25 Years In The Making
The North American Adonis rises!
People! People! People! Things are happening. Punk Rock B-Boy is still warm from the oven but I’m not done. It’s Adonis time.
If you’ve been checking in with Vertices for a while now, you may recall reading the story of North American Adonis. To recap: back in 1998, doseone, Jel and I started working on an album together. We tracked to a digital workstation-thing called the VS-880. Before the project was finished, the VS-880 crashed and all the work was lost. We were unable to summon the strength to re-group and finish the project… until now - 25 years later!!
Now, I’m sure you know but in case you don’t, doseone is one of the greatest rappers of all time and is among the genre’s most creative minds. He’s a free thinker. He’s a warlock. His abilities to freestyle and chop are legendary. He operates on a level where very few can hang. Not many rappers would have the guts to step into a cipher with the Freestyle Fellowship guys. dose would. And has. For some, he’s beyond comprehension. He’s completely uncompromising in his work. It’s increasingly difficult to find that kind of ethic in today’s hip hop world.
If you checked out the Punk Rock B-Boy album, you heard me sing Jel’s praises in the song “Terminal Illness”. Although his contributions have been overlooked by some, he is a CONSEQUENTIAL figure in the evolution of hip hop. He’s the one who brought the sampler from the studio to the stage. He changed the way hip hop beats are made. You see those videos of kids tapping out beats on MPCs? Jel was the first. That’s his innovation. I’d argue that practically every beat-maker working today is influenced by Jel whether they realize it not. His technical innovations and contributions are one thing. But his actual beats are something else altogether. He’s made some of the heaviest beats known to man. His sound is distinct and yet impossible to pin down. It’s progressive, it’s jazz, it’s blues. It’s always incredibly funky. And it’s always rooted deeply in the hip hop bedrock. He’ll a first-ballad hall-of-famer, as far as I’m concerned.
As I recall, it was right around this time last year when dose reached out and proposed the idea that we finally finish the North American Adonis album. At that point, the wheels had just begun turning on Super Dope. So I said that I was down but that it would take a bit of time before I could give the effort my full attention. As soon as the work on Super Dope was done, I went directly to work on Adonis.
Now here’s the incredible thing. Although the recordings laid to the VS-880 were lost, the original beat files were not. Back in ’98, Jel made the beats on an SP-1200 and the disks they were saved on survived. So most of the beats on the album are the originals from 25 years ago! How friggin’ ill is that?! In fact, we preserved as much from the original vision for the project as possible.
The one thing that changed (to a degree) was the raps. I know I still have the rhyme book with my original Adonis verses somewhere because I never throw that stuff out. But it would require a very intense search. My basement is filled with the ephemera of a 35-year career in hip hop. It’s boxes piled on top of boxes. I would have undertaken the excavation if necessary. But in one of the very-first messages I received from dose on the subject of reviving the monster, he said something along the lines of: “Things got pretty silly back in ’98. Maybe we can dial that back a bit this time”. And when we first started writing and tossing ideas back-and-forth back in the spring, the vibe was fairly serious. But let’s be real. I think one of the reasons dose and I clicked the way we did back in the 90s is that we both have strong silly streaks. It can’t be contained. So a lot of laughs were had. The album we’ve come up with is heavy as hell but it’s also very fun.
And here’s another thing. When you receive an email with an idea and a verse from doseone - one of the most creative, skilled, technical, ferocious rappers to ever walk the earth - it’s a challenge! If you don’t want to be swallowed alive, you gotta bring it! Working with dose raised my game. He inspired some stuff I didn’t know I had in me. This whole thing was a dream collaboration. I’m grateful to dose for making it happen.
Here’s another mind-blowing thing about this album: the original artwork was done by my friend Nic, who used to live in Halifax back in the late 90s. He did art for a bunch of my projects back then - the Centraur 12”, the Sebutones 50/50 Where It Counts, Vertex… So as part of the effort to preserve as much of the original spirit of the Adonis as possible, we all agreed that it would be cool to use the original art. But there was a catch. Nic is super-famous now! He’s one of the top illustrators at Marvel comics. I hadn’t spoken to Nic in many years (he doesn’t live in Canada anymore) and I wasn’t sure what (or if) I’d hear back. His time and talent are very valuable commodities now. But Nic got back to me right away and said he was psyched to be involved. He just wanted to give the artwork a bit of a spruce-up and turned that around for us in a matter of hours. Nic rules. If you’re not following him on Instagram, you should be. Find him here:
https://www.instagram.com/nic__klein/?hl=en
I can’t think of too many albums - in any genre - that were 25 years in the making. This is sort of like an exercise in time travel. The album is filled with surprises. I can’t wait for you to hear it (and see it). Handsmade Records doing it right, as always. I hope you have as much fun listening to it as we had making it. North American Adonis! Coming soon! Who would have thought?