Sunday Music: When Discovery Becomes A Policing Service
November 30, 2025·0 comments·zg
It was 2000. I was in college. Somebody’s floormate, who I had spotted and cornered because he was wearing unreasonable headphones, was giving me a CD. He was from the northern Midwest somewhere, if memory serves me correctly, but had a parent or somebody who he spent a lot of time out west with, in the previous handful of years.
We’d talked for a few, in the hall outside of a mutual class, about underground hip hop. He told me had some of his vinyl on campus, and a growing Napster library thanks to the ethernet connect, and he was going to make me a mix, which he was now making good on.
I put it in my discman, with my far less fancy headphones, and one of the first songs, transferred from vinyl (which I’d later figure out because he had it sped up/pitch shifted up some) was this song. If you don’t know it, make sure you jump in about a minute, it’s got an extended intro on it in this version:
I knew about Madlib already. The Lootpack album, which was released in 1999, was not on my radar yet. The west coast energy was immediately recognizable, without being Dr. Dre g-funk smooth, but also not without just the right amount of Heiroglyphics stoner + Alkaholiks tipsy mixed in
The beat was rough around the edges. The vocals were rougher, both in trying to fit too many words into too little space (which was a thing at the time, so interesting how it manifested in different parts of the country too, but that’s a post for another day), as well as in the Cali version of beating “whack emcees” that was, I guess, just distinctively the non-east coast version, which is a nuance if you lived this moment I bet you can still hear.
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