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:
“If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact that we not only have feelings but insist upon having them at whatever cost to ourselves.... The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Brünnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In real life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)
“Good music is very close to primitive language.”
—Denis Diderot (1713–1784)
“On the first days, like a piece of music that one will later be mad about, but that one does not yet distinguish, that which I was to love so much in [Bergotte’s] style was not yet clear to me. I could not put down the novel that I was reading, but I thought that I was only interested in the subject, as in the first moments of love when one goes every day to see a woman at some gathering, or some pastime, by the amusements to which one believes to be attracted.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)