morgan started out donwill and von pea featuring ilyas. at first it was supposed to be like tribe and consequence on beats rhymes and life…it was a don and von group album but we wanted him to be on a good 6 or so songs, then that just turned into the whole album and then just turned into the group being all 3.

its the 3 of us equally of course but i think its always been on ilyas’ mind that something he was recruited for ended up changing his life. truth be told none of us  would be where we are if it wasnt for the 3 of us as a whole. i truly believe some don and von shit wouldn’t have done it the same.  same way brand nubian aint the same without grand puba. yeah they got “punks jump up” and “love me or leave me alone” but it aint “one for all” or “slow down”.

im still leaving these guys though. FLASH! ITS LONELY AT THE TOP!