If you're lucky, you'll get a second act in your life, and if you're really lucky, you might even get a third. With that said, the Reintroduction EP was just a reminder that behind the facade of dark, low-tempo, bass-driven instrumentals, I'm still a pretty horrible or mediocre at best rapper that forgets his lyrics about 40% of the time. Around 2022, I was performing at shows and doing a mix of an instrumentals along with dropping a handful of vocal tracks. Thing is, the vocal tracks were joints that I recorded years prior, many of which needed lyrical changes as people were more easily offended these days. If you've ever wondered, these are the tracks I was performing along with their original release date (in no particular order):
Frank & Beans [2002]
So What Now [2002]
Running Through The Mall [2005]
Strippers With the Shits [2007]
Cat Shit [2017]
I got bored doing these same songs over and over, and it started to feel corny and predictable. More importantly, those songs didn't really reflect who I was at that point in my life. Don't get me wrong, it's super cool to hear people sing the chorus of Strippers With the Shits and then ask you to clarify the lyrics after the show, but that's not what I want to be remembered for. I mean, it's an important part of my sonic timeline, but there's so much more depth to what I create than goofy raps about exotic dancers with diarrhea.
I wrote Reintroduction and Plug and added both songs to my live set before I had actually recorded anything outside of a couple of rough demos. Unlike my older tracks, these were written specifically to be performed live and they were both a lot of fun to do. The recording process was pretty straightforward as I had already composed the instrumentals for both tracks in Ableton Live. I swapped around some drum parts, added some scratches, switched some samples, and spent the next several weeks mixing the vocals. I don't think that I'm ever fully content with a mix, especially when vocals are the center point, but I think both Reintroduction and Plug are pretty decent without being over-the-top.
Any questions?
Where is that dialogue from at the beginning of Reintroduction?
The first part is dialogue from an old Flower Tucci porn video and the second part is from American Beauty.
Is Plug a low-key dis track?
Yes, it absolutely is. I don't think a lot of cats realized it at the time, but I took a few shots. Look, if you're gonna pay for plays whenever you release a new song to artificially inflate your stream count, and then brag about how popular your music is, you're a fucking poser.