Spec Boogie "Show You How to Hustle"
Friday, September 1, 2006
That picture to the left look familiar? Yeah, sure it does. It’s a slightly Photoshopped rejiggering of Pharrell’s cover for the largely shit-upon In My Mind, and it corresponds to the record from former art school student and current Brooklyn rapper Spec Boogie, who found Mind’s instrumental tracks and set about making them good. On My Grind is only the latest entry in the sampling-as-boldfaced appropriation trend that’s been happening on mixtapes since forever, but, due to its purposefully limited sonic pallette concept, Grind most strongly recalls Dangermouse’s Grey Album. The difference, obviously, is that Grind stays in the same genre ballpark as its source material, so it manages to stand on its own as a fully-realized record instead of a one-off choppy mash-up experiment that mostly appealed to stoners and Beatles freaks (ahem). It helps even more that Spec is a pretty good rapper with charisma to spare and an obvious sense of humor, and not just an opportunist with Garageband and a Myspace page. I don’t think anyone would turn down a beat from Pharrell, because they’re often pretty great, but the fact that he has neither rap skills nor charisma should stop you from buying the CD. Spec somehow got hold of the instrumentals for it though, and his version of “Show You How to Hustle” (mp3) is the best result. It takes its source material from the song at the end of Mind that actually brags about sipping wine and eating “a bundle of truffles.” I swear, Pharrell is just about the trust-fundiest, frattiest sounding rapper I can think of right now. But his main beat on that song, nothing more than a looped sustained organ note over some Questlove drumming, is stylish and minimal and funky as hell, like a random part of a Jimmy Smith record skipping over and over. It occasionally breaks into a quicker organ vamp, and then a weird and even skimpier conga beat, and that’s about it. And Spec is actually a surprisingly good rapper that drops a pretty damn specific and recent Entourage reference (”Play Ari and avoid drama”) in the same verse that he offers the magnificently phrased strategic warning to those seeking to live outside the law: “Think you can relax? Go on, get complacent. Soon as you take a vacation, agents move white through your hood, like gentrification.” God damn, this is miles and miles better than Pharrell’s. I don’t use the word “vainglorious” enough on this site, so I will now. This shit is straight vainglorious. That word’s on my mind because it was actually used in the subject line of the email I got yesterday about Spec. But it’s an appropriate term to use for comparison of Pharrell and Spec, because they’re both vainglorious—Spec because it takes chutzpah to take another man’s work, rejigger it and claim it’s better. It’s way better, by the way. Pharrell’s vainglorious because he’s a douchebag.
Don’t even think you’re gonna be able to pay money for this record, because if you did, Pharrell would make sure Spec went to jail. Here’s Spec’s Myspace, though—that’s about all I got. Oh, and the guy from Berkeley Place interviewed him. Looks like he’s got the whole album for download, too, so yeah, grab that.
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