Young Turks

Mid Morning Madness (aka Lemonade was a popular drink)06 January 2009by Caius Pawson

[A bit of Pretext: Unfortunately one of my new year’ resolution wasn’t to ‘Start Making More Sense’. This blog is wholly confused and lacks quite a bit of focus, so try to forget my typed up inner monologue and just enjoy the clips, links and downloads as they’re all well worth the drivel you have to read through to get to them. Enjoy]

I’ve just come back to London: it’s dangerously cold and the days are eerily short. It seems to take an age, but when the morning light finally dissipates the night, the city is bathed in an incredible pink lemonade colour. Long before then – when I get up for work – its still pitch black. Gang Starr’s Hard to Earn has been the sound track – for the last couple of days – to this darkness. Something about the Guru/DJ Premier pairing reassures me on a gloomy morning (probably the knowledge that at least I don’t live in crime swamped, pre Giuliani New York).

Gang Starr – Suckas Need Bodyguards
(I should really have embedded Mass Appeal but this refers to my totally inane point about crime in New York).

I’m normally having my breakfast by the time Dwyck comes on:

Gang Starr Feat. Nice N Smooth – Dwyck (Live)
(The music video for Dwyck is a pretty good; a light hearted affair that sees Gang Starr and Nice and Smooth hanging out in Atlantic city with a bunch of attractive girls. I prefer this live version though. The two duos (with Dr Dre in attendance!) play on a TV show to about 10 people. The camera shots – looking out into the crowd – don’t do much to hide this and it makes for quite a funny/embarrassing final product.)

Dwyck is important to me here for two reasons.

Firstly: It reminded me of Nice N Smooth. Not exactly (well nowhere near) the Hip Hop legends that Gang Starr are, but well worth a mention for the few slabs of party classics they released (and for the odd awful choice of sample).

Nice N Smooth – Hip Hop Junkies
(Nice N Smooth made a remix of Hip Hop Junkies – in Spanish – called ‘Spanish Fly.’ Everything about this version is amazing, but the video is Killer. For some reason embedding on it is not available. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE go check it.)

Secondly (and slightly more sentimentally) for this lyric:

“Lemonade was a popular drink and it still is”

For no particular reason, this is my favourite Guru line of all time.

When I was a snotty teenager I used to buy Fat Boss magazine. British, A3 sized and equally UK/US Hip Hop based, it was illustrated with a weird range of Ninja based cartoons and printed on nice heavy paper. Every month it had a great poster. One month it had Guru coming out of a newsagents with a bottle of R Whites Lemonade (who incidentally have a great great ad). The aforementioned lyric was printed beneath his big grin.

It was this poster that I really wanted to blog about, but I can’t find it anywhere on the internet, nor can I find a note about Fat Boss (RIP).

So instead of leading you completely empty handed, i’ll leave you with a huge sidetrack:

After googling Fat Boss I found this great photo of Mento legend Count Owen.

It reminded me, for no particular reason but its tropical nature, of a track that Pablo (aka El Guincho) gave me a few days ago: ‘Hindou’ by Orefiche & Valdespi. I can’t find anything on the internet about the duo or the track, the lyrics are in Spanish and I’m an ignoramus when it comes to Latin music, so I won’t try to educate you on it. What I will say is that it’s out of this world beautiful and reminds me of that lemonade pink that London occasionally gets bathed in.

Download: ‘Hindou’ by Orefiche & Valdespi

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