Kyle: Today we’re talking about Mista Don’t Play: Everythang’s Workin by Project Pat.

Cliff: Unless you have a better idea and want to interrupt me, I would love to just immediately look through the fourth wall of this podcast at other people listening to it. Because a little meta conversation we’ve had about this episode is. Worrying about it being a little one sided because you have a lot of history with this record And I would rather just immediately sort of diffuse that whole idea because one of the reasons we’re talking about this record to begin with is because of that and No lie at all You have been influencing me to listen to this record Since I was in the ninth grade the eighth grade Like this was a favorite album for me to listen to in my car as soon as I had The legal ability to drive a car and be by myself in it So I love the idea that we might get to hear a lot more from you about This album in particular.

And so I’m just hoping that by immediately standing up and looking at that idea square in the eye, that we could just enjoy the rest of this one, because I’m personally looking forward to it,

Kyle: I’ve been waiting for a party to go to that. Somebody was like, Hey, who has thoughts on project Pat? Wait, nobody’s leave. Lock the doors. did I burn you a project Pat CD for your truck back in the day? I kind of vaguely remember that.

Cliff: Oh, this was pre truck, this was 1984. 1986, no, 1984 Camaro Z28

Kyle: yes. Did you have the subs in there?

Cliff: with two JL audio 10 inch subs in the back. Like I can’t hear songs off of this record without imagining the phantom vibrations of my trunk riding around town, getting seven miles to the gallon with the T tops down.

Kyle: You look cool as shit though. not going to lie.

Cliff: That’s one magic power of this record for sure.

Kyle: I meant in the car, but the car and the record for sure

Cliff: Camaros Memphis hip hop. It’s a cool guy starter kit.

Kyle: in the South of Atlanta suburbs. on the thought of meta commentary, you basically brought it to my attention that like I don’t even really know why I like this record so much. you said something to the effect of like, there’s two types of people. There’s people that try to get into stuff like Southern rap.

And then there’s people who just like it, you know, who, who you’re either Southern rapper, you’re not, it’s not a music that you can just be like, Hey guys, big gulps, huh? it’s kind of either in you or it isn’t. And I don’t know that I want to believe that. I want to believe that like, this is the music of my people.

This is my culture. And, uh, I want everybody to be welcomed into the party. I want to ride in the passenger seat of any car that somebody who’s driving with two JL audio tens bumping this, I’ll go wherever. I’m interested to unpack it a little. I think there’s a lot to talk about. the two things that like really jump out at me about all of this are idiosyncrasy. you’re going back to a piece of source material that there’s nothing like this and it’s unique and distinctive even against itself and all the stuff that this group of people was making and. often imitated, never duplicated.

I knew this was extremely influential music. I’m aware of what’s happening in hip hop and popular culture in the 21st century. I’m as plugged in as I ever was. I love hip hop as much as I ever have. I think it’s an extraordinarily good time for hip hop in spite of what people may say, like that’s a hill I’d die on. But like all of it comes from this some percentage of all of it comes from this and like very specifically from this record actually I’m just really excited for the thought of like somebody will have never heard of Project Pat or heard the name or something and then stuff of like a hundred things will start clicking immediately and then we’re like Oh, this is This is a very recent Rosetta Stone thing.

So there’s that it’ll, I think it’ll make a bunch of pop culture, click into place and the shit’s just dope. Just on like a reptile brain level. If it doesn’t hit you in your pineal gland or whatever, money back guarantee. Pato

Cliff: pat cadence on purpose all that stuff clicks in like you were saying. I mean, that’s just what I mean, mention several later, but, even down to like a Megan Thee Stallion song just from the last few years where she, at a really particular moment, drops four bars as Project Pat, effectively, right?

And then goes back and it’s like you’re saying, it’s, it’s everywhere and it’s permeated so much of it. I do think as There are moments and as we discuss music where we might want to dial up that we are southern boys And then sometimes dial that back down. It doesn’t feel great all the time these days, but to your points there Is something inherently cultural about this, which just by being from the South, having spent, both of us have family and have spent a lot of time in Tennessee, and, in and around Memphis, um, but also Nashville and just like that area where.

They’re kinda hard to express, but even when we were in high school to some degree, there was a moment in time where a lot of people sat around with each other doing nothing, listening to this music in someone’s car in a parking

Kyle: in a parking lot.

Cliff: because that’s how kind of third places used to work. And,

Kyle: And like, so important to note how car culture really plays a role in this and in Southern culture in general, like we don’t have the Northeastern density and. There’s not enough singularity like on the West Coast in a single neighborhood to warrant anything like that. And not only are you like car hopping around in your own city or your metro area, but like the South is so regional, you know, you, you mentioned Memphis and Nashville, which are what, two and a half, three hours apart drive,

Cliff: huh,

Kyle: you know, you do that you do.

Jackson, Mississippi, you do Huntsville and Birmingham, Alabama, you do the Florida panhandle, you know, you do Savannah, Macon, Augusta, Columbia, South Carolina, if you’re in the car, you tend to be going a lot of places like the Southeast is as big as a, a major chunk of the European Union and you just spend time traversing it about as much as a European.

It’s just like kind of what we do.

Cliff: yep, driving in cars with bad gas mileage to go taste how biscuits and barbecue are cooked in all the different places that you just mentioned because they’re all unique.

Kyle: Man, a Bryant’s biscuit. Have you ever had a Brian’s biscuit in Memphis?

Cliff: no, but it’s on the top of my mind every time I go near it, because I tried last time I was around because you told me I needed to, and something prevented me, and it will not prevent me the next time.

Kyle: I haven’t been in a long time. it’s probably been at least 10 years if not longer since we did Memphis, but man, it that was a bit like I don’t know if we have an equivalent on this podcast, but I guess it was like, we, we talked on the last episode about Grace Jones in Jamaica.

And then I, I made the whole like Palm desert analogy. It was a bit like going to the Palm desert and being like, Oh, there’s a frequency here. there’s a thing Memphis is like a, it’s very different within the South. It’s like super working class, blue collar. There’s a lot of like factory jobs still.

It’s the gateway to the Midwest because Arkansas is. right over the bridge, you know, West Memphis, Arkansas is right over that bridge. so it’s situated in a really interesting place with interstate commerce and like you hear in a lot of hypnotized camp stuff, them talking about interstate commerce and trafficking and drug trafficking to be specific, that sort of thing.

a bunch of real life stuff, and I guess that’s another thing to address right off the rip is like, you’re listening to two upper middle class white guys who like probably have no business weighing in on and speculating about, all the socio cultural layers that you can unpack with this, and the last thing that I want to do is sound like a guy that’s writing his thesis on it, I don’t think that I will, but if you’re a person that Feels like you can’t connect on that wavelength because they’re talking about shit that makes you uncomfortable I think there’s another level that you can get to with this still

Cliff: For sure. As usual, we will set the example of showing people how to sincerely like a thing without being totally cringy about it all the time and learning how to like a thing and then let you get energy from liking a thing and then go learn more about it. We have a range of albums and always talk about the different ways that it will send you downstream, for other artists and genres and everything else.

And what’s cool about this one is it will, I mean, the stream that it sends you down into is Everything is all of it, and I even sort of laughed at myself hearing you mention Memphis, like we need to give this, you know, kind of short defense of it to people who have maybe never been around it, because I think on the other hand, even culturally, How many people remember that Memphis is where rock and roll came from and where the blues came from, like what we’re about to listen to and talk about is yet another genre of music that emerged almost whole cloth from an area because of its like density of culture and people who were in community together wanted to make music together and like, I don’t know, people think that the Vortexes are over Sedona or whatever, but something went on in Memphis and has gone on there for a long time.

And it’s always fun to dig it back up for people who have never even thought to drive by that part of the country.

Kyle: yeah, I mean the the Most beautiful and the ugliest stuff about civil rights all lives in Memphis. And I guess I, I didn’t really think that much about that in the context of this episode, but you know, you go to Memphis, you go inside Sun Records and you think about Johnny Cash, you know, singular beloved across racial lines and Jerry Lee Lewis and all those guys.

You go to stacks, like I shed tears on the organ in the a room that green onions was played on because that shit changed my life, you know, there’s like a short three song list of songs that Sound like whatever cells are plumping pumping in my blood and it’s spodey odie green onions and probably one other thing and it’s also the home of the Lorraine motel where Dr.

King was assassinated. Uh, and there’s still a palpable heaviness at that place. So like there’s beauty when you learn about something like the MGs, there’s the ugliness when you go to a place like the Lorraine motel. There’s sorts of social strata crime and stuff in Memphis. It’s got a, it’s got a pretty gritty, hard nosed reputation, but it’s also got Beale street.

It’s the home of the greatest blues, you can go to like places that are basically old houses and they’re like BYOB joints and people play till all hours of the morning. So yeah, it’s, you know, if you love New Orleans, if you love Chicago, if you love any of those towns that like you associate with music, Memphis has a really underrated reputation for being a place where like music is essential.

It’s in its bones.

Cliff: So I feel a little compelled almost from watching a recent interview. With Patrick Earl Houston, Project Pat here listening to him talk for a while and hearing him give his perspective on how he got into rap to begin with. It went through his brother and so whereas in, in a lot of cases, like we, I feel like we go out of our way to not imply that people just sort of like fell into music or that, you know, someone on affiliated with the artists themselves actually drug them along and made the difference that we’re talking about.

But like, in this particular case, Pat pretty specifically laid out. Got in through his brother, and I think that’s maybe the best place for, uh, if you’re cool with it for us, kind of like set up camp and start drawing out a little map of what was happening in Memphis, maybe just a little bit before this, so we can get a little bit of a lead up to how we ended up on this record in particular.

Kyle: Yeah, I wish that I knew everything about the late 80s, early 90s, like immediately pre Triple Six Mafia, pro like Prophet Posse Era of things. Kingpin, Skinnypimp, all that sort of stuff was also thinking back to, we did the spinoff in 2020, the tuned radio, and we talked about sampling and I spent a big chunk of that episode talking about juicy J and how I think he’s like actually one of the best producers in hip hop and not just cause they have a signature sound, but like, because he is so musical. and there’s a lot more musicality across the sort of collective than I even knew when I started reading more. So this record came out in February of 2001. The past output goes all the way back to the early nineties. in the late eighties, you have a handful of teenagers, like a couple of little clusters of teens, one being DJ Paul and Lord infamous, uh, learning to play music.

And then you have Juicy J learning to DJ and wanting to become a singer slash actor slash entertainer. and Juicy J is Pat’s brother and the two sort of camps intersect and they’re like, you’re doing dope shit. We’re doing dope shit. Why don’t we link up and try some stuff together? So you start seeing Pat pop up on versus on Juicy songs as far back as like 91. So That should give you a sense of like how long he’s been in the game. Mr. Don’t play is, is like sort of 10 or 11 years into wrapping. what you’ll notice if you go back and I didn’t realize how true this was. It’s like that signature Pat style has kind of always been there. It’s been there for a really long time.

And we’ll, I’m sure we’ll talk in a little bit about like how that was. Encouraged or nurtured out by the musicality of the people around them. But like I was listening back to, all these songs have been sampled now by someone, by the way, uh, there’s a song called nine to your dome. The juicy did 94 project Pat flow on that.

There is a song on the record, the end by three six mafia that came out in 97, but I think it was recorded a little earlier than that, where the kill is hang. Signature pat on that. And it’s just like all through there. It’s all dotted. So he’s built up this thing, and then, true to Pat fashion I guess, he like, you won’t find Pat stuff for a little while.

Cliff: I see there’s a gap in your working history here. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Kyle: I was wasting away in Memphis equivalent of Margaritaville. Uh, yeah, he went, uh, if I fuck up, I’mma go downtown, man. He did, for several years, because of robbery charges.

Cliff: listening to him recount. That whole situation and how it ended up was I hesitate to use this word, but I don’t have a better one really endearing. the way that he would talk about those moments in his life when he was kind of being interviewed and being asked about him in a pretty no nonsense way. And he would like, he would just be like, listen, I’m, he’s one of those people who likes to tell you that he’s straight up with you all the time.

Kyle: ha ha!

ha!

Cliff: but seems to break in the direction of like, I think he’s actually. Actually that way the whole time and not covering it up. Right. And so he’d kind of preface it with like, I’ll be straight with you about it. And then he just like talked exactly about his role in a crime, exactly how it happened, exactly how, how and why he thought it was a good idea at the time.

And in that moment, and then in a few others, throughout. You know, some pretty negative moments of his life that he was recounting. It was interesting, though, because he would draw out a thread that we might touch on as we go along. But he was like, you know, I actually, when I think about myself making those decisions, I recognize that I had a moment of decision where the part of me that was a church going Christian had a perspective on whether I should be doing this thing or not.

He was like, you know, and then you got the devil on your shoulder and he was like, I’m telling you, I did the wrong thing. And I can remember the feeling of like kind of choosing the wrong thing. It was about money and that’s what I thought I needed to do and I did it, but it’s just like to hear honesty about it without, any veneer of like, I need you to not look at me bad because I did this or I’m going to glorify this and I need you to think it was cool.

Both of them just like, Nope, this is what happened. This is what I did. This is why I went to prison. This is what I thought about while I was there. No, I don’t think that it was a good idea. Uh, I did the best I could at the time, and just learning a little bit more about this person, I think is, something that helped rekindle an appreciation for this record that I could not have had as a 15 year old.

Kyle: That’s real. I You know, hearing you talk just now, I was sitting here thinking about how we’ve been grappling with artists and whether they’re good or bad, you know, like the Marvin Gaye episode, and we’ve touched on that a number of times. here with Pat, it’s like, you have a lot of both, especially if you’re coming into a new and 2025, like you have some really good stuff, some really bad stuff, and then right in the middle, you have this lightning bolt music that makes you feel some type of way.

And. it just sort of eliminates any need to put yourself in a camp or do that, you know, Reddit shit. I’m for it or against it. it’s good. So maybe Pat is a good exercise in music, like a, palate cleanser to be like, yeah, he’s good and bad and so am I, and so it was everything and all right, just play the fucking, you know, and that hadn’t occurred to me either, so I appreciate that,

Cliff: So that, that speaks to the gap in his resume, perhaps.

Kyle: uh, but it gets right back to work. He reemerges around 98 with a group called the Kazi, which is him and a couple of other guys that were like the story of like what became hypnotized minds and the like iconic classic DJ Paul, juicy J thing that really went on a run in the early two thousands.

There’s some other players in that orbit sort of like early odd future had some random people in it that didn’t wind up being sort of like the final core crew. Yet another episode where we’re talking about the power of the collective. here and like achieving more than the sum of their parts. so he did a record with the Kazi and then in 99 puts out his solo, you know, quote unquote, debut Getty green on his brother, juicy’s hypnotized minds label.

So like up and going at this point, three sixes put out a couple of records like mystic styles came out in 95. It was an underground cult classic. The end comes out in 97. There’s like a bunch of underground mixtape stuff. They’re really starting to like pop off in Memphis in the South, sort of like the second big wave behind eight ball and MJG. What I think is interesting about the debut and a lot of these records is hypnotized minds was put out through loud records, which is like a real through line. There’s that cat. His last name is Rifkin was a loud records guy. Was putting out like street stuff, not shiny veneer number once done, uh, like trying to be cosmopolitan playing in the mall type rap shit we’re talking about.

They put out Wu Tang 36 chambers in 93. They put out Only Built for Cuban Links by Ghostface. They put out all the major Mobb Deep records. So you’re talking about Shook Ones Part Two, Exist in the World because of Loud Records. Talking about M. O. P., Ante Up, still one of the hardest rap songs ever. You’re talking about The Executioners, which I know you have a special love for because of that one song that was pretty popular for a minute.

but like hard stuff. not big boys, the way you move, listen with your mom types up with all respect to that song. Cause that’s one of the greatest songs ever. and then I guess kind of like the moment, the sort of crossover moment, if there is one here, I think it’s a crossover moment because like this record went gold. It was, this record was number four on billboard at like the height of CD sales, you know, 17 CDs of the turn of the century. So. That a record that’s talking about like robbing and killing and all that stuff as flatly and Ken Burns ly as it does, went number four.

Now being a little older, I can understand why culture scared the shit out of parents at the turn of the century. This and Marilyn Manson and Eminem and all that, like, what is happening? a little less worried about kids now if that’s what it was like when we were early teenagers. So the moment was sipping on some syrup, 2000, three, six project, Pat UGK, huge meetup.

so you’re talking about this comes out around the time of, Miss Jackson, like early stankonia, huge. This is the moment Southern rap goes on the map. It’s easy to forget now because of the 25 year dominance, but Southern rap did not used to be culturally dominant. And it was talked about in wheel.

Like I, I sent you a weird. Super cringy NME review where they’re, they’re talking about it in like, big daddy Kane pimp language but like sipping on some syrup wouldn’t exist without Pat, you know, because he does the hook, but the hook comes from an almost throwaway line from the song ballers on Getty Green.

And it’s like one of the most iconic hooks in all of Southern rap and in all of 21st century hip hop. so I think that’s a, like, I want to stop down and be like, that’s a project pat thing. And he said that in another interview where he was like, I have the ability to take a throwaway line and make a whole song around it.

Like from anyone, he said specifically from Pac and Biggie, like I’ll take a word or an idea and I’ll, I’ll write a whole song around it, but like. that’s not easy. That’s an understatement. That’s not easy at all

Cliff: Also, this song was everywhere. Everywhere. Everyone knew this song.

Kyle: And it’s it’s you know for the olds and for the Midwesterners it’s about abusing prescription cough syrup

Cliff: They can ask AI for the recipe for lean or whatever. That’s not what this is about.

Kyle: used to be a country it’s opioids now used to be promethazine

Cliff: Yeah, the song was everywhere, we all knowingly sang it as basically children who did not drink syrup. So, we’re in the clear. At least for a few years until we could figure out how to read ingredients lists.

Kyle: Yeah, the, I’m gonna get a grape soda and a styrofoam cup. So I got some, some purple drink to carry around also sample great. going back to soul, great Marvin Gaye sample, not from the record we covered, but from the followup record song called, is that enough? And really like, Juicy J and some of the guys that I play football with are like the two reasons that I love old soul music as much as I do. I learned about so many artists because of Juicy J samples. Got into Marvin Gaye, learned about Willie Hutch, learned about the OJs. I’m sure there are others.

Cliff: So maybe it’s time to make a pit stop into, Sorry, I’m caught up in my head trying to imagine what it might be like to have never heard a record like this before. to put it on. But getting past that. So thinking about some ways to take this thing in fresh, uh, and considering that as we have covered here to very different degrees, probably orders of magnitude different.

you and I have both, had such a history with this record specifically that there is no taking it in fresh that we could possibly do anymore. Uh, but. I do feel like I noticed a few things trying to shift this record into serious music listening mode instead of the usual places that I love to put this or have put it in the past.

Kyle: Well, I feel like you listen to this kind of music less frequently than I do these days. Is that safe to say?

Cliff: That’s a confirm. Yeah, I think so.

Kyle: So like if anybody can listen fresher, it’s probably you. So like you know, with your 2025 eyes and ears, what jumped out? What surprised you?

Cliff: Appreciating smaller details that I can hear when I listen differently now on more modern forms of music output, uh, than the kinds of things I was throwing together, uh, as I I taught myself car audio as a child I’m only being sort of facetious, like, for real, everything sounds completely distinct and different than I sort of remember it feeling and sounding like in the places that I used to spend this so much, so then what stands out to me is more of like hearing the, bells, the samples in the little, Extra touches that are in here because I don’t you know, hopefully it wouldn’t be oddly offensive to note this from my perspective like the beats are Not complicated On

Kyle: Oh, not at all.

Cliff: right? And that’s sort of a staple of the genre. And so if you are, you know, a kid and therefore an idiot listening to this, you’re also kind of like smooth braining the whole experience and like flattening it into the beat and the lyrics and whatever. And so being able to go back and just like Hear the detail that I hadn’t heard before, and then once again remind myself, Oh yeah, I’m listening to hip hop, that came from somewhere!

And then giving myself little jumping off points, uh, which, I mean Honestly, I don’t think I’ve had as much delight sample chasing as I have on this one in particular because the songs that it sends you to are hilarious. Like, and I mean that with true and genuine respect towards 80s and 90s rap aficionados and folks who love it.

It’s cool. but the, the very particular hops along the stops of chasing some of the samples here are just like songs that actually made me laugh because they felt like high, loose energy types of songs that were coming out so early. There was nothing to prove, nothing to do, nothing to sound like.

But that led to, Once again, a recurring theme of this podcast can you do a lyric that makes Cliff crawl up inside of himself? and yeah, I found some easily chasing things here. Um, but it was just truly like paying attention, not only to. Uh, the details, but specifically the details that are in like a particular part of the sonic register was something that I could do differently now and feels obvious to say in retrospect, but like a 2001 hip hop album sounds fundamentally different in the ways that I can listen to it now than it did in any of the ways that I had available to me even then, and that’s.

If the rip on a CD that I had was even somewhat above 128 or something like that, you know? So, unironically, the kind of clarity of this album comes back out to me, and that sort of surprised me because of how sort of unexpected it was. and that, that just, sent me on a bunch of joyous little trails, listening to a bunch of different songs on this one.

Kyle: there one or two moments or sounds in particular that you were like, Oh, or, or a vibe that you, or a vibe that you were drawn to?

Cliff: Yeah they’re heavily weighted in a few different directions. I like, it’s almost embarrassing to the degree that I’m weighed towards the very first track on this album. it’s not only the first song, On this album and like a huge hit, but was also the first song on whatever CD that I had this on.

So it’s just a hundred percent of the time I was hitting chicken head and like It got deeply ingrained in my being, and so, but that said, it’s like a Pavlov’s bell type of thing at this point, right? Like the, everything about it snaps me into a particular way of feeling, uh, and it still works to this day and, but what.

What I think delighted me, and we’ll talk a little bit more about it, So, going back to the songs that I knew the best and liked the most, um, Chicken Head, Aggravated Robbery just ones that I definitely liked a lot and spun a ton. It was then noticing like, oh, wait, In the little kind of skit thing that happens in Aggravated Robbery, Chickenhead plays in the background.

And like, the little loops of things that I could sort of appreciate, and it’s like, Putting on my musical brain that I’ve gotten in the time since this record came out and seeing and appreciating hip hop artists like, Kendrick, Vince Staples, people who just like do detailed things on purpose and then sort of demand that you come along with it.

It made me appreciate that a lot of that stuff was probably hiding in songs and records that we didn’t really know how to appreciate that fully back then. Because it hadn’t gotten so, you know, maybe production level blown out and detailed and all that stuff. So, a few of them throw me right back into the same vibe, for sure.

But even just like, speaking of aggravated robbery, like I can’t even tell now whether there is like a mandala effect going on with the genre of horrorcore that 3. 6 spun up. Because now when I hear things like the main hooks and aggravated robbery, like, it sounds scary to me. And sounds like it, I truly can’t even tell anymore whether I’ve just like mentally associated, uh, what, like how that genre spun up their appreciation for horror films and all those sounds and how it permeated music quickly.

I can’t tell whether that’s what I’m actually hearing here or whether just in retrospect, learning what all that stuff meant as I got older. Now I’m just sort of projecting onto it, but it’s like. Songs like those have a really particular visceral feel still to this day to me, uh, and I love that I can drop right back in anytime I want.

Kyle: Yeah. There’s some pretty menacing atmosphere in a lot of those places.

Cliff: That’s a good way of putting it. Yep.

Kyle: but it is very atmospheric, which is like, You almost wonder if that’s what they were going for because it is so here’s the beat, you know, like hi hat, synth, bass, whatever, but it’s really atmospheric and kind of world building. And, saying things about Project Pat that, out of context, sound like we’re in the Tangerine Dream episode is like,

Cliff: Uh huh.

Kyle: is a little bit of a head trip.

Cliff: So what did you do, knowing you had to re approach this and think of anything specific and fresh to say about it?

Kyle: mean, keeping it a book, the big surprise for me is a person who can listen to songs a thousand times and still get the lyrics wrong, is hilarious because I do, I do words professionally, but I like can’t memorize speeches and I can’t remember lyrics and it just is what it is. I would love for a psychologist to tell me what that’s all about.

Cliff: You can’t remember him and I can’t hear him. We’re quite a fucking pair.

Kyle: What? I don’t know. I’ll, I’ll figure it out. I’ll tell you again later. the big thing. driving around listening to this record. Again, the car is the best context for this record always. And if you can’t get access to a car out of like fucking go on vacation and get a rental car, it’s like kind of worth it.

the big surprise was how many of the lyrics I know by heart and can like, say from the diaphragm, with my whole chest, and how many things have influenced the cadence of what little twang that I have as a southerner. but then just like all these little turns of phrase and things that he says, like the one that sticks out to me, one of the, one of the handful that sticks out to me is rhyming shizert, like shirt with outskirts in If You Ain’t From My Hood. Somebody pointed out that that’s actually, that’s actually like a pretty intense piece of poetry. You got to be pretty smart to do some shit like that. you know, somebody like Eminem gets a lot of credit for pretzeling words and internal rhyme and stuff, but, there’s like some really innovative wordplay on this thing, but also.

it’s just sort of halfway enough between eighties and nineties, like I’m repping, you know, reppity, reppity, rep, and where things got either more complicated or more slurry down the line. We’re like a lot of it is really memorable and almost in a Will Ferrell movie kind of way where we’re like, you’re going to remember lines from this almost certainly, I’m gonna introduce me project pad.

I keep it real. I’m gonna introduce you use the sucker faking deals. and even back in the day, like when people. Hey, when the institution hated Southern rap and hated this kind of shit, like Getty green got two and a half out of five mics and 99. And even in that review where they spend most of it dogging on them, they say.

Pat should be given more credit for developing a style that will easily stand out in today’s crowded world of MCs. I think if nothing else grabs you, to your point, there’s the clarity of the sound and there’s so many tight beats and I think this was the, band, so to speak, that launched a thousand cracked fruity loops downloads. Because to your point, you feel like you can do it, right? You just put the hi hat, you put the hi hat four on the floor hi hat, you find a good 808 you

like.

Cliff: people are doing with Trap these days. They listen to it, and you think you can get there. It’s the, yeah.

Kyle: That’s right. It’s hard to make it look easy, but they do it. and you have sort of a base B A S E with the hi hat and the kick. And then in the middle, you have all these weird ingredients that you can play with. And you see throughout the record that they do a lot of different things with that, you know, like weird.

and the other thing is also vocal close, favorite thing to talk about. you talk about skits the out there skit right between chicken head and cheese and dope top of the record. I remember reading an interview with Donald Glover when Atlanta first came out and there’s the jail scene where the guy turns around and talks to him.

about why he got arrested and it’s like, you know, we got the two cans and they was a big ones though. There was a big ones though. And he’s like, I wanted to put somebody like that in the show because I feel like that accent won’t exist. Like people won’t talk like that 10 or 20 years from now. And similarly, I appreciate having grown up around here, talking to people at the breakfast place. people aren’t going to talk like accents. Aren’t going to be that thick anymore because of the internet and migration and deregionalization and whatever. So it’s just like, I’m, I’m glad. And it makes me want to like, talk more country, more twangy. Like I did when I was a little kid. just total, like I said earlier, idiosyncrasy and it’s all, it’s all memorable for me.

So I, I guess the short answer is, yeah, I knew it was in my bones, but I was surprised how in my bones it was like, shit, is this actually one of my like top five favorite records of all time? Maybe.

Cliff: I had the cadence of, uh, If You Ain’t From My Hood, You Can Get From Around Here, so deep in my psyche that I didn’t remember it was a Project Pat song, just a thing that goes on repeat in my head Well, when I want to hide my thoughts inside of myself and saying a thing like that as a refrain coming from my person, uh, but it’s like, it’s my brain’s response to anybody who has shown up and started acting like a jackass.

And so, yeah, to your point deeply embedded in everything. If I can, though, uh, one thing that also surprised me truly, um,

Man, I, we’ve started joking a little bit about what if people who sort of know us from other forums make their way into podcast episodes, so here’s another easter egg. I highly recommend putting on Memphis hip hop when you are in a meeting where you mostly just have to listen. It trivializes everything in the best way possible.

I cannot explain what joy I got from trying this.

Kyle: Hold on, like, like a zoom meeting, you’re on mute and you just have it

playing.

Cliff: Uh huh. I

Kyle: Oh man.

Cliff: can’t express the like, the reminder that you all of a sudden get of like, Oh my god, we’re just staring into computers at each other all the time, doing nothing, writing things down so that we don’t forget. And just, Something about pairing it with this,

Kyle: You’re just like another project manager. Like, Kim, there’s people that are dying.

Cliff: maybe that pulls on the threads of, I’ll just speak for myself here just in case, but like the threads of history where yes, we went through car culture time. We also went through like this music. Is the feeling and the soundtrack of going over to somebody’s house to smoke and like, if you don’t know what that sentence means, this isn’t going to make a ton of sense, there was a time and people and place and culture, like all of them had to combine.

But if you had the right combination, you would just get invited over and then you just go to people’s houses. The pinnacle of activity that could occur or blossom from that is a game of Halo that

Kyle: was going to say video

Cliff: be quit halfway through. And like, that was it. That’s the whole activity. And how long is this going to take?

Well, until we are back to feeling like we can drive home to wherever we need to go. That’s how long it is.

Kyle: Three games of Madden.

Cliff: Yeah, yup, Halo or Madden was pretty much the option. But like, also though, that feeling of, and I don’t want to oversell it, but it’s true. trying not to spend money, so you’re just hanging out with other people who are also trying not to spend money, and just chill.

And like, they’re, they’re,

Kyle: when chips were a dollar, you could eat a whole big bag

Cliff: I mean,

Kyle: size

Cliff: also true. Yeah, yeah, you would nominate the least, um, stoned person to go to the gas station for you and talk to the attendant and count out the dollars and

Kyle: Yeah,

Cliff: Yeah.

Yeah.

Kyle: crumpled into the tiniest ball in your pocket.

Cliff: this it? Yes? Can we leave? Okay.

Kyle: it’s too much, it’s okay. I’ll figure it out. Thank you. Thank you for your service.

Cliff: But yeah, I think especially if like us, you have some form of a relationship viscerally to this music and the location that it comes from and all this stuff, that’s something to pull on and a thread to pay attention to here. If it isn’t a part of your cultural history, okay, cool. That’s fine. You won’t feel the same thing by default, but just like every other single record we cover, there are entry points that you can go in through and you at the very least will accumulate appreciation as you go along.

But more than likely, you’re going to find If not, that you like this record in particular, which we highly recommend, you’ll find that you like some offshoot, something in the 3 6 Memphis sphere, you’re going to attach yourself to, and you’re going to find a new, uh, love for. Probably an area of hip hop you don’t pay attention to, because they don’t talk all fast and glitchy like they do these days.

Kyle: So I guess let’s get into the DNA of it a little.

Cliff: Please.

Kyle: we’ve already touched on Project Pat Flow. I think breaking down what that is a little bit. You’ll hear it immediately. But it’s all the things like, you know, Pat would say that’s like one of 15 flows. But, Having had it so ingrained, it was like hard to find reference points for it that, you know, it would be cool if it were like this other thing.

And like, I was thinking about two things. The only other artists that I can think of that uses their voice like an instrument in that way, and it not feel like spoken word or beat poetry bullshit is Tom Waits.

Cliff: Oh, shit.

Kyle: intonation and character of a voice. it allows them to inhabit a truth. and then I also thought about Fela, talking and toasting and that sort of style. that was so, so, so grounded in truth. And you’ll hear Pat talk about how it was easy to come up with it. And it made me think again about Atlanta. You know, the, the concept of like people who are trying to rap, people who are trying to get into it versus like people that are like, Oh, I can do this and make money doing this. And Pat is definitely in the latter category and he just happened to be smart and talented at it. But I think the thing that you’ll notice about Pat versus other people in the Hypnotized camp, Juicy J, DJ Paul, Lord Infamous, Crunchy Black, Gangsta Boo, Somebody said, while 3Six’s raps often felt like supernatural hyperbole, and you mentioned Horrorcore they’re telling stories around murder and, satanic rites and sort of like, shock value shit.

There’s none of that with Pat. It’s very like, I went and did, you know, there’s the story. In aggravated robbery about Fred, it’s all like that. or in the interlude telling the story about the chick that got arrested for boosting checks, it’s just all real life. They said Pat was always grounded in reality and harsh truths about the streets. And that’s not to say that you should feel some type of way about it. It shouldn’t be urban horror porn, nor should you glamorize it, like suburban parents were so afraid of their kids doing for so long. But it just is what it is you know, point out the window it’s life out there So there’s that and then the two other things that I would point out are you mentioned crazy samples?

Like there’s crazy musical samples, but there’s so many film samples. There’s so many more film samples Not just of dialogue, you know, which like punk bands we loved growing up did that I think about like how I think Norma Jean started with the network sample when they would play live So there’s that sort of shit layered in, but then it’s very clear that they just had stuff on at the studio and they had their own studio so they could just like vibe all day and all night.

And it’s just like, Oh, that’s dope. Let’s put that in there. There’s such an obvious error of that. So you have, An interpolation of the score from Blood In Blood Out, like a deep cut, really shitty JLB movie. You have that in So High. the sort of like weird Latin rhythm is from Blood In Blood Out.

You have Carlito’s Way and Aggravated Robbery. You have Scarface in a lot of Three 6 songs, but in Ski Mask. You have The Omen, which is like crazy. These guys are sitting around Stone watching a show like The Omen. I would never. Uh, you have the Omen, the weird, is the weird choir thing in We Ain’t Scared, Ho.

You have Roman Polanski’s The Night Gate with Johnny Depp, two great folks to invoke.

Cliff: You can get from around here, bud.

Kyle: you can get from around here. Yeah. So in, in, if you ain’t from my hood, you have Wes Craven’s New Nightmare in Break the Law. And then you have the interesting string line in Cheese and Dope is from The Perfect Storm, the George Clooney Nor’easter boating movie.

which is like so, so of its time and interesting, but like, I would say all of that adds up to just like a smartness, a curiosity, they’re just chasing after a bunch of stuff and they’re not one note. and I think that is reflected in some of the diversity of the sounds that you hear on this palette of beats.

And then the last thing I would say is, maybe this was a thing that surprised me as well, how self referential the shit is. You know, even within a song, so they do a lot of like North Memphis or like North, North, across all their shit, like, you know, Sonic branding, almost like a producer tag, before their collective and then in don’t save her, you know, it’s maybe a chicken and egg situation, but the ain’t nothing going on, but the money and the power is in the hook.

It’s sampled in the hook, but then it’s Part of Crunchy Black’s verse and like maybe that was from an earlier thing and reused. Maybe not So it’s either like Referenced and pulled into another thing or they’ve taken the vocals and they’ve chopped it into a beat element Which in and of itself is really interesting.

So you have that and the break the law we ain’t playing or you had the like so hot so so so hot and That’s inventive, you know, like using your own voice sampling. That means they were like really In the studio fucking around until they came up with new stuff and that’s really compelling to me

Cliff: At the risk of putting an overly fine point on it, in case someone’s having trouble locking into the kind of cadence and flow that we’re talking about, With project pat like I did like your sample in your example. It was good. But like basically the on the kind of fourth beat More times than not, there’s just one long, like, the equivalent of like a quarter note.

at the end of bars, he slows it down and drags it out and does a little something different with the rhythm earlier on in all of those, you know, bars. And I think, again, I, uh, it, it almost feels, Like, morally corrupt to be verbalizing things like this, but

Kyle: You use that analogy one time with frank ocean turning the lights on in

space mountain It’s a little it’s a little bit of that but I don’t know.

This, This, episode could easily be 60 minutes of that’s dope. That’s dope. Oh, and that dope that’s dope. So like, it’s nice to think. I also, I don’t know if you feel this way, but I felt kind of bummed that there was not. Hardly any like really critical analysis of this stuff. You know, I feel like not a lot has really done justice to everyone notices the influence, but nobody’s trying to get how and why. so think we’re both curious about that. And let’s just say it’s like, it’s all homage to how great we think this shit is.

Cliff: Yeah. For sure. even trying to draw out the, the rhythm of his cadence, like two things are worth, or I think are worth drawing out from that relative to what you were just saying. And like the lack of just like critical. Praise or appreciation for some of this stuff. So, okay. So one, uh, the reason it’s worth like digging into the cadence, even if you don’t immediately get it, or if you’re sort of like, I don’t give a shit about what you’re talking about right now.

Okay. But okay, let’s, let’s draw a contrast with even something you just said, Kyle, which is like the just raw amount of critical praise or review of this like era of music is in specifically from Memphis on the other hand. You mentioned Outkast. the other side of what was evolving out of Southern hip hop, uh, which was, you In some forms, like a mild precursor to OutKast, OutKast took a different approach, I mean, even just between Big Boi and Dre they took different cadence approaches to how they rapped, and like, those things became traceable and distinguished in different branches of southern hip hop, and like, so much, I mean, Constant theme of our podcast here is like the way that you can see outcasts and everything, basically, um, and like all that’s still true and there’s nothing to, to take from that other than to say there are at the same time, other supportive cultural moments that were taking off that may not have ever, you know, surfaced in your life because three, six never eventually made fucking.

Hey, y’all. So like, it didn’t like come up for pop culture air where

Kyle: That’s never won an Oscar though.

Cliff: Touche, but like whether it’s the cadence of the delivery or whether it’s just like, you’ll clearly be able to hear the difference in the production in what we just talked about in terms of where samples are coming from, how things are sampled, how the production is done. We’ve talked about the beats and how they’re all approached.

Like every single one of those things. Fundamentally different in a slightly different branch of southern hip hop and created like multiple genres of music that we’d all come to love and appreciate. So in one sense, even just if this didn’t catch your radar, I think understanding its proximity to something else important and recognizing as well that like, Just the way that you could recognize a three sacks verse now when he decides to appear or when he used to decide to appear on records, like you can recognize project Pat in the same way, even if you don’t know how to put your name or that name to it.

And I think. Like one immediate cool example, you know, hip hop, you can always do the sort of like this song samples or is sampled by, and you can chase things that way. but like one thing that’s fun here is like kind of influence chasing. So. One good example of Megan Thee Stallion’s Southside Forever Freestyle from 2021.

Okay, literally, like we got, we got to drop this in like at one minute and 43 seconds. She does four bars of cadence and like it is Project Pat. And like once you just have that baseline appreciation for what Pat was doing with his cadence and why it became recognizable. It becomes like really cool to see it surfaced.

as homage in modern hip hop. Like, this shit is still important to important people who are doing cool things in music.

Kyle: I definitely want to get back to the influence bit that’s really the big thing. I think now, doubling down on a couple of your points. One, I would say, if you are very pro outcast, very neutral or whatever this, I’m not a Southern studies or God forbid an African American studies major, but if I were, I might say something like, You know, if you’re looking at southern futures or whatever, outcasts is Afrofuturist, pro topian, and this is more dystopian or real, but they all exist in the same sort of cinematic universe.

and they, they really do belong together. And there’s a little nugget that I think threads those two sides of the yin yang together. And. It’s how like connected all the Southern subcultures were Memphis, Houston, Alabama, Mississippi, New Orleans, and Atlanta, and then Southern and Northern Florida.

the very first thing that you hear on this record is a sample of a New Orleans bounce record from the early nineties on chicken head. The all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right. Is a sample from another culture, and it would be very easy knowing like the insularity of a lot of music scenes to be like, that’s not our turf.

We should only do stuff from Memphis, but that is really the nature of the like Southern rap gumbo. It could come from everywhere. The other thing that I will say is we keep talking about the project Pat flow, and I don’t want to run the risk of. People thinking it’s a one trick pony thing. That’s what he does all the time.

Or it’s the only thing that he can do. thinking about what to focus on or isolate. I would listen for the moments he switches up into something else idiosyncratic and a couple of examples of that that really stand out to me are on so high, the sort of Latin beat where he chooses to follow the rhythm and the melody the whole time. And it’s like one of the first really like weird beats, and then on ski mask, it’s got this Weird rhythm in the chorus where it’s a bunch of kick You know, there’s like three quarters of the place. You feel like it should be a snare It’s all kicks and he they’re all like speed bumps that he goes over With his cadence and it reminded me of misty mountain hop by zeppelin Where it’s a fucked up rhythm The John Paul Jones brought to the group and I remember the story of Bonham being like, I have no idea how to play over that.

So I’m just going to play in four and the drums and plant go in four over this weird and it creates this weird swirly thing. And there’s a bit of that, like, I don’t know what to do with this weird shit that you did juicy. So I’m just going to drive straight over the speed bumps and it works.

It’s a different thing. There’s like, there’s tension. Between those two things. And it’s really cool. And if you, and if none of that does it for you, then the last thing I would say to look for amidst the menacing atmosphere is sense of humor. There’s funny shit all over this record in the same way. The show Atlanta is very funny, darkly funny, still billed as a comedy because whatever.

we’ll start with chicken head. That sounds funny as shit. second verse where Pat and LeChak go back and forth and they’re drawing at each other is funny and universal. And if you don’t get why it’s funny, go get on Tik and search for the chicken head audio and watch the thing where the boyfriend and girlfriend will do the verse.

And then they’ll switch outfits when it’s time for the other one to talk. It’s like people inherently get. The comedy, the real human comedy in it. the one that always gets me is crunchy black’s verse and ski mask. There’s just something so again, guy in a parking lot, funny as fuck about the way that he talks about committing a robbery.

That’s just like really, really works for me. And then there’s comedy in the juxtaposition of Pat’s. Some of his really gritty lyrics and then the sound of I remember being a teenager and hearing a beat like life we live That just sounded like weird smooth jazz type stuff and I didn’t learn till much later about life we live which was kind of the song one of the songs that like Brought this record back into orbit in the tiktok era It samples, it really versions more than anything, a Curtis Mayfield song from his final album, came out in 96.

So it would have been like still very of this era. And it was Curtis’s only album after he was paralyzed in 1990. And he recorded the vocals for the song, pretty much line by line punching in, lying on his back because he was paralyzed from the neck down. And the hook of that song is the life we live is oh, so beautiful.

And Pat takes that song and does it in earnest is talking about like what you said about the interview earlier he’s talking about how he’s fucked up in his life, but he doesn’t regret it and Like life is still beautiful because I’m still here to see it in spite of all the things that I’ve done And I think I just had to be much older and go through much more shit It was just one of those things that it was funny in the way that like I didn’t get why Barry White Or Marvin Gaye was sexy until I got older And there’s just something lived in about it that you can feel in your bones.

Cliff: If I may, go

Kyle: You may.

Cliff: If I can just click a little bit further though in to chicken head, even as an example for more things to focus on and sort of, Be spread out by, so to speak, uh, and look at all the different things that it touched and was influenced by, you know, we’ve already mentioned so far, like I said, I was pretty blown away by the samples.

You listed an incredible list of movies off the top to begin with, but even the, I don’t know if, if it’s the, 2001 ness of this record or some other aspect of it

Kyle: Pre 911, by the way.

Cliff: but chasing the samples even just on chicken head is Endlessly fascinating to me, so on one hand you’ve got A good portion of the rhythm and some bass comes from a too short song in 88 called Cusswords, which is just, once again, like I’m just being straight.

Uh, I don’t mean this in any sort of dismissive or disrespectful way. It was a funny song. It’s funny. some of this rap is funny from some of these particular times and like Listening to the way that we used to talk about sexually explicit things versus the way that we do now, just like really gives me a tickle in the funniest ways.

Um,

Kyle: You would have been uncomfortable about that in an older episode.

Cliff: and then you mentioned, all right, the vocals that are right at the beginning, the like, all right, sample, was taken from a song called Bitches Reply by DJ Jimmy from New Orleans. That song itself was a response to MCTT Tuckers, Where They At? And like, once again, I, I just, as I went down this, as I descended this ladder into 90s and 80s rap, Possibly hell, all of the lyrics are hilarious to me, all the way

Kyle: It’s party records, right? It’s culture shit. Yeah.

Cliff: but just like, I am a capital S serious music person a lot of the time, right? Like, I like serious music, I like weird, artsy stuff. So, to have a different

Kyle: Yeah,

Guys with nice guitar cases that went to Berkeley with two E’s.

Cliff: and just like, if I’m being honest with myself, I can have like an elitist streak about stuff, like dude, if you’re not going to take this seriously, I don’t want to fuck with it, and like, so I have a hard time, and for whatever reason, the like, portal of Project Pat and 3 6 takes me places where I can enjoy and appreciate this in a different way, I don’t have to think it’s incredible or interesting or serious.

but, but something different about it, uh, gave me a different type of joy in chasing music that I don’t necessarily automatically get with hip hop just cause they sample stuff. And so I loved doing that. I loved being surprised by the way the production has changed over the years from that like string of samples.

But then on the other hand A couple of things, or one thing you mentioned earlier as well, like the tracks that I just mentioned also helped laid the foundation for like bounce music coming out of New Orleans, right? And so, you know, some, I think examples of that not, not only LaChatte but like Hot Boys.

And then I hadn’t really thought about it this way, but Uh, I saw, uh, Gasoline Dreams be referred to as, like, a sort of descendant of that bounce, which I thought was cool to, like, okay, now we’ve

Kyle: Jimi Hendrix made a bounce song.

Cliff: Yeah and then

Kyle: Also, did you know that I only know this because I saw on the YouTube video of that DJ Jimmy song the B side of that record features an early juvenile in the early 90s. So like the lineage is kind of all there. It’s, it’s like people pulling each other up and apprenticing each other and stuff.

Cliff: yeah, and the, let’s see, the like, it sounds like bells or xylophone, the kind of instrumentals that’s on Chickenhead that comes from Biz’s Reply is itself a sample taken from a song called Drag Rap by the Showboys who was, uh, Queens rap group from the eighties. I mean, you can really ride these songs all the way down to like some of the beginnings of hip hop.

and to your point though, like we just, even just on one song, on the biggest song on this record, chasing just one thread, we’ve already ended up back in Queens, which is not necessarily what you would have expected from this era of hip hop. And to your point, It is culturally specific and local but it was actively absorbing things from anywhere else that hip hop was taken off.

And like, it’s just, To me, it’s always cool. If you hold up a microscope to hip hop, you just, you find a whole lot of stuff you didn’t expect to be in the little Petri dish that you’re looking at. And I

Kyle: There are a few genres that can make you learn as much as quickly, and that’s one of the great things about it. Just the speed of inspiration to two things that got me really excited. Just then one, there’s that Bauer guy that I guess his claim to fame is the Harlem Shake beat, but he on Tick Tock deconstructs samples of in a really good way.

Like he’s worth a follow if you’re into sample stuff at all, but he always recommends doing the, what else use the sample of a drum break. The interesting thing about drag rap is juicy has used some portion of drag rap, easily 20 times in 25 years. It’s all over it. So it’s like more of that self sonic imprint.

It’s a building block he has put a bunch, bunch, bunch of places. I don’t remember what the other thing was. Too excited.

Cliff: I can only hope to repay a small amount of the excitement that you managed to give me literally as just a kid with subwoofers about this record. I will just never get over it. I’m just, I’m endlessly personally delighted that we’re finally talking about this one. So what else? Is worth paying close attention to when you listen to this music outside of, we’ve sort of talked about flow and cadence, we’ve talked a little bit about talked a lot about samples and, uh, different regional hip hop influences and things like that, but maybe, from the production angles, anything stand out to you that we haven’t talked about so far that’s worth paying close attention to?

Kyle: Probably the last two things, if none of the other things have stuck to your ribs yet, are, they’re both songcraft things. One is that these songs have hooks. They are very memorable. Chickenhead’s very memorable. Don’t Save Her is very memorable. If you ain’t from my hood, it’s very memorable. certainly the ones where Naman Lumpkin sings like Life We Live and Gorilla Pimp. Very memorable. Short, simple, no real complexity, not too many bars. plain spoken, very punchy. I mean, hell, I feel like one of the, one of the longer, more complex hooks is like Cheese and Dope. Because it’s got four lines to it and you maybe sometimes I forget the sequence of them What you need bro? But there are hooks it’s really if you can get past the grit of it, it’s really poppy They have great pop sensibilities, which feels like an insane thing to say, but they really do And, all credit to the musicality of these guys. We’re talking about like DJ, Paul took piano lessons at age 13, Lord infamous who’s DJ Paul’s half brother.

So, but you know, again, very small community, Lord infamous learned to sing and play bass and guitar by 15 and they were making compositions like before they could drive wholesale compositions. So if you listen to trap shit now, I don’t want to be like, it’s watered down because there’s a lot of great production from like.

Band play, Honorable C note, certainly the Metro Boomins of the world, like there’s a tremendous lineage of southern producers now But like I would say the closest lineage in terms of musical sophistication It’s probably Zaytoven and Zaytoven’s ability to play the piano the way that he does if you watch Gucci Mane’s Tiny Desk There’s a deceptive musicality and I think you see it in So like take the blueprint, the other thing I was going to say is the blueprint of the hypnotized mind sound 808 nowhere.

You’re going to get a better trunk, not base check 808 example, then break the law when it really gets going straight line, one tone, people will hear you from down the block. and I guess that’s a bit of a side note. Like if you’ve never had an experience where you’ve been in a car with somebody that like the base physically takes your breath away and your sternum.

Ride with somebody in the car. Listen in to Southern rap or go to a sun show. so you got 8 0 8 and then we mentioned the four on the floor, high hat. And then you have these unusual synth atmospheres or really melodic keyboard lines. the one that I didn’t know was, and I think it’s on ski mask.

The one that I didn’t know was a sample. Was a sample of late 80s Sabbath, like, of course I didn’t recognize it because I stopped listening after like Sabbath, bloody Sabbath or something.

Cliff: sorry, I saw today, uh, where, uh, someone was posting a video of, uh, an M. I. A. video released from about 13 years ago, and now the ongoing meme is just to pretend that she passed away after that.

Kyle: did. We got clone MIA like

Gucci, but it’s way

worse.

Cliff: they’re just like, R. I. P. What a good video.

Kyle: Honestly, honestly, I’m, I’m going to start dropping that into episodes. All right. RIP MIA. MIA is MIA. Damn. Anyway, the song was nightmare by black Sabbath and it’s like weird. There’s so many times where they pick the preset on the keyboard that like when I was taking piano lessons growing up. And coming home to practice on my Casio keyboard is like, whoops, get that one. Like, don’t ever use 42. That sounds weird as shit. That sounds like, the guy at church is trying to do something different and it’s too different.

It’s like the weird crystals or whatever. There’s so much of that. It’s just, there is a fearlessness to that. That’s just like, I know they were stoned enough to be like, you know what? That sounds dope. Let’s go with it. And then it just works. Then they just build around weird sounds. So, this would be a really good beat tape, I think.

Cause you, could just kind of live in the worlds of the beats. That’s it. anything else for you that we haven’t covered at this point?

Cliff: We might as well start attempting to point at the, 10 million distinct possibilities of where to begin going next. although before we do that, maybe I’ll just encourage people. the exercise of the music calendar that we talk about is, well, I mean, obviously we fucking think it’s cool.

We did it. It’s helpful. Right. But like one of the reasons we’ve talked about it being cool is that. Sometimes there’s, there’s an aspect of listening to music that you don’t necessarily get access to until you try to have a discipline about it. And the discipline of listening to a record that comes to you every day, as opposed to just like vibing your way through Spotify, produces something different.

Like your experience is just fundamentally different when you, when you approach it a little bit differently. And so similar. To that sort of idea of thing for this record I want to especially encourage you if the first listen or two is like I’m not getting it just immerse Start immersing if you need to spread out a little bit around like 3 6 or whatever do it if you want to go back to like music style or mystic styles from 95 Which I totally did do it but like It was a, Differently from, listening to the Grace Jones record enough to break into a new form of appreciation, like, sort of distinct from that, what happened here is I, I felt like I kind of like leaned back into it after a while.

once the real cadence of all of those beats, I got used to it again, in the way that I used to get used to it on a pretty regular basis, or have it at a particular time of the afternoon every day. it unlocks something different and I want to encourage other people like you can You don’t have to become a fan of this music if you don’t love it, but a few of you are going to brute force your way there and be surprised on the other side.

And I’d love the opportunity to encourage people to do it. And like you said, yes, if you can get in front of a subwoofer that is so loud that you cannot communicate to anyone around you, that is the ideal context. But you can step down from there and still have a good time.

Kyle: You raise an excellent point there. That there is an enormous cinematic universe. With three, six and hypnotize camp that there, is an entry point for 99 out of a hundred people alive where something about this will hit you. You can go all the way back to the early to mid nineties to back when they were lo fi and find some of that cool, hard lo fi shit.

You can find, a beat somewhere along the timeline that is the beat that you put on a playlist. That nothing else sounds like it. think of an early thing, like riding the Chevy would be an example for me. I just love the beat. Just listen to it all the time. There could be a funny thing gangsta booze, where them dollars at, you know, just like another funny chicken head slice of life type song. or it could be any point in this early to mid 2000s where like. Hypnotized camp was on a generational run with tell the club up dogs who run it. The head buses, little white, if that’s your flavor, little white eventually gave us jelly roll. So, know, maybe apologies for that. but it culminated, like we mentioned with an Oscar win for the song and hustle and flow in 2006.

But like they’re putting out whole records of, of really incredible beats and soundscapes. And you can find something like you can do an enormous 300 song playlist and just think about the fact that they all made all these songs in this short amount of time, locked in like the soul query and just making beats all day and all night.

And there’s something in there that you’re like, Oh, that’s dope. That’s really cool. I’m into that. and there’s enough there that I, think speaks to the reason that they have had such widespread and deep cultural influence.

Cliff: I have a fun idea. Let’s, uh, let’s use Drake as a stepping off point so that we don’t have to stand near him. because, One of the, again, bajillion ways we can start heading downhill is 2021’s Knife Talk, right, which Project Pat showed up on by Drake, uh, on Certified Loverboy. All that sucks, point being, what I’m saying is if

Kyle: The song doesn’t suck. It’s a good song,

unfortunately.

Cliff: exactly. Okay, but what we’re going to do is make Knife Talk the inside of the black hole. So, take me away from there and show me any of the places I can go from here to start going down rabbit holes. What?

Kyle: marriage. He’s the kid from suburban Toronto that has no business being in this world anymore than Cliff and I do. and if you need to see whether or not he’s real, then just watch the Knife Talk video and see how he holds the literal knife in it. Baby’s first Halloween costume. Um, also, Knifetalk was supposed to be on 21 Savage’s Savage Mode 2, and Drake, like he’s done so many other times, colonized it for himself. If you go back to the worst behavior video, he uses Memphis, the city and project Pat and juicy J the people as cred props in the background of that for the song, worst behavior from I, from now, but nothing was the same.

I want to say still looking like the guy from Degrassi in a hockey Jersey and backwards hat in that just like a frat boy. Parachuting in, and then that’s not even the most egregious defense. The worst is the song look alive by black boy. JB. Great song. Hey, how much I love it. where he wholesale you talk about Megan doing a four bar homage wholesale uses a pat verse that if I fuck up, I’m gonna be downtown Maine.

Cliff: J. Cole used a line for a hook, but that’s pretty different from what

Kyle: interpret it, you know, doing, doing the luxury interpolation. It’s not that. It’s the energy. There’s something about the energy of it. You know, Catalina wine mixers going great, but there’s something about your face wants me to land one right in your suck hole. we hate Drake on this podcast. Uh, okay, but moving away from the black hole.

I’d like to immediately start moving toward the silver lining. Pat himself, obviously does not share this disdain, um, and so maybe it’s not our place to, maybe it’s not our place to, but I, I will never get rid of it. Sorry. Pat said specifically, I mess with Drake Daddy though. Drake Daddy mess with everybody down here.

He said of Dennis Graham, OG, he be downtown kicking it. Look, and ain’t nothing going to happen to him. Nothing. Ain’t nobody gonna mess with Drake Daddy, bruh. Nobody, man. No. You’re gonna get flatlined. They don’t play that, cause see, Drake shows too much love down here. So I can respect that. Maybe it’s all genuine. But from there, I think the two things that I would point out is like, if you have listened to Rap Caviar on Spotify, or if you listen to rap radio anywhere, or been to a public venue playing rap anywhere, In the past 15 years, you’re going to hear something from somebody who loves and has taken influence from Pat.

Gucci Mane basically said, I got my, like, when I saw Pat rapping as simply as he did, I knew I could do it. The Migos, there is an offset song where he Straight up, borrows from Pat and Miko’s ton of influence from Hypnotized Camp. A$ AP Rocky, A$ AP Mob, very easy to draw that straight line back.

21 Savage, probably to me the closest spiritual successor to Pat in terms of the realness and the uniqueness and simplicity of Flow. And talking about violence, plainly, obviously future and then Travis Scott. So that that’s one whole school, let you know, the 10, 15 years ago, and now. Dominant in terms of influence on their own.

But then I’d also say like Memphis is really having a moment directly through people like Glorilla, through people like the late young Dolph, who. you see white girls rapping Dolph at their wedding now. That’s sort of a phenomenon on the internet lately, which, I have mixed feelings about.

Key Glock, who’s, you know, like arguably the king of Memphis of this generation. You have Duke Deuce, who quite famously, you know, Sampled If You Ain’t From My Hood, for the Crunk Ain’t Dead song, and did that incredible dance where he like, they revive him off the table. Uh, and then extending to other places like Houston, you have Megan Thee Stallion, like you mentioned, you have Big X The Plug, you have Tia Kareen.

Also for Memphis, you have Denzel Curry sort of in that atmosphere. I think Denzel Curry is maybe from Florida, definitely from somewhere else, but like the Glorilla record that blew up so big last year, there’s Pat all over that three, six, all over that. Like, yeah. Glow is Juicy J’s. Yeah. Oh, interpolation to pass stuff all over there.

And she’s a Titan in her own, right? Like, I don’t, I don’t want to take away from her very unique thing, but. Her birthful spirit is, uh, directly in the spirit, the lineage of Memphis rap. What else? Have we touched on all corners of the influence? What else is there?

Cliff: Everything I think to hit, we’ve hit over the course of our conversation, but like I’ve said, my, knowingly at a sort of disadvantage for knowing exactly how to look into this particular kaleidoscope, but the unexpected outcome of that has been. which, boy, I’m gonna have fun trying to say this in a way that doesn’t make me feel pretentious.

getting better at appreciating music, we have talked about this, comes with a lot of really positive things. like a lot of them, sincerely. However, your level of, like, genuine surprise, Decreases a little bit over time. You like, you know things. You know

You, you start Yeah, And you start to get a feel for things, even when you don’t know them, sort of like you can, you can drive into a town you’ve never been in before, but you sort of know where everything is, just because you’ve been to a lot of towns, and you’re trying to get good at visiting towns.

this one has brought back the sense of like, uh, you don’t know shit, bud. You don’t know anything. You don’t even begin to know what you think that you know. Uh, and so. Um, we talk so much about kind of going in different directions, especially through time that an artist will send you on and, you know, we, we’ve recently talked about a couple of episodes ago, we talked about Paramore and how we.

We covered, you know, their latest record, at least at the time of that recording, uh, and we sort of used it as a window to look as far back as we wanted to look at and see a bunch of different moments. like, like you’ve described, like the, the cinematic universe feel of everything around Project Pat, Juicy J, Three 6, anything like that. Feels, you know what? We’re gonna, we’re gonna dork for it. Okay? Because you said cinematic universe. It does actually remind me of the period of time in between me finding out that the Marvel movies had a thread and me reading like all of the comic books that they stole it from. in that little period of time, it was like, Oh, there’s a bunch of shit hiding in here that I don’t understand yet, and I’m willing to, like, watch this dumbass movie three times just to catch this little reference in here because it’s interesting.

And it, like, kind of gives me something to explore. And there’s no one, like, there’s no test coming. There’s no one here telling me I should know this, or I should have already known, or whatever. So I can just sort of, like, Explore until I get saturated with the realization of all the little secrets that are in here.

Um, and now I can watch them make, 30 TV series that don’t have anything to do with anything anymore. Point being, that is a lot of the sensation I get from this, again. And maybe, like I’ve admitted several times, maybe that does just connect really tenderly to like a very particular moment in my life.

And like, I have a, I have a genuine love for 16 year old me and the type of dude that he was and what he was trying to do and how he was trying to live. And like, this gives me not only that feeling, but then just like, I feel like I am just. Awash in places to go and things to think about in hip hop to listen to and artists that I haven’t heard Even though i’m thinking about artists.

I haven’t heard that are from the late 90s or early 2000s Not too many things get, like, reinvigorate that sense of infinity for me anymore in music, it has such a, like, don’t give a shit attitude the whole time that it really feels uncanny, uh, for this to have that level of effect on it, but, like, going back and having, like we’ve talked about so much, whether it’s the new forms of audio output that just, Actually sound good, or ways of like perusing music that we didn’t have when this album came out and things like that, like, it just reignites that feeling of possibility in music and the thing that makes me love music in a way that I’m sure other people love art, but that we’re constantly trying to express, which is otherwise experienced as a pretty nonverbal thing, but just like, man, it shows up here.

Kyle: I’m going to be talking about the universe and talking about physical place, the like sensation of town you’ve already been in reminds me that before we recorded, I think when we decided like, okay, we’re finally going to talk about this record, you mentioned offhand, another thing that I would have never considered, which is a connection, a spiritual connection to Kendrick Lamar,

Cliff: Oh, yeah.

Kyle: expand on that, I wanted to save that a little bit, expand on What that connection is for you, because I feel like almost as much as I love project Pat, you love Kendrick Lamar and especially the really like place based Kendrick that, you know, we talked about in a previous episode,

Cliff: totally. Thank you for reminding me of that. This is exactly one of those examples of, I got surprised by the dots that I started connecting in a

way that, Uh, oh, oh man.

Kyle: I’m a dad. I get one, an episode punched my punch

Cliff: You get as many as you want, bud. I just get to make that sound after you do it.

Kyle: Yeah, that’s

Cliff: maybe the easiest parallel to draw, like, Project Pad on this record, we, we’ve talked about, is a lot of times, just like, telling a story.

And, It doesn’t necessarily glorify or try to gloss over the shittiness of what the story is itself about. It’s just a story, and it’s true because he was there. And like, similarly, when we talked about the Good Kid, Mad City episode, when we talked about the Art of Peer Pressure from Kendrick, and it’s like, the, placeness of a story, the feeling, and the cadence, and the sounds, and the production, everything anchoring you in those moments, like in The Art of Peer Pressure, or, some of the other examples on that album in particular, like it’s a very like 2000s Compton thing this is Kendrick.

He was this person, and you know, we talked all about how the story gets told there, but like, you know, he’s, he’s telling you a story about a person and a group of people in a place, and they’re doing things together, and When you hear it enough, and when you absorb enough of the sort of culture around it, it has a ring of familiarity to it, and it feels like the place, and it has you know, especially in Kendrick’s stories, like, it feels like you’re running somewhere, away from the cops, towards somebody There’s a problem.

There’s a thing. There’s something is sort of happening and you’re responding to it and you get dropped into the middle of the story and here’s Kendrick just basically trying to kind of overwhelm you with the feelings of that moment. And so, similarly then, when Project Pat will tell you a story, It feels like you’re sitting there in a lawn chair in a parking lot listening to him tell a story while a beat plays in the background.

And like, it feels like Memphis, and even though, you know, neither one of us were kids growing up in Memphis in the, you know, 80s and early 90s, like, to me those two worlds, all of a sudden there was like a wormhole between them. it was just two variations of what can happen to individuals who end up becoming people who are good enough to write lyrics about it.

And like, so we get to peer back through those individual people back into like, what it felt like in those moments for them. And you can tell that in so many minutes, er, in so many moments for Kendrick, those moments are And almost like fear or risk, right? And when I hear a story about Memphis, it’s sort of more like, well, yep, that’s the shit that happened yesterday.

Kyle: Yep.

Cliff: I’m alive. So are you. Today’s today. but it’s not, that isn’t itself a statement about the story, or judgment about the story. It is a like, conceptualization of what it felt like to live the story itself. And then hear somebody tell you about it later. And just like, again, just Even that was just one place where I started seeing like, okay, Kendrick’s not on the other side of that song, pointing back at Project Pat, going, that’s where I got this from.

But like, that’s not how hip hop works. And that’s not how hip hop has to work. And that’s some of the magic of it, is like, you can see things reflected unintentionally in other places, in different times, and in different Cultures, but that are you know, closely enough connected, like in this case, cars.

In one case, you’re using cars as a getaway. In another case, you’re using cars as sort of like a base camp to set up in. And, like, even just finding those little areas of connection help me to like see and appreciate. Even modern rap, totally differently that, you know, may stylistically be pretty unique from, this record in particular, but, from a storytelling perspective that matters as it relates to where the story is taking place, and specifically in this case for, cultures that I get to have the, honestly, like the privilege of hearing about in a genuine way.

those are really cool moments and honestly, maybe if in my moments of being too hard on hip hop, it’s because I want more. Of that sincerity and a little bit less of a bitch’s money fame, which is, I know a pretty common complaint, but like, once again, here we are talking about a record that honestly, isn’t bitch’s money fame.

Uh, there’s a lot here, uh, and there’s a lot of genuineness and sincerity about this that you can appreciate if you lean into it.

Kyle: It also strikes me that, thinking about Kendrick and the way you talked about movement, there’s a sensation of movement, but you feel physically in the world. And part of that is sonic collage. And I would love to give flowers to Smart hip hop storytellers that, if it’s the band can, or it’s some band that has a reputation for high art, for like field recording and sound collaging.

like that tweet that got quote tweeted a lot for a while. Like what’s one thing that’s considered classy if you’re rich and trashy, if you’re poor, you know, it’s like, it’s cool. If it’s art rock to do this kind of thing. And it’s sort of disregarded as like skit bullshit if it’s on a hip hop record.

But the, the detail that we talked about Grace Jones and the, the dogs being present in, in the argument at the bridge. There’s great examples of that on good get mad city. You mentioned Vince Staples. He does a lot of that stuff, you know, porch screen doors and that sort of thing. but specifically like the bus pulling up in the out there skits, like a detail they did not have to have, but it’s there and it’s all just like real stuff happening in that world.

So there’s that level of detail that you can get to, to that makes it that much more real. And I think you make a good point that it’s not the performance of real. It’s not the exaggeration of real. That’s like, this is how hard I am. This is this aspirational stuff that I’m doing, like getting money.

it just is what it is. It doesn’t try to make you feel the way about it.

Cliff: so where do you want to send people from here? Hopefully I’ve inspired them a little bit to be willing to do it. And, gave a pretty good Not a pretty good, that’s underselling it. You have a really good overview of a lot of the modern places where you can end up. But like, I guess if I were a generic me and you could like wind me up and point me in a really specific direction after being like, I, everything’s working for me, sir.

Why don’t you send me in a new direction? Thank you. So like, what, what, what would you do without having to defend why you only chose one particular avenue,

Kyle: yeah. The first obvious answer is if you’re deciding that you like more hip hop. You know, or, or a different fleet. Like if you’ve been like a tribe Nas, whatever type person, and this has been a cutoff Avenue for you, you can go back to four bears of Southern hip hop and like street storytelling, hip hop, like eight ball and MJG is great.

Two shorts. Great. UGK is great. NWA ghetto boys, Scarface, all stuff like that. That’s not where I think I would go next from here. I have a playlist, my literal single favorite playlist that I play all the time, like nights to go to sleep, when I have people over to like hang out on the back porch. It’s called Blue Dream, named after the Juicy J record Blue Dream and Lean. And Juicy got to this point as a producer where he signaled that he was going to do a soul sample based beat. Like really soulful, not buried in it, really oriented around old school street soul, he would say, play me some Peppermint and that is how it would kick off. And the point that I think I want to get people back to. In a world of seeking community and a misunderstanding of we are allowed to have a mix of feelings about the South, but I’m a proud Patriot of the South thinking about that old Maylene and the sons of disaster line. Like I’ve traveled the country far and wide, but I’ll always be a son of the South.

I love who I am and I love who you are and we wouldn’t be the weird ass white boys. We were, we are without having grown up in the sweet syrupy fucked up South. I’m so proud of this place. yeah, a lot of bad stuff has come from here, but like, I think all the best stuff in the history of this deeply imperfect nation has come from the South.

I’m like, I’ll stand on business about that until the day that I die. So I think just like the South is the home of soul, capital S soul in the country, soul movement, civil rights, all that stuff. So like rediscovering the soul and finding something to love. about the American experiment has come directly from all the ugliness.

you can start with the soul, like Isaac Hayes, Ohio players, the OJs, Bobby Womack, certainly Willie Hutch, who’s finally at long last on streaming. This stuff wasn’t available other than the Mack soundtrack for a long time. So I’m very excited about that. The song sampled in Stay Fly. Tell me why is our love turned cold?

All time stone cold. Soul classic now on Spotify, but beyond the music and like, spreading out your stride a little expensive time in the South, man, come down here and not just passing through the airport, eat the food, meet the elder, talk to the people at the food place. Like we’re talking about, like sit in a Waffle house for four hours. Talk to an old person, appreciate the history. and I say that cause like, I don’t want us to take for granted that this may not be the music that you grew up around. and all the world building implications of that. So I guess at least appreciate where this could have come from and like, appreciate that it gave rise to what Pat is doing now, what his prison ministry efforts, and just like taking the reality of this album for what it is, is as he says on the sort of seminal song on this record, take the good with the bad, smile with the sad, love what you got and remember what you had

Cliff: And go to Memphis.

Kyle: and have a biscuit for us.