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hip hop is dead part 2

(quick sidebar, before i get into this, the cousin on “daddys girls”…jessica…is mad cute to me. her voice is hardcore but shes cute in a “tomboy best friend that dressed girly to be funny one day and you found out she had a nice shape now you wanna fool with your homegirl” kind of way. excuse me for not only liking big butt only half black video girls. SMH at you for judging me! the shame of you.)

anyway…hip hop is dead 2, produced by this fool:

sorry this took so long, I blame ilwil. haha! we were going to all speak on this because of its significance, but it didn’t happen! this is one of the very first tanya morgan songs we ever recorded as a group. I was working on my detox of an album back in 2003 called…well if you caught it a few months ago you caught it (that was a decoy by the way…11/11/11 the real one will be out…ha!). in 2004 we did moonlighting, it dropped in 2006, and in 2008 we did the follow up ep called the bridge. don always told me this was one of his favorite tm songs and it was just sitting around. as you see, “peatox” (haha that’s the new nickname for S.U.) still aint out, so this song would’ve been still sitting around. I just felt like it should drop, so I asked ilyas what he thought.

my text to ilyas circa spring 2008: “yo, hip hop is dead 2…should we put it on the ep?”

his text to me: “FINALLY! POUR CHAMPAGNE ON A BITCH! YAY!”
(lupe fiasco joke)

so that was a yes.

there’s one main part of this song that gets me: “when noone else would mention us, we he spoke highly of”-donwill

that line gets me so much yo…think about it. not to get all krs one on you, but hip hop is us. you, me, all of us. with that said, it started with a few of us first. the inner city kids. the poor kids with older brothers and sisters on crack, playing in abandoned lots uptown and shit. all cultures have always had their own music, and a lot of our parents had their pop, soul, house, jazz, and even disco. something happened before my time where there were a bunch of teens sitting around in the mid 70s bored. that boredom turned into what we now call hip hop. at its very core, hip hop is about inner city youth  expressing their lives, desires, and woes. bragging is a desire, rapping about drugs is some peoples lives, rapping about dead homeboys are the woes, and so on. you didn’t hear that in a donna summers joint. which brings us back full circle…when noone else would mention us…we mentioned us.

sure many people turn their nose up at it, or don’t understand why some of the negative is necessary, but so what. we placed ourselves on a pedistol with hip hop music because wed never see one otherwise. people like will smith and queen latifah come from hip hop, do remember. we’ve travelled the world and changed so many lives and it all started from some kids with nothing. you can tell me im thinking too hard, but the fact that you know who I am at all means you love hip hop enough to search for it! long story short, hip hop gave a lot of us pride. some things we shouldn’t be proud of, but focus on the pride, not the negative. with that said, hip hop can’t die.

“how low” liner notes coming one of these days.

tanya morgan “the bridge” ep still available on itunes/amazon etc.

tanya morgan “brooklynati” lp coming in late april

no more music for the suckers

p.s. i added more lyrics to the lyrics page. you know, i be rappin.

introduction! liners

von pea “introduction” from my latest mixtape (right click and save as)

instrumental taken from:

this intro was just talking at first and I liked it but I wanted to give people a reason to play it more than once. usually the intro to an album is just that, the intro. once you’ve been introduced the first time that’s it. its like seeing a person and saying “hey, im von! nice to meet you” everytime (im ashamed to say I’ve done this to people before…im sorry my memory is shot). anyway I turned it into somewhat of a song so you’d want to play it along with everything else. i had no idea id get so many compliments on the “we got moms” line, thats cool because it was random for me to write, but its usually the random lines that folks like. as a writer when you think too hard about something, thats the thing nobody will bother with (haha) so its always better to go with the natural stuff more than trying to kill em with some super crazy line you gotta google to understand. the funniest part of the song to me is when i stop the beat to say “linda ellerbee” because when i wrote it i thought it was the illest shit on the planet earth, and my inside joke with myself is when rappers stop the beat at shows to emphasize theyre saying something so dope and they want the crowd to hear it. i stopped the beat for that one line as a way to make fun of myself for thinking it was such a dope line, when its just a nerdy ass line. lol

tommorrow: players!

biggie is alive!

well nah, but this is pretty funny to me. maybe its in bad taste, but i think its funny. people have been way more disrespectful to bigs death.

and ultramag aint heard nothin! lol…what original version of threemcees? the one with ilyas cursing up a storm on the hook?

i guess this will be the threemcees update. so how did this start….ok so we did “cuddlebums” with 88 keys and he said “hit me up for the payback track” which made me smile pretty hard because now we get to do ANOTHER song! and we can put it on our EP?!!?! WOW!

we go up to his crib and his adorable daughter is tearing up magazines and laughing like kids do. we go in the beatmaking room and he starts going through a stack of records he picked out. 88 makes beats and throws them away and makes another one and throws it away and makes another one and throws it away and…now keep in mind we on some “fanboys playing it cool” ish so almost every beat sounds good to us, but he had a certain one in mind. we just asked for something upbeat to rappity rap over. long story short we got around to the threemcees beat about…3 hours later or something (haha) and left happy. i think by the time we got back to brooklyn 88 was like “i might do something else”

a week or two later he felt like he didnt give us a good enough track and wanted us to have a BANGER. I was happy with the beat we had, but he insisted and its just an honor already to get anything from him in my eyes. ilyas also had started writing the song already. actually, here’s the demo i think ultramag is talking about:

so back to the process…we had gotten back from a 1 off show we had in denver when i got SICK AS HELL. like, i thought i was dying for real. i never felt that way before and it all started with my ear stopping up, then getting infected. i was fucked up for about a week and literally wasnt sleeping, just laying there til the sun came up in pain…shit was crazy. i say that to say this, someone had to go get the session/tracked out beat from 88 (the tracked out beat is all the parts seperate. 4 minutes of just a snare drum, 4 minutes of just the kick drum, then the hats, then the bassline, etc…) and since im the album producer most of the time thats my job. i couldnt do it, so donwill went to get it. 88 was working on his album that day too so don was there allllllll day haha…and 88 is analogue so i heard everything had to be burned in real time which took even longer! haha…

all that, and i mix the joint (i hate mixing and i retire from it lol) and send it off to the label to be mastered and whatnot. weeks later 88 isnt satisfied with the jam and still thinks he can do better so we end up recording what became “take the w” on the tanya morgan is a rap group mixtape. thats a story too.

so i think i told the whole story….88, i thank god we crossed paths. its definitely an honor and a pleasure to know you, man. you are absolutely on my “whatever niggas need, im there” list. Timm See? thank you. i feel like i always write your name wrong (lol) but this wouldnt have happened without that phone call.

and oh yea, to anyone who has caught us at any of the “freshly dipped tour” shows and stopped to tell us you think we are dope, thank you for the love. im sorry to my NYC crew for dipping out…i had to come see my moms and my brother!

and im sorry to my FELLOW LESSONDARY GANG MEMBERS che grand and spec boogie for not being able to stay at their show for the same reason. peace to AOK too…homeboy sandman, what you told me tonight means a LOT coming from you. when niggas try to hate, i have a decent list of super emcees like yourself that think im dope, and if i can impress a super emcee then im doing something right.

ok this might start sounding like a love fest but i just want cats to know i appreciate them because its real easy to hate/be indifferent and jaded nowadays. we all need each other to keep going.

oh yeah, threemcees. produced by this guy:

up next, hip hop is dead 2 aka the “moonlighting” era “self untitled” outtake…

Be You! f/ Czelena

produced by him:

featuring her:

so dig it, back to the hotel room from the “the bridge” story. I played a very very early version of this beat in the hotel for don and il and ilyas felt like it had potential. he said it sounded like some cincinnati cookout shit.

I get back to brooklyn and I’m on the bus when I get inspired to write to this…based on wanting to shout out kip and lafonduh in a rhyme haha…someone on the bus had on a vote for pedro shirt and that’s all it took to set this entire song off. I send my idea to il and don and they build on it. ilyas says he knows a woman he thinks is dope and wants to ask her on the song. the resident r&b thug (just joking) donwill co-writes czelena’s hook and I go back and tweak the beat some more…and that’s that! the bass is extra heavy on this for the trunks. I know nothing about that, I’m on the iron horse* HEAVY.

*subway train.

this is my least favorite believe it or not. I guess I’m just a super backpacker. there isnt much story to this one though….

next: “get me inside” aka “MOFO YOU GON SMELL MY COLOGNE!”

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