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MEMPHIS RAP

Honestly, a lot of this music sounds like what it would feel like to stay awake for over 30 hours. Or being out in an anxiety-ridden city at 4 am. A lot of the subject matter in these tracks is pretty miserable and it's crazy how the poor quality through decades of cassette degradation only contributes to the sound. Listening to this kind of music is truly a unique listening experience but I have to warn you that it can really have an effect on your subconscious and your mental state. In my personal experience, listening to nothing but 90s memphis for 2 years straight definitely fucked me up.(dj kyoss wanted me to add: "it sounds insane under the influence but you didn't get that from me")

LADY BEE / SKINNY PIMP, BATTLING GENDER NORMS IN AN UNACCEPTING ENVIRONMENT

In the early 90s, Kingpin Skinny Pimp released a series of songs with a chipmunk voice under the alias “Lady Bee”, he claimed that it was a form of therapy for him to help get over his ex-wife. He was said to rap in her point of view of all the awful things he did to her.

Now at the time, nobody actually knew it was him behind the tape, nobody really questioned the high-pitched raps and thought to slow it down. It’s important to note that there are certain Lady Bee songs that actually do feature a female rapper, but we’ll be focusing on the Skinny Pimp songs for their innovative approach to rapping, taking a different approach of tackling heavy subject-matter.

Although there were certain speculations surrounding the origin of Lady Bee, people started pointing fingers at Skinny Pimp in the early 2000s since he had produced all her music and nobody had actually seen her.

This video features a slowed-down version of “Jealous Bitch” proving that it was actually Skinny Pimp behind the voice.

Taking such a risk in an extremely homophobic/transphobic climate to artistically express himself is why I respect this project. Skinny Pimp potentially risked his life pulling this off and incidently innovated high-pitched rapping 25 years before it would actually begin making waves in the underground.

I also wanted to highlight how exceptional the production on these songs is.

For more information, please refer to this article

and now, it’s time for the recommendations.

this is by FAR my favorite song from the whole scene. i just can’t ever get enough of that beat.
it sounds so nostalgic, you can truly feel the emotion he was trying to transmit here.

what I love so much about shawty pimp’s music is how minimalistic it is. he couldn’t afford an industry 4-track so he had to settle for a cheaper option, this meant that he had to record all his songs in one take. every single verse in one take, even if it had a feature, he would just pass the mic to his homie. all the cuts you hear where the beat stops playing in the middle of his verses were done manually by him while he was rapping. beautiful.

I also noticed how the song’s whole pitch shifts by a couple of cents towards the middle (1:33). I wonder if anybody else heard it. haha.