Switched on Pop - Prelude & Feud on a 'G' Thang: Biggie vs Tupac

Episode Date: December 3, 2019

The East Coast / West Coast hip hop feud between Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls is full of tragedy and conspiracy, but what did it really sound like? For the third season of of the hit podcast Slow Burn, host Joel Anderson and producer Christopher Johnson dig up untold stories about this infamous rivalry, and they join Nate and Charlie to break down boom bap, G Funk, and the surprising points of overlap between two titans of rap. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Nate Sloan here, and I want to remind you all that we have a book and you can buy it right now. It's not officially out until December 13th, but get it now. They'll send it to your door somehow. I don't understand how publishing works. What I do understand is that it's really fun. It goes from Andre Benjamin to Zed and it breaks down 20 amazing songs from the last 20 years. years. We had a blast writing it. And I hope you dig it. Go to Switchedonpop.com slash book to check it out. All right. On to the show. Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. So growing up as a kid in the 90s, the story of 1990s hip-hop, East Coast versus West Coast battles, the Biggie versus Tupac. This was constantly in the news. But honestly, I was young. I didn't really know.

the real story or understand the context or even the music at the time. And relearning this history and music is something that I've always wanted to do. The podcast Slowburn tells the untold background on essential political and cultural stories. In this season, they're tackling East Coast versus West Coast hip-hop, a 90s musical divide that is embedded in the era. And what we want to know is what distinguishes these coastal sounds. And what does it mean? Joining us from Slow Burn season three is host Joel Anderson and producer Christopher Johnson.

Welcome. Thanks for having us. Yeah. Okay. To start us off, who are the players in this feud? I think for us, much of the conflict between these two people and these two different regional rap scenes starts in 1994 when Tupac is shot at a New York recording studio. Tupac believed that the notorious B.I.G, I'm going to call him.

Biggie from here on now. He believed that Biggie, Sean Puffy Combs, and their associates had him set up that night because they were at a recording session for Biggie's group, which was called the Junior Mafia. And so it should be noted that there's no credible evidence that Biggie or Puffy were connected to the shooting, but yet Puck believed this or said he did. And it's not long after that shooting that these real fractures between Bad Boy Records, which is the label that Biggie represented and Death Row, which is the label that Tupac would come to represent. start the show, and that's particularly after Tupac names them in publications as a suspect. So that's kind of setting the scene.

And then Tupac's in prison, not long after the shooting because he was convicted of sexual abuse, while Tupac is in prison, Biggie releases a song called Who Shot You. The release of that song really complicates things, and that's kind of, what allows this beef to kind of go out of control from there. So 1994, Tupac's shot that's 25 years ago. What else do we need to know about what's happening in the 1990s that will contextualize this East Coast, West Coast feud? And probably more specifically inside of hip-hop. Precisely. Rap music, I think, you know, it's popular among its fans, obviously, but it hasn't really crossed over to any sustained mainstream success. And so you have these two pretty successful in their

own right, rap artists, Tupac Shakur and Bicky Smalls, but they're still not quite there just yet. There are West Coast artists, especially from Los Angeles, who have started to pull the attention of hip-hop towards the West and especially towards Southern California. And some might say that there was a little bit of concern about this amongst New York rap fans who felt like hip-hop was theirs and theirs alone. That's where some of the rub, or tension. I hesitate to call it beef, but definitely differences in aesthetics and lifestyles. Led to some misunderstandings, I think, between two different music scenes. It's not whole coasts and even whole states. It's these different approaches to telling the stories of street life and

acting out the stories of street life that kind of became part of rap culture. Right. Not at the level of beef yet, something below ground turkey or something, impossible burger, perhaps. So you describe that we've got these coastal scenes. Hip hop, of course, is birthed in New York, and as it moves to the West Coast, it adapts a new sound, one that becomes extremely popular. And what we want to do is figure out what are the differences in those sounds. So let's dive right into the music. You mentioned the song Who Shot You by Biggie. This is, of course, part of the feud, but it also, I think, is instructive on what's happening for the East Coast.

sound. Let's describe the sound. What are you all hearing that makes this an East Coast style? It just sounds very dark and foreboding. And we'd describe it in the podcast as something like you'd hear in like film noir. Something you would hear walking down a hallway in a mystery movie, right? It's definitely got what I think rappers call that boom bap. It's got that boom bap sound to it.

You can hear it in the drums. and even the stuff that isn't drums, literally, there's a lot of just percussion, the sort of the tinkling and all of that that's in there is so, like, percussive. With that classical boombap East Coast sound, which is what makes it so beautiful. You hear this in the production,

and, you know, I think epitomizing a production of groups like Black Moon and the beat miners. I'm taking the back, come follow me. On a journey to see a for rail MC. The mind tricks the body, body thinks the mind is crazy. Whatever's lazy when I get the flow, I'm swaysy. They became really known for this very dark, as Joel says, noirish sound. It's just dense and rich.

And even in the lyrics, like Biggie says, it's hard to creep them Brooklyn streets. Like it sounds like an image of Brooklyn, especially Bedstuy, at night in the mid-90s. You never quite know what's around the corner. And that's the same with this. The song is a kind of soundtrack. The music is a sort of soundtrack for that sort of scene. It's not the only sound that was coming off of the East Coast. It's not even the only sound that was coming from Biggie.

But this very much captures a particular kind of East Coast sound, for sure. Boomap is a sort of very open and somewhat vague term. For some, it's a whole genre, but in that era, it was used to specifically describe the sound of the beat. And it was that boom bap, boom, boom, bap, right? That kind of a sound. It's a simple but hard-hitting backbeat with kick and snare. And one of my favorite examples of this with boom bap in the title is KRS-1's return of the boom bap. That's right.

I never crossed over, never went pop. You know KRS will give you real hip-hop. So, see how it sounds. Just noting how little is going on, except for one person on the mic, spinning and really emphasizing the energy and the sort of hard nature of this music. And as he says, right, this is boom bap. He's never, he's never going pop. That's what you want to hear in a freestyle. You know what I'm saying?

You walk into a studio, somebody that is as gifted lyrically as big he is and you want to be able to hear the MC clearly. You know, the music can't drown out the MC with that kind of music, right? Exactly. And I think it's also important to note the importance of lyrical dexterity that's happening in this era, right? With someone like Biggie where he is a true innovator on how rhymes work, going across lines, embedded rhymes, slant rhymes, really moving beyond the ABAB sort of old school hip hop style. To me also a part of what makes boom bap boom bap is the way the MC hits the beat, hits the drum with the lyrics. The boom bap is like a metronome. and you hear the lyrics that both artists are spitting

and they're pretty much like on the beat. Like it's really moving like a drum. It has this sort of staccato. It's very rhythmic and that's a different sound than I'm sure what we'll get too soon the more sort of G-funk L.A. sound. This feels like the right time to move to the West Coast away from the noirish boom bap of East Coast hip-hop.

What do we find musically in the West Coast Sound at this time? It's hard for me to say that there is a thing called the West Coast Sound. As a hip-hop fan from the 90s era, late 80s-90s era, there were so many different kinds of rap groups coming out in the 90s, even from California. Some of the men and women who paved the way and who had the earliest success like NWA. that LA sound, but then there were groups like Farside.

And there are rap groups also from the Bay Area who had a different kind of sound. I'm thinking of all the hieroglyphics kids, AC alone, and the freestyle fellowship. I might as well be inside of your mind. I know you thinking, damn. How does he? What was he a man? Or a machine with computerized diagram. I tell him no.

I am of the flash. Hell, E-40, too short. Yeah. Yeah. Understand it. I'll be more hip than the hippopotamus. Get off in your head like a neurologist. And so there are lots of wake to an atlas,

got a pot of by the name of Tupacolus. The 707 Maroisco hell will fall back to floor terrace. And so there are lots of different West Coast sounds, but there's that G-Funk sound, which I think is what you're talking about, that definitely is a different kind of, well, it's what the name suggests. It's very funky. It's evocative of a kind of parliament, funkadelic sound, lots of sort of slapping bass and, like, rolling keys and these sorts of things

that sound very different than that boom bap sound. There's probably no better example of that if you need to get the G-funk sound than listening to Nothing But a G-thing by Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg. Emphasis on that high Moog-style synth line squealing at the top and oftentimes synthy-funky bass lines a la Parliament Funkadelic. Yeah, the through line here is Dr. Dre, right?

I mean, because we're talking about some of the earliest roots. Like, if we're going back to NWA, then we're talking about the kind of music that Death Row did. I mean, the person at the center of that is Dr. Dre. And a lot of what we describe is, like, that West Coast sound or that G-Funk sound is music that Dr. Dre perfected over a decade, essentially. And even Snoop, it's interesting hearing Snoop hit that song at the top. That one, two, three, and to the four.

Snoop Doggy Dog and Dr. Dre is at the dough. Ready to make an entrance. So back on the top. Before I have to pull the strap out the cut. Give me that mic. Like he has this very rhythmic flow. He's stepping into the beat in that way. He's like announcing himself to hit the drum in the same way that Boombap artists do.

I mean, his flow is kind of definitive of a certain kind of Southern California sound. But he has shown both in his style and in the songs, like respect for a kind of East Coast style and East Coast flow, which is not to say that that's all East Coast heads could hear, but he gets a lot of respect for mixing these two sounds. Let's turn this G-Funk lens now to one of the central protagonists in our East Coast West Coast feud. Hit him up by Tupac from 1996.

What do we need to know about this song before we hit play? So the thing about Hit him up is that Tupac had a long time to think about this song and this album while he was in prison. Because remember, as we mentioned earlier, that he thought that Biggie and Puffy were co-conspirators in the shooting that happened to him right before he was sent to prison. So he's in prison, stewing all over this.

He's very mad at Biggie and Puffy. And so he releases an album. All Eyes on Me, double album has about, I think, 28 songs on it. Hit him up is not one of them. Hit him up comes out later as a B-side. And it is pretty much... It's almost unprecedented in hip-hop district. tracks because it's very literal.

It's very profane. And it's just, it's, it's incendiary, essentially. And so, yeah, I'll be interested to see what you're able to play. But it's a podcast, man. Let's been the first verse from Hit him up. I think we can take it by the amount of things that we didn't hear that Tupac is not happy with Biggie.

Yeah, right. You know, even to this day, I'm 41 years old, been a hip-hop fan my whole life. I mean, I can't think of a more disrespectful, you know, song that was directed at another artist in the history of hip-hopping. Maybe no Vaseline by Ice Cube. Yellow boys on your team so you're losing. Hey, yo, Drake, stick to producing, calling me all those.

You've been it to. Easy E. So you're getting to win in it quick. You got jealous when I get you. But it's not even nearly as profane or as literal as Tupac. Well, you can literally hear Tupac at the end of the song, like the last minute, it's just him yelling. You know, yelling at Biggie.

That's just, I mean, he devolved into hysterics, essentially. You know, it's just a screed. Yes, a screed. A tirade, if you will. Things aren't looking good lyrically in terms of the relationship between these two artists. I do want to, we were talking about sort of the sound of Tupac and especially sort of like the death row L.A. sound that's going on. I want to zoom in on that and just play the intro of this song. And we can hear actually, I think quite a bit in common,

we heard earlier in the Dre Snoop Dog track. Very funky bass line here, sort of a Moog-style bass, and again, a little bit more in the background, but we have that high, whiny lead tone as well. Something we've heard all over Dr. Dre's sound. And this is the G-Funk sound through and through for me. Um, yeah. Yeah, it's interesting.

I love when someone might feel different. Tell me, what do you think? Or not. I mean, the sample, of course, is from the song, Don't Look Any Further, from Dennis Edwards, who was in The Temptations. And that song, I think, is that from a Junior Mafia? Junior Mafia is Get Money.

And if you don't stop, then we won't stop. Continuously to get money. You can be as good as the best of them. Interesting. Okay. And that's the get money remix. And that's the get money remix too. That's not even the original version of get money, but yeah. And so we're getting the same chord progression, the same style base, but slightly different notes. So it seems like they actually just completely remade the track. So this is digging on a track that features the Tories B-I-G, actually taking that and using that as the root material. Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, you know, Again, I mean, from the lyrics to the production to, you know, the execution, the only thing that you could really say about that track is that Tupac just wanted to get across the point that he was mad. And so to that point, like, you know, Christopher said, there's not a lot of art to this.

It's just, it's raw anger. It's something that, you know, even today we haven't really seen in rap again. Well, just quickly, I'll say it actually reminds me of not something from the hip-hop tradition, but a song by John Lennon written after the Beatles broke up, called How Do You Sleep, which was a disc track against Paul McCartney. And it is brutal. I mean, and it's not like similar to this. It's not always like very clever.

Like at one point he just says, the sound you make is muzac to my ears. Oh, wow. And he says, he says the only thing you've done was yesterday. I'm not a Beatles fan, but this might be the way to get me into it, you know, a little beef. I didn't realize they were doing it like that. The fact that Tupac is sampling a biggie track in his disc track in order to just add further insult to injury and the fact that we maybe heard this as G-Funk and y'all were like, I don't know, maybe. Altogether, this is pointing to me that there is attention here.

There's this West Coast, East Coast feud, but when we start to zero in on the musical differences between those two styles, it seems like they have more in common than you might think. We're thinking, let's take a short break. And when we come back, let's dig into this tension. Like, is this feud more of a personal feud or is it more of a musical feud? Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster? Well, you have to ask lots of questions.

I'm Maria Sharpova and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week, I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness. I have a few pretty tough questions for you. Okay. Ready? Do not sugarcoat something for me. No, no.

We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs, and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey. Pretty tough is your front row seat to the women who have demonstrated the power in being unapologetic in their pursuits. I hope you'll join us. New episodes drop Wednesday. on YouTube or in your favorite podcast app.

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But what we want to do in this space is talk about America and politics beyond the current president. So what do most Americans think about deportation and border security, period? I think that Americans are definitely against the kind of violent displays that we've seen in the street from ICE. When it comes to the question of deportation, the answer is more complicated. My sense is that people want border at the border. They don't like the idea of having no idea who's coming into the United States at any given time.

The view on immigration from the bottom up instead of the top down. That's this week on America. America actually every Saturday in your audio and video feeds. Okay, so if this isn't totally necessarily a G-Funk sound, that West Coast sound, what is a quintessential Tupac track that would encapsulate that G-Funk quality for us? Whenever I think of like the music that people consider gangster rap, West Coast, G-Funk, I think usually for me the building block is Parliament Funkadelic, but maybe you all might feel differently.

Or Zapp, Roger Troutman. I do think that it's right, that it's like a particular kinds of parliament funkadelic songs, not all of them, but there are some that definitely have that. It's a very synthy sound, those, like those keys riding over the top. That's not necessarily the sound that you hear in Zapp and Roger. So listen, you know, we call that like the West Coast sound, but I think about EPMD. You got to chill. Listen, when I tell you, boy, you got to show. They very much have that so-called G-Funk sound, but it's, you know, it's EPMD, obviously.

All right, guys. What I love here is that I tried to set up a false binary of East Coast, West Coast, and say that we have Boombap versus G-Funk, and we can't even settle on definitions of these sounds. I think what we've discovered is that actually these things collapse onto each other a whole lot more than it might seem at first. What I want to do is share some music that I think breaks apart this division. Let's look at some of the things that they actually have in common.

The first thing I wanted to look at was this idea that G-Funk and Boombap might actually have common ancestry. And we can look at a track like Africa Mabata's jazzy sensation and hear both that really funky, sort of parliament-y kind of baseline and that Boombap kick and snare. We got a little something that you can't resist. We want to say a little something to the other emcees. We said we don't have no quality. We got... So beyond that, we could look at the fact that both artists, both Tupac and Biggie, often are actually sampling from similar sources.

Of course, one of the most sampled artists of all time is James Brown, and they, of course, both of them draw from that. So here's Trapped by Tupac. They got me trapped, can barely move the city streets without a cop, And here's the sample, which is The Spank by James Brown. We can go to Biggie, who is featured on Total's Can't You See, also on Bad Boy Records. And here is James Brown's The Payback, which, interestingly enough, is actually one of the vocal samples on Kendrick-Climbred. Mars, Cancunta, a West Coast rapper, using the sample, which I've been used by East Coast rapper.

I can dig rapping. So we have both maybe some common ancestry in earlier old school hip-hop. In the sounds, we also have common root material. The other thing that these artists share in common are producers. And Easy MoB, one of the most important producers of this era, worked with both Tupac and Big And we can hear his sound of the Emu SP12, the sort of quintessential 90s drum sampler on Tupac's Temptations. Yo, MoB, man, drop that shit. I love that.

We actually get a shout out to Easy MoB at the top of the track. And we can also hear his production on Biggie's The Machine Gun Funk. So when I see that we have a common ancestry in music that, is drawing on that sort of funk sound and Boombap happening earlier in the 80s. We have the same sample sources, and they're working with the same producers, I think upsets the narrative of an East Coast, West Coast divide and shows that there's actually perhaps things in common that are happening within the music.

Yeah, well, their beef was never an aesthetic beef, right? Their beef wasn't about a difference in, I don't think. From my understanding, their beef wasn't at least not primarily about styles. It wasn't about my styles better than, you know, my tiger style can defeat your dragon style. It wasn't like that. And in fact, you know, Tupac, from what I know about his music, really starts to take on a so-called West Coast sound when he joins Death Row. Like a lot of his music before that had all different kinds of sounds in a way that's different from like Snoop, right, who kind of had a particular sound for a lot of his, especially earlier music. Yeah, I was surprised to learn on your show that his early MC name was.

was even MC New York. Yeah, I mean, he had so many different influences. I mean, he worked with Shock G, you know, in Digital Underground, which is like another influence in his music. So, yeah, I mean, when we tend to think of Tupac as a West Coast artist, what we're talking about of the 11 months that he was on death row. And it's a sliver of his actual career, but it ultimately was the most popular.

And so that's why we remember it that way. But I mean, it just kind of shows you that East Coast versus West Coast was always very reductive. Like Christopher said, I mean, Seattle's on the West Coast. I mean, but nobody's talking about, like, the Seattle influence of West Coast music. We're just talking about L.A. And we're not talking about Baltimore's influence on music.

We're talking about New York, right? Yeah, I think we could grab a track of Tupac's Like Soldier's story, which you talk about on your show and really hear that Boombap, East Coast style. Yeah, a couple things. Boom, back. Boom, bad. Yeah, a couple things.

So, you know, if you go back and you watch the Source Awards, and we talk about this in episode three, and you see when Snoop gets up with Dre to accept its producer of the year, is that right? And, you know, they're being booed. At least a part of the crowd is booing them. And Snoop basically says, you know, hold up, hold up. The East Coast ain't got no love for Dr. Jay and Snoop Dog and death row. Y'all don't love us.

The reason he seems to be kind of taken aback is what we're talking about now, which is that, yes, we know that there's something that's brewing between these two scenes, but in Snoop's mind, I mean, and you see it in his face, I think he meant it. Oh, yeah. He was totally flummoxed. Yeah, like, you love our sound, and we love you. Right. For a lot of people, like, the divide is almost not only arbitrary, but kind of ridiculous.

Well, which isn't to say that, like, there was not some legitimate condescension from New York rap fans. One important thing to remember that night is that Outcast got booed at the same award show, 1995 Source Awards. Yeah. What you're talking about, Snoop's like surprise. He's like, wait a minute. I don't understand why you guys don't like us. I mean, this music is the shit. And the sales have proven it, and we've done shows out here, and we see that you love,

us and so what does he say? So let it be known then. So let it be known then. Like let people know that you love. I love that line. Well, let it be known then. We don't give a pope. We know y'all East Coast.

We know where the pope we're at. Yeah. Yeah. That's the Crip at it, man. That is the Cripp. Let it be known in. Musical evidence for this affinity that you're talking about that Snoop was, you know, so shocked at might come in the form of a biggie track that

really has a G-funk influence. And it's actually called going back to Cali. I mean, it sounds like Dre could have produced that track. It's very much a zap sound. Is that more bounce to the ounce? It is more bounce to the ounce.

It is. It is. You know who did that track, right? Easy MoB. Easy Mo B. No way. Yeah, no, Easy Mo B did this track. And a quick funny story about it is that this is right around the time that

Easy Mo B is falling out with Bad Boy. Because Easy Mo B was like one of the early Bad Boy producers. I guess you could have called him one of the hitmen, one of Puffy's Hitman, which is his in-house production team. So Easy Mobie got his start that way. But then he started working with Pock and he started working with some other people. And so then, you know, things kind of, you know, faded out in that relationship. But at any rate, he was helping, he put together, going back to Cali, that beat submitted it, said he never heard anything back from Puffy, never heard anything back from Biggie. Then the album gets released and he's like, going back to Cali, that's crazy. He didn't

even though the name of the song, he had no idea what the name of the song was going to be or anything. And so he was like, yo, like, I would have never named the song that. Like, that was, he felt that that was in Cindy area or whatever, but I've used that word a lot today because it was, because that was going on. And to me, it's also super interesting that, like, a lot of this music that we're talking about that's getting so widely sampled by these two different coast is music that's made by black artists who were from neither coast. Like, if we're talking about Zapp, right, Zapp and Roger, who are from Ohio,

and, you know, James Brown, obviously, from the South, like this music that's getting brought into a beef that's happening between these two coast is pulling off of music that's from neither coast, really, and that's feeding that sound. Now, yes, it's being rebuilt and remade by artists from both coasts and in between, but to me, it just says something about, like,

again, just how kind of arbitrary in some ways. Now the beef it went from arbitrary to very, very real quickly. People lost lives, but these like this East Coast, West Coast thing in terms of the sound just doesn't resonate for me as a rap fan. Peafunk's from Detroit.

You know what I mean? Yeah. It's just kind of like out what I mean, it comes to represent West Coast sound, but these dudes are from Detroit. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And like that, you know, Big Papa, Isley Brothers, Philly? Are they from Philly? Oh, the Isley Brothers? I'm Or at least that record label, I think you should feel like.

I feel like these brothers are also from Ohio. From Ohio. Take my black card. Sorry, Mama. Hey, girl, ain't no mystery. Hey, y'all, if you're a true player, to the honeys get your money player fellas like the miss. This makes me think the Midwest has the biggest claim towards funk of any more than any goes.

It's like Midwest is holding it down. Yeah, yeah, that's right. I don't mean to be reductive here and to say that the East Coast and West Coast are meeting somewhere nicely in the middle, but that narrative is sort of playing out. I really don't want to be reductive. There is a boom bap sound. There is a g-funk sound. There are geographic tendencies towards those sounds, but it wasn't as if these were happening in regionally specific ways. Like, this is popular music.

Both Shug and Puffy were making music for everybody to buy. They wanted to make money off of these records, and they were going to make stuff that, And I think that part of the way in which these sort of hyperbolic narrative of East Coast, West Coast division is evidenced is that the backing track to that feud is actually kind of the same thing. And I think that for me that the music is so often drawing from similar influences that they're actually crossing over between styles, both artists, really shows that there is affinity. at some level, at least at an aesthetic level, and that the feud really does feel like the headline should have been, like, Biggie versus Tupac, that's real. Yeah.

But the East Coast versus West Coast, and I don't mean to say, you know, as you put it, like there were fans that, you know, had affinities as well, but it sets up this binary that feels not, just doesn't hold up when we listen deeply into the music. That's absolutely right that, you know, it doesn't hold up. And I mean, even, I mean, some people might argue to say that, Tupac versus Biggie was a beef was not actually a beef. It was very much a one-way beef that Tupac had with Biggie.

The Biggie was very taken aback and did not understand why Tupac was mad at him. And some people could say that it was just performance art on Tupac's part because what we learned from that beef or from that conflict is that beef sells and rap. It's driven a lot of other careers. 50 Cent has made an entire career out of beefing with people. And so it helped people to see that there was money in that. It also showed people that you have to be really careful. And like, you can't, you know, play with fire too much.

But it is lucrative. It can be profitable to start fights and rap every day out again. So the art of the beef remains alive and well. Do we still hear G-Funk in modern hip-hop? Do we still hear boom bap in modern hip-hop? Go sound, man. Modern, modern, I mean, to the extent that I listen to contemporary hip-hop. Yeah, we're old men here now.

I'm sure it's out there, but I think that it's just sort of morphed. And, like, you know, it's much harder to tell the regional influences on music now that, like, a lot of the music sounds the same and comes from a lot of the same sources. Going back to what we're talking about in terms of Tupac, you know, using music that certainly people had known from Junior Mafia and from Biggie to throw shots at Biggie and hit him up. And, like, you know, obviously, beefs weren't new to hip-hop when Tupac came around and, and came for Biggie, and I'm thinking about the beef between KRS-1, Boogie Down Productions on one side.

Manhattan keeps some making it. Brooklyn keeps on taking it. Bronze keeps creating it, and Queens keeps on faking it. And the Juice crew, Queensbridge Cats on the other side. That, like, you know, if we remember this beef, that M.C. Shen makes a song that basically says, that hip-hop starts in Queens Bridge, which is so fascinating. And then, of course, Chaos One, Boogie Down Productions,

is having none of that coming from the Bronx. And in the beginning of that song, The Bridge is Over, he samples the bridge. And so this is a kind of thing, like, in hip-hop, and I think also in black music, you hear it in jazz. In jazz, they call it quoting. In hip-hop, they call it sampling. but that there are all these sort of extra-lirical messages that are sent back and forth to fans and to artists between each other.

And also inside the lyrics, but outside of the lyrics too, that you hear basically a kind of signifying that is invoking all kinds of things just in a sort of tinkling of some keys or a particular horn lick. That means so much especially between fans. And so this is not a new thing when Tupac does it. hit him up. We started that question with, is there G-Funk and Boombap happening? And I did identify a little bit, but it feels like it is a bit on the margins. And just two things that I think are important to note would be certainly Kendrick Lamar, write Dr. Dreus Potaget, and we can hear from Good Kid Mad City on the song, the art of peer pressure, a very clear G-Funk reference.

But it's just really the beginning of the song before he goes into another beat. So we have some G-Funk in Kendrick, but he's going to be. got to be quoting his producer. He's got to be quoting his entire neighborhood and community and the whole world of hip hop because he is just so dexterous in his knowledge. On the boom bap side, the only thing, I mean, obviously it's through and through embedded within hip hop, but the style that I hear it most is in this sort of underground, I don't even know if it's underground, but this Spotify playlist music world

of Lofi hip hop beats. So here's a track, Call Whenever by Psalm Trees, and it's kind of like, I'll just play it. Imagine you've walked into a piano lounge or then someone has taken a KRS one beat, but just slowed it down in half, and it's kind of drunk.

I hear some boom bap in that. And that world of lofi hip hop music, the playlist is actually beats to relax slash study to, Has 800,000 subscribers on Spotify. So there's definitely cultural influence of that music, but it's happening not at the level of top 100 hip-hop,

but rather sort of background study music. I think that's right. Yeah, I mean, they went and play the club. It's the lounge music. Boombap has gone from hard-hitting to now it's lounge music. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think that there are probably still artists out there who are doing, like, that old boom-bap.

Who is it that? Oh, yeah, like, I think it's Q-Tit or somebody that says, you know, skilled in the ways of that old Boomap. Like, it is the music, for sure. It's the production, but it's also the emceeing. And especially in a Boom-Bab style where you basically have like two or three instruments,

and one of those is the MC. That people, when you see people nodding their heads at a Boom-Bap show for a Boom-Bap performance, it's their nodding to the MC as like an instrument the way that he or she is really spitting on the mic is kind of controlling the crowd like an instrument does. So, yeah, like, we hear music that says, okay, this is boom-bap or boom-bat slowed down,

but without the MC, I don't know. Well, I mean, that may be one of the reasons that we hear less of it, right, because there's less... Like, I don't want to be the kind of person that says that music has changed in that way, but they're just not a lot of dudes that spit like that anymore. Like, that's not...

You know, like, just imagine a guy, like Tiliqa Wali trying to make a living in 2019 rapping now. You know what I mean? Like that would be really difficult because I think people are much more, there's much more emphasis on the actual beat and the music and it being sort of lush and funky and like unique. But like to be really effective on Boom Bab, you've got to be like a really gifted lyricist.

And that's just not, I'm not saying that people are not capable, but that's not necessarily what you will hear on the charts anymore right now. Yeah, and it just occurred to me and I can't believe that I didn't think of this. Like that when I saw, like we all, well, many of us did, Black Thoughts performance at Hot 97, 11 minute spit that he did last year was it? That was last year, I think, yeah. I've seen some ice cold summers hot winters too.

I never thought I went Grammy awards with the roots. I never thought I would be getting long in the tooth. My OG told me, boy, you better go and live your truth. I am a walking affirmation. That imagination and focus and paces get you closer to your ass for me. For me, really there's no shame. for me in saying this, I kind of got a little teary-eyed. In the way that people talk about going to a classical performance

or seeing a beautiful piece of art, and they get a little weepy. Like if I'm standing in front of the Mona Lisa and I get weepy, it's okay. It, to me, captured so much about the perfection of an aesthetic and especially a Boombap aesthetic that, and so for me to know that both to see it done with pinpoint precision

and that it's still alive and well, in someone like Black Thought and in his hands made me feel really good and feel really happy. But that's a really good example. And some of the other stuff that he does on his new album, new-ish album with Ninth Wonder is Boombap-ish. Black Thought is way too sort of technical and there's a dynamism to him

that is different than the Boombap sound, but he hits it in a certain way. He's very much on the beat. He doesn't go around a lot from what I have heard. But he's a good contemporary example. but he's also an OG. Yeah, man. I mean, he was around long enough to make fun of Biggie when Biggie was a lot. Right on. Christopher, Joel, this has been such a great discussion about the both real and imagined

borders of West Coast and East Coast hip-hop in the 90s. It's been very ear-opening for me to really delve deeply into these sounds and their context. So it's like forever going to change how I think about this iconic feud. Where can people hear more of Slow Burn? Pretty much anywhere you listen to podcasts, you can go to our website, you can go to Apple, you can go to Stitcher Radio.

Yeah, wherever you get your podcast. You can hear it. There's an episode a week. We have eight episodes. The final episode we're aired December 18th. Right on. Well, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much, guys.

Oh, our pleasure, guys. Thank you for having us on. It's a lot of fun. This episode of Switched on Pop was produced by Charlie Harding. Go check out Slow Burn. It is awesome. Season three live now. Our amazing engineer and editor is Brandon McFarland.

Megan Lubin production fellow Bridget Armstrong, producer, Nashat Kerwa and Liz Kelly Nelson, executive producers. We are proud members of the Vox Media Network. Find more of our show wherever you get podcasts. And we'll be back in another week. Every Tuesday, we come out with a new episode. If you want more, go to switchdownpop.com. Hit us up on Twitter at Switch on Pop.

That's it, y'all. See you next week. Thanks for listening.