♪ Check it out, yo. ♪
♪ And it sounds so nice. ♪
♪ Hip-Hop, you the love of my life. ♪
♪ I'm about to take you to the top. ♪
♪ Hip-Hop, hip-hop to the top. ♪
- So one of my favorite joints of all time,
no doubt, 100,000%, Babe Ruth, "The Mexican."
Either released in 1972 or 1973.
I didn't know at the time that it was
gonna become a staple in hip-hop.
The B-Boys, the B-girls in the Bronx,
and then beyond that globally, really took that record.
Ultimately, in the eighties, it became part of
the Ultimate Bricks and Beats compilations.
Wound up getting sampled by a ton of hip-hop producers.
It was innocent when I was listening to it
as a six, seven year old.
My sister was into early jazzy, soulful disco.
The record just sonically had a depth to it
that's kinda hard to explain because
I didn't really know how to articulate music at that stage.
Thinking back on it, it's hard to articulate now.
The song just meant something, it had a soul.
Another track that comes to mind that...
Wow, man this brings me back to basketball.
It brings me back to sneakers.
1980, The Treacherous Three released the song
on Enjoy Records called, "The Body Rock."
At that point, for what I was hearing
most of rhyming was pretty simple,
very motivated to move the crowd.
You know, party rhymes.
Not that The Treacherous Three weren't
adept at doing that as well, but they were lyrical.
To me, they're so far ahead of the curve.
Doing compound rhymes, doing alliteration.
Special K was like,
♪I'm not in the place by accident ♪
♪ 'cause I been sent to represent the magnificent ♪
♪ intelligent that's why I'm on the mic with this statement ♪
♪that the party's content is excitement, feel confident ♪
♪ I'm a resident and I'm a resident of this establishment ♪
♪ and that this department got a document ♪
♪ for every red cent that they spent to help pay the rent ♪
♪ for this announcement. ♪
That's 1980, think about how complex of a rhyme that is.
When we get to G Rap and we get to Cool Keith and Rakim,
we get complex rhymes but that's, like, years later.
The Treacherous Three were way ahead of the curve.
For some reason, as a 13, 14 year old it just spoke to me.
If there was one song to really
point at as an Anthem of the entire decade
that me and Stretch were on the radio,
it would be O.C. "Time's Up."
So much so that, as a director of our documentary,
which eventually aired on Showtime
and was licensed to Netflix,
O.C. "Time's Up" is in the intro title sequence of the film.
Buck Wild was a producer on it,
but O.C. spoke exactly what we were all aspiring to.
Sure, he got technical with,
♪ You lack the the minerals and vitamins, ♪
♪ irons and the niacin. ♪
But when he said,
♪I'd rather be broken, have a whole lot of respect, ♪
♪it's the principle of it. ♪
♪I get a rush when I bust some dope rhymes I wrote ♪
♪ That maybe somebody will quote. ♪
That's my existence to this day.
Thank you to O.C., and Tremendous Record.
I can't talk about music without mentioning
the one and only.
Perhaps, if the universe had to decide
on a voice to represent it, it would be Stevie Wonder.
The brother could sing in eight octaves.
He's been recording since the early sixties.
So how many decades is that?
Sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties,
two thousands, 2010, 2020.
That's seven decades that he's been apart of, crushing.
You understand what that means?
Seven decades of hits and affecting people,
making people cry.
Naturally with me and Stretch's album, No Request,
while we were deciding on what songs we would interpret,
"If You Really Love Me,"
which is one of my favorites by Stevie,
was a no-brainer.
We enlisted Maimouna Youssef
aka Mumu Fresh, who's from the DMV, to be on a mic.
She sung with The Roots and Common,
and she's a solo artist and phenomenal, strong woman,
strong spirit.
And she crushed it.
And I feel like our version is its own entity.
Sure, we emulate Stevie,
but we can't be Stevie and we're not trying to be Stevie.
It felt nice to do an album
and have something Stevie-related to it,
because he's meant a lot in my life.
Eddie Palmieri,
Ten time Grammy Award Winner,
National Endowment of the Arts, jazz master,
Latin music legend,
but also an activist.
Eddie Palmieri, in the early seventies,
did a concert at Sing Sing
for the incarcerated population there.
Eddie was so ahead of the curve in terms of...
He was making Latin music in the 1950s and 1960s.
But in the seventies, he enlisted some players
that were in Aretha Franklin's band and really created
this new genre of...
Latin meets funk meets jazz meets soul,
which had been dibbled and dabbled in prior.
But the way that Eddie did it was insane.
He did it at Sing Sing
for one of his biggest records, Azucar.
They called it Azucar part two, part three.
As a DJ,
if I play Azucar live a Sing Sing,
that's like the records that get the B-boys out,
the B-girls out, but also the sauceros out.
It just crosses so many boundaries
and that's what me and Stretch's album is about.
Bridging people together, not building walls to divide.
I'm still pinching myself that Eddie Palmieri
would sign me and Stretch for our debut album.
And that's my life in five!
♪ Check it out, yo ♪
♪ And it sounds so nice, ♪
♪ Hip hop, you the love of my life. ♪
♪ I'm about to take you to the top, ♪
♪ Hip-Hop, hip-hop, to the top. ♪