moshitup

Rae closes the song by shouting out his car and his jeweller.

The Rolls Royce Wraith debuted in 2013, hitting car shows just two months before this track hit SoundCloud. So while it’s unlikely that Rae actually owns a Wraith, he could well be the first rapper to namecheck it in a song.

Will the Wraith catch on in Hip Hop like its cooler-named predecessors the Ghost and the Phantom?

LP shouts out Queens legend DJ Grandmaster Vic from Southside Jamaica. Along with Harlem’s Ron G, Vic is credited with popularising blend tapes, entire mixtapes of soul/pop songs and acapellas over Hip Hop beats.

Not to be confused with V.I.C. who was down with The Beatnuts (and is also from Queens).

As revealed on the Combat Jack Show, Rugged O was R.A.’s younger brother Johnny Omar. He used to hang out with R.A. at the studio and rap with the pros. Surprisingly, given his MC name, he was only 8 or 9 years old at the time.

Dante may be getting his Kool & The Gang breaks mixed up here. The drums in “Dope On Plastic” are from “Give It Up” rather than “Chocolate Buttermilk”. Both songs appear on the same album.

“Chocolate Buttermilk” is a big break though. Eric B & Rakim would later use the drums in their song “No Omega” (making number 3 in J-Zone’s 10 Favorite Sample Flips). You might also recognise the horns from another record that Dante was involved with, Pete Rock & CL Smooth’s “Straighten It Out”.

This is CJ Moore who is actually listed as co-producer on the back of the record (someone called Dan “The Man” Miller gets engineer credit). Moore also worked with another forgotten Tommy Boy act of the time, Black By Demand.

The “Can you dig it” vocal sample in the chorus of “Dope on Plastic” is from Parliament’s “Chocolate City”.

Probably 1971’s The Best Of Kool And The Gang, an early compilation which features both “Give It Up” and “Funky Man”, the two main samples used in “Dope On Plastic”.

Digger Tip: This is the easiest way to get hold of “Give It Up” which, unlike the other songs on here, was never released on a 45. The only other place to find it is Kool’s much rarer (i.e. pricier) debut album.

This is Marley Marl imitating the intro from the breakbeat classic “Impeach The President” by The Honey Drippers. Marley chopped up the “Impeach” drums to make this beat, inventing a technique that became a staple of Hip Hop production.

The original intro is:

Ladies and gentlemen
We have The Honey Drippers in the house tonight
They just got back from Washington DC
I think they got something they want to say

The “Impeach” kick and snare were Marley’s go-to drums for a while. He reused them on “Eric B Is President” and “Make The Music With Your Mouth, Biz”. It’s also rumoured that BDP used them for “The Bridge Is Over” after finding Marley’s tape reel in the studio.

This is a continuation of the EPMD rebuttal but note the similarity to Big Daddy Kane’s lyrics in “Set It Off”:

Save the bass for the pipe and rearrange your tone
Or take a loss and be forced in the danger zone

Rakim took a swipe at Kane just a few lines earlier in response to perceived disses in Kane’s lyrics (including a line from “Set It Off”). Was this another jab at the King Asiatic?

This simple braggadocio line kicked off a subliminal war of words between Kane and his main rival at the time, Rakim. Kane was calling himself a rap soloist and warning the competition, but the line could also be read as a warning to a particular rap soloist.

Rakim — who declared himself the soloist on “Eric B Is President” — certainly seemed to think so. Perhaps Kane’s assertion on “Somethin' Funky” that he would “get paid in full instead of talking all that bull” also had something to do with it.

Whatever Rakim’s thinking, his next album contained a few lines seemingly aimed at Kane and his fast rap style, like this from “Follow The Leader”:

No need to speed, slow down and let the leader lead
Word to daddy… indeed

and this from “No Competition”:

No one in my path can withstand
Under pressure the wrath of a swift man

Much like Rakim’s imaginary beef with EPMD it was all cleared up with a phone call. The rivalry kept 80s Hip Hop heads entertained for a while though. To this day people still debate who would have won a Kane vs Rakim battle.