Music
Due to being removed from an active music scene, the two MC's were free to develop their most idiosyncratic tendencies musically. According to Weston, the group's lyrical style stemmed from the two not being able to listen to New York hip hop on the radio in Virginia. Weston stated that "except for Brand Nubian, we weren't influenced by what was going on in New York. Basically we wanted to be different and we wanted to be dope like Brand Nubian... So instead of saying, 'I got a lot of balls,' we'd say, 'I got more nuts than a Baby Ruth.'" Hines also felt being away from the environment helped their personal artistic growth. "We just wasn't exposed to that many styles at the time, so it helped us form our own." Hines and Weston would make up gibberish words, adding -iggity after many of them, which would eventually become their signature. The group also had a tendency to weave many pop culture references into their rhymes.
Though many have assumed that EPMD produced the music on the album because of their executive production credit, Weston stated "in the studio back then it was just me, Skoob, Chris, and Derek, and that was it. EPMD didn't produce us, we were just with their production company. A lot of people forget that." Weston referred to Charity, who died in the year 2000, as "the brains of the operation, definitely... He was definitely the boss and the real executive producer of the first album. We'd have meetings at his crib in Brooklyn and he was running things."
Read more about this topic: Dead Serious (album)
Famous quotes containing the word music:
“The great challenge which faces us is to assure that, in our society of big-ness, we do not strangle the voice of creativity, that the rules of the game do not come to overshadow its purpose, that the grand orchestration of society leaves ample room for the man who marches to the music of another drummer.”
—Hubert H. Humphrey (1911–1978)
“When we are in health, all sounds fife and drum for us; we hear the notes of music in the air, or catch its echoes dying away when we awake in the dawn.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“From where Pan’s cavern is
Intolerable music falls.
Foul goat-head, brutal arm appear,
Belly, shoulder, bum,
Flash fishlike; nymphs and satyrs
Copulate in the foam.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)