Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Felt - Morris Day




Should I try to aspire you to write my style?

Since I've decided I'm done working for the day and am waiting for a ride, I actually have time to amuse you with more of my mediocre writing/story telling. I decided on posting a Felt song as a tribute to my shirt which I have decided to retire. Oh I'll still use it to work out or play basketball in, but the time has come to no longer be out and about the greater Phoenix area rocking it. I have reinforcements on the way, and plus its had a famous two year run as my FB profile can attest to

Back in my more youthful but less handsome days, around 8th grade, I believe,  out in the Suburbs of San Diego a rise in tagging commenced. No, I was not a part of that silliness-at least not initially and not for serious. I hung out that year mostly with a couple of guys named Brandon and Steve, and we actually had a good time making fun of all these kids starting to tag up the school, park, and neighborhood with their ridiculous tag names and crews. There was the Kid, Slim, Tiki, and all sorts of other lame ass names. Anyways one day we were joking around and making fun of these cats, when we decided we should come up with an even lamer name for a crew than what was already out there. Our Initials of our first names came up with what we thought was an aptly titled reply to all this nonsense. All we needed to add was a "we".  And BAM! a crew name was born- "We R.B.S." as in our initials cleverly disguised as "we are bull shit" for the slower readers out there.

We decided one night while we were all spending the night together at one of our houses that, what better way to make fun of all this  by tagging the biggest, most visible thing at our school. THE BALL WALL. So off we went in the middle of the night with a can of Red, or brown spray paint- I dont know the exact color as I am color blind-but color didn't matter. What did matter was gonna be how hilarious we thought it was going to be to paint the biggest tag out of all the so called crews out there with "WE R. B. S.". Problem was, us three were not exactly expert taggers, especially in the dark. We were all gonna take turns spray painting our own initials but as it was dark, none of us really knew where the other had ended their letter. Plus since the ball wall was pretty out in the open and visible to a major cross street we kept looking for the 5-0 (officers of the law for those of you not hip to the game) in case we had to RFTC (thats an Atmosphere song for all you that don't know- Run From The Cops, its about a tagger and being caught by a hip hop loving cop...anyways) So since we were novices at this vandalism thing, and since we were more busy looking out for cops that looking at our tagging, our " WE R. B. S." vision of a tag looked more like "weRB" with an "S" somewhere floating out looking more like a snake... It was however the most notable tag I can remember from those days and we felt we had made our point.

While WE R. B. S.'s crew tagging days was short lived, it was quite the lyrics writing crew. We had a project due in History regarding slavery and we decided we would bust out the pad and pen and make a rap song out of it. This is actually the first time I ever wrote any kind of lyric. Again, we were trying to be funny with it but we still took it seriously. Way seriously actually. For you kids that never owned a cassette single of any song, there was a time, that when you bought a cassette single, the "B" side would usually just be the instrumental to the song. After hours of writing to TOO SHORT's The Ghetto, we decided it wouldnt work to cut it up into three verses. Then we busted out the GETO BOYs " Mind Playing Tricks on Me" and bam! it was perfect- we were three lyricists, and the song had three distinct verses. We spent a whole night getting every cadence and syllable of our verses we had written to match the song. Its actually pretty funny today how hard we worked on it-all for a History project. You would have to be pretty old, and in GATE at Cajon Park, but we rocked Ms. Follett's History class that day. At least that's how I like to remember it. Thinking back on it, I think time was running out for the period and Brandon didn't want to wait for the next day to perform because he was getting all anxious and nervous about performing our classic song, that I'm pretty sure we just squeezed it into the final minutes. People were too busy packing and waiting to leave class to truly appreciate the greatness. Anyways, we would go and continue to write songs off instrumentals for a few more months, but realized as we were only 14 and we weren't going to be rockin the Sports Arena anytime soon, to put our Rap careers on ice for the time being. That classic track for history is long gone- all I know is that it was about being a slave on a ship or some shit and one of us played the slavemaster, another one was the captain of the ship and one of us was the slave. I'm gonna go ahead and proclaim it as ahead of its time- you all weren't ready for it.

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