Royal Renegades Week, Day 2 - MC Boo and the Crew

I almost bought this album when it was new. I was on vacation with my family, driving to Florida, and we stopped at some Southern in-between state - forget which one now - and I saw a music store specializing in rap and hip-hop in the phone book at the hotel.  Of course I made my parents swing by, and it was like this little house, full of mostly cheap mixtapes.  Behind the counter, I saw MC Boo and the Crew, and I remember asking the guy if that could possibly be McBooo from BDP. And he was just like: nah, this is just some wack Miami bass shit; you don't want that. So I left without it. It happened that one of the tapes I'd brought with me on the trip was the first DJ Magic Mike and the Royal Posse album, and in the car I'm looking at the liner notes and I see MC Boo! Well, by that point it was too late to go back and I didn't get this album until many, many years later, when I finally ordered it from Amazon as an adult, filling the little gaps in my collection.

Honestly, I wasn't missing all that much over the years. I mean, it's not bad. But you see that blurb on the front cover? "THE BEST BASS ALBUM EVER RECORDED...!" Well, yeah, it's not that.

You would think the biggest issue would be the loss of Magic's production, and yeah... the production is weaker. Still okay, but weaker. But the most disappointing aspect is MC Boo. After "We're On a Mission," I expected more from him. He's not terrible or anything, but he's just... generic. Average. Good enough to get by without embarrassing himself, but never saying anything slick or compelling or kicking a delivery that stands out at all. Same with the production.

Now, at this point you may be asking, "who is The Crew?" No, there's not another team of junior MCs on hand or anything. It seems to just be referring to his DJ, Ray Swift, T. Isaam and the Ocean Records production team. The DJ, in fact, is the real star of this album. Even though they left Magic, they still had somebody on hand who could provide some really nice cuts, which definitely breath some energy into an otherwise dull album.

Unlike MC Madness, T. Isaam, and even Jan Hrkach or DJ Lace, MC Boo hadn't been working on Mike's albums since the first one. He'd been out of the picture for a few years. So, in a way, this is a bit of a comeback for him (which he raps about on one of the strongest cuts on here, the opener "Freeze"). But it also means that he doesn't seem to share the same hostility towards Mike or Cheetah Records, so there are no diss cuts. There is one song with a line about how he "used to kick rhymes with my so-called friends," which seems like it might be a Royal Posse reference, but the song's about how he grew up as a hustling youth, so he could just be talking about kids he went to school with or something. He's basically going for a "I'll just do my thing," live and let live career move here, which is respectable. But on a generally plain, disappointing album like this, a diss or any kind of statement with stakes would've gone a long way towards making this interesting at least.

A bigger part of the problem is that, despite this being an MC Boo album, a bunch of the tracks on here are strictly instrumental, so Boo's not even involved. Frankly, that shit bores me on Mike's albums, and when your production is weaker than Mike's... yawnsville. One song features a big sax solo instead of vocals, which is interesting on paper, but in practice, it's just not enough to hold a whole song together. At least not when the rest of the track is so flat. And we get a song called "Bangle Sluts" on side 1 and "Bangle Sluts (Re-Mix)" on side 2. First of all, the song's alright I guess, but it's definitely not compelling enough to warrant two versions on the same album. Secondly, the Re-Mix is actually just the instrumental.

Amazingly - and I don't mean "amazingly" in a hyperbolic way, my mind was literally blown by this when I first heard it - one song, at the end of side one, consists of nothing but a loop of a ticking clock for several minutes. Not even a bass hum! Yet, bizarrely, it's titled "Back To the Bass." I mean, if you were looking a moment that perfectly emblematizes everything that's wrong with this album, here you go.


Again, though, don't get me wrong. If you're a Royal Posse completist, this album has moments that will at least get a pass... Some decent samples, and again, it comes to life when Ray Swift gets on the tables (primarily the DJ cut "Go Crazy"). Wisely, "Freeze" was the single, b/w a boring but passable instrumental called "Let the Bass Go," which actually doesn't have much of a deep bassline. "Kickin' Rhymes To the Rhythm" would've been a better choice, it's actually the best song on here, with a funky sample, nice drums, killer scratches, and a naturalistic emphasis on Boo's rhymes.

But things are about to heat up in Royal Renegades week, as tomorrow we unleash the Madness...

Royal Renegades Week, Day 1

On "Through the Years," a song he liked so much, he included it on at least four of his albums, DJ Magic Mike breaks down his musical history, and talks about the extensive line-up of his crew, The Royal Posse, saying:


"I started my own crew,
I called it Royal Posse, and I start with twenty-two.*
Now the posse's on - dope DJs and rappers, G;
Finally made a name, but we're only known locally.
How many obstacles do I have to face?
My only solution was to head for Miami bass.
Everything I touched was a number one pick;
But wouldn't you know, I had to get the shitty end of the stick?
But I wasn't gonna let it stop me;
Back to Orlando to unite with the Posse.
But as time passes, people change like the seasons
And most of the posse changed for the wrong reasons
Everybody ain't true, everybody ain't straight;
I had to bring the posse down from twenty-two to eight."

Now, The Royal Posse's line-up was ever-shifting (MC Madness had a skit on his second album saying he'd send you on an all expense paid trip if you could name two albums where the personnel was exactly the same), but the biggest change happened essentially all at once, when a bunch of members openly broke it off and struck out on their own, most notably his best known partner, MC Madness. They were pissed at Magic for wanting to do solo projects after Madness started to get cornier, and at Cheetah Records over payment issues (Mike was vice-president of the label, and Cheetah's president, Tom Reich, was also Mike's manager and executive produced all their stuff... so the pair probably seemed pretty inextricable to the guys, even though Mike wound up leaving Cheetah and forming Magic Records a few years later), so they went off as a unit to the freshly formed Ocean Records.

So, just who went? Well, MC Madness, of course. He released his debut solo album, Come Get This $ Honey for them in 1993, saying in his first song, "I got side-tracked by a bogus brother: DJ M&M, that punk motherfucker. Now I'm back, the game I'm gonna win." In the Special Thankx[sic.] of their biggest album together, Ain't No Doubt About It, Magic Mike wrote to Madness, "YOU'RE MY BOY TILL THE END. FUNNY HOW I CAN'T SEE THE END. DAMN SURE COULDN'T TELL THIS 4 YEARS AGO. GOD WORKS IN MYSTE-RIOUS WAYS." That was in 1992 - things sure changed quick.

Now, the only other album Ocean put out was another Royal Posse exile: MC Boo and the Crew's Back To Bass-ics (though Madness and Boo also dropped a single each off of their albums). Among other things, MC Boo is the MC on the original "Drop the Bass" on the debut DJ Magic Mike and the Royal Posse album in 1989 (where he also has the intriguing credit of being the "Rap Consultant"). Also, the liner notes are incomplete so he's not credited, but he did that incredible track, "We're On a Mission."

So that's two core rappers out. But who else left? Well, DJ Lace, the other half of Vicious Base, stepped off around this time. He went on to do a lot of stuff - both in Miami bass, and more in clubby techno kinda music - but didn't seem to get too caught up in the drama - though he did record an album with DJ Fury, the guy responsible for "Magic Dike" and all that other anti-Magic Mike stuff.  Mike dissed Fury pretty hard with "Fury Who?" on This Is How It Should Be Done.  Anyway, Lace didn't follow the guys to Ocean Records, though Madness does shout him out in the liner notes of his solo joint, suggesting who he sided with in the split; and I don't believe he ever worked with Magic or Cheetah again.  And I've just recently blogged about what Magic Mike did with the Vicious Base name years later.  Mike did diss him in the liner notes of his 20 Degrees Below Zero EP, though, for forming 2BMF with producer Beat Master Wizzy, who produced a couple early Royal Posse songs and was actually down with Vicious Base before the Royal Posse album, then left earlier on (I guess around the time Boo left). But they never recorded a Magic Mike diss or anything.

Another big drop out, though, was definitely T. Isaam. He was the new member of the crew on 1990's Bass Is the Name of the Game, and contributed to all the other albums before his parting. In fact, he was the only other Royal Posse member to get a full album with Mike: 1991's Southern Hospitality. The other core members, guys who were down for years and years, still never had the shot to put out any albums they could call their own, just verses on all of Mike's albums.  T. Isaam never put out an album of his own again, but was a major writer and producer on Madness and Boo's albums.

Also, perhaps less obvious to us hip-hop fans, but a major player to go was Jan Hrkach. Jan was a member of pretty much the only notable act on Cheetah Records besides Magic Mike (i.e. the only other ones to drop multiple releases), the techno group called Radioactive Goldfish. Jan was a big behind-the-scenes guy at Cheetah, engineering, mixing and even occasionally producing a song for Mike's albums. Well, he became president of Ocean Records... which certainly explains why Radioactive Goldfish stopped putting out records on Cheetah after 1992, and the label really became nothing but Mike's vehicle. Jan also did the mixing, engineering and some "electric bass" instrumentation on Boo's album.

Other members quietly drifted in and out of the Posse at different times, but this was the big rift. And we're gonna study it for the rest of the week.  It's been a while since I've done a "week." 8)


*Here's a fun trivia challenge: try to name all twenty-two!