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Shuffled! is a weekly column appearing every Thursday here on BPRLive. Each week, we welcome a person from the APA community to share some thoughts about the music they listen to. Check out the Shuffled! archive for past articles.

Today’s Shuffler: DJ Phatrick

DJ Phatrick has been involved in the Bay Area hip hop community since his escape from Texas in 2000. Since then he has gone on to co-found the Bay Unity Music Project, a digital music and recording enrichment program for youth and young adults in Oakland; DJ’d for the legendary Native Guns hip hop group; hosts APEX EXPRESS, a weekly Asian Pacific Islander public affairs radio program on 94.1FM KPFA; and, oh yea, rocked hella parties. Whether in the classroom or the club, studio or streets, DJ Phatrick operates under the firm conviction of using music and hip hop as a tool for social movement, change, and justice.

Now a recent LA transplant, DJ Phatrick spends most of his days writing useless nonsensical blog entries and posting songs up illegally on his website, www.djphatrick.com.

Time to shuffle…

AHHH! This is harder than you think it is. I think I’ve gone through maybe 20 different shuffle cycles and burned through 5 pages of Post-It Notes (physical and virtual) just to get a decent group of 5 songs. You always get 4 amazing selections, then BAM!…”This Is Why I’m Hot” by Mims. Look, I dj frat parties sometimes, ok? I mean, a chinaman gotta eat, right? [sigh]

Ok, here’s the final shuffle I’m goin with:

“Crooks and Rooks”
Bambu
“Crooks and Rooks” is off of Bambu’s 3rd album, Exact Change, which just dropped September 11, 2008. Exact Change is probably Bambu’s most introspective and mature album to date. If you know Bam, you know that his album making process is like writing a journal, chronicling all the emotions, beliefs, and passions that he’s experiencing at that point in his life. This time around, Bam’s muse is the greatest event to happen to his life thus far: the birth of his son, Kahlil Bayani Deocampo. Channeling his new fatherhood, Bam holds back on alot of the guntalk prevalent in his previous albums while still retaining the humorous revolutionary wordplay that makes Bam THAT DUDE, not just among API emcees, but all emcees. Crooks and Rooks is produced by Oakland’s Nick James. To find out how you can get Exact Change, log on to www.bambu.la.

“I’ll Bet You” [Single Version]
Funkadelic
Ahhhh yes. Funkadelic. Shouts out to fellow Chinese mothershipper, and Pretty Buoyant Society affiliate, Adriel Luis, for rekindling my fanaticism for George Clinton and the Parliament/Funkadelic fam.

Just one thing to say here: Lil Wayne rapping “We are not the same, I am a Martian…”? Credit Parliament/Funkadelic for that.

“Rankin’ No. 1″
Latyrx
I’m a poser. I didn’t get into hip hop (meaning the hip hop that elitists label “real” hip hop), until after high school in the fall of 2000, when I escaped Sugar Land, Texas and arrived in Berkeley, CA where my two white freshman year roommates introduced me to the backpack. We would take the BART to the now-defunct Maritime hall to watch a then unknown-to-me Talib Kweli, a Mos Def who did a 15 minute live rendition of “Ms. Fat Booty,” and a band called the Roots who played 3 hours straight for multiple acts…then hitchhike home since the BART closed at midnight. During this crash course in non-mainstream hip hop music, I discovered the Solesides/Quannum Crew. DJ Shadow was still huge at the time with college kids, buzzin off of Endtroducing even 4 years after its release. Blackalicious was the popular act from the crew with the alliterated “A2G” getting constant rotation with the heads in my dorm suite. But Latyrx was my personal favorite. They had same hard beats provided from Quannum’s main producers, Shadow and Chief Xcel, but with the unmistakable swag that all emcees born and raised in the Bay Area possess. Add some experimental lyricism, and you have serious thought-provoking SLAP. On top of all that, Lyrics Born is Japanese American! He is one of the first few folks on my list of prominent Asian Americans in pop music, after James Iha, Jocelyn Enriquez, and Q-Bert. I recently had the opportunity to help conduct an interview with Lyrics Born for APEX EXPRESS, the Bay Area’s only API radio show on the FM dial where I have served as producer and host. You can listen here: http://kpfa.org/archives/index.php?arch=26682

“Show Me What You’ve Got (Remix)”
Lil Wayne
I swear Steve Jobs practices some kind of voodoo; iTunes shuffle has the uncanny ability to read your mind. Weren’t we just talking about Mr. Young Money during the Funkadelic song?

Anyway, this reminds me of a recent job interview I had for this hip hop program that offers weekly workshops on the 4 elements to the public for free in LA. The very first question they asked me was: “What do you think about Lil Wayne?” In my head, I was like “What the fuck?!” Do they want to judge me on how down I am with “real” hip hop by using my opinion on Weezy as the barometer? Should I play to their backpacker aesthetic and say “Lil Wayne is the worst thing to happen to hip hop since Puff’s verse on “Missing You,” or should i tell how I really feel? I chose the latter:

Lil Wayne to me presents hope for hip hop; hope for the future of creativity amongst the communities that continually innovate the music and culture instead of staying within the confines of the “4 elements.” I’m talking about the Soulja Boys of the South, the “Chicken Noodle Soup” kids of Harlem, and the Hyphy youth of Oakland. Hate as much as you want on these “bubble gum, ringtone shit” kids, but they are the future. Whatever music they make and whatever style they’ll squeeze outta the limited resources available to them will determine what pop music will sound like 10 years down the line. Lil Wayne gives me hope because he’s one of the few artists out right now (including T-Pain) who has HELLA mass appeal. He’s the hero of EVERY hood in the U.S., and is played on EVERY radio station in the world, yet sounds like noone else out there. He’s making it cool again to be weird, to be different, to be a Martian, much like Andre 3000 did in the mid-nineties. He’s bringing back a certain caliber of lyrical creativity that was missing in “Crank Dat” and “Lean Wit It, Rock Wit It.” I mean, “A Milli” was Top 10 on the Billboard Charts and it’s a fucking battle-rap song, meaning it’s one of those what we call “rah rah” tracks where you just demonstrate your lyrical ability; it doesn’t even have a hook!

Don’t get me wrong, though. I’m not a blind groupie of Lil Weezy. I was actually one of the folks who were extremely skeptical of all the hype between the Carter II and Carter III. But as an educator, to see Wayne’s words memorized verbatim, even his mixtape tracks, by all the middle and high schoolers in West Oakland, you see a huge opportunity to create lesson plans around his music. On the literary tip, you can teach metaphors, similes, and rhyme scheme using Wayne as a starting ground, then branching out by comparing and contrasting, as well as, exposing to students, other artists less popular with them, like a Mos, or a Gift of Gab, or a De La Soul, etc etc. On the critical thinking tip, you can challenge Wayne’s rampant misogyny – ask the young women why they love repeating “I suck a pussy, fuck a pussy, leave it there…” and whether they ever questioned what they were saying? Then compare that with, say, Talib’s “For Women” or even “Keep Your Head Up” by 2Pac…it goes on and on. Use what the youth of today like instead of dismissing it. Enough about this, moving on…

“Comet”
Mango Pirates
Wow, three API artists in one shuffle! I’m not cheating, I swear!

This takes me back to freshman year when Napster was still free and we were connected to the dorm’s T1 downloading highway of heaven. This was the anthem for us young, naive students taking Intro to Asian American Studies. It was the companion music for all our Ronald Takaki readings.

In the summer before my senior year, my girlfriend inherited her older brothers’ drums, guitar, and bass and we used to jam all afternoon. By “jam”, I mean we would play different renditions of “Comet” over and over and over again.

Last 5 posts by shuffled

• Shuffled! North Star of the BROWNSTAR Revolution - December 10th, 2009
• Shuffled! Pen Khek Chear - November 25th, 2009
• Shuffled! Maanav Thakore - November 19th, 2009
• Shuffled! Jerry Ma - August 13th, 2009
• Shuffled! Tanzila Ahmed - August 6th, 2009

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