Friday, December 9, 2011

The Return of a Hip Hop Artist

By Farah Fan


In the late 1970s an underground urban movement referred to as hip hop artist began to evolve in the South Bronx area of New York City. Encompassing graffiti art, bboying, rap music, and trend, rap had become the dominant cultural movement of the minority populated urban residential areas in the eighties. Graffiti, rapping, and bboying were all creative variants on the competition and one-upmanship of street gangs. Sensing that gang members' often violent desires might be changed into creative ones, Afrika Bambaataa created the Zulu Nation, a loose confederation of street-dance crews, graffiti artists, and rap performers. By the late 1970s, the culture had gained media attention, with Billboard magazine publishing a write-up titled "B Beats Bombarding Bronx", leaving comments on the local sensation and mentioning important figures such as Kool Herc.

One phenomenon in hip hop is the re-emergence of hip hop artist Ski Beatz, a fantastic hip-hop comeback story. His supple and bluesy grooves, which recall Dr. Dre at his "Chronic" peak, have educated some of the best underground rap music of the past two years, including Currensy's "Pilot Talk" and "Pilot Talk II," and two volumes of his own "24-Hour Karate School" series. In stark contrast to the cooks-in-a-kitchen formula standard of urban pop, Ski Beatz often produces these albums by himself, giving them a distinct and uniform sound.

The New York producer is touring the country as part of the Hip-Hop and Love Tour. Murs is the headliner, but Ski Beatz and his band the Senseis will be ever-present onstage. Meanwhile, three albums that he created attained stores this fall: both Tabi Bonney's "The Summer Years" Murs' "Love & Rockets Vol. 1: The Transformation" and Locksmith's "Embedded."

It's uncommon for a hip-hop musician to completely disappear and then re-establish himself with even greater acclaim. In the late '90s, Ski Beatz - then known as Ski contributed to several classic albums, including Jay-Z's "Reasonable Doubt," Lil Kim's "Hardcore" and Camp Lo's "Uptown Saturday Night." Then as now, he was well regarded as a craftsman: in Jay-Z's single "Dead Presidents," he slowed down and looped a sample from jazz-fusion keyboardist Lonnie Liston Smith's "Garden of Peace," and then positioned a hard drum track underneath it.

But by the early 2000s, hip hop artist Ski Beatz's name had faded from major album credits. His disappearance wasn't unusual. Some music artists burn out, change careers or simply, in hip-hop parlance, "fall off." Born David Anthony Willis, he had started his career in the late eighties as a rapper-producer, first with underground group the Bizzie Boyz and then with Original Flavor. Then he chose to focus solely on production. So he moved to his native North Carolina, bought a property and got married. When he got bored with being out of the game, he went back to New York to fix his music career. There, he reconnected with Jay-Z's former business partner Dame Dash, who was building an enterprise called DD172. Today, Ski Beatz is arguably better known than he was in the '90s. His creation technique has changed, too. In the past, he relied on sampling directly from a record; today, he produces arrangements with the Senseis using interpolation, or replaying a sample with live instruments until it's nearly unrecognizable.




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