various artists - live @ playground, los angeles 3/5/1992
(youtube / internet archive)

i'm back to shaking out the shoeboxes for ancient and minute rap history because there is nothing else left to do in this cursed world. for today i have an audience recording from a 1992 artist showcase at the hollywoood club night playground, featuring previously unheard performances by freestyle fellowship, (tung) twista, mixmaster spade, funkytown pros, king tee, nemesis and more.

playground was a thursday night weekly put on by nwa affiliate dj speed and then-bell biv devoe collaborator dj epic (who would later invent soft-nu-metal as a founding member of crazy town). it often took place at a venue called spice, which is where this tape was recorded, though my scan of old la weekly listings suggests it changed location a few times, bouncing around neighborhood venues like the probe and anti-club. the earliest mention of the night that i could find, dating to september '91, described it as "hip-hop meets rock" but it must have evolved into a pure hip hop night at some point (or, as their ads would claim, "l.a.'s #1 hip-hop klub") and appears to have continued its run at least through july of '93.

i bought these two tapes off ebay several years ago, where they were sold alongside a larger genre-agnostic collection of late 80s/early 90s southern california audience tapes. the contents are obviously minor as fuck in the scheme of things but in a way that's what makes them so major. though the earliest roots of hip hop distribution lie in fan taping and trading that impulse had mostly dried up by the late '80s (maybe because it had shifted to radio?) and the handful of live recordings from that era that do float around now usually tend to prioritize bigger stars. so it's cool to hear a three hour document of a relatively unremarkable night in los angeles rap history, where workaday lesser knowns and soon-to-be legends alike were pushing through all the usual highs and lows familiar to anyone who has ever attended a showcasey rap event like this (technical difficulties, an utterly bored crowd, occasional glimpses of brilliance).

this was nine months before the chronic so it catches los angeles rap in a weird transitional period when the dominant street sound was still sample-based lench mob-style bombastic funk but the industry was seemingly trying to nudge everyone towards more of a crossover boom bap thing. side a of tape one features three unknown and ungooglable acts – ease, brother quest, and we funk – doing basically what you would expect ("aqua boogie" in the air) and not blowing it. the same goes for little known roughneck girl rappers marla mar and the good n plenty crew (sadly, not marley marl, as labeled on the cassette), who perform their single "back to black." (they, like many acts on this bill and in this whole hollywood hip hop nightlife milieu would eventually sign to ruthless, though they never ended up releasing anything on the label.)

next comes the pioneering dallas group nemesis, hitting some of the more hardcore tracks from their '91 lp, munchies for your bass (but, notably, not their biggest hit, the bass ballad title track). then it's the underrated la boom bap crew funkytown pros mostly kicking freestyles and performing tracks that were presumably intended for their never released/never leaked(?) sophomore project, followed by mark money, a rapper from cincinnati(?) who seemingly released just one major label 12" and sounds better than you might guessed from this bio.

tape 2 opens with dre b gone, another lesser known artist who never got a release date from ruthless, doing self-proclaimed "softcore" reggae rap, and yomo & maulkie, who actually did put out an album on ruthless, and a good one at that (the host keeps calling maulkie "markie"). after that we have mixmaster spade who co-parented all los angeles gangsta rap. he was admittedly a bit past prime at this point, promoting his cloying comeback ballad "sexy lady," but it's just nice to hear him perform. notably he segues his "genius is back" medley into a short cover of crash crew's harlem classic "high powered rapp", which may be of note to my fellow old school melodic rapp-with-two-p's genealogists out there, of which i am sure there are many.

the flip side starts with yet another ruthless artist, admiral d, the rasta imposta of "always into somethin" fame, who opens his set with the self effacing chant "i rapped with nwa so buy my record! i'm the first white rapper on wax so buy my record!" the record never came out, of course. king tee follows him but frustratingly performs just one song, "the great."

if you've read this far you probably already know that the main draw on these tapes for me is the appearance of freestyle fellowship. they and their affiliates are in fact the rare exception to my previous nobody was trading live rap tapes in the '90s claim – their usual thursday night haunt was heavily dubbed – and you can hear why on here because they are just completely better at rapping than every other person on the stage. they kick some freestyles and perform three songs from the then-unreleased inner city griots which wouldn't be released for another year. a very young (tung) twista raps last and he's still in his first form, doing his micro machine man guinness book fu schnick schtick. it's technically impressive but sounds absolutely stilted compared to the group that came before him.

so yes this tape might seem like a smoking gun for every double timed chopper in america bit freestyle fellowship directly and eazy e forced bone thugs to rap like them conspiracy theorists – twista was there on stage! eazy would've been the host if he had showed up! – but i am trying my best not to give a shit anymore. ownership is boring and the evolution of music is always more complex than it seems. it is in fact is much cooler to think about all these disparate geographic scenes drawing from dramatically different strains of black american music and still converging incidentally, with fellowship rapping to jazz, twista to house, bone to reggae, and memphis getting their flows from the devil himself. i still think the fellowship did it best and also someone absolutely needs to edit the first sentence on that wikipedia page.