You have to strike while the iron is hot. After the 4 Horsemen 1 & 2 and Knights of the Roundtable 1 & 2 I showed that I was no flash in the pan. There was no denying I was an official player in the game now. It was pretty much classic or bust at this time.
One day I was riding I-95 down the southern east coast with my business partner Alex, who would go on to own the legendary American Bully “Tungsten”. The radio station was playing the classic song “Who Run It” by Three Six Mafia and he suggested I do a mixtape with my remix style but feature southern music. He lived in Texas & Virginia and knew something like this would be accepted in the south and everywhere else as well. This was around the time when southern styled Hip Hop was beginning to take the lead in the music business. I knew a project like this could help expand my steadily growing fanbase.
I once again locked myself in the lab and after weeks of mixing I emerged with Dirty Business. I definitely got the results I was looking for. It was received well all over but especially in the south and also out west. Below you will find the mix in its entirety. YouTube has been giving me some problems with my mixtapes so unfortunately it is blocked in America unless you use a VPN but all my people in other parts of the world should be able to view. Do remember this is always available in the cd shop. Enjoy.
Europe in the summer is a beautiful place. After close to 2 hard years in the lab and churning out close to 10 classic mixtapes, an album and a dvd it was time to get away. The summer was a bit of a downtime for mixtapes and I had some offers to go overseas and do some solo shows after falling back from live performances for a while. I accepted a few dates across France and in the Balkans including a festival at beautiful Ohrid Beach in Macedonia with my good friends DJ Goce & P of the legendary European group S.A.F.
It was great to change my surroundings and recharge my batteries. I enjoyed it but it was time to get back to work. I hadn’t dropped in a while so I knew I had to deliver. I stayed true to my winning formula and put together a slew of remixes along with some of the better songs out at the time and I included a section where I featured a bunch of up and coming artists in the game without record deals. The final result was Napalm. It was another well received project and helped to further solidify my position. Here it is and please be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel so I can keep dropping these mixtapes in full.
I met Un Pacino around the same time I met Das Efx. When I first got with Das it wasn’t as a Dj, it was as a producer. They had taken a liking to my beats and I had become an in house producer of sorts. They put together a roster of artists they would attempt to put out and they were called The Ressless Clique. It was comprised of Dray and Skoob themselves, an R&B singer from Atlanta named J Dirty and 2 MCs from Far Rockaway, Queens. They were Scott Caine and Un which was short for Unforgettable. They were kind of a duo and had great chemistry together on a track but Un always showed that he could also be a solo artist. There was no denying he was lyrically gifted and had a unique voice.
We recorded a few Ressless Clique songs that weren’t released and eventually hit the road together. When I began to dj the shows for Das Efx we went on a nationwide tour with Black Sheep and the whole crew came. We hit just about every state in the continental US and we lived on a tour bus for over a month. We all got really tight from that experience.
After the tour Das Efx and the Ressless Clique would record some freestyles for my mixtapes and they even got released as underground white labels. We would continue to do shows together while working on new material. When we were together there would be a steady menu of blunts and beats. After one session with the guys there was a beat I played that while it wasn’t quite Das Efx’s style Un was feeling it and wanted to record a song to it. At the time I was putting together a compilation project of songs I produced so I figured I could use it on there. We hit the studio and “It’s Gangsta” was born. This was probably Un’s first solo song. It would later be on my “Dangerous Minded” album and dvd.
Un would add “Pacino” to his name and began to come into his own as an MC. I featured him on many of my mixtapes and his name began to spread. He was featured on a few songs on Das Efx’s 5th studio album “How We Do” and he did some work with Mic Geronimo before becoming a fixture of the mixtape and dvd scene. His “Hard White” mixtape series with Scott Caine and H. Brando became some of the hardest out and his freestyles and songs would appear on countless DJ mixtapes. This led to him working with Prodigy from Mobb Deep. They created many songs and eventually went on to release an album together called “Product of the 80’s” before Prodigy’s untimely death.
Since then Un Pacino has gone on to “underground legend” status. With no record deal he has released a catalog of mixtapes, albums and music videos that rival many artists signed to labels. While his style may never be commercial it’s nice to see him maintain a certain lyrical integrity that is lacking in the game today and make a respected name for himself by doing so.
I had become the dj for the group Das Efx and we recorded some songs together but we had not released any of them. At this time Das didn’t have a record deal and a platform to release music. We were constantly recording new music and trying to negotiate a situation with a label. One day we were together and I gave them my latest beat cd. There was one beat that strongly caught both of their attention. However, there was one problem. Un Pacino had heard the beats and picked the same one and he had sketched out a song with Mic Geronimo to it.
I had put together a unique sound kit for this beat and at this time producers were going with a signature sound. From Timbaland to DJ Premier to the Neptunes, most prominent producers had a similar sound to a lot of their tracks. Das suggested that I use the same sounds but play them differently and make another beat for them. I went into the lab and loaded up the MPC and flipped those sounds into the beat for “How We Do”.
From the first time I played it for Dray & Skoob we knew we had something. They even thought it was hotter than the original. Shortly after we recorded the song in the studio and not long after that we had a single deal with Landspeed Records. The record did pretty well. With no promotional budget, subpar mixing and mastering and no video the record began to sell out globally in record stores. It would climb the underground and college charts and even hit #1 for a few weeks. It didn’t make it into regular rotation on the radio stations but it did get spins on the mix shows. I can still remember the first time I heard it played on “Future Flavas” with Marley Marl, Pete Rock & Callie Ban.
In its limited Landspeed release it did well enough to be parlayed into an album deal with west coast record label “Fome”. The album would also be called “How We Do”. Unfortunately this deal didn’t pan out so well and with no videos, budget issues and minimal promotion for the album it disappointed. After it’s release Das Efx decided to go on hiatus and it was then that I began my all out assault on the mixtape game. I had given up any hope or desire on signing a major label record deal but instead would approach mixtapes like I was an independent record label and run it as such. Years later Das Efx would reunite and we would continue to tour the world. In our later travels we would find the song “How We Do” to be the favorite of many of the younger fans and not the platinum hits of the early years. One can only wonder what could’ve happened if the situation was different but I guess it’s like they say, “Everything happens for a reason.”
Godbrothers 2. Another crucial building block in the House of Rondevu. In the spring of 2004 I was really coming into my own in the mixtape game. I was developing a steady following and things were definitely progressing. I made a side project a few months earlier called Godbrothers Instrumentals with only Nas & Rakim instrumentals. I was thinking about doing a proper mixtape with that theme and after hanging out with the legendary mixtape collector “Tapemasta” in Brooklyn and he suggested it too I knew it had to be done. After some dedicated time in the lab I dropped it and it was immediately embraced. The bootleggers had a field day. The hip hop website reviews were all great and it even received a “Classic” rating from the highly critical mixtape review website “RAPMULLET.COM” Below is a clip from the mixtape. Be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel so you will know about all my latest drops.
