2 reacties:

Anonymous said...

wait, what is this? i can't find any info about it anywhere else...

January 14, 2010 8:01 PM

S.O.U.L. said...

I think there about 17 tapes going around. Here's some more info

Back in the mid-80's when Dr. Dre was still wearing make-up and glitter as part of L.A.'s World Class Wrecking Crew he made mixtapes and sold them at the Rodium Swap Meet in Torrance, California through Steve, a tall Asian guy that wore a baseball cap and sunglasses. It was a gangster's paradise: one stop shopping for all your gangster needs, before being a "gangsta" was ran into the ground and everyone and their grandmother was "gangsta". This was the time of the real OG's, or perhaps rather the last days. Ironically there wasn't a lot of real gangster music for the real gangster's to listen to. It was still mostly all New York-based hip hop that was being produced. And people like Dre ate it up and spat it back out at us with his Rodium mixtapes.

See before there was any of that east coast vs. west coast beef, there was just one coast and it was called rap music, hip hop or what ever you called it. You were practically listening to the same thing from one coast to another and you appreciated it because there just wasn't that wide a selection. So if Biz Markie or Doug E. Fresh came out with new singles, KDAY in L.A. would be blasting it and Dr. Dre would be mixing it up for the station and his Rodium tapes. The same would apply to living on the east coast. So for example when Eazy-E and NWA dropped their singles and albums, kids on the east coast bought that stuff up quick! No coastal discrimination, no issues, not yet any way..
if you like old school hip hop and rap then you couldn't do any better than a Dr. Dre mix tape bought for $10. They had colorful names like "20foe7um" "You Got Ganked" "In Effect" "Dope Beat" "8-Ball" and came with a different colored sleeve to make it easier to differentiate when you were scanning your collection.
Dre often brought in the latest artist he was working with at the time to rap intro's on the mixtape, so it was common to hear Ice Cube, Eazy-E, MC Ren and more obscure L.A. rappers like Cube's mate Sir Jinx(from the pre-NWA crew CIA). Dre would also lay down his own short raps throughout the tape. He started making these tapes for shits & giggles(and money no doubt) and he found his new calling and indentity through the music and the artists he was working with. Otherwise, he'd still be wearing make-up and glitter, which you know, is do-able these days considering Gnarls Barkley and all the other wacky hybrids.

This was an important time for hip hop and rap. The L.A. scene was growing and becoming more popular with Ice-T and Dre's work with Eazy-E's "Boyz in the Hood" single. But it wasn't until he helped create NWA with CIA's Ice Cube(who wrote the last World Class Wrecking Crew hit "The Cabbage Patch"), DJ Yella from World Class.., Arabian Prince, MC Ren and of course Eazy-E when the doors were blown completely open.

January 15, 2010 9:38 AM

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