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By Thoomas Hobbs
Okayplayer

Behind The Beat is a new series where journalist Thomas Hobbs talks to rap producers about the making of their most iconic beat. For our second edition, Hobbs spoke with Ski Beatz, who crafted Camp Lo’s iconic single “Luchini AKA This Is It.”

Hip-hop had never seen anything quite like Camp Lo before. The Bronx rap duo, which consisted of slick-talking MCs Sonny Cheeba and Geechi Suede, looked like they had caught a yellow cab straight from a Blaxploitation movie set, with their coded slang and eccentric personalities instantly distinctive.

Although it wasn’t a huge chart success, peaking at no. 27 on the Billboard 200, their 1997 studio debut Uptown Saturday Night quickly developed a cult following, with its fusion of jazz, funk, soul, and luxurious hood rap feeling like a breath of fresh air compared to the anarchic gangster rap that ruled the airwaves. While rap in the mid-90s had arguably become too fatalistic and obsessed with the idea of MCs having brushes with death, Camp Lo pushed the culture into a much more colorful direction.

“Coolie High” is so laid back you can envision Sonny and Geechi recording their verses in hammocks, while “Rockin It AKA Spanish Harlem” is capable of making the most hard-nosed street guy get up and do the “cha-cha-cha.” These vibrant songs captured the feel-good glamour of a Saturday Night in the Boogie Down in the 1970s, creating an escapist playground where finding a date, a bottle of Amaretto, and a place to go dance with a hottie were among life’s most pressing concerns.

“It was like they had stepped out of another era completely,” agrees legendary rap producer Ski Beatz, who considers himself the third “unofficial” member of Camp Lo, having produced the majority of Uptown Saturday Night. Even now, he continues to work prominently with the duo. “They had those crazy Donny Hathaway hats, Opal sunglasses, trench coats dragging along the ground when they walked, toothpicks hanging out their mouths… it was crazy. They really had those Partridge Family colors. It was like watching Coolie High in real-time.”

But that’s not to say that Camp Lo’s recording persona was an act. Ski is keen to stress that these guys really are wired in this way. “These dudes really are those people. They naturally had the same kind of flyness of 1970s Marvin Gaye [The Uptown Saturday Night artwork is a tribute to Marvin’s I Want You album cover], but with this raw ‘90s spin on it. I used to listen to them talk to one another and understand about 20% of it.”

The song arguably most synonymous with the group’s unique style remains “Luchini AKA This Is It,” an ebullient New York City rap anthem that sounds ripe for a spin in a disco hall. Rather than describe themselves as being “faded” the group uses “Luchini” to refer to their euphoric state of being as “Harlem River Quiver,” a reference to the dizzying 1928 Duke Ellington song of the same name. The idea of possessing “Belafonte Vigga” levels of swag, meanwhile, is a loving reference to the fabled strength of legendary actor and civil rights activist Harry Belafonte.

Across the song’s breezy four minutes, Sonny and Geechi rap about being fly in a way that’s never anything less than innovative. However, it’s Ski’s perfect beat that inspires such brilliant rapping. “We had basically finished [Uptown Saturday Night] and Profile Records felt we were missing a single and needed something for the radio so I went into the lab for a week and just started digging through the crates,” Ski said.

“Soon as I dropped the needle on that Dynasty song (‘Adventures in the Land of Music’) and heard those horns, I knew I had found something special. Luchini was slang for money and having wealth, and something that the guys said a lot, so I built it into the hook. Soon as the guys heard my hook, we knew this was unique. The reason I say ‘This is It’ like I did was because I just knew we had found Gold.”

With studio time “costing like 5k a second” back in the ’90s, Ski says the duo crafted their verses at his crib on 110th Street in Harlem so that by the time they went to the studio the pair could lay their vocals as quickly as possible. Of the beat itself, Ski, rather modestly, said it was “easy” to create.

Ski Beatz said Camp Lo crafted “Luchini” at his house on 110th Street in Harlem. Photo Credit: Profile Records

“Once you find that magic sample, the rest is easy,” Ski said. “I added the drums from ‘All Night Long‘ (by The Mary Jane Girls) to make it sound more disco, a little bit of piano, and then I made the sample sound more bling. I’m not a looper kind of person, but that loop was just so perfect. The way the sample comes in, well, it didn’t have a down beat, so I had to bring it in on the snare. It just made it all sound extra cool.”

Around the time Ski Beatz was recording with Camp Lo, he was also working with Roc-A-Fella records on Reasonable Doubt, the debut album from an aspiring rapper who went by the name JAY-Z. Ski, who produced Reasonable Doubt highlights such as “Feelin’ It” and “Dead Presidents II” already had strong ties with Roc-A-Fella, with his rap group Original Flavor being managed by the label’s co-founder Dame Dash. Yet he admits that splitting his time between Camp Lo and the more twisted mafioso fables of JAY-Z was challenging, with Hov sometimes taking beats he had originally intended for the duo.

The iconic New York City hip-hop duo Camp Lo is back with a new single, ending the last day of 2021 with a bang with their track “DAYDREAMING.”

This celebratory track is a victory lap, reminiscing on the rollercoaster of a year that 2021 was. The duo reminds us to, “ Live for the days, the dreams, the highs, the lows,” on this triumphant hip-hop track produced by Jocko who also produced Coolie High back in ’96.

Check out “DAYDREAMING” by the legendary Camp Lo on Tidal, Apple Music, Spotify or your favorite streaming platform

On The Bending Of Language In ‘Uptown Saturday Night’
By Michael Penn II

VinylMePlease.com

Written By | Jay Glover
Image | Aviva Klein

THE HISTORY OF BLACK MUSIC HAS ALWAYS BEEN ONE THAT DEFINED THE PRIDE, GRACE, AND STYLE OF ITS PEOPLE.

From the heydey of the Harlem Renaissance and it’s cultural defining…

Written By Brian Josephs
SPIN.com

Jay Z’s 1996 debut, Reasonable Doubt, still doubles as the modern hustler’s code of ethics, even if it wasn’t an instant smash: It didn’t go platinum until 2002, well after the Yankees fitted crowned him King of New York. There’s no doubt the record benefitted from Hov’s afterglow, when he’d catapulted to stardom with his flossier efforts. But it’s rightfully a canonical record, and the contributions from producer David Willis—aka Ski—was a big reason why, as his efficient chops of classic soul made it to four of the album’s classic cuts: “Politics as Usual,” “Feelin’ It,” “Can I Live,” and the biblical “Dead Presidents II.”

A year later, Ski was almost wholly responsible for producing Bronx duo Camp Lo’s 1997 classic Uptown Saturday Night, which sounded like a classic Blaxpolitation flick. Camp Lo took the Cadillac-whipping, mink-wearing stylistics to push street narratives toward the fantastical: Sonny Cheeba’s rapid slang sung like a Cotton Club sax, while Geechi Suede’s even-toned delivery tossed syllables with the speed and tension of a Harlem car chase up Broadway. But it was Ski’s production that had the violence and brass to move the dope dealers (“Krystal Karrington,” “Negro League”) and body shakers (“Black Nostaljack AKA Come ON,” “Luchini (AKA This Is It)”). Ski’s vinyl-era palette was narrow, yet it ran deep enough to give Camp Lo’s tales of blood and honey some gritty, soulful credibility. The borough’s been called the Boogie Down Bronx for decades, but Uptown Saturday Night might be the most accurate representation of the label.

A new collection, On the Way Uptown, which was recently released just a few weeks before the 20th anniversary of Camp Lo’s debut, gathers demos and pre-Uptown Saturday Night cuts into a document of their growing process. In an interview with SPIN, Ski said these songs, made in 1994-95, was the first batch the collective sent to label Profile. Although Ski said he used the “same process, same room, same equipment” for both records, On the Way Uptown paints a portrait of an act working out the seams. You hear Ski getting the hang of infusing soul into the drum patterns’ tss-tss-tss-baps, and the duo’s vocal dynamics shifting in real time—the “Krystal Karrington” demo features Cheeba and Suede echoing back-and-forth, which didn’t make it to the final record. It’s a minor change, but it flips the track from an insular cipher into rallying anthem.

Camp Lo’s innovative linguistics pushed Uptown Saturday Night to hip-hop’s upper echelon, even if the lyrics read like jumbled jigsaw puzzles to the uninitiated. “I know nobody was going to understand it,” Ski told SPIN. “But the way they were putting words together just sounds like some crazy dope fantasy rap. It put different things in your head when you heard them rap.” Like Ghostface Killah and Cam’ron, the duo saw words as endlessly moldable signifiers regardless of the Merriam-Webster classification, as they meshed dense slang and pop culture allusions. Between the duo’s internal rhyme dexterity and Cheeba’s easygoing flow, the words just seemed to fit—you got distinctive quotables like “Make the octopussy do the wa-tusi for the night” and “Uno papi chulo 69 position and switchin’.” You didn’t ask questions; good jive talk automatically compels you to adapt.

The negative space of the jazzy “World Heist” shows Ski’s confidence in Camp Lo’s picturesque abilities (“The bulletproof’s under my goose let the coffee fill my glass”); then, there’s the high-quality edition of “Bubblin’,” the Anita Baker-ripping noir film Spike Lee never made. The earlier versions of “Luchini (AKA This Is It),” “Sparkle,” “Black Connection,” and “Coolie High” are included here for the throwback obsessive. The release draws attention to how Ski was able to tell two fully formed stories—the Marcy hustler on Reasonable Doubt and Bronx’s Dolemites stalking through Uptown Saturday Night—with the same vintage soul.

As fluid as Camp Lo sounded on Uptown Saturday Night, the duo spent the entirety of the LP walking a tightrope. Rendering the concrete as abstract is an easy way to fall into convolution. Very rarely does doing so leads to interlocking language that breaks open a new atmosphere. This was a mythological Bronx, a shindig that very much looks like the Ernie Barnes-inspired painting that adorns the album’s cover.

“Nobody’s like Camp Lo to this day,” Ski said. “That’s why their music still sounds pretty good, because the shit that they say is so fucking wild. You’d never understand what they were really talking about, but it sounds so good in how he’s saying that. Nobody even wants to try and do that.”