I started rapping when I was in junior high school. It was primarily a secret endeavor. I wrote tons and tons of verses and songs and rarely shared the work with anyone. Once in a while a guy named Mike Wiggins and I would engage in friendly battle.
I graduated from high school in 1990. That year (or was it the year before?), I bought my first sampler - a Roland S-10 sampling keyboard. That thing had four seconds of sampling time and sounded cloudy as hell. I worked with that hunk of garbage for about five years and never got any good at making beats in that time. There are some who will tell you that thirty-some-odd years later, I’m still not much of a beat-maker but I digress.
That same year (1990), I recorded my first song. I didn’t have any kind of home recording set-up, so I had to pay for professional studio time. I was not ready to make that leap. The song I recorded is cringefest 5000 and I don’t want to talk about it. It stinks.
Over the course of the five years or so that followed, I continued to make songs that stunk. For all the evidence you need, look no further than my first EP (under the name Stinkin’ Rich), Chin Music or my first album, Game Tight. Trash. You could say, “cut yourself some slack; you were just a kid”. But I was older than the guys in De La Soul were when they made 3 Feet High and Rising - one of hip hop’s greatest masterpieces. No excuses. I stunk on ice.
I chalk up the years between 1990 and 1995 to searching for my voice. And maybe it took an extra-long time because I was in an isolated part of the world (Halifax, Nova Scotia) with a very small hip hop scene. But I was searching. I was deeply devoted to hip hop. I wanted to get involved. But I didn’t know who I was or what I wanted to be. I couldn’t even figure out how my voice and delivery should sound.
It must be said that the one thing I had going for me in those years - and I’m eternally grateful for this - was my affiliation with the great Jorun Bombay. I see Jo as a true hip hop genius. We worked together a bunch through those years and he taught me a ton about DJing and beat-making. He showed me the ropes. I was a terrible student but he showed me. The production on the songs I did with Jo in those years is great but my rapping still stunk.
But sometime in late 1995 and early 1996, something happened and looking back, I’m mostly mystified by it. I don’t exactly know how or why but something clicked. I’ve been thinking about it over the last few months. I don’t think I’ve figured it out but I’ve come up with what might have been a few contributing factors.
First of all, I got my hands on a proper sampler: an Emu SP-1200. It was it a big improvement over the S-10 and having an iconic bit of hip hop gear inspired me. So the beats started sounding a little bit better.
Second - in 1995, I won a demo contest and the prize was a few days in a primo studio with a producer/engineer-guy named James Carrier. I remember that after we laid the beats down on tape, things got off to a slow start when it was time to record vocals. Maybe I was feeling intimidated and out of place in this fancy-ass studio but my performances in the vocal booth were meek. And the pristine recording environment exposed all my weaknesses as a rapper. To James’ credit, he shut things down for a bit and he gave me a talking to. He pushed me to commit. He insisted on conviction. He even coached me on a bit of vocal technique. And he made things fun. He knew exactly what to do to bring a performance out of me. After that - and for the first time - I heard my own voice on tape and liked it. I was in that studio for only two or three days but recorded an entire album called Year Zero.
Third (this is the mystifying part) - I found some confidence. I don’t know where it came from and it didn’t last very long. When I look back at what was happening in my life at that point, I really can’t figure out where the confidence came from. In fact, all I can recall is stuff that should have been a blow to my confidence. But I listen to material I recorded at this time and I sound like a very self-assured young dude (I would have been 23-24 years old).
Fourth - I bought a Tascam 4-track recorder which allowed me to record at home whenever I wanted to. I didn’t have to pay for studio time or rely on the charity of friends. It gave me a lot of opportunity to experiment and work by trial and error. That did me a world of good.
The Year Zero album was never released. Some of the songs from that album and a variety of other odds and ends recorded between 1992 and early 1996 were compiled on an album called Weirdo Magnet. Weirdo Magnet was originally sold as a double cassette. Not too many copies were made. Maybe 25? 50 tops. That album contains the earliest songs I recorded that I still quite like today. It also includes some songs that I hate-hate-hate. I had a few ideas that I thought were clever but which were not executed well at all. I thought I was a better writer than I was. There are detailed notes for most of the songs on the Bandcamp page-thing.
When I signed my record deal with Warner, they offered to re-press and distribute titles from my back catalogue. For the re-press of Weirdo Magnet, I edited like crazy and re-recorded a few things in an attempt to compose a cleaner, tighter album. I cut some of the embarrassing stuff but not all of it, unfortunately. And some good stuff was left on the chopping block too. Oh well.
Anyway, the point of all of this is that I think there’s a pretty big leap in the quality of work I was doing between the Game Tight album and the Weirdo Magnet album. Kinda boggles my mind looking back on it now. It was the biggest leap I ever made in my career, I’d say. And it was the beginning of a very brief peak period.
The next thing I recorded after the Weirdo Magnet stuff was the first Sebutones album, Psoriasis. I might argue that it’s the best record I ever made. Maybe we’ll talk a little Sebutones in the next post.
By the way - the audio clip above is of the demo of the first version of “You Know The Science”. You can hear me working out how the last few lines should go at the end. It would have been recorded in the window we’re talking about here - late 1995 or early 1996.
