When To Walk Away Pt. I
Preview to The Long Goodbye
***This blog was originally written by Koncepts and featured as documentary comment on Cocaine Blunts appearing in 2009. Since then the trolls have made it less inspiring for the homie Noz to keep the blog up so I thought I would recreate it here for the sake of background***
“Fundamentals consisted of me – Koncepts – and Karma. We met each other at Berkeley High, 1992. All I remember was being introduced to this dude who was into rap, and had a little bit of game to him - he knew all the different cats around school, kept good weed, knew how to talk to girls. Quickly we started hanging out, going to parties. We formed The Fundamentals in early '93, long before the crew Kemetic Suns came about. At that time, the crew we made was called "Ascension": in addition to us, we brought in a group called Hijinx (Peekaboo and Embassy), rappers Malignant and Level Z, and Anthony/Ayentee. Before I got with Karma, I was in an awful band that played funk-rock-jazz-rap-fusion a la Alphabet Soup or the Mo'Fessionals – interesting sidenote, playwright Itamar Moses played keyboards in that group. But I wanted to do something that was more straight up Hip-Hop. I was DJing already and I played the guitar. I fell off with the guitar lessons but started making primitive beats. Hanging out at Anthony’s house in north-west Berkeley I started to get hip to funk and latin and freakier jazz music all courtesy of his father’s record collection.
We all hung out and got busy together, either at Anthony's house or at my house. Anthony’s house was like a constant spot – there would be any number of kids there, from the graf crew DOA down to West Side Berkeley dudes, friends of his dad, relatives. I was granted use of a narrow boiler room underneath my mom’s house – the “Bomb Shelter” – to record in, and all of the material featured was made there. The beats here were made either on an Akai S-01 (a cheap version of the 950) and a Roland R8 Human Rhythm Composer, or the Ensoniq ASR-10, which I stuck with. Kids would come through, I would throw together a beat or have one I had already worked up, and they would record. Anthony, who made beats as well, occasionally helped out engineering things. I’d do arrangements, hooks, whatever. I wanted people to write songs, not just lay down rhymes, so I tried to focus their talents and that’s how a lot of this stuff came to be. A lot of guys didn’t have any idea how to write songs – like, verse/hook/bridge, or whatever. Some dudes just wanted to spit for like 6 minutes. Off the head. It was a mess.
Most of us were from Berkeley or Oakland. Karma spent some time up in Sacramento early on. Malignant had one foot out in Richmond I think. Around the beginning of 1994 I moved to the Mission neighborhood in San Francisco to go live with my father, but continued attending Berkeley High and hanging out with the crew every day. It was a regular thing to go from school to my mom’s basement where the makeshift studio was, record until 7 or 8, ride the bus back into San Francisco and wash up somewhere around 10 at my dad’s apartment. Peek lived out by Eclipse, in the Union City area, and they were friends, so that’s how we got down with the Mixed Practice crew. Eclipse tells me now that he got real tight when Peek played him some of my stuff, like “who is this other young dude out here with beats??” Karma’s brother Wayne knew Corey/BFAP from the Mystik Journeymen, so we got down with them around ’94 or so, but I think they probably saw us as like, young’uns in the game. We met Kirby around then as well, up at UC Berkeley at KALX – Karma had gone up there with BFAP from the Journeymen. While BFAP was kind of cool on the kid, it was obvious he had incredible talent. Kirby, originally from East Oakland, had spent many years in Stockton prior to coming to Berkeley… had kind of a checkered past, but it turned out he and Karma knew some folks in common from up that way. We would hang out and freestyle in his dorm room but we hadn't really clicked up in a formal way yet, like we would later.
Even though our style was more on the “backpack”/”houser” thing, a lot of the cats in the crew had street ties, we just didn’t really put it out there like that. It was more a thing you wanted to get away from, if you had ever been close enough to see it. The one exception was The Mental Patients – featured here on “Mental Anxieties” – who were some real street cats from South Berkeley, North Oakland, and East Oakland. But they’d come through, we’d smoke, lay down some music, no drama ever. They weren’t really a part of the crew per se but they showed love, would share smoke or even muscle if it was needed (which, on a couple of occasions, it was). Good dudes. Any time there was beef you had an assemblage of dudes from West Side and South Side Berkeley as well as North Oakland and parts of the east as well. We rolled deep.
The Ascension crew only lasted but so long, though, and at a certain point, friendly competition turned into beef. Dudes started talking behind each others’ backs, trying to create little allegiances and whatever… just childish stuff but you know we were, at the time, anywhere from 14-18 years old. Embassy and Karma, long rivals in the cipher, came to blows and everyone went their separate ways. I spent several months recording my own material, thinking I’d record my own demo/album, maybe sell it like the Journeymen and Mixed Practice and the other guys I was meeting around the scene at that time. That stuff never got released anywhere, with only one track turning up on 30 Days; much of it is featured here.
In the summer of 1995, Karma and I were both working in San Francisco. He was interning at Polygram - Polygram had an office in San Francisco! We patched up and started working on what would become 30 Days & A Plane Ticket, our first “real” tape – the title owing to the fact that I was moving to New York City 30 days from when we started. Karma’s style, originally an old school, laid back flow, and at one point a bone of contention amongst the more east coast-influenced crew, had developed into a this tripped out, cerebral scattershot of politics, hood slang, conspiracy theories, and 5% math. A cat he rolled with called Bay-Bay came up with the name Kemetic Suns. At that time, though, it was basically just a loose affiliation of folks we rolled with, some of whom didn't make music at all. It was just a crew in the loosest sense. Kirby was down at that point, but I don’t recall meeting Hypnotic (another crew member) until 1996 or so, beyond the point at which this comp comes to an end.
Honestly I don’t know what people will think of this stuff. I’m opening myself up which is always a risk. I think we had some talent. We never made a huge mark, despite being really prolific – due mostly to my ability to record. I had the good fortune to hold onto most of my old sessions. I’m sure there’s a ton of amazing stuff out there that has disappeared… I’ve certainly been met with that response as I’ve sought out material by other groups of the time. We wore our influences on our sleeves – but as kids, that’s just part of developing your own style. Back then, it wasn’t about features, or placements, or even tape sales really – just a bunch of cats doing music. That’s what the underground tape thing was really about. I can think of no better way to illustrate that.”
Return To The Bomb Shelter DOWNLOAD
Part II