AKA: The Single that Makes Me Weep

AKA: Blame/Thank Luda

Through most of high school and the first few years of my college matriculation, I wanted to be a rapper.  As comical as that is, part of the reasoning was that I could actually spit, and I was around people who could spit too.  Some were pretty talented on the production front as well, including a cousin who is still making waves and a man I consider a brother.  With a view on music that was never satisfied with just listening to music from the States, my limited talents were as varied as a DOOM verse and as legible as a Young Thug soliloquy, but eventually the YT bit degraded.  I still stutter or stumble a bit on my words when I try to speak too quickly, but I’m getting better.  On Morehouse’s campus (my first college) I observed a handful of impromptu cyphers, watching guys with more charisma than I (and some with smaller vocabularies) work a crowd and drop punch-line after punch-line against their opponent.  To this day I don’t know if everyone was from Morehouse or even the AUC, but these were some pretty decent cats.

None of them were in my circle though, save for that aforementioned cousin who was my roommate for half of my sophomore year (he transferred out by the second semester; Morehouse was never the wiser, so I had a big room all to myself).  I knew rappers who rapped on the side: otherwise they were busy with work, or school, or personal endeavors that ranged from foreign exchange to spiritual enlightenment.  I joined this funny stable and little did I know I was drawing knowledge from them.  My raps became stronger and more varied: sometimes I would spit 16 bars and didn’t even know it.  Why, sometimes I look back on that freestyle I spit after meeting that Caribbean girl.  That was a sick freestyle.  I wish I remembered all of it, as opposed to the two lines I can still recall.  Funny enough I remember going to Wal-Mart later that day.  Good times.

After a  while that passion for wanting to be a rapper died.  I was still interested in it, don’t get me wrong, but as a career choice or a means to attract women I just stopped (which is funny because as I recall it was shortly after conversing with another girl that the rap passion died down).  But it was still on the backburner, and between me, a charismatic fellow from Louisiana and a deceptively smooth cat from Alabama there grew a three-man concept that never came into solid fruition.  This trio was known as Swaggtacular and the Beats.  Me and Louisiana were DiZ and E-Veaux respectively, collectively known as Swaggtacular, a pair of CAU students who could spit and liked to rap.  I handled verses more so, he knew how to do catchy hooks, and it was a good team.  The Beats was the producer, the Alabaman who pulled a Kasseem Dean and gave us beats by the pound in record time.  Of course we only ended up using one, for our single, which never really was.

You might be wondering to yourself, “Were these guys serious?!”  Well yes and no.  We were serious about not being serious: at the time I wasn’t even getting my hair cut.  The three of us enjoyed making fun of rap as much as we enjoyed listening to it, and with a speedy beat maker and some speedy wordplay on our part, we were having a blast.  Admittedly, most of this time was spent in planning, but it was all fun all the same.  Between cracking up all the time and never sitting down enough to write verses, there was only one real verse that came from the whole failed project.  It was for a song I refuse to name (for the sake of decency) about our appreciation for the women of the AUC.  We really could have taken the low road and made it about the physical, but we went the high road and pulled a Lady Brown with it: the name was a deceptive way to make fun of guys who only focused on the physical.  Good times yet again.

So this song became our joke, and it was never actually saved.  We recorded it but after we had our laugh we just kind of let it fall by the wayside.  There are no regrets, no complaints, no questions of “What if…?”  We just let it go, and to this day I still laugh at the grand scheme we had planned.  The album was going to be sixteen tracks long, two of them skits, and all but one non-skit track featured guests.  I have to specify just how significant that is: guests.  Plural.  At least two.  One song was going to be a tribute to the incomprehensible, with me, E-Veaux and two famous “ringtone rap” “stars” more or less adopting a mumble mush delivery over an already overly muddled track to produce something that we could only call “Huh?”

There was the track that was to serve as an outsider’s introduction to the Atlanta University Center, a hardcore, profanity-laced foray featuring twin smooth jazz giants Kenny G and Walter Beasley.  The next track was going to be an even more in-depth look into the AUC, where the backdrop mirrored Jim Jones’ “Crunk Muzik” but with a electro/house music flair.  It was called “House Musik”.  It featured Ne-Yo and John Legend.

I think we were trying to parody rap but got so caught up with life we never actually got around to doing the project.  As I look back on this track listing I have to say that I could have looked back fondly on this would-be Ludacris tribute (featuring Lil Wayne and Nate Dogg (RIP)) or this “Yup” song that might very well be the precursor to the currently one-part series “Dang it, Bobby!” we have on this site. 

Yes, “Yup” featured Bobby Valentino, back when he was still on the road to being unknown but still known enough that people remembered “Slow Down”.  This whole fake album came around the time of Ludacris’ transition, to be honest.  Not just into acting but that five or six year period after the release of Release Therapy where he switched things up and found himself in a weird place where he wasn’t as fun as previous releases, wasn’t as focused as previous releases and tried to show himself as more serious but had yet to find any balance, even if he ultimately did get a couple of Grammy Awards (for an experimental album and a lackluster song). 

If anything, we modeled the track listing for Swaggtacular and the Beats after the mildly cinematically themed Theater of the Mind.  Nearly every song had a feature save for one (just like with ours.  Our feature-less song was “Ha Ha”, a concept that had us tell non-rhyming jokes and ending every line with “ha ha”, and starting some with “ha ha”, and sometimes just saying “ha ha” for an entire line).  In a dark way, Christopher Bridges’ attempts to become a more well-rounded rapper, departing from the clown prince moniker he adopted and shared with Redman (still waiting for that ode to big women, Luda and Red (Swaggtacular never got around to doing it)), was the very reason we went and thought about even doing this project.  Kudos to the man who has acted in Academy Award winning pictures, but between Release Therapy and Theater of the Mind and the polarizing Battle of the Sexes, an album which may have accounted in the amicable breakup of the group, we witnessed the rise, fall and reconstruction of the standard rapper. 

It all started for us with a deceptively positive track devoted to how great the women of the AUC were, and this was after playing around and freestyling with upbeat lyrics and songs about more base desires.  Food?  We did it.  Women?  We were on it.  Success?  Not so much, but we didn’t often rap about things we felt like he already had (yeah, infer away).  Then we got a little serious, even if the content of the would-be album was varied between serious and comical, even spiritual (the track “The Lord is Good” was a super posse cut that would have featured Eddie Long, T.D. Jakes, Kirk Franklin, Yolanda Adams, M.C. Martha Stewart and the greatest rapper of all time himself VIC over a beat that sounded like this).  We added a bunch of guests who had no business being on there: Luda had Willy Northpole, we had Bobby Brown, a skit about an Italian restaurant and a Ludacris tribute called “Zip Codes”.  We were so corny.

So is Swaggtacular and the Beats a failed experiment to parody the latest albums from Ludacris?  Unintentionally.  The project alone was worth the laughs.  It would have been cool to try and convince John Witherspoon to rap with us about not going to the bathroom for 25, 35 minutes, but he did that quite well on his own too.  It would have been nice to make a song with Black Star, the Standard and pre-preachy Lupe Fiasco in a song that also featured Bobby Brown that was also, sadly, about how Bobby Brown really didn’t amount to much.  And the outro would have been like that of Tha Carter IV, where the only person who wasn’t a part of it was the album artist himself.  With such hardcore lyricism from the likes of ONYX, NWA and Three 6 Mafia you can only imagine how smooth the Temptations would have sounded over the chorus (and Sticky Fingaz was an honorary Temptation for the track, we REALLY developed some serious lore for this stuff). 

But aside from being completely impossible to do, it also stands as one of the more lighthearted things of our college years.  It wasn’t “innocent” but it was fun, and I guess it serves as a legit look into both our creative mind states and rap as a whole back then.  I’d post the track list but seriously, we were a bit more… green when it was developed.  But one day, maybe, we’ll do it big.  And present the album in its entirety. 

Because who doesn’t want to hear Gucci Mane and Jean Grae on a track together, rapping about being broke?