AraabMuzik x FLUD | Beats Per Minute
I was lucky enough to be alive back in the day when Hip-Hop first came out and it was pretty much all I listened to from when I first heard it. I was hooked like a fiend. As I got older I learned about sampling, production and beat-making and fell in love even more. It was crazy to me that these DJ’s & producers could make beats, actual whole songs worth of music out of thin air. Back in those days the DJ actually held alot more weight than the MC. Without the music, the hard-ass beats like Rakim’s “Follow the Leader”, Stezo’s “It’s My Turn”, Special Ed’s “I Got It Made”, and many others, would have just been poetry. Sure the words were slick and well put together, but you hear the beat before the lyrics and if the beat doesn’t catch you & hold you for the next 3 1/2 to 4 minutes everything else is a waste of time, at least in my opinion.
Fast forward to the 1990’s and the 2000’s and there’s cats literally murdering beats so viciously that you don’t even need any lyrics. There are alot of cats that can slaughter a beat machine, cats like The Alchemist, DJ Premiere, Timbaland, and Just Blaze, but for the most part they make tracks mainly for MC’s to lace with vocals…add the lyrics and the track is finished. There was never more than a handful of producers that could literally create entire songs of just beats, at least beats that were so hot they didn’t need any lyrics added. Sure you could listen to the instrumentals, but the instrumentals weren’t made to be heard by themselves. Fast forward to somewhere around 2008-2009 and AraabMuzik pops up doing some production for Cam’ron & Dipset, and early in the game you can see he’s a certified monster on the MPC.
The video below is AraabMuzik doing a live performance collaboration for Flud Watches, a New York based company that makes wristwatches in all kinds of styles. I’m not exactly sure how this collab came about, I think it was for a few new watch designs (at the time) that looked like an actual turntable and another that was an actual MPC. And who better to collab with than the MPC monster, AraabMuzik?
The talent this kid has is something else, straight through the video, no fuckups at all, flawless transitions and the end product is absolute crack. I wish there was a full length release available with this particular track on it. Anyway, enough of the yappin’…check this jawn out.
