fashawn can skate

so fashawn got on my radar last year, with his boy meets world mixtape. i was taught to follow production. instead of dre, just blaze or pow low the don, i follow j. rawls, el-p, marco polo, and... exile. soulful samples and knock. so, when i heard that exile was producing another album, i was curious. exile produced blu and blu is the sh&t (please get the album if you haven't)! back to fashawn. so "boy meets world" was pleasant. i liked the song with planet asia. nothing noteworthy, but it was one of those albums that you want to listen to again but never do.

fast forward to last month. i follow mixtape djs, like i follow production. i like mixtapes and still listen to them. why? well... watch.

Real G's Rock Tapes from richdirection on Vimeo.

currently my dudes are statik selektah, don cannon and green lantern. "the champ is here" was my reintroduction into mixtape shopping. i remember hearing from a car and remembering the green lantern drop. see. growing up, i had a barbershop and older cousins, so getting new mixtapes wasn't a problem. then in college, well you know the hustle. wednesdays in the union at FSU, then fridays on FAM, then there was always phaze one. and if all else fails you could just get your trade on with the someone from the tri-state. leaving school, things got weird. the internet went BOOM and a move to the midwest and killed my tape access. sure, dj drama was in full effect, but if your taste ran closer to NY you were stuck. then came the move to brooklyn, the home of the mixtape. and i moved down the block from where this happened.



nice.

how it works in brooklyn is, just walk down a street. keep walking and you will eventually run into someone selling mixes. 1 for 5 or 5 for 20. simple. most of my lil wayne collection came from empire mixes, so much so that i think dj drops are a part of songs. point being. i'm back in the tape game. saw that fashawn was coming with a new tape dedicated to illmatic. i got it last week and its DOPE!. he re-did all the songs. the genius is that he kept the same cadences and changed the lyrics to update the content and make it more 'cali.' it bangs.



what's more impressive then that is this.....



dude started with a switch back three. tuff!