Author Archives: djk

Spit


Spit was a grab-bag of beats we never got to use on other albums, prank calls, long audio extracts from the film Beat Street, stoney living room improvisations from a memorable and chilly fall evening in Minneapolis, and other detritus.  Nevertheless, listening to it now I feel like it had a couple of transcendent and insightful moments, especially on the live cuts; however raw, they shine through better now, having had the most egregious filler trimmed.  (I cut about 4 1/2 additional minutes of Beat Street dialogue while digitizing this, if that gives an idea of how bloated the original release was).

We envisioned the original Spit as an audio companion to issue three of the Envy the Dead zine.  It was an extremely limited edition:  100 cassette copies, with numbered labels typed on a manual typewriter.


Mediocre Rhyme Explosions, Volume 1

Mediocre Rhyme Explosions was the booklet that accompanied the Envy the Dead album in 1993.  It showcases some of Dave Mac’s lyrical ingenuity and features a special handwritten bonus lyric, for the song “The Principle of Uncertainty,” which unfortunately we never properly recorded .

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Notes from the editor:

“I’ll never forget the first time I ever saw the Oral Anarchist David Mac.  It was a hot Fargo afternoon in the midst of the summer of 1983.  The sun went down on the searing asphalt creating a shroudlike silhouette of the skinny boy, dressed the nines in his trademark Fila sweatsuit and Bally loafers.  His breakdancing was flawless, each subtle movement recalling the nuanced grace of Nureyev or Baryshnikov.  A crowd had quickly formed in a crescent shaped throng, each spectator agape as Mac took on battle after battle, slicing and dicing all challengers into a hip-hopped mincemeat facsimile of their former pathetic selves.  It was then that I knew I had stumbled upon something unique, something unparallelled, something whose allure drew me in like an unsuspecting safari member in the quicksand of the central African jungle.  That was only the beginning, however.

Wiping a bead of hard-earned sweat from his brow, Mac swigged a quick dose of his 44 ounce Dew and sidled over.  Amazed, I stammered some piddling comment about his finesse, artfully combined with freighttrain-esque power.  And I’ll never forget the next words out of his mouth–“you think that’s hot??  You’d better check out these rhymes…”  Thus began a decade long partnership which has now culminated in this magnum opus — the quintessential rhythm explosions of the man known as David Mac.  Please — read and listen with a discerning ear as the rhymes enclosed here are sure to conjure up images in your cranium of the boombox toting warhead of hip hop mediocrity at his absolute finest.” — Introduction to Mediocre Rhyme Explosions, Volume 1, 1993.

 

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