Local Lingo: Bay Area Jazz Rap '90-'99 Anthology Vol. 14
01. Quannum MCs – Bombonyall | Davis, '99
02. Hieroglyphics – Oakland Blackouts1 [Live in Seattle '99] | Oakland, '99
03. New Moon – New Moon vs. Stress | San Jose, '99
04. Tony Francis Cardassius – Slippin' Into Darkness | Vallejo, '99
05. Gabba – 415 Representas | San Francisco, '99
06. Bicasso – Elevation (101 North) | Oakland, '99
07. Mission (Crown City Rockers) – Testing | Oakland, '99
08. Street Reportas – Desert Sands | San Francisco, '99
09. Mr. Kee – Sun Down to Sunrise | San Francisco, '99
10. Scratch Paper – Applauding Audiences | San Jose, '99
11. Esoin – Jungle Abyss ft. Dem-1 | San Jose, '99
12. Zion I – Tag UR Name | Oakland, '99
13. Maleko – Til the Candles Stop Burnin' | Half Moon Bay, '99
14. The Basics – Keep On Tryin' | San Jose, '99
15. Nomadik Mind Travlers – Hazey Elements | San Jose, '99
16. Culture Identity – Untitled #16 | San Francisco, '99
17. Young Joseph – Our Time to Shine ft. Rich | San Francisco, '99
18. Bink – Something 2 Ride to | Vallejo, '99
19. Foreign Legion – Full Time B-Boy | Oakland, '99
20. Sunspot Jonz – No Clue | Oakland, '99
21. Record Players – Untitled #4 | San Jose, '99
22. Justin Morales – A Long Story | San Jose, '99
23. T-Buck – Da Funky Flow | Daly City, '99
24. B-Ski Rocks – Coast 2 Coast | San Francisco, '99
25. Gift of Gab – Rhyme Like a Nut! | Davis, '99
Peace to Zumbi from Zion I and Gift of Gab.
Minor liner notes on Volume 14
1 – Because I figure everyone listening to this has heard 3rd Eye Vision, I went with something different. A live version rather than the studio. Not the same performance in the audio as in the embedded video above.
Look folks, you can put quotes 'round those footnotes.
And that concludes our trip around the Bay Area. Hope you found somethin' to help get ya through the summer. 14 days, 350 tracks. That's over 2.5 gigs and nearly1 one full day's worth of music. I made this so you could cherry-pick favorites, play it straight through during some kind of weirdo endurance BBQ party, or hit shuffle and hope you don't land on a socially conscious record that makes Grandma too upset to finish her macaroni salad. That's how we do it in the Bay.
This side of things is admittedly less madhouse / nuthouse and more arthouse / coffeehouse. That's never going to win the headline war. And while it doesn't have the slaps of hyphy or technical precision of turntablism, it's largely down to earth and relatable. On some Our Band Could Be Your Life type shit.
If I had to pick just one NorCal group to speak for my life and style back in high school, it'd have to be Hiero. The more Living Legends oriented kids were alright, but it was just too preppy, white, and L.A. for me. Then the few Zion I heads were halfway in-between the two camps.
This project has been in my head, in some form, for years if not decades now2. And the roots of it all go back to the beginning. My earliest memories are in the South Bay. Spent most of my life in the North Bay. Northern California, North Bay. Norf Norf, Vince Staples might say. But that's SoCal and I'm getting way sidetracked.
The truth is, this all started as a concept for a short compilation of songs from the Bay Area where the artist could reasonably be described as a West Coast member of the Native Tongues, i.e. what might get called homage now or biting back then. There was clearly a huge influence from De La and Tribe (and to a lesser extent Black Sheep and secondary acts) on not just so-called conscious rap, but also party rap, and pro-black political stuff too. We saw part of them in our own image here.
The Hip Hop Hippies had made their way down to Haight Street. This is of course not only seen in the name Local Lingo being indirectly related to Native Tongues, or even the main cover art with the 3 Feet High and Rising inspired font and Bay Area sports team tinted daisies, but also the part about “Bay Area Jazz Rap.” Perhaps a label you ascribed to yourself ten years ago no longer applies and while you've since peeled that particular “Hello I'm _____ !”sticker off, a large portion (perhaps a majority) of the public still think of you as wearing it. Sounds change and evolve. Sometimes tastes don't. And that's alright too.
All that to say, The Bay is its own thing. We get copied a lot, don't get me wrong. But it's like when gangster rappers try to cosplay as 2Pac. Sure you might have one aspect of the personality down, but where's the nuance? The layers? The depth? The subtlety? Y'all don't have our history or our complexity just because you took a little piece of our slang on some paint by numbers shit. They bite flows, but we make up new ones.
1 – I looked at the total duration after I settled on the tracklist. It was just about one day's worth of music. But then I cut out the dead air at the end (and beginning) of the tracks that needed it. So let's say you get to pick a song to add to the mix. Something that fits the theme and vibe. My general loose rules were: Bay Area, nineties, jazz or boom bap sound3, roughly between two and eight minutes, PG or PG-13 rather than R lyrics (nothing overtly violent or sexual that would sound out of place here), no using the same main artist in two songs unless they are using a noticeably different name (rather than a variation) for one of them. So for example, you can't choose New Moon, I already picked them once. (You can have the same group called two different things, have two groups called the same thing, and it just gets more confusing from there. Not the Funk Mobb from Stockton, the one from Vallejo!)
2 – Some of these tracks have been floating around loose in my brain, wanting to be on a playlist. And I've wanted to connect them together somehow, but didn't fully find the thread until recently. Songs in particular that made me make this anthology: Commanda C & DJ MF – Check 'Em, Bored Stiff – Peaceful Rotation, The Dereliks – I Am a Record, The B.U.M.S. – Elevation, Lackadaisical – And I, and L*Roneous – Doctrines of the Lip Swift.
But then I remembered / found more songs. Sometimes a gangster or a pimp wanted to take the time to spread the knowledge in a song instead of slick talk. And also, my parameters loosened slightly. Then there were points where it was like, to hit and end on a big landmark number of total tracks, I could either cut twenty songs or find thirty more. And it was always easier to find more rather than to get rid of songs I had already decided on. But I would find too many new possibilities again. And it quickly spiraled into what you see here.
3 – Okay, so there's some light g-funk that got snuck in there somehow, but there's also acid jazz to balance it out. That's how that works, right?
A few other songs I originally considered: MC Red went by Frank Red in '95 and had a song called I Get Down. But as other artists got added, this one got removed just for being one song too many, and the loss wouldn't hurt, as it was already covered by the MC Red jawn from '92.
Pep Love & Jay-Biz (The Shamen) were billed as The Prose when a compilation in '99 thought that their song The Prose from '93 was also the name of the group. That one briefly held a spot early on and even then it felt like cheating, so once that was no longer necessary, it was removed.
I couldn't find the '98 song Keep It Crankin' by Quinc featuring Smoke without an obvious DJ watermark. So I had to either include a song with drops on it, cut out the tag and truncate the track, or leave it out entirely. The song isn't historical enough to warrant either of those earlier options, so it got left on the cutting room floor.
In fact, since just one more song should push things over a day, here's that East Side Oakland (ESO) track I mentioned a couple weeks back. Since it's from '89, it'd go before Vol. 01. The first bonus track in history to be put at the beginning. Full Circle.
Believe it or not, everything else that I was really considering got included. The real struggle wasn't in making room for new artists, it was in narrowing down to a single representation per artist name. I wanted people who have been listening and digging for decades to be like, I've never seen that name before. Or at least to hear a demo they hadn't until that point. So that's why I put in music that not only dropped at the time, but unreleased gems that showed up out the vault years or even decades later. Studio quality tracks, but also lofi demos, live one-take jakes...
Any new finds anyone wants to share? Or which (if any) of the fourteen alternate cover collages is your favorite? People have already been posting feedback in the comments both here and over at The Martorialist (among other places), which has been great to see.
