In 8th grade I was a kid who lived and died by west coast gangster rap and you could find me bumping everything from NWA to Quik to Spice 1 to Too $hort. But there was just so much good music coming out in the Mid90s that you didn’t have time to just dedicate to the west. At the schoolyard, I was hanging with my childhood friends but I was also always hanging with some kids from the wrong side of the tracks as well. But we were one in the same. Kids that loved hip hop. I started to see classmates of mine spending a large part of the school day just tagging up their notebooks. I always thought it would dope. When the Artifacts dropped “Wrong Side of Da Tracks” I was pretty sure my dreams of becoming a baseball player changed to me being a graffiti artist. Too bad my marker game was weak but my love for the 4 elements of hip hop never faded. I wanted to be a part of it all the more I saw and heard of it. This track was one for the culture. With Tame One’s passing this week, I had to bring some words and visuals to my platform.
Tame One and El Da Sensei had different styles that complimented each other so well. And the production they were laced with? Geeeeeesh! When I think of the movie Kids, it’s the Artifacts’ debut album Between a Rock and a Hard Place that I imagine as the soundtrack. The Artifacts music just made me want to be creative with whatever I did. Soccer, schoolwork, basketball, doodling, etc. The Artifacts were what I cared about in 1994 from the East Coast. Give me some Artifacts and Jeru and I was golden. A song like “Lower da Boom” would just get that head nod going and the lyrics you’d hear would give you the scrunch face where anybody near you might look at you and think you were a weirdo. But all of the true hip hop kids didn’t care. They had the soundtrack for their lives in their eardrums with the music out at the time back then.
What about “C’Mon with da Git Down” though? Perfectly crafted beat with Tame One bringing a Hiero vibe over in Newark, NJ. If I ever heard this song while riding my skater I was for sure ready to crack somebody in the head with my board if I had to. Or at least that’s the hype I had going on in my eardrums.
Post-Artifacts, I stayed in tune with El Da Sensei and Tame One because they were both talented in their own right. But when Tame One started popping up with El-P and the Def Jux crew (shout out to the Weathermen!), I knew El-Producto and the production crew would lace Tame with some fire to rap over. How fresh was the Weathermen posse track with Cage, Aesop Rock, El-P, Tame One, and Yak Ballz though? That Cage album was loaded with outside-the-box beats, flows, artwork, etc. Tame One drops in at 1:10 with the best opening bars between all emcees and captures your attention. Such a good posse track right here!
My favorite solo track of Tame’s would have to be “Slick Talkin” and it’s not even close. Tame carved up the J-Zone beat and created a timeless track that any NY rap fans back in the late 90’s and early 00’s know most of the words to. You can’t listen to Tame, Artifacts, Company Flow, Cannibal Ox, Aesop Rock, or any of the others from this time and not feel a certain way. It’s a shame that this track only has 7K views on YouTube and 124K streams on Spotify. Let’s get those numbers up fam… RIP Tame One!
