Da Beatminerz Keep It Real on 'Stifled Creativity'
Da Beatminerz, the renowned hip-hop production duo comprised of DJ Evil Dee and Mr. Walt, are back with the bass to celebrate hip-hop's storied funky sonics.
Stifled Creativity Da Beatminerz 21 June 2024 Soulspazm
Stifled Creativity, the first official Beatminerz album in 20 years, is a full-out celebration of hip-hop. Call it "boom-bap", "1990s rap", "the golden age sound", whatever contextual descriptor best signals to the listener that this subgenre reached its peak popularity in the days of bucket hats, backspun ballcaps, and baggy sweats (at least as evidenced by Black Moon's video for "Who Got Da Props"). Adjectives abound. Call it what you will; this is hip-hop, as Da Beatminerz make it. Their sound appeals to the timelessness of music forsaken to a moment in history.
Brothers Mr. Walt and Evil Dee (real names Walter and Ewart Dewgarde) have been churning out beats since the early 1990s; to this day, they still produce their records in the family home where they were raised in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn. They debuted with Black Moon's 1992 single "Who Got Da Props?" Now considered a hip-hop classic, the track is built from seamlessly chopped samples of Ronnie Laws' jazz-funk nightcap "Tidal Wave" and the opening drum break from Skull Snaps' "It's A New Day".
For decades, the duo have tinkered with the sonic blueprint they laid down on that first hit: stark drumbeats, sparse coatings of sampled melody, and resounding basslines looming close to the foreground. Stifled Creativity is the latest product of their lifelong passion: keeping hip-hop alive.
"We went from using the SP-1200, the S950, the MPC 3000, the MPC 2000XL, to using the MPC Renaissance, to using the MPC X, to using Ableton," Evil Dee says. "But what I always tell people is it's not about the equipment; it's about the person behind the equipment. No matter what we use, it's still going to have that Beatminerz sound. It's still going to be funky."
"Seckle", the first song on Stifled Creativity, attains funkiness from the sizzle of slow-cooked reggae. Electric guitar licks wobble with the soggy tones of a King Tubby dub. The bass is massive. Fans since Enta Da Stage - Black Moon's debut album and Da Beatminerz' first full-length production credit - may have flashbacks to the first time they spun "Powaful Impak" and felt the earth tremble beneath their Jordans. "Seckle" also features rhymes from KRS-One, the hip-hop spokesman and self-proclaimed philosopher Fab Five Freddy once called "the heart and soul and conscience and brains and philosophy of rap." A fitting first guest for an album flaunting the genre's roots.
"Everybody talking 'bout bring back the 1990s," KRS-One raps on "Seckle". "But half these dudes in the 1990s, they weren't grimy!" With this line, he acknowledges the cultural context for a new Beatminerz album in 2024. To set the record straight on how listeners have misremembered 1990s hip-hop is to concede that listeners are probably thinking about 1990s hip-hop while playing this record.
Stifled Creativity is about origins, and "Seckle" introduces this theme on two levels. KRS-One rocks the microphone at the party spot and commemorates the boom-bap while calling back to some of his now-classic tracks: 1987's "South Bronx" chronicled hip-hop's 1970s park-jam beginnings, whereas 1993's "Attacks" reaffirmed hip-hop's staying power ("We will be here forever!") on an album titled Return of the Boom Bap. From this angle, "Seckle" is another signpost in a career spent historicizing.
But the instrumental from Da Beatminerz nods back further to the sounds of Jamaican toasting parties. Rap's many mutations have often neglected the genre's Jamaican influence; the first hip-hop jams thrown in the Bronx by DJ Kool Herc were inspired by childhood memories of dance hall parties in his native Kingston. By drawing a line back to 1960s Jamaica, Da Beatminerz overcame the temptation to flatten their music into throwback fodder. The decision informs the listener that this will not be a record about the dope ol' days of Kangols and teal-patterned parachute pants. Like all meaningful hip-hop, this is a record about Black musical lineage.
PopMatters talked with Evil Dee and Mr. Walt about the new album over Zoom. The brothers transmitted from different rooms in their house in Bushwick, "the Dewgarde crib of hits" as it's referred to in the liner notes for Enta Da Stage.
"The house we live in is the house where we were born," Mr. Walt says. "We weren't literally born in this house, but this is our family house. My mother and father had this house before me and my brother were born. This is our home. We recorded every record in this house. [Black Moon's] Enta Da Stage, [Smif-N-Wessun's] Dah Shinin'. All the pre-production is done here. Stifled Creativity was done here. Brace 4 Impak was done here. Everything was done here."
Their combined record collections fill three floors. The brothers worked in different New York City record stores: Mr. Walt at Music Factory on Jamaica Avenue in Jamaica Queens, Evil Dee at Knickerbocker Records in Bushwick, and later Beat Street Records in Brooklyn. Da Beatminerz still go record shopping, not because they feel they need more records, but because they love the act of record shopping. Both subscribe to the same method: don't listen to a record before buying. Take a chance, and nine out of ten times, you'll find something you want to sample.
"Walt's record collection is neat and dope," Evil Dee says. "Mine is chaotic. Walt is Felix [Ungar], and I'm Oscar Madison."
"But I'm Felix who likes girls," Walt says.
The Dewgarde brothers have a great repartee and a knack for slipping lighthearted jokes at the other's expense into the conversation. Like most consummate record collectors, they have a penchant for delving into the history of the music they love. A passing mention of house music producer Todd Terry prompted a tangent of little-known facts about two record labels that Terry at least co-owned, Freeze andBad Boy Records (no, not P. Diddy's Bad Boy; Terry's label came first by about half a decade). Both speak with easygoing authority, the kind that develops from enthusiasm and unforced dedication. They've watched hip-hop change over the years.
"In the late 1980s and early 1990s, [hip-hop] started to break up," Mr. Walt says. "Everything was boom-bap, but you had your East Coast, West Coast, gangster, that tree sap shit... We never fully labeled it. Hip-hop was hip-hop... When we used to work in record stores, one person would buy a Def Jef CD and then turn around and buy Kool G Rap or the Beastie Boys. There wasn't really any segregation in hip-hop. That shit really just started recently."
"Hip-hop is at a point where there are different demographics," Evil Dee says. "You have your boom-bap. You have your trap. You have your commercial records. You got drill. It's enough space for everybody to breathe. One of the only problems I have with radio is radio will stick to one thing and keep it at that one thing when there's a whole lot of stuff out there that they could play."
Da Beatminerz's moniker is a fitting summation of their career: instead of expanding to claim new territory (experimenting with different styles and trying out contemporary trends a la Grandmaster Flash with 2009's The Bridge), they mine deeper into their sound, exploring nuance and the variations available within the confines of midtempo, 4/4 hip-hop. The blueprint they work from is regarded as a 1990s throwback in part because that's when they started, but mainly because that's when this music reached its commercial peak. Da Beatminerz are continuing a legacy with conspicuous roots stretching back to South Bronx block parties and the culture's core principles: peace, love, unity, and having fun.
"We want to keep this music going," Evil Dee says. "We want it to live."
Da Beatminerz are capable of kicking mad flavor every time their fingers grace the mixing board. Stifled Creativity's taut and confident craftsmanship is the upside of having stuck to one style for over thirty years. The downside, from an audience perspective, is that a veteran group like Da Beatminerz begins to resemble a preservation society. At a certain point, holding your ground looks a lot like going backward. Even if you're digging deeper, extracting fresh sounds from a fixed position on the rap spectrum, it's not guaranteed the world will tune in to hear your progress.
Stifled Creativity doesn't merely reminisce about herringbone chains and LL Cool J's 1989 tour, though both of those things are mentioned. "Back in Style", which features vocals from veteran rapper Ras Kass, is the album's most nostalgic moment, but its chorus portrays the song as a recursion rather than a trip back in time: "Never say the skills played out, 'cause everything just comes back in style." The beat sounds fashioned from synth-funk circa 1981 - think D Train's "You're the One for Me" and AM-FM's "You Are the One". Kass rhymes about afros, snow cones, and buying the first iteration of Air Jordans, which were released in 1985. He shouts out 1970s babies, 1980s ladies, and 1990s fellas. The song seems designed to be a hit at summer cookouts.
Other tracks present the boom-bap resurgence as something more dire. On "ANTI", Black Moon's Buckshot makes peace with his status as an unsung real-one of rap's underground: "I could have been a rapper that was signed to a label / But a sign is something you hold, my mind can't relate to." A dash of melancholy trumpet and an unnerving choral harmony add even darker shades to a dour recollection of nascent hip-hop memories: "I been in the lobby of the project hallways / We ain't had shit but beatboxing all day." On "Champion", Mickey Factz ends his rap by suggesting that preservation is ultimately a doomed enterprise: "Back to the essence from where I started / Antique, we capture the relic before it's tarnished."
For the most part, though, the roster of MCs featured on Stifled Creativity - including legends like De La Soul, Camp Lo, and Pharoahe Monch - aren't concerned with looking backward. The Villanz offer reassurance on "Fear None", calling on Black solidarity to combat fears of police brutality, negative portrayals from conservative media outlets, and racial inequity in the US prison-industrial complex. Marquee details the grind of her studio-to-tour circuit on "Can't Live Without It". On "My Year", Posdnuos is "mistaken for the guy who used to be in De La Soul" and assures the listener that "I'm still in it." Braggadocio runs rampant, as it should on any rap record worth its weight in 24-karat gold chains. Whether it's Mickey Factz pointing to his courtside seats at the Barclays Center or Bishop Lamont describing his verbal delivery as "the hottest, coldest, purest, blue flame alchemy change contained into a flow," the boasting on display here asserts that these rappers are thriving in their present moment.
Let's talk about bass. It's probably what Da Beatminerz do best. The kick drum on "Martial Law" drubs deeper than an 80-ton drill rig. "It's All 4 U" backs Halley Hiatt's lively R&B melodies with a warm, full-bodied bounce, while the downbeat on "The Birds" is almost overcooked, threatening to clip if played through feeble subwoofers. On "B-Ville Pioneers", the opening drum break to the Chakachas' "Jungle Fever" is engulfed by a bassline powerful enough to swallow city blocks. On other tracks, like "Back in Style" and "Adore [HER]", the basslines are restrained, allowing the melodies more room to breathe.
It might seem trivial to gush about basslines, especially discussing a genre lauded for the political and cultural force of its lyrical content. Though bass may not be considered the most important component of a hip-hop track, it helps set the foundation over which a rapper shapes her rhymes. The vocal is perceived as a reaction to the instrumental, not the other way around. As Tricia Rose notes in her 1994 book Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, "Volume, density, and quality of low-sound frequencies are critical features in rap production," specifically because they "echo Afrodiasporic musical priorities" such as "privileging repetition as the basis of rhythm and rhythm as the central musical force."
Da Beatminerz are masters of bass. That is not hyperbole. The duo has honed this aspect of their craft through decades of practice and by welcoming innovations in the technology used to produce it.
"In order for hip-hop to survive, we have to embrace technology," Evil Dee says. "It's like DJing. We're both nice at what we do with this DJ thing. We DJ now with Serato. We still use turntables. We still use records. It may be a time-coded record, but we still use records. It's just all the records are in the computer. You still got to know how to DJ. It made life very easy because now I don't have to carry eight-million crates, and I can do every party with my whole record collection with me. I don't have to sit there going, 'Ah, I left this record at home!'
"It's not about a piece of equipment. It's about the person operating the equipment. Because at the end of the day, if you know how to operate your equipment and you know how to make that sampler work the way you want it to work, you should have no problems."
Stifled Creativity is the product of an important creative distinction: Da Beatminerz treat technology as a means to an end. If one regards this album as a series of decisions about song structure and stylistic flair, it's not a stretch to say that every track could have been recorded in 1992. The format hasn't changed. Sonically, though, these songs have a richer, more tactile tone color (or, if you want to defend analog equipment, at least a noticeably different tonal quality) than rap songs from the 1990s. Compared to the Dah Shinin' - a staple of backpacker rap - these beats pop and dazzle to fuller effect, sounding in turns both cleaner and grimier. "Martial Law" would have graced the tape reel of countless bootleg cassettes if this record dropped in 1995.
The care put into Stifled Creativity proves Da Beatminerz aren't stuck in the past, and their conversation backs it up. They don't gloat about having rubbed shoulders with world-famous figures in the glow of what many consider to be rap's golden era. They aren't fixated on trying to shove the metaphorical toothpaste back into the tube. You just had to be there. The only time they suggest that "there" might have been superior to "now" is when describing the sense of community shared by New York's hip-hop cognoscenti circa the early '90s.
"Back in the 1990s, we all lived off each other, inspiration-wise," Mr. Walt says. "When we were recordingEnta Da Stage, our sessions were from twelve a.m. to six a.m. We would either go to D&D early and hang out with Premier and Guru while they recorded Hard to Earn and just get inspired by that, or we would go to Battery Studios and see what Tribe was doing, and they were recording Midnight Marauders. At one studio, Showbiz and A.G. and Buckwild would be there. Somebody would be making a dope song, and we were like, 'Yo, I got to make a song better than that.' It was a friendly competition, and we all inspired each other."
"Because of technology, music went from being something that was community-based to now being private," Evil Dee says. "We used to go to the record store to buy records. Now, we sit on our computers, and we buy records. We used to go to the store to buy clothes or whatever. You can do all that online now. You can do everything online. You can make your records online. You don't have to leave your house. At the end of the day, I feel that's the problem with music today. If you make music for the people, you have to go outside."
If making music is the act of building a world, then Stifled Creativity - an album jam-packed with guest features and built from familiar and obscure samples of Black music culled from decades of crate-digging - is a world of rich communal connections, creative interaction, and ecstatic collaboration. Yes, there are dark spots. But rarely does the record make the listener feel lonely. It makes you feel enmeshed, maybe not inside a scene, but inside an ongoing conversation about how the scene used to be, how it felt, and how it forever molded the way our protagonists see the world and continue to go about their lives.
Reissues are all the rage. Streaming services have cultivated a consumer ecology where entire discographies and decades-old rarities can be stumbled across effortlessly. (Spotify employs the word "discovery" to describe their algorithmically generated playlists, but there's nothing romantic about the process of scrolling through song titles.) You can make it through the workweek listening to old-school rap without progressing chronologically past The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Monoculture has fractured into more splinters than a boombox backed over by a Lexus. Old music has never been more popular. It's difficult for veteran acts like Da Beatminerz to compete for attention with their past releases, especially when some of their hits have solidified spots in the hip-hop canon through the unlikely form of Spotify-curated playlists with titles like "I Love My East Coast Classics".
I'd like to humbly propose that rap fans, from the casual to the acetate-toting, not just listen to Stifled Creativity (and you should! It's a solid album!) but listen to more records like Stifled Creativity. That is to say, don't sleep on the older heads continuing to pump out fresh tracks. Instead of shuffling through Enta Da Stage for the 30th time, give the new shit a listen.
"We're really targeting the fans that supported us from day one," Mr. Walt says. "But if we could get some new friends along the way, that would be great. If it doesn't happen, it doesn't happen."
That's another way of saying Da Beatminerz still keep it real.
