Making hip-hop music — rapping, writing rhymes, making beats, performing, recording, and mixing — was my primary means of artistic expression from 1988-2011. In ninth grade, back in the mid 80s, my friend Amy Pearl played me Run-D.M.C.’s “Rockbox.” It blew my mind.
I stayed up late listening to riveting radio mix shows by legendary NYC deejays Red Alert, Chuck Chillout, Mr. Magic, and Marley Marl who broke new artists weekly. They introduced me to visionary golden age groups like Eric B. & Rakim, BDP, EPMD, X Clan, Stetsasonic, Queen Latifah, Public Enemy, Jungle Brothers, and many others, who were pivotal to my budding artistry and my nascent outlook on the world. Thanks to my paper route, I started buying every tape in the measly Rap section of the music stores on Central Ave in Yonkers.
The raw honesty spit in magnetic rhymes over crushing beats was like a magic elixir, an infusion of heart and soul when I needed it most. I’d finally found a language to communicate everything I was holding inside. Kids in school ridiculed my obsession, calling hip-hop a fad. It wasn’t long before I started rapping, deejaying, and producing myself under the alias Vesuveo, my middle name. Here’s a selection of personal favorites I’ve made over the years.
1. GREEN AND GOLD / FEATURING EMINEM, VESUVEO & ABLE (1998)
The title track to the third full-length album by my group The Anonymous, “Green and Gold” features a hungry, up-and-coming Eminem, me, and Able. I met Em after bumping into his manager on the Venice Beach boardwalk where I’d set up a makeshift booth to get my music out there after quitting yet another dead end restaurant job. His manager suggested we collaborate, and after listening to his music, I agreed. In late ‘97, Em came to LA for the Rap Olympics emcee battle where he fatefully gave his Slim Shady EP demo to an Interscope Records intern which made its way to Dr. Dre a few weeks later and led to his major label signing.
After the battle, Em and Paul Rosenberg came to my home studio on a back street in Venice and spent a few hours while he wrote and recorded his parts. We were ready when they arrived with a few options. Em picked a new instrumental of Zinn’s we hadn’t written to yet. Able and I floated a concept we’d recorded to a beat of mine a few weeks prior exploring what we might be willing to do to get rich. He worked out his verse and the intro while Able and I adapted our verses and the chorus to the new beat.
Released in the fall of 1998 on GoodVibe Records, weeks before his first single with Dre, “Green and Gold” rose to #9 on the U.S. Rap radio charts. We had a video planned but the morning of the shoot Paul called to tell me that Dre had to squash it because he didn’t want us taking eyeballs away from Em’s debut. My most celebrated record to date, Em’s presence challenged us to step up our game. I went for mine with a personal verse referencing the value of artistic integrity and the grueling immigrant journey of my ancestors. During the session, Em asked me for scrap paper. Turns out, I gave him an old restaurant resumé of mine, on which he wrote his verse. He left it behind and I saved it for 27 years before selling it at Sotheby’s 50th Anniversary Hip-Hop Auction.
2. LIFE ON EARTH / FEATURING VESUVEO & ABLE (1999)
The last song we recorded as a group, The Anonymous’ “Life on Earth” was created in a few hours at Zinndeadly’s studio in Venice. No hook, no scratches, just a butter beat with smooth rhymes. It’s the only song Able and I didn’t use pen and paper to write the lyrics. Instead, we stacked lines in our minds, putting together each verse one stanza at a time, tossing it back and forth. We had the song memorized by the time it was written. Originally released on GoodVibe Records in 1999 as an EP on vinyl and cassette, Dedicated signified the end of an era. We all went solo after it came out. I marked the transition by moving back to New York to focus on production after spending 4 months recording and performing in Italy. The cover art features an early photo-collage of mine using 6 photographs I shot of my backyard at The Villa, my bungalow in Venice, where we wrote and recorded all our songs, with a beautiful mural painted by our stellar longtime DJ Drez.
3. SPARK NASTY / FEATURING VESUVEO (2011)
From my 2011 solo debut Shine, “Spark Nasty” might be my favorite off this album. I’ve always been partial to Zinndeadly’s smooth, atmospheric beats. I altered my energy, tone, and delivery for different parts of the song to bring dynamics to the vocal performance. DJ Drez’s scratches add that special seasoning. It also features cameos by two virtuoso Indian musicians, Rabindra Narayan Goswami on sitar and Ramchandra Pandit (RIP) on tabla. I recorded them because I thought they’d give the beat a new dimension, that marriage of hip-hop with folk music from around the world, which has always been a source of musical inspiration to me. I’d always wanted to make a solo record, but it ain’t easy to carry every song on an album alone. A deeply personal record, it took five years and fifty demoes to complete. I experimented a lot. Mixed by Matt Lavella, I recorded all 9 songs in my home studio. I didn’t use a pen and paper to write the lyrics. I sat in front of the mic and recorded one rhyme at a time as they came to me.
4. FOREVER AND A DAY / FEATURING MYSTIC (2001)
From Mystic’s Grammy-nominated Cuts for Luck and Scars for Freedom LP, I originally produced this beat for an Anonymous song. But when GoodVibe chief Matt Kahane heard it, he slipped it to Mystic and she picked it for her debut. So I ran with it. It was a big break for me as a producer. I was paid $500, the most I’d made up to that point. I programmed a tough beat and bass line and then added cut-up samples of koto (plucked string instrument) and shamisen (wooden flute) from an old Japanese folk record to form the foundation for the track. Mystic’s unique vocal presence and heartfelt lyrics brought the song to life. It got a lot of love when it came out in 2001. The Source magazine called it “the jewel of the collection with spine-tingling piano keys and thunderous drums.” The album was re-released by Universal Music in 2011 to celebrate its tenth anniversary.
5. OMEN INSTRUMENTAL (2003)
This beat represents my time in NYC after moving back from LA, merging the rugged sound of my early years with a more polished presentation. You can definitely hear the West Coast influence, especially Dr. Dre, one of my favorite producers all-time. Gaetano Lattanzi, a talented multi-instrumentalist, elevated the track to new heights with his keyboard riffs. I was aiming for big budget artists but I still wanted my tracks to sound nasty. The bones of the beat I made in the aftermath of 9/11 while I was living in a bathroom sized room in a shared apartment on East 25th Street in Manhattan after losing yet another dead end restaurant job because people were still shook in the city and no one was going out to eat. It was a challenging time on all fronts, to say the least, reflected in the dark mood of the track.
Still, making beats took me places rapping couldn’t. A few years later, I started placing tracks in dozens of MTV and VH1 shows which generated great royalties. I collaborated with a bunch of artists on their albums, among them Northern State. In 2004, for their Columbia/Sony debut, I was paid $24K to produce two songs. I got to pick where we recorded, all expenses paid, so we used the legendary Sony Music Studios on Manhattan’s west side, in the same room that Beyoncé did “Crazy in Love”. There were tapes from G-Unit’s session the night before on the mixing board when we arrived. Swizz Beats’ studio was across the hall. The monitors were 6 feet tall and sat on massive magnets so they wouldn’t shake the room. Pete Rock, DJ Muggs and Questlove — all hip-hop titans — also produced tracks on the album. For a kid who grew up idolizing hip-hop stars, I was once again amidst rap royalty and this time, my production had gotten me get there.
6. WHEN WE WERE KINGS / FEATURING VESUVEO & ABLE (1998)
Possibly our best song as a group, “When We Were Kings” captures us at our peak. Zinn with the ridiculous one-of-a-kind beat, mixing a classical string sample from Scheherazade with a crushing boom-bap beat and bass line. Drez wax-axing on the scratches. And Able and me deep in the cut, going toe-to-toe with poignant lyrics that capture the urgency and uncertainty of our lives at that moment, while grounded in our truths. We’d been in Los Angeles for three years by then, still had shitty dead end jobs, no record deal, nothing to lose, and lots to gain. We recorded and mixed it at my bungalow in Venice aka The Villa, where The Big Lebowski was filmed. I had to move my studio gear out of the way for the Coen brothers to film the scene where The Dude is confronted by his landlord for not paying the rent. Art imitates life. Struggling to make ends meet, I negotiated $10K for 3 days of filming in and around my bungalow, a big score at the time.
7. DUCK SEASON / FEATURING VESUVEO & ABLE (1996)
The core songs of Weep No More, our 2nd full length, were created in our Venice home studio in our first year in Los Angeles. We’d thrown ourselves into the deep end, performing at any venue that would have us, from dingy rock clubs to empty sports bars, bougie restaurants to spaced out raves, underground open mics to pay-to-play talent shows. At one such gig, we met a young entrepreneur named Jim Fredo of Arcane Records, a godsend, who signed us and invested $30K into this album. For the first time we had a budget and recorded three songs at Paramount Recording Studios in Hollywood, hired a great publicist, and a savvy young street promoter named Minus who got our music into the hands of all the influential hip-hop deejays across the country.
“Duck Season” was inspired by a gig we landed opening for Wu-Tang Clan protegé Shyheim. The stage was ringed three deep with hungry emcees from South Central hip-hop hotbed Project Blowed. Upset that a few out-of-towners had gotten this prime gig, they shouted over our rhymes and heckled us throughout our set. We'd planned an impromptu freestyle to close out the show. Fed up, Able finished his last rhyme yelling, “And Project Blowed can blow me!” Thirty dudes rushed the stage and tried to pry the mikes from our hands to battle us on the spot. In the sheer pandemonium, we held tight and escaped without a bruise, deciding to retaliate with this song, a warning to sucker duck emcees. I incorporated birds chirping throughout, blending a cello riff with a tough beat and bass line, and adding a Verdi orchestral sample in the hook with the turntable wizardry of DJ Mark Luv.
We capped this period off with an unforgettable show at the House of Blues on the Sunset Strip. We were supposed to open for Born Jamericans and do a short 15-minute set but when they cancelled a few days before the gig, we agreed to headline if they gave us 2,000 comp tickets. We packed the house passing out free tickets to see us at one of the city’s premiere venues.
8. ALGIERS POINT / FEATURING VESUVEO & EVELYN HARRIS (2011)
The first single off Shine, “Algiers Point” features the always stellar Evelyn Harris of Grammy- winning acapella group Sweet Honey In The Rock. The song’s concept came from an article my brother Tommy shared with me from The Nation magazine. It exposed unsolved hate crimes perpetrated by racist white vigilantes in New Orleans in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. My buddy Dave Stern played all the guitar parts. That main guitar loop he came up with holds the whole thing together. I added a three piece horn section to give the song a New Orleans vibe. I used more live instrumentation on this track than any other production. Only the drums I programmed.
9. DR. EZ’S COOL FANTASTIC PART II (1998)
Created for a DJ Drez mixtape, “Dr. EZ’s Cool Fantastic Part II” features 10 emcees — in order of appearance: Rakaa of Dilated Peoples, Vesuveo (me), Able, Tony da Skitzo, Divine Styler, Neb Luv, Luckyiam, The Grouch, Asop, and Sunspot Jonz of Living Legends. I agreed to produce, record, and mix the song at The Villa for Drez as long as we could also put it on The Anonymous Green and Gold album, which was also in the works. Drez was all for it.
The biggest challenge for me was to create a track that could keep the listener interested for 7 minutes while still maintaining a cohesive groove the emcees could ride. I cut-up samples from Bob Marley’s classic “No More Trouble” and layered them with programmed drums, bass, and an ethereal flute sample I played in on my ASR10. Released in 1998, it rose to #1 on the Urban Network underground hip-hop chart. URB magazine wrote, “II has one of the most elaborate beats I’ve heard this year; the components evolve like living organisms.” I was unknown when arrived in LA three years earlier. Now, thanks to my hustle, community building, and budding association with Drez, I found ourselves in the thick of it and working with the cream of the West Coast scene.
10. BABYLON INSTRUMENTAL (1999)
This track represents the peak era of my production work at The Villa in Venice. I flipped a bunch of orchestral samples, a live ride cymbal loop, and a nasty drum roll into a fevered pitch, punctuated by the cinematic intro and a wild string break half way through. I started producing in 1992 during my senior year in college after charging an Ensoniq EPS-16+ sampling keyboard on my credit card. I’d messed around on my friends’ equipment for years, but getting my own gear allowed me to dedicate myself. It came fast. My years of deejaying and avid listening trained my ears to what I liked to hear. My production chops got a big lift from collaborating closely with Zinn, himself a gifted producer. In the beginning, I looped and truncated samples. Then I learned to program beats and musical accompaniments from a library of my own samples and sounds. Later on, as my craft evolved, I started to integrate live musicians.
11. CHRISTMAS IN HOLLIS LIVE / FEATURING VESUVEO & HOLIDELIC (2011)
One of my favorite live performances, here’s a collaboration I did with the incredible Everett Bradley (member of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, percussionist and background vocalist for Bon Jovi, Hall & Oates, etc) and his blazing Holidelic 9-piece funk band at the Iron Horse Music Hall in Northampton, Massachusetts. We did Run-D.M.C.’s holiday classic “Christmas in Hollis” with a nasty rhythm section, 3 backup singers, and a horn section. He even had the tinsel and sleigh bells, let alone the wig and the platform shoes. He doesn’t mess around. We didn’t even get a chance to rehearse but you wouldn’t know it.
