Preview to The Long Goodbye

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All Men Are Brothers

Karma: There was this great kung fu western flick my god brother Kenny brought over called All Men Are Brothers: Blood of the Leopard which was adaptation of the Chinese classic Water Margin. It was the story of a high level government official who must choose between his position and his allegiance to a rough street monk who is very anti-corruption in the government. It represented so many relationships at that time. My god brother Wayne was really loud and boisterous, but when I was around he was always calming me down to learn discretion. When he died of cancer in 1997 it put a large hole in my heart. Somehow I ended up becoming that person that was calming folks down and was caught between the diplomacy and the ethical outrage of the people I was around. We would leave shows in San Jose, San Luis Obispo or San Antonio. It would be 3am as we drove home. Somehow at every gas station there was a group of young men about to fight. Somehow there was some kid at an IHOP looking at his pager like “I’m going to get revenge”. Somehow I always seemed to put myself in the middle and talk them down. Somehow I never got shot.

Koncepts: just a perfect song man. we were all really vibrating on the same frequency. I love the little glass clinks and crowd ambiance from the sample. and the kick drum knocks so hard. that’s that Bay Area shit man, a mellow ass sample and deep bass.

Ashes To Ase

Karma: We would perform a lot in the “hip hop” room at raves. That was the culture of the 90’s. Hypnotic hated it because he didn’t feel techno. However to be quite honest, the women at raves were thousand times better looking and more stable than the women who went to hip hop. The baddest of them used to hang in the “jungle” room – a rough amalgamation of actual jungle, trip hop, drum and base as well as what would eventually be dub step. Kirby and I loved going back forth over those beats. We could rap for hours over the stuff. For me it brought me home to Jupiter, Florida. It put me in the red clay of Georgia. It gave me the woods of Mississippi. I loved obscure southern rap and especially enjoyed the bounce aspect. I also appreciated the underestimation that California and New York put upon southern rap. It paralleled the mistake many crews in the Bay ran into. They dissed us on tape, we responded by snatching the mics at their show and serving them. Then they took it outside to battle and got demolished. Then they wanted to throw hands and lost there too. This track is a narrative to that. At the time we wouldn’t have seen it that way.

Koncepts: I feel a way about this song. It’s fucking amazing - the beat, the rhymes, the hook… my god. and when we dropped this at a show? bedlam. but it has a kind of ignoble history. My partner Zvi and I had this Delia Gartrell 45, which is this brutal ballad about a woman’s son dying in the Vietnam war, and we chopped it real slow. Zvi had the idea of chopping up Skull Snaps and doing a bounce pattern with it. It was unique, no one was doing bounce drums with samples, especially not old school breakbeats. Anyway, we kinda fucked up the money because we also gave this track to Mazzi [rapper with our other group the Soul Purpose] and it was like, ok, let’s see who does what with it… Mazzi made an incredible track called “1 and 9” about being from the hood in Jersey. It was super ill. So we had this issue, who could use the beat? Nobody even cares about shit like that anymore, but back then it was a real problem. Zvi wanted to roll with Mazzi’s version, I was on the fence. Anyway, I feel like that disagreement was another one that ended up torpedoing the project. And what’s sad is that neither song ever came out - the Soul Purpose project fell apart not too long after and the album we were working on never made it out of the demo stage. Nowadays I prefer “Ashes” to “1 and 9”. But at the time I couldn’t call it.

My Morning Star

Karma: Perhaps the most honest writing anyone was doing in (w)rap™ at that age. I was in my early twenties trying to understand what it meant to be a man while facing a divorce like end to my long term relationship. There were some rules we made up to protect our esteem. One of them was we wouldn’t date women we met in the industry because it led to hardship later. I think that put so much expectation on the women we fell in love with outside of music that when those relationships crumbled it hurt us even more. On top of which, Hypnotic and I were facing this same debacle every time: why does it seem like self-control and discipline gets punished. Simply put, we both were in faithful parties in long term relationships that ended when our romantic partners were not faithful. That combined with life in show biz, turned us bitter when we stuck to the honor code. 

Koncepts: this beat is mad mournful with that one drawn out note that descends and ascends in the chords. I used an SP1200 on a lot of the Auditron drums courtesy of my partner Zvi and you can hear the programming gets a lot better and the drums are chunkier. Ka and Ba perfectly wrote this for how the beat felt to me. Vulnerable and hurt but still standing strong. It’s a shame the project never came out because there are so many tracks that I felt were just the perfect distillation of a feeling, this was one of those. Probably my personal favorite now.

Ba

Koncepts: I love this song man. Ba really showed his heart on it. And it takes skill to rap over something like this which is kinda mellow and laid back but not like, sad or down. the loop just gets me in a zone; very based. this might have been an intro beat or slated for Per Aa Ra’s project originally. There were earlier takes that I felt like Ba nailed it a bit better. But you couldn’t save takes back then and we had that stupid belief that a) we have to deliver everything in one take and b) we can definitely do the next one better. so it goes.

Karma: I remember when this was done and I would drive around with mix downs, this was the soundtrack to getting through traffic. It became synonymous with “things are going to be all right”. I struggled for many years to explain what this meant without falling into esoteric answers or metaphysics. One thing my Dad was very good at impressing upon me was “don’t feed steak to children” meaning don’t waste your time trying to explain complexities people don’t want to learn. In of myself, I was learning how to be more efficient and not waste my time. This song really gave folks a sense of optimism.

The Final Conflict

Karma: Why a final conflict? One thing I have come to terms with and this album should evidence – I can see things before they happen. I am not going to spend a single second of time on weirdos defending it. I will just state – people were downloading music from www.kemeticsuns.com three years before Napster. Towards the middle of 1997, something was changing in the Bay Area. I was starting to get fans who worked at something called a “tech company” who would invite me to work as a contractor. They had website that had millions behind them but they couldn’t tell you what they did all day. They wanted to pay me to tell them what was cool. More and more I saw a reliance on machines as the new free labor. The dot come boom was becoming a second gold rush and I was aware it had it limits. In 2017, the largest obstacle facing the American worker is not automation. It is the perception that automation demands a better quality of life for all. There are some very good thinkers on this subject but I would direct attention at Berkeley’s own Phillip K. Dick, Frank Herbert and William Gibson. 

The point being, the matter of artificial intelligence is not an if, it’s a when. Once this consciousness evolves, it will split in its belief systems. If humans can be cruel, please believe there are machine gods that can be crueler. I am reminded of the quote by Francis de la Rochefoucauld, “Man believes he has abandoned his vices when in fact they abandoned him long ago”. Now looking at where we are with a new year, self driving cars and a new a president, I suspect we are at the placed I had hoped to avoid. Maybe there are some jewels in here for our fans in the years to come.

The album in its entirety is below:

The Final Conflict Soundcloud 

Part 5