The Other Dana Dane Comeback 12"

In a previous entry about Dana Dane's (notice the link, by the way? that's what I'm talkin' about!) latest comeback record, I mentioned he had an "other" one first. Well, this is it. "Let Me Do My Thing" came out a year before "Fame 2000" on Hardball Entertainment, and it's produced and co-written by, believe it or not, Redhead Kingpin and David Wynn (I don't know much about Mr. Wynn, but there's a definite Teddy Riley connection here, as he's co-produced stuff by artists like Wreckx-N-Effect and Blackstreet).

This was a pretty low-key, limited release... when I mentioned it to Redhead Kingpin in a 1999 interview, he was pretty surprised anybody'd heard of it. Redhead was making a bit of a comeback as a producer at the time, producing for R&B singers like Mona Lisa, Case, Kandice Love and Kym Rae. He was mainly pleased by how different they were able to make Dana sound from his old school work, and that if you were to hear this on the radio, you wouldn't even recognize that it was him (which is true; Dane's famous accent is almost entirely lost in the deep, whispered ultra-laid back delivery on this record). Now, I don't really know how good of an idea it is to take a beloved old school entertainer making his comeback and strip him of his most appealing and sellable aspects on his "debut" single, but hey. It's what they wanted to do, I guess; and they succeeded.

So... the song's not bad. The production is kind of bouncy, but slow, with a very "all music created by a studio technician with no samples or instruments" kind of sound. Dane's rapping is adequate, but completely uninspired. I doubt anybody would really dislike the song, per se; but you'd have to be a pretty serious Dana Dane fan to really care if you heard it a second time. The b-side features a remix, with the same basic instrumental chopped a little differently by Mate Boogie (he also did a remix for that Redhead produced Kym Rae single I mentioned before), who also adds some scratches to the mix... which manages to make it slightly more interesting, but still nothing more than mixtape filler.
Unfortunately, I couldn't find any current links for Redhead Kingpin (though he was recently featured on the 90's remix of Nas's "Where Are They Now?"), but I did find DJ Wildstyle (of the FBI crew)'s myspace. :)