When you’re in these situations, you do not feel as though what you are doing is wrong. As a matter of fact, everybody in the video volunteered themselves, for the sake of our mission. Nobody was put up to any scene in this video. You can try to chock this up as exploitation – it will not work. This video is one hundred percent real and unstaged. These are the people that most of gangsta rap music fraudulently portrays. These are the places that hip-hop claims to care about. It seems as though our city and our people place no importance on our community any longer.
We are essentially reporting live from neighborhoods and communities long forgotten, and, in Atlanta, recently torn down. These conditions that our people live in are terrifying, and we seek to expose what so many have forgotten. The fact that this video is nearly terrifying in its graphic nature means that it is doing exactly what it is supposed to do – terrify. If it does, we have succeeded in our goal.
"We hope that this video shocks your conscience. It's one of the rawest Rap videos I've ever seen, all shot on location in an Atlanta hood probably schedualed to be bulldozed. This video has been blogged the fuck out of within the last week since it came out, and rightfully so. Pill - Trap Goin Ham from Motion Family on Vimeo. Oh yeah did I mention one of the members plays the dental tape with almost an alto saxophone range of notes? The above track is the B side 20 minute track from Smell the Remains that still sounds as fucked as it did when I first heard it. Not even Lee Perry could expell the Duppies from their tapes. They're like a Surf Rock band, if Duane Eddy had a love child with one of the Manson girls and recorded said offspring on a broken reel-to-reel. Contemporaries of the Butthole Surfers when they were good, and once lead by "the first rock critic"/the guy that wrote " Burnin for You" Richard Meltzer, the band members are in their 60's and still smoking tons of weed and playing shows with Portland kids 1/4th their age. For many, DIY means an impulse to release everything, for Smegma it means an impulse to play music with each other everyday for three decades. Comprised of various members throughout their 36 year (!) span, the band has put out a huge discography, sometimes with gaps of over 10 years in between releases. Originally from Pasadena, relocated to Portland in the mid 70s, Smegma are both underground legend and another band the Wire was 30 years late to cover. iI might not show within the music I post about here, but I have spent a lot of time listening to mic feedback and tape loops, and I don't mean King Tubby. It took a minute to realize that I could find much of what I was looking for in the Hip-Hop cassettes I had stolen from my art teacher prior to these discoveries, so for a good chunk of that time I was filling my head with a lot of for lack of a better word experimental and more notably improvised music, and still do today. Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy and the above album Smell the Remains basically destroyed music for me at age 15 and lead me on my search for the most fucked up music I could find throughout high school.
Smegma, along with the man that named this website pretty much decided my direction in life early on. Those that came to this page for booty jams might want to ignore this one, but if you like DJ Milton, Mannie Fresh, Gucci Mane, and slowed down Rap music you got to face the facts, you like weird music. In an effort to make sense of my love for all things bent, I can't go on without dropping a little knowledge on one of the most important bands that ever existed. Smegma - Beauty School (from Smell the Remains 1988)