The Beatnuts - Intoxicated Demons EP (1993)
"It's not really Spanish all the way, but it's more Afro-Spanish."
Intoxicated Demons (1993)
I didn't get The Beatnuts for awhile. Being born in '91, I don't feel hot shame rush to my cheeks when I admit that. Most of the praise I've seen for The Beatnuts comes from rap industry nerd people, most often on the editorial side. When I started really digging into rap after the millennium, they were dropping a new album, Take It Or Squeeze It and The Originators slid under my radar, but their '04 outing Milk Me caught my attention, probably because of the excellent cover. Still, despite hoarding every album I could find in Boxden's UG section and scouring the Internet for albums from every guest feature I'd ever heard, I still didn't check for them.
I won't say that my own ignorance mirrors the attitude of most hip-hop fans towards The Beatnuts, but I would argue that they're often forgotten in discussions about the orgasmic 90's. One reason is because they were Latino. Cypress Hill suffers from this somewhat less (though still to a degree) because they got in slightly earlier and were able to claim more of an original stance. Pun often suffers from the same lack of recognition that The Beatnuts do; in fact, while it seems contradictory to my argument, the fact that Cypress Hill and Big Pun were outspoken about their Spanish identity made them easier to distinguish from the rest. Where Pun would rattle off Spanish slang and B-Real had a sharp esse accent, The Beatnuts didn't always flaunt their ethnicity in the music. Intoxicated Demons only pushed their Latino-ness in the skit, "Engineer Talking," where tongue-in-cheek sarcasm is still effective. But it's not what they're loved for.
JuJu, Psycho Les and Al Tariq started with Intoxicated Demons in '93, but it sounds like D.I.T.C. Off the cuff rhymes that sound like ciphers, nothing fancy, traces of humor, horns to perfection. I don't know what it was like on the scene when The Beatnuts broke out, but I could see why their legacy might have been pushed to the side of bigger acts in the mid-90's. Which, for full rap nerd disclosure, makes discovering their music that much more pleasurable.
The high should hit you immediately. When I think about good drums, I think about violence, and the drums on "World's Famous Intro" are aggressive, to say the least. They lift you into the cloudy funk that is "World's Famous," an introduction that lays out the strengths of bass, horns, and drums when complementing each other. "Psycho Dwarf" follows the same formula, but the refrain of, "I wanna fuck, drink beer and smoke some shit!" is an irresistible dimension of the crew's fun-loving attitude. It wasn't the skits that people cared about - it was the politically incorrect, nasty inclusion of those sentiments in their music that made them unique.
"No Equal" employs a vibraphone (fucking love that instrument) sample with crispy drums and a mischievous bassline, and here it's best to pause and consider the true reason that The Beatnuts were so dope - their beats. They didn't quite have an innovative style like RZA or Premier, but they made songs that you could play on repeat for hours on end. To provide a pocket of constant escape is a skill that should never be underestimated. After all, they did start as the Beat Kings.
"Reign Of The Tec" is a bit more worldly, incorporating a little West Coast bounce and some squiggling guitar samples with a bit of slopfunk movement. 'Third Of The Trio' has a catchy vocal sample that triples onto itself, but that track exemplifies the problem - it's dope, but is it different?
Luckily there's "Story (Pink In The Twat)," my favorite song on the EP by far. I don't know what that main sample is. I can't even tell what instrument that is. Sounds like a flute. Pair that with the reverse sound effect that the Beastie Boys freaked on "Paul Revere" and you've got one addictive fucking rap song. On top of that, Les and Fashion are actually telling stories about chicks they fucked. It's dirty and perverse, but it's from the first-person and it's vivid, so it works well.
To me, The Beatnuts didn't sink in the first time. I knew that there were more daring sounds to experience first. But now that I'm coming back to their discography (their production work on the Constipated Monkey LP is a necessary listen), I'm starting to get why heads revere their music so much. Dope beats, dope rhymes. Simple and plain. Add some original skits (with more buttery beats, to boot) for humor and you've got the perfect rap recipe.
I'm also including 'Intoxicated Demos,' a vinyl release from the dope providers at One Leg Up Records. It features previously unreleased tracks, radio promos, and original demo versions of songs. Bullets hit cunts and recognizable samples get freaked all over the short release, making for a perfect companion piece to their debut.
