See, I became underground since the life in the street
The love of the beat, large is the fleet
That will remain underground for all my boys whose souls sleep
Six feet deeper than the soles of my feet.
—ZEV LOVE X, “BLACK BASTARDS!”
As far as industry standards were concerned, Mr. Hood, which sold about 150,000 copies, would not be considered a triumphant debut. But it hardly tanked either. It managed to slip in at an opportune moment when the majors were still throwing money at their new cash cow, while trying to figure out what worked and what didn’t. Who would have thought, for example, that a soulful, sing-songy rap about “Tennessee” by a Southern group called Arrested Development could win a Grammy in an era when gangsta rap ruled the airwaves? Relationships mattered, too, and KMD were lucky to have a true believer in their corner in A&R man Ross. “We didn’t recoup on the first record, so when it came time to talk about another one, the label wasn’t sure,” he says, “I convinced them that they should, but they set the budget at $200,000, which was a lot less than Mr. Hood.”1 Though their major-label debut may have been but a momentary blip on rap’s radar, it proved to be a learning experience for the brothers that helped broaden their horizons.
When they hit the road to promote that first record, touring with labelmates Brand Nubian and Leaders of the New School, they had to forge their own identity independent of 3rd Bass. Image Crafting 101 was not a class offered in high school, yet it was essential in the cutthroat field of entertainment into which they had been catapulted. Initially, KMD appeared onstage, as in their music videos, wearing the Ansaar uniform of white robes and kufis. While obviously trying to set themselves apart, they came across as a little too different—not to mention awkward—since appearing like religious zealots didn’t quite jive with the playful vibe of their music. After a few shows, however, they switched up to regular street clothes, helping them better connect with their audience.
Despite being practicing Muslims, the Dumile brothers also succumbed to peer pressure this time around, and started experimenting with alcohol and weed. After all, the Five Percenters in their touring party—namely Brand Nubian and Busta Rhymes—bound by no such restrictions, were having too much fun. Zev’s initial concession to loosening up involved drinking red wine, but he chose Manischewitz, the kosher brand, as opposed to the forty-ounce bottles of malt liquor favored by his peers. On the West Coast leg of the tour, headlined by De La Soul, he also indulged in marijuana for the first time. Years later he recalled, “On those long stretches, I think 15 days out there, days would get longer and longer. So, it just made us relax I guess.”2 While the first album captured a snapshot of young adolescents, these new experiences marked a coming of age, providing fodder for their next album, Black Bastards, which they worked on over the course of the next two years.
The contrast between the two records could not have been more stark. On a track like “Sweet Premium Wine,” Sub declared his newfound taste for alcohol, rapping, “You know I’m complex-cated like a Rubik’s Cube puzzle / Who said I drink? I don’t drink, I guzzle.” Meanwhile, numerous references to weed cropped up in tracks like “Smokin’ That S*@%!,” “Suspended Animation,” and “Contact Blitt.” The latter, in fact, related a true story in which the whole crew smoked so much on the tour bus that even the bus driver caught a contact high. He was so stoned, in fact, that he attempted to extort them for money in order to continue driving. Zev set the scene, “My rap label mates, they all smoke blunts / Went on this tour once, the bus was loco / From Albuquerque to like Acapulco / See it was Lord J, Sadat, Alamo / Busta and myself in the back with the whole O.Z.”
Another obvious departure from those innocent times of yore was “Get-U-Now,” on which a revved-up Zev boasted, “I’ve got a brand new .380 in the box, made like Glocks / A shoebox of bullets, two clips, no safety lock.” Rapping about guns and drugs hardly covered new territory, and for a group so often compared to the conscious collective of the Native Tongues, it seemed like a complete 180-degree reversal. “So, all those new things we were learning, a lot of the weirdness that came out of being in the business, went into that record,” Zev explained, “that’s where you get a lot of the edge on it, almost bitterness I would say. It’s like a talk shit kind of record almost. A bit like, ‘Well, fuck y’all,’ we’re still going to do our thing.”3 Transitioning into young adults, they were obviously heavily influenced by the swirling currents around them, as well as the many new heads coming into their cipher.
“I first met DOOM in 1989 on the set of ‘The Gas Face’ video,”4 says Bobbito Garcia, a Wesleyan University grad whose first job in the music industry was working in the mailroom of Def Jam. After getting bumped up to promotions, he made sure his friend Jorge Alvarez took over his former position. Bob and Jorge knew each other as neighbors at 160 West Ninety-Seventh Street, located in the rapidly gentrifying but still crime-prone area known as Manhattan Valley on the Upper West Side. Robert Hill, who ran the independent Zakia label that released Eric B. & Rakim’s first singles and album, also lived in that building, as did a young graf writer named Kadi Agueros, who left his tag, “EROTIC,” on any flat surface he could bless with a fat cap. Right around the corner, at Ninety-Eighth and Amsterdam, was the unassuming playground of PS 163, the Alfred E. Smith School, better known as “Rock Steady Park.” In the eighties it served as the headquarters of legendary breakdancers, the Rock Steady Crew, many of whose members lived in the neighborhood and perfected their acrobatic moves on that same asphalt.
Growing up in an area steeped in hip-hop, Kadi, a fan of BDP’s first album, formed a graffiti crew known as CM, which stood for “Criminal Minded.” Fellow writers Kae-Nit (Hill’s son), Nice-O, Dev, and Style formed the core of this crew, but other friends from the area who dedicated themselves to different elements of the culture were down as well. Percy Carey, a former child star on Sesame Street and currently the rapper known as MF Grimm, gravitated toward the CM Fam, as did his DJ, Roc Raida (Anthony Williams), a Harlem native who would clinch the DMC World DJ Championship in 1995. “There were so many people involved—neighborhoods, people on the street corner, people older than us. Even if they were the neighborhood wino, they were down with CM,”5 says Grimm.
Apartment 6G, where Jorge Alvarez lived, served as the crew’s unofficial clubhouse, where dudes would hang out and listen to the latest jams while drinking 40s, puffing on blunts and Newports, playing video games like Super Mario, or scarfing down $2.50 fish sandwiches from the Chinese deli downstairs. “It’s just my people, that’s how we grew up,” says Jorge, who also met Zev at the same time as Bobbito. “Me and DOOM got cool quick. He would come around my way and before you knew it, he was family.”6 On his frequent forays uptown, Zev spent many a night at 6G, soaking up the vibes and making new connections that would last a lifetime.
Though he never really aspired to be an MC, Jorge loved to snap and make jokes. While stuffing envelopes in the Def Jam conference room, he would channel this humor into freestyle raps over the Honey Drippers’ old-school break “Impeach the President.” Egged on by other rappers he knew like King Sun and MF Grimm, he eventually wrote a rhyme and performed it for Bobbito, who gave him further encouragement. Bobbito went as far as setting his friend up with a European producer called the Duke of Denmark to make his first demo, “My Intro.” But Jorge soon found other opportunities to rhyme, linking up with Prince Powerrule, a Puerto Rican MC with a deal on the independent Revenge Records. They went into the studio to record more demos, including “9mm Rhymes” and “Rhythmic Insanity.” Jorge also appeared on the track “Young Stars from Nowhere” off Power Rule’s album debut, Volume 1 (Interscope, 1991).
One day, while Jorge was dubbing copies of his demo in the office of Faith Newman, Def Jam’s head of A&R, she overheard it and was instantly impressed. After passing on the tape to her boss, Russell Simmons, Jorge received a promotion. Simmons also expressed an interest in signing him and making a record, but, apparently, the young rapper had already made a verbal agreement with Pete Nice, who was making moves of his own.
The second and final album from 3rd Bass, Derelicts of Dialect (Def Jam/Columbia, 1991), had dropped only a month after KMD’s debut. Despite spawning the hit “Pop Goes the Weasel,” a diss of Vanilla Ice that helped the album go gold, success could not compete with a litany of personal issues stacking up between Pete and Serch. Six months after the album’s release, while on tour to promote it, they announced their intention of going their separate ways. Serch relinquished his stake in their company, RIF productions, and, therefore, no longer had anything to do with KMD as he pivoted toward a solo career. Meanwhile, Pete, after forming a duo with DJ Richie Rich, scored a label deal at Columbia to start developing his own artists. He brought Bobbito on to run day-to-day operations and act as A&R. Jorge, whom Bob had nicknamed “Kurious,” after the popular children’s book character Curious George, became the first act signed to the newly established Hoppoh imprint distributed by Columbia.
Bobbito was also diversifying his portfolio during this period. The former Def Jam employee partnered on a rap radio show at Pete’s alma mater, Columbia, with freshman Adrian Bartos, who called himself DJ Stretch Armstrong. Between Stretch, who already had a reputation from spinning at New York clubs, and Bob, who had one foot in the music industry and another in the underground through his CM connections, their show on 89.9 WKCR became a much-followed alternative to commercial rap radio—as well as highly influential. It served as a one-of-a-kind vehicle for introducing new talent, airing exclusive material, and highlighting live freestyle and scratching sessions. Not coincidentally, Jorge, now going as Kurious, appeared as one of the show’s first guests. KMD also dropped by for the first time on February 17, 1991, to promote Mr. Hood.
Meanwhile, Dante Ross, who was busy building his rap roster at Elektra, had signed his first West Coast artist, Del the Funky Homosapien (Teren Delvon Jones), a bohemian rapper from the Bay Area. Not only was he Ice Cube’s cousin, but Del also helmed his own crew of abstract wordsmiths out of Oakland known as Hieroglyphics. Following Del and the Hiero crew’s first appearance on The Stretch Armstrong and Bobbito Show, freestyling with Kurious, they all became fast friends and started hanging out at Kurious’s apartment whenever they were in New York. That’s where they met KMD for the first time, too.
“They was over there on a record player, fooling around with an Ultramagnetic record of some sort. They was just buggin’ out like, ‘Yo, Ultramagnetic!’ just going crazy,” recalls Del. “I’m just thinking like ‘Yeah, that’s my shit, too! As much as they was goin’ off over that record, I was the exact same way. So, I knew from that, like, ‘Ok, I’ma fool with these fools,’ you know what I’m sayin’? Like they kindred.”7 As labelmates, they were already familiar with each other musically, but hanging out together as part of the CM Fam allowed Del to start getting to know the brothers Dumile on a personal level.
With a reduced budget for Black Bastards, KMD could not afford to squander time or money at expensive studios. The group had also been downsized after the departure of Onyx, who apparently left over creative differences, so they needed to consolidate their energies and step up their game. Capitalizing on their Ansaar connection, they decided to record the album upstate at the community’s compound in Monticello, New York, where Dr. Malachi Z. York, the Ansaar leader and a former musician himself, maintained a studio. In addition to establishing himself as the charismatic and controversial leader of multiple religious movements even prior to the Ansaars, York had moonlighted as a singer-songwriter in the early eighties, specializing in R&B and gospel. His musical career went as far as starting his own label, Passion Records, which later became York’s Records, and building a studio that he used and rented out to other artists. KMD initially blocked out two hundred hours at the upstate facility, but when the Ansaars suddenly uprooted and made a mass exodus to Georgia in the summer of 1992, the group had to move their effort closer to home.
While working on Dust to Dust (Def Jam/Columbia, 1993), his post–3rd Bass album with DJ Richie Rich, Pete had met Rich Keller, a freelance engineer at Chung King. Keller also operated his own studio in his house in Leonia, New Jersey, but unlike most home setups, he invested in a good microphone with pre-amps and a two-inch tape machine, the industry standard at the time. The additional gear allowed him to track and record vocals from home and then take the two-inch reels to mix at any professional studio. Through the latter part of 1992 and continuing into the spring of 1993, KMD became his main clients.
They would work in spurts of a week or two, with a week or two off. Arriving at Keller’s in the late afternoon, they usually toiled well into the night. “I feel like they moved in,” the engineer recalls, “like they brought crates of records.” Unlike their first album, where Subroc was focused more on production, but played the background lyrically, the dynamic was shifting. He was slowly coming into his own—not only as an MC but as a man. At eighteen, he and his girlfriend had just brought a new life into the world—a little girl—and with her came a total change of perspective.
According to Keller, “He was more animated and outspoken. He acted more like the rapper in the group during our sessions. I know DOOM was the main MC, but Subroc acted like he was. He had the machismo and had more attitude. DOOM was more about the music and the ‘mission’ when I was with them. He lived the music; every song was a proclamation that he had to get out. I was inspired by his dedication to the music.”8 Before the record’s completion, DOOM, too, would experience the birth of his first son. The vagaries of life helped transform the brothers into different people as they worked on the new album. No longer as loose and carefree, they could feel the pull of responsibilities as they became the main providers in their family.
As far as the division of labor on this album, Sub was credited with producing seven songs compared to Zev’s sole contribution, “Contact Blitt.” They produced the remaining six tracks together, though their younger brother Dimbaza, credited as Q4, got another assist on “Constipated Monkey,” for which he found the drum loop. While Zev still handled most of the vocal duties, Sub rapped on five tracks, including “It Sounded Like a Roc,” a solo effort. This album also included several cameos. “Smokin’ that S*#%” was a posse cut featuring members of their uptown crew—Kurious, Earthquake, and Lord Sear—while “F*#@ Wit’ Ya Head” showcased their boys from Long Island: H20 (Hard 2 Obtain) and CMOB. The “What a Niggy Know? (Remix)” featuring MF Grimm was a late addition to the album.
KMD had already established their affinity for skits on Mr. Hood, and this album, too, opened with a two-minute sonic collage laid over an acoustic bassline and breakbeat called “Garbage Day #3.” “That track was Subroc’s idea, he put the whole thing together,” according to Zev, “It was movie pieces from the 60s and shit like that.”9 Before the advent of Pro Tools, assembling this track involved a lengthy and painstaking process where Sub stayed up all night watching cable TV with a portable DAT player handy. After recording pieces of dialogue, he cut those clips together the next night using the MPC60 that the brothers had bought from Dante Ross.
Gone, however, were the Sesame Street snippets, as they borrowed instead from deeper, darker material like Melvin Van Peebles’s blaxploitation classic, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. In fact, the film’s graphic opening scene depicting a prostitute taking a young boy’s virginity stands as a fitting metaphor for the entire album and the group’s loss of innocence. A favorite sample source they returned to again and again was the free jazz and spoken word album The Blue Guerilla (Juggernaut, 1970) by Gylan Kain, a founding member of the Last Poets. John Gamble of SD50 had introduced the brothers to the album, and it obviously struck a serious chord. They also happened to know Kain’s son Khalil, who starred in the movie Juice (1992), and, perhaps, felt they could sample it liberally without fear of a lawsuit.
Aside from using numerous snippets of spoken word and instrumental pieces, they borrowed the whole title of “Constipated Monkey.” In the original version, Kain, with typical gravitas, said, “So you sit up at the counter like a constipated monkey / Starin’ into an empty bottle, lookin’ for God.” When taken out of context, however, “constipated monkey’ ” sounded hilarious, and, no doubt, resonated with the CM Fam, who became associated with the term after Kurious adopted it as the title of his own debut album.
If KMD seemed like a whole new group, it was not lost on the people close to them. After securing a deal for Kurious, Pete wanted to sign a white rapper by the name of Cage (Christian Palko), who was featured on “Rich Bring ’Em Back” from Dust to Dust. Through his appearances on Stretch and Bobbito’s show, Cage entered the orbit of CM, becoming good buddies with Subroc. “So that whole crew was running together at that time,” says Pete, “and, you know, unfortunately, they were all dropping acid and doing tabs and doing all types of crazy shit. Now, at this point, you look at DOOM who’s a devout Muslim, bringing his prayer rug and doing daily prayers on the tour bus, you know. You go from that to DOOM and Sub just smoking blunts, drinking forties, dropping tabs. So, it was like a total 180-degree pivot that they made. And then you see like with Black Bastards how different it was.” Ross adds, “There was an immense change with the guys in-between records, both as people and artists. They were hanging out in the city a lot, often with Constipated Monkeys, and they were experimenting with a lot of mind-altering drugs. Like a lot of them. Even so, I still felt good about what might become of the record.”10
Despite the inevitable growing pains, KMD still showed plenty of promise and potential, as well as having the unflinching support of their peers. But even as their careers progressed, not all was well on the home front. According to Dimbaza, “My brothers got a record deal, but that shit did not take my mother off of food stamps.” For a certain period, when an injury forced her to stop working and collect disability, bills would pile up, and sometimes the electricity was cut off. Such a precarious situation was enough to upend the fallacy that rappers got rich off record deals. At a time when studio costs were prohibitive, even if a record sold well, royalties could be recouped against the advance, along with any additional marketing and promotional costs. The business model of the music industry had always been to nickel-and-dime the artist as much as possible, charging them back for any expenses to keep them in debt to the label. Being young people with no prior experience managing money further complicated matters.
Rich Keller, who saw a lot of the brothers during this time, remembers, “There was a point where I felt like, you know, we got personal. Like they had some issues. Pete was pretty tight with the money. I gotta say, the money was not flowing. I know they had family issues back at home that they talked about, just based on not having enough money, you know, for rent, bills. Things were kind of tough at home. So, I contributed to help them out.” In addition to buying them lunch during studio sessions, at one point, Keller remembers giving the brothers extra pillows and blankets to take home to their siblings in Long Beach. With everything riding on getting the album out, the group was, no doubt, feeling the pressure.