About Me
The rap auto-biography of hot dog the rapper - edited by Bubs
I was born in a little town in the PA mountains that was as much the exact opposite of "big city, urban life" as it gets, or at least as much as I can imagine it gets. Minorities of any sort were rare - very few and far between. I went to school and played sports against only white kids in my formative years. From the time I was in kindergarten until I moved to the Midwest after my sophomore year of high school, I only remember one black kid at our school, and he was several years older than me. When I first learned about the existence of rap and hip hop music, I just had no idea what the fuck it was. It didn't really make much sense to me, and I didn't really have any way to listen to it (because the Intanet wasn't around back then, and we didn't have record stores in the middle of nowhere, where I lived).
I was basically introduced to rap music by Coolio and Naughty By Nature on MTV, but I never really gave a shit or thought twice about it. Then, one day my sophomore year of high school, on the school bus on the way to a basketball game, I listed to the Wu-Tang Clan on someone's Discman. (Remember those, from the pre-iPod era?)
That night, I signed up for BMG and all those free discs you get, not knowing that you also get a lot of expensive-ass Huey Lewis and the News tapes, and grounded...
So when my own copy of 36 Chambers showed up in the mail, even though it was the censored version, I was elated. I didn't get any other rap CDs. Wu Tang was the first thing I ever listened to that caught my ear.
Not long after that I somehow got my hands on the VHS tape for the movie "Above the Rim". And not long after that I bought the soundtrack and was really excited about it, though I had no idea what I was listening to.
Over the next few months, I slowly began listening to more rap, including Tupac. He was in the news (MTV News) at the time because of a jail episode. This was around the time that "Dear Mama" was released (and until I saw that video, I had no idea that Tupac was the guy from "Above the Rim"). I slowly became more intrigued as I found more shit that I like to listen to: Gravediggaz, Biggy, EPMD, Mobb Deep, Wu solo joints, etc.
Not long after I added rap to what could formerly be called the Blue-Album-dominated playlist of my life, my family moved to a small city in central Missouri. I arrived the day before my first day of soccer practice, and I was immediately curious and entertained by several of the people I met. There were black kids and white kids, and a lot of them listened to a lot of rap music that I'd never listened to before. There was shit from the south and a lot of west coast shit that wasn't popular enough to make it's way to my West Cenn Penn. hamlet on cable or over the radio airwaves.
This was about the time that Jay-Z released his first album, and all the Bad Boy and Death Row shit was at full steam. We were driving 40 minutes to Columbia to hit up Streetside Records for new releases at midnight on a pretty regular basis. All these guys played all their west coast and southern rap for me, and I brought all my east coast shit into the equation for them. We'd just drive and dig on tunes, the preppy little white fuckers that we were.
Just before I moved to Missouri, I'd picked up a bad habit of (completely) petty shoplifting - mostly gum, candy, magazines, baseball cards - little shit. That habit stopped once I moved, but only momentarily. One day, a few of us were at a store after school and when we walked out and got in the car, I pulled a couple CDs out of my jacket and was all, "what up!!??"
They were like, "How did you fucking do that?" And I was like, "I fucking broke off the security sensor. Duh."
And then some people's brains started turning. Jump forward a few months, and we were running a pretty decent little hustle, taking CD orders at school and hitting the malls and stores at night to fill the orders. My dad gave me the credit card to buy a winter coat, and we went to four stores before we ended back at the first where we got the biggest coat that could conceal the most CDs.
It eventualy got a little bit more grand. We got to the point where some fairly large corporations were writing us checks at $100-$200 a pop on a pretty regular basis in return for merchandise that we'd stolen and taken back as "gifts that we didn't want". We were selling TI-85s and video games for half-price to kids at school. Basically, for awhile, I was the truck that everything was falling off of at my high school. It wasn't big time, but it was enough that I was carrying around cash in my pocket that middle-class kids my age didn't carry around.
And the music was free.
I can safely say that I started smoking pot because of rap music. If all of these people making all of this music I dug were openly talking about how much they loved smoking pot, I wanted to try it out. And I pretty much loved it from the start.
I continued listening to a pretty wide array of hip hop until I got to college my freshman year. That was when Eminem first happened. But other than Em, I pretty much stopped listening to rap as (a) I listened to waaaay less music my first two years of college, and (b) the music I did listen to was normally something that someone else was playing while we were partying. I didn't have a car, and we didn't really drive much, and that was when I had always listened to music. My CDs were always in my room (or getting borrowed/stolen), and fairly quickly, a lot of the music that I'd spent the better part of a few years listening to was gone from my life. The only rap CD that I remember buying between the time I went to college and the time flunked out two years later was a Meth and Red disc. The title escapes me.
I did keep listening to Eminem, though. This was about the time that MP3s became popular - not yet widespread, but they were picking up steam. I'd brave the thirty minute download times on an infant Napster to grab a track here and there. (The funny thing is that, when I got broadband Intanet not long after, I didn't download an awful lot of rap music on Napster).
We threw some intricate theme parties in college, and one that I always wanted to throw was the rap party. I happened to meet a guy who could get me 40oz'ers at cost from a distributor when I was 23, so I finally decided to throw the party. We set up a dice table, had a barbecue, put a mic on the "stage" for freestyling and I premiered my first ever rap song and video, "Party, Party". I handed out fifty numbered and autographed copies of the "Party, Party" single, entitled Guns, Guns and More Guns.
When that party happened, I wasn't a rapper. It'd taken me a full two weeks to struggle out the lyrics to that song. After that party happened, I only considered and referred to myself a rapper in a manner where it was a funny anecdote when I was telling a story.
After the party, I still wasn't listening to a lot of rap music, but thanks to "Hey, Ma" by Cam'ron, a seed was growing in my head.
My friend Uncle Phebian started listening to an awful lot of hip hop around this time, and he kept introducing new stuff to me. I wasn't listening to it too much, but he was burning me discs here and there, and I was really liking what I was hearing. Mos Def, Digable Planets, The Roots, etc.
About a year and a half after the rap party, I started building a pretty extensive collection of music on my computer. Digging through boxes, I found what was left of my high school CD collection, and I started ripping everything to the computer and listening again. There really wasn't much left, but I had Liquid Swords, Aquemeni, some Tupac, some Biggie. And I had an itch to listen to a bunch more stuff in order to catch up on five years of ignoring rap and hip hop.
Not long after, I started messing around with some "free" software that I'd obtained when I was working on "Party, Party." Pretty quickly, I got good at sampling loops out of songs, and Dos and I would get high and try to freestyle. I wasn't any good at it. Bluntly, I was horrible. I still am. I can't freestyle at all.
But that didn't stop me. That summer (2005) I moved to St. Louis, and the folks that gave me a place to live were building a recording studio in their basement right next to the room that I was making my home. They used it for recording bluegrass music, which is pretty much the opposite of hip hop. But in my free time I'd mess around with Protools or a keyboard or a drum machine just trying to figure out how everything worked.
One night, I convinced Spurge to have "beat night" with me. I'd been getting pretty frustrated because I knew next to nothing about music and absolutely nothing about making beats.
With a bottle of Jack Daniels in hand, I watched Spurge go to work in the studio. By the time he was done, he had left me with the loop for "Freckle Bo Beckle Me". At that point, I hadn't left myself very much of that bottle of Jack Daniels, and when I woke up the next morning trying to figure out what I'd done the night before, I noticed that I'd emailed an MP3 to a lot of different people. I listened to it, and I was pretty amazed at what I had written and recorded while I was blacked out. Somewhere inside my above-average hangover was a feeling of accomplishment, although to this day I'm not sure why.
A couple months later, I made "The B.O. Club" entirely on my own with a drum machine and a keyboard. It's horrible, but it's my first completely original rap song.
I wasn't getting much help from anyone with beats, so I "took a break" from producing my own music. In fact, I gave up on being a rapper. I was convinced that I didn't have the musical and creative resources to make it happen, and I was super fucking frustrated.
Several months later, I was tagging along with some friends from college while they were making a short film for the 48 Hour Film Festival. That Friday night, they were writing the script, and at one point they were discussing the song they wanted to use over the credits. For the Festival, music and content has to follow copyright rules. They were joking that they wanted to use "I've had the time of my life" as the song, but because of the rules they couldn't. I said that I could sample it and write a rap over it, and I got a few yeah, sures, but I was seemingly brushed off.
In the morning, I woke up on the floor, looked around, and decided that if I was going to write that song, I needed to get home and do it. So, back at the studio (named 8====D Studios), I bought the song online and found a sample that I could use. It didn't take long; I had lyrics for it in an hour, and I was recording and re-recording not long after that. By 1:30 that afternoon, I had emailed the song to the guys at their video studio. No more than 10 minutes later, one of the directors called me back to tell me how much he loved it. A day later, the film ( titled The 15th Floor, viewable here ) was submitted with my remake of "I've Had The Time of My Life" as the song playing over the credits. In the credits I was introduced to the world as Hot Dog the Rapper.
I haven't released a rap song since "Time of My Life." I haven't even hit the studio to try to record one. Within the past couple months I've listened to a lot of mix tapes, and I decided that I was going to start rapping over other people's loops, whether I pulled them from other rap songs, rock songs, punk songs, or whatever. With several samples in tow, I've been writing a lot of lyrics, scattered across text files on my laptop.
Last week, Dos and Pheebs and I looped a drumline from a Fat Joe tune and started writing lyrics for a new song about the soccer team we're starting called the St. Louis Silencers. And for the first time, I felt everything come together in a fairly perfect way. I just couldn't stop writing down lyrics, and I think they sound pretty good. It was the first time that I ever actually felt like I was a rapper.
So, now that I'm officially a rapper, get ready to hear a lot about my three favorite things in life:
1. Weed
2. Ca$h Money
3. Fucking white bitches
=hot dog the rapper, 2/10/2008
