Larry Larr Meets The Fat Boys!

Okay, he met one Fat Boy.

It's been a while since I've written a proper post on here, so I'm coming with what I'm sure you're all demanding: Larry Larr's love song.  "Larry, That's What They Call Me" was Larry's big single from his 1991 debut album, Da Wizzard of Odds on Ruffhouse/ Columbia Records.  There was a video and everything.  But unfortunately it didn't blow up and by 1992, he was unsigned again.  But there was one more single the label before Columbia gave up, proof positive that the label didn't know what to do with this raw talent: "Confused," the token love song every rapper had to do for a major label to prove they were versatile.

That said, Larry was versatile, and he was able to make this song swing.  It's not one of those slow, whispered, "hey girl, you know I love you, girl, from the night until the day, girl, until you're mine forever, girl" songs everybody started making since "I Need Love."  I mean, he does lay down a bunch of cliches interspersed with the word "girl" a lot in the first verse: "girl, I hate to strut you inside my rap, but girl, you got me hooked; you're all that.  I love the way that you look, the way that you walk, the way that you dress and the way that you talk.  Girl, I'd like to have you for my own.  Girl, I can't help it, let me take you home."

But he's rapping fast on a high energy track with that hard P-funk "zoom" effect X-Clan used to love being constantly cut in by his DJ Mad Ice.  It's like a hardcore new jack swing track with live funk guitar and this girl Stephanie Miller singing her heart out for more than just a repeated hook.  She gets to delve into some back and forth, reminding me of Kwamé's "Ownlee Eue" or the songs Grand Puba used to do with Mary J Blige.  Chuck Nice produced most of the album, but two guys named Craig "Make The Gruve" Caruth and Rob Williams did this one.  Which makes sense, since this isn't the kind of Philly street track Larry was the real master of.  But honestly, this song works and even manages not to feel out of place on the LP.

If you want to hear an out of place song on that album, check out the CD version which has an exclusive house song called "Get Funky."  Wow.

Anyway, that's "Confused."  It's super 90's.  Like, check out this exchange, "(Larry, I'm sorry; I didn't mean to hurt you.)  Girl, I'm cooler than the cat in the Cheetos commercial."  But the writing gets better when they get into the meat of the song and why it's called "Confused."  It's about young, capricious lovers cheating and naively wounding each other.  Stephanie really killed it here.  I tried looking her up online but apparently she didn't take off like she really should've.  Discogs links one or two credits many years later, and I'm pretty suspicious that it's a different Stephanie Miller.  But it surely didn't help her that Columbia kicked her off the single.

Yeah, "Confused" is an album track, but the single is notable because it has exclusive remixes that it puts first.  I have the CD single, which has all the same versions, but the 12" single has a B-side called "Keep On Y'all," which is right off of the album.  The back cover credits vocals by EST, but disappointingly, he doesn't rap on it; he just comes in to do the shout outs at the end.  It's a slick song, though, and the kind of thing Larry's fans really wanted from him; it makes a lot of sense to see it on the B-side.  Alternatively, the CD-single just has a bonus radio edit.  Otherwise, the two's track-listing's are the same.

So let's get to the Fat Boy already!  Yeah, who's an artist you'd least expect to turn up and remix Larry Larr?  Prince Markie Dee and the Soul Convention?  Well, it fits considering this is a 1991 new jack love rap.  Yes, the two Marks have gotten on board not just to remix but "Remake" it.  They'd already started making a name for themselves producing this kind of stuff for Father MC, but this was before "Real Love" and before they came out with any of their albums and people had really caught on that Prince Markie Dee had reinvented himself outside of the Fat Boys.  But they've turned it into a real Soul Convention song, with their signature piano and completely replacing all of Miller's vocals with their own whole group of uncredited R&B girls.  And honestly, they're good, too, riffing and crooning behind all of Larry's verses besides just the parts in between.  They've turned it into a sweeter song, though they keep some of the original percussive elements and "zoom" effect, stretching it out to over six and a half minutes with lots of solos and extended choruses.

They even made a music video for it, though I don't remember ever seeing it on Rap City back in the day.  It's cut down considerably to a more traditional radio-friendly length (and yes, shorter than the Radio Edit on the CD single).  So you don't really get the Soul free-for-all vibe of the full-length version, which lets the girls open the song acapella and take over the last few minutes until it's almost a gospel song, except instead of professing eternal love for Jesus, they beg for Larry's forgiveness.  It's actually kind of epic.

There's also a Hip-Hop Mix of "Confused," also by Mr. Make the Gruve.  Instrumentally it's pretty dope, just layering in a bunch of classic breaks and samples.  It's got the famous Lyn Collins "Think" break, famous as Rob Base's "Woo! Yeah!" "It Takes Two" beat, as well as the "Mardi Gras" bells.  It's got some "Let's Dance" in there and that sick shredded electric guitar sample Professor Griff used for "Pawns In the Game."  It's dope, even though Larry's relationship raps don't really fit.  But it really falls apart when they try to lay Stephanie's vocals on them and they don't gel at all.  It's pure tissue rejection.  Too bad they didn't set Larry's "Get Funky" vocals to this instead.

But anyway, yeah, this didn't work out for Larry Larr.  He got dropped.  But things went better for Prince Markie Dee, who'd go on to produce a host of A-list artists and sign to Motown to release his own albums with the Convention.  It's a shame he didn't reach back out to Larry and fit him into Love Daddy somewhere.  But then again, they probably wouldn't've been able to recreate the magic they got here.  Because this single's surprisingly good.  So actually, maybe it would've been better if Stephanie Miller joined the Soul Convention.  Then again, maybe she did.  I don't think those girls tended to get all their credits on those albums.

Fat Boy Back In Effect

In 1991, when FS Effect came out, I had no idea who they were or what their music sounded like. But I bought their album anyway. Why? Because this was after The Fat Boys had broken up. Prince Markie Dee said he was tired of being in a group people looked on as a joke. Also, he really wasn't so fat, at least compared to the other two - if he lost anymore weight, he was gonna stick out... but that probably wasn't so much on his mind. Anyway, he left, and we fans were left wondering what was he going to do now... We eventually found out that he was going to become a surprisingly successful, R&B-fused producer who'd even score a couple solo hits, more suited for Video LP ("kiss it or diss it?") than Rap City.  But this was in that void, between The Fat Boys and The Soul Convention. He made his first appearance doing a guest verse on FS Effect's debut album.

Well, the group turned out to be a decent but fairly generic new jack swing group; and the reason Markie Dee chose to start his comeback here is pretty easy to guess. He was producing them. He didn't do their whole album, but he did several tracks, including their lead single and, of course, the song he appears on. I found out years later that I could've just bought the single, because Markie Dee's guest verse is the B-side. Oh well. Here it is now.

So the A-side is "Your Luvin'." It was also the first song on the album. They did have a second single ("I Wanna Be Your Lover," which features Christopher Williams singing circles around them) and a some exposure on the New Jack City soundtrack, but you can really tell Giant Records figured all of FS Effect was predicated on this one song. The full-length, So Deep It's Bottomless, was really just a formality to make the single more official. If this song was a hit, then maybe they'd put some more money into these guys and maybe stick with 'em for a while. But it wasn't, and their story's a pretty short one.

So how is it already? It's not bad. It's certainly well produced, with a lot of keyboards and smoothed out funk guitars played over a solid break beat. And there's some really nice R&B vocals for the hook, which all blends together seamlessly. I mean, a lot of heads are going to outright hate this just for being a new jack rap/R&B hybrid; but if you're open to the style, it's certainly a well put together example of it. Really, the only weak spot is the rapping. But that's a pretty big weak point, because all the MCs have super simple, stilted deliveries, and weak, contrived rhymes: "I like to think back to the days when I used to be trippin' about bein' engaged at a tender age. That made me remember the stage of years, when I was still wet behind the ears." They're clearly all trying to be Father MCs (who Markie Dee would also successfully produce for), but they just can't do it like he could.

But none of that shit's what we're here for, anyway. Flip this over to the B-side and we get "Mentally Stable." It's the album's hardcore track (think of the title track to Father MC's Father's Day), and it's the one where Markie Dee shows all these FS Effect guys how to rap. If you're interested, by the way, there were four guys: Joeseph Brim, Rich Love, Amery Ware and Carmel DJ EZ Lee. Yeah, surprisingly, they had a DJ, and he was probably the best part of the group. Certainly, his scratching on "I Wanna Be Your Lover" was the highlight of that single.

So yeah, think "Father's Day." It's hardcore, but not "Protect Ya Neck" hardcore. It's hardcore within the parameters of new jack swing: rolling piano loop, funky horn stabs, plenty of scratching by their DJ. Everybody says "motherfucker" at least once in their verse. And Markie Dee grabs the mic first to kill it. True Fat Boys aficionados will know that Markie Dee was always the beast of the trio in terms of rhyming. Granted, times have changed, bars have been raised... this surely isn't as impressive to fresh ears as it was back in '91, corny references stand out more now that everybody isn't doing them quite so much; but it was a genuinely exciting verse at the time. It was also still genuinely shocking to hear one of the Fat Boys declare "I'll kick your fuckin' ass" on a record. And the FS Effect guys... well, Markie clearly left them in the dust, but they do manage to pull their own weight at least enough to fill up the song without having it feel like it's hit any lulls or soft spots.

Now, the 12" features several mixes of both tracks, with promising titles like the Down Low Mix, Hip Hop Show or DK EZ Lee's Jeep Style... but, disappointingly, they're just overly fanciful ways to describe really basic radio, street and instrumental mixes. I was excited to hear the Bald Head version of "Mentally Stable" when I first brought this 12" home, but oh well. The song itself is still worth having, and the 12" single at least saves you the trouble of getting the whole album, which I'd reserve exclusively for die-hard new jack swing fans. Though if you like that kinda stuff, there are some well-sung hooks, fresh cutting and old school samples on there.

Markie Deethroned

Here's a surprisingly little known record (not on Discogs, etc), considering it was a pretty major label release from a long established artist: Markie Dee's "Bounce."

Perhaps part of the reason for the obscurity is the name change... Prince Markie Dee, formerly of the Fat Boys had already established a fairly successful solo career for himself, putting out some hit records of his own in addition to producing a lot more. Still, his '95 Motown album, Love Daddy, failed to yield any hit singles, so I guess he was looking for a new image. So, here he's just Markie Dee... though the front cover sticks a little crown image in place of the word "Prince," but the spine of the tape and the tape itself just reads "Markie Dee," and that's how this record's cataloged; so this was a full-on name change... though the writing credits do credit "Prince Markie Dee"... I'm guessing it was a label-imposed change, perhaps? He has since gone back to using the "Prince."

And this record has a new (or at least different from his last two albums) sound to go with his new image... in addition to dropping the "Prince" from his name, this artist-formerly-known-as stepped away from his, frankly kinda boring, R&B-heavy last album style for a more traditional hip-hop track.

For this venture, Markie Dee plays it relatively safe, using Kool & The Gang's essentially unaltered "Hollywood Swinging" for the track. The rapping delivery is a bit more relaxed then the Prince Markie Dee of old, and clearly a bid for the Hot 97 market. I can totally hear it coming out of my car radio in the late 90's in my mind... ;-) There's a real Bad Boy sound to this record - so much so, in fact, that Puff Daddy and Mase used the same track and made basically their own copy of the same record for their record, "Bad Boys." Anyone who used to work at Crave, if you're reading this... that could have been your hit!

See, what happened with this was: "Bounce" came out on Mariah Carey's short-lived vanity sub-label (of Sony), Crave, in 1997. When Mariah Carey divorced former Sony/ Columbia Records CEO Tommy Motolla that same year, the label was shut down, making this Markie Dee's final record (to date). The fact that he's not even on his cover (it's a woman's breasts, because the song is named "bounce," right? How classy) and no upcoming album is mentioned in the liner notes suggests that it was over before it began, and Crave just threw this out into stores knowing there'd be no follow up.

Now, this song comes in two versions: "Bounce" and "Bounce (Ol' School Intro)." The first version features several live instruments, almost tuning up, showcasing the fact that Markie Dee still had the whole Soul Convention engine behind him ...there's even a female R&B singer doing her thing in the background of the hook. The "Ol' School Intro," on the other hand, dumps that and replaces it with the much easier, but also much catchier, horn sample intro to the original Kool & The Gang record. I think Markie Dee agreed with me that this is the preferable version, as it's the "Ol' School Intro" version that's used for the instrumental mix on the B-side.

The hook of the song, interestingly, is a play on some of Rob Base's from "It Takes Two." It's a peculiar choice, and a lot of people who didn't grow up with "It Takes Two" on the radio every single day like me probably didn't catch it, but check out this lyric comparison and see for yourself:

"I'm Rob Base and I came to get down.
I'm not internationally known,
But I'm known to rock the microphone;
Because I get stupid,

I mean outrageous.
Stay away from me,

If you're contagious.
...
Ladies love me,

Girls adore me;
I mean even the ones who never saw me

Like

The way that I rhyme at a show"

Vs.

"My name is Mark and I came to get down.

And I'm internationally known

For chillin' in my Benz with an eighteen chrome.

I got honies,

So outrageous;

We can get it on

'Cause Mark is the greatest.

Ladies, they love me;

Yes, they adore me;

Wanted to bounce the first time they saw me,

Like:

Bounce, bounce, bounce!"

...That's more than just a coincidence.

Today - that's right - he has a myspace page. He's how living in Florida where he hosts a radio show. Now, I don't know if you remember, but around the time of the Love Daddy album, he did a little press talking about a Fat Boys reunion album. In fact, the Fat Boys had done a little production and DJ work on his solo albums, so it's not like they'd ever had irreconcilable differences. Of course, tragically, Buff Love died in 1995. But there was still talk of putting out an album, using the tracks Buff had already recorded... of course, this never came out. But we know there's at least SOME Fat Boys reunion material recorded. Obviously, this needs to be released in some way, shape or form and anyone with access to this material, directly or indirectly, needs to get the f' on it already. Right now. I'm serious. Go.

Tags: Markie Dee, The Fat Boys, Prince Markie Dee, Soul Convention