Tigra and Bunny D's lesser works

Or at least talk about the giggle-fit in the middle of "He's a Mutt"

I'm pretty sure that "Grab It!" was the first single (an answer record to "Push It!") and "Cars" was second or third. The first album, though, despite "Cars," was weak. I disagree with the premise of this thread (that non-"Boom" was necesarily "lesser"). The second album - Drop That Bottom, Atlantic, 1989 - is the greatest hip hop album ever, by anybody. I don't have time to say why, though remember back in the late '80s everyone was saying that Public Enemy were the future? Well, listen to It Takes A Nation of Millions and compare it to Drop That Bottom and ask yourself which foreshadows the next decade-and-a-half of hip hop and dance music. Bottom's got big bass, speed beats, everything. Which doesn't explain why this album's the best, but seven or eight of its songs are as good or better than "Boom" - e.g., title song, "Low Rider" (dif from version on Groovy), "Why Would I (Go Back to the Burn)," "We Got Our Own Thing," "Trouble in the House." Third album is nice but not as good; the second had stiffed, so they went psychedelic and sample crazy, which is not bad in itself, but what's lost is Bottom's scamp voices running rings around big bass.

(Subject for future thread, future research: Miami bass, s&d. For all I know, there are scores of Miami bass LPs as good as this.)

So ILM almost got me kicked out of John Muir Elementary School. You pieces of shite.

(nb: I am going to go and buy the complete "Drop That Bottom" today coz I only have select mp3s of it and that stuff doesn't float around filesharespace enough for me to grab it that way. However I strongly suspect Tiffany's New Inside may live up to it but again I only have a few trax. I also stand completely corrected on the "Grab It"/"Cars" chronology but "Cars" still rocks harder. Also I wanna hear what ppl think [Kogan in partic] was wrong with the rest of the first album. They just sound so much more confident and audacious as rappers there than on anything else I've heard.)

"Gillette, On the Attack!" is like rap-metal
"Mr Personality" is an even crueller dis than "Short Dick Man"

Here's what I wrote about her flow in the '90s version of *Stairway to Hell* (where I have 1995's *On the Attack* at number 33 for '90s metal albums through then): "This 20-year-old suburban Chicago Latina raps raspy and rude, like Joan Jett as a varsity cheerleader. She also provides her own laugh track, a whole bunch of *different* laughs. She deals hackneyed insults about your dad tying porkchops 'around your neck just to get the dog to play witcha' (dig that gum-cracking diction!), yet she sounds absolutely *proud* of the lame disses she pretends she's just now invented." And so on and so forth. So yeah, I suppose you might say that I kind of love her voice. (As far as "flow" goes, um -- who cares?) *On the Attack* was one of the best albums of 1995 (and "Short Dick Man" not nearly the best track on it, by the way); her less metal-guitared but also less monofunctional followup, *Shake Your Money Maker*, was one of the best albums of 1996, though almost nobody remembers it ever existed. (Apparently she put out stuff since then, too, but I never heard it.)

The traxx were dope but she was doper.

Not that they need that sort of endorsement.

I woulld wager that Tigra flowed the best although each brought thier own individual style to the music.

I still listen to thier CDs like they are new CD. Too bad they went unnoticed. Today they would have been BIG money makers. I cannot stand the rap females out now. They are nasty, raunchy, unfeminine and have no realy style or pizazz.

L'trimm had class, spoke clearly and very well, had fun with it and always acted like ladies (and were happy) AND could flow. I can listen to their songs and feel as if it was made in 2003 rather than 10 years ago. I don't think they sound outdated at all (but then again I am a big cheezball and fan so....They were just a product of being in the wrong time era.

It kinda sucks being a huge fan of a group that no longer exsist and worse a group where there is virtually no information on them:0(

Thanks for the info I knew they would do something worthwhile with thier lives.:o)

is this the old routine where it's fashionable to disdain the sophisticated? what gombrich called 'the preference for the primitive'? then there's the rhetorical overstatement.

i like l'trimm too but jesus, what a crock

here's the 'irreverent' low culture/high theory juxtaposition

Calling L'Trimm "primitive" is condescending, and ignorant too.

(And for what it's worth, if Spoonie Gee - who came out of the blocks at age 16 with something nearly as emotionally complicated as the Stones in their late 20s, had put together an album worth of tracks as good as his best few singles - it'd be the great hip-hop album. But he didn't, and the best of LP screws things up by omitting the B-side of "Spoonin Rap" to the A-side.)

Anyway, Amateur(ist), you and I don't have the beef going that you and Chuck have, and I don't want to start one with you, but you're doing something I have contempt for (and which DeRogatis did in his review of Stairway to Hell), which is attacking our motives rather than addressing our arguments or analyzing the music.

Frank, I've never been a big rap head, but I do wonder the extent to which saying that it's the best ever rap album stems not from the strength of the material but from a Party Principle that you seem to have advocated in the past - "Disco Tex is actually at the party while the New York Dolls merely wish they were at the party" - that kind of thing.

i'm not attacking you at all, frank!! i find your comments interesting and useful, as usual. i was mocking chuck and sterling. chuck's principle comments on this thread are of the type that says little about the music while employing pointedly "controversial" or contrarian rhetoric, hyperbole if you ask me. thus rather than discuss the music of l'trimm he simply says they are better than all the canonical rap artists--k.r.s. one, de la soul, and so forth. sterling employs the "high theory/low culture" heuristic to make a sort of "jokingly serious" claim for l'trimm's importance. these are both common critical gambits which don't typically get us anywhere nearer to the substance of the music than we were before. my juvenile jibes don't get us there either, but just the same i thought i would clarify their object.

how does this dense paragraph of references, comparisons, relentlessly evaluative assessments, etc. say anything about the music? i suppose if you know the music of all the artists being referenced in the the penultimate sentence, there might be a between-the-lines comparative-description of l'trimm's music, but if so it's a description that doesn't actually use any descriptives! it doesn't provide us with terms, with ideas, that can't be debated an argued except in a fashion that encourages ever-denser in-jokes and greater opacity.

this seems to me to be one of chuck's major MOs.

....and it's a great record.....

also, i know they're from florida, but for some reason the accents on "cars that go boom" strike me as having this long-island quality.

I don't hear Drop That Bottom as minimalist, not at all. Uses samples and such, as well as beats running all around. And "minimalist" ≠ "unsophisticated." "Minimalist" is probably the wrong word for hip-hop anyway, even for deliberately spare-sounding tracks like "Love Rap" and "Sucker MCs" and "Suckapella" and "Wait" and some of the Wu-Tang, Neptunes, Timbaland etc. etc. This is because even the spare-sounding stuff is designed to be part of a crowded radio or club or home-listening soundscape, whereas the music that calls itself minimalist is trying to make the soundscape minimal (and thereby produce maximal effects with it).

Someone who knows something about minimalism might want to jump in and correct or elaborate on what I just said. Did Kraftwerk and Donna Summer ever define themselves as minimalist? Anyway, once Bambaataa/Baker came along, the sound got crowded with beats and samples and stuff - at least "crowded" was one of the choices (not that it hadn't been a choice for Moroder/Bellotte/Summer, as well) - and Drop That Bottom is in that electrotossinthekitchensinkfunk line. The tracks on Grab It don't pull together all that well in comparison to Drop That Bottom. I don't really know how to explain this; the songs - with a couple of exceptions - don't do the expert tension and release you get on Drop That Bottom, don't time the vocal entrances and exits so well (the "Grab It" on Drop That Bottom is way more compelling than the original version). And the songs on Grab It go on too long, which can make them seem minimalist, I suppose. Back to Drop That Bottom: The bass booms there aren't just, you know, deep and bassy, but have a nice round bounce to them, which makes the sound feel rich and comfy, to me.

"Best album," by the way, isn't as crucial to me as a whole lot of other things, consistency being a hobgoblin and all that. But being consistent with feel and greatness for 9 out of 10 songs is worth something and beats every other hip-hop album I've heard by a long shot, even if Spoonie Gee and Eminem and Roxanne Shanté matter to me more.

(Tim, as for consistency of feel and greatness, the Dolls clobber Disco Tex.)

When I saw L'Trimm live, they sure seemed to be enjoying themselves. Sure, it was part of their act, and maybe a front, but I was convinced. And I doubt very much that they felt they were being exploited.

Who claimed it did? I go into plenty of detail about the specifics of L'Trimm's music, and most of the other artists in that post, elsewhere, on this board and countless other places, and I've done so for decades. There is nothing remotely contrarian in what I wrote above, and there was no hyperbole. I was merely expanding, off the top of my head for crissakes, on Frank's claim that *Drop That Bottom* was the greatest rap album ever made. Basically, I was thinking on my feet, and I wound up not entirely agreeing with him, actually--or agreeeing with him with reservations at best. And of course, I also did it two and a half fucking years ago. To revive this thread just to bait me with tired paranoid delusions about my intentions, delusions that everybody has seen regurgitated scores of times before, is pathetic. If you want to find me talking in more specific terms about why I prefer some kinds of hip-hop, it's really not that hard to do a search. But then, the argument that I shy away from "clarity and argumentation" wouldn't hold much water, I suppose.

please explain to me the appeal of old OLD old skool hip-hop

Does that thread prove that I romanticize the primitive? I guess somebody might make that argument, except I don't think the hip-hop talk about preferring on that thread *sounds* primitive, and even if I did, the thread pretty lucidly demonstrates that what I love about the stuff is not its primitiveness; more often, its its *energy*. (Looks like I only mention L'Trimm in passing there. Honestly, I'm not sure how much I talk about L'Trimm on ILM; I haven't spent much time thinking about them in the past few years, at least compared to when they came out, where I thought {and wrote} about them plenty. They show up a few times in my second book, but it looks like I mostly talk about their lyrics, not beats or voices. I'd have to dig out what I wrote about them for *Request* back then {I reviewed both the second and third albums there, as I recall} for the latter.) At any rate, nothing in the post above suggests I don't have *reasons* for preferring *Drop That Bottom* to albums by the other artists I na name; I just go more into detail about those reasons in other places.

Feminists and Feminist Sympathizers Unite: A Bold Call for Pazz & Jop Activism

Technique in Rap and Rock

dude, he's just talking(typing). it's not an essay meant to dazzle anyone. that's how he talks! hell, that's how i talk. don't you know any big music lovers?

"For me, no post-old-school rappers ever came closer to matching the spirit of disco-era hip-hop than a pair of teenaged Miami girls separately named Tigra and Bunny and collectively named L'Trimm. In 1988, they made cars go boom with *Drop That Bottom,* one my favorite rap albums ever. The track 'Heaven Sent' (over a beat that gets more carbonation out of the Tom Tom Club's 'Genius of Love' than Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five did in 'It's Nasy' or Mariah Carey and Ol' Dirty Bastard did in 'Fantasy') lays out L'Trimm's own Book-of-Genesis-type theory on how the world was created. They say 'God' did it; they even thank him in the liner notes.

But it took *humans* to murder the blues: back when 'leaves were high fashion,' L'Trimm say, 'the world was full of mystery, oral harp action.' Everybody wanted to have parties, but harps just weren't funky enough, so instead everybody just chilled and ate and hummed the same tunes over and over again. But when the drum was invented, history was born anew! I guess it's possible these words are meant to argue African drums' primacy over European harps. But what they're really doing is affirming rock or funk or whatever as progress from the blues, which after all is where 'oral harp action'--i.e,, harmonica solos--rule the roost. In rock and rap, which usually view the blues as something superior to be revered, this qualifies as downright subversive. If L'Trimm had come right out with a track entitled 'The Blues Sucks, It's Boring And Too Slow, And It Doesn't Have Enough Instruments,' they would've made exactly the same point."

(Not sure that I agree with all that now -- for one thing, shouldn't it actually be 'The Blues SUCK, THEY'RE Boring And Too Slow, And THEY DON'T Have Enough Instruments'? --but re-reading it was sure fun!)

Anyway, Drop That Bottom is pretty good and I might have sold it a little short yesterday. I agree with Frank that a big part of it is the rhythmic aspect of their raps: entries and exits. They seem to be on the ball about doing things musically that feel natural and right and work musically.

Maybe it's just 'cause Grab It was the one I heard first, but almost every song on Drop That Bottom sounds to me like an inferior house-y remake of something on Grab It.

(if I remember correctly, Tim Ellison bought my copy of Drop That Bottom on eBay).

I like the 1st two albums better than the last one too. The girls sounded less confident on the 3rd album because they were. They were discouraged that their creative freedom was being stripped from them, they'd go into the studio and find that their lyrics had already been written by some label guy. They prefered to abandon the album than bastardize their sound. I like "What's the Story" on that album because Tigra explains what the girls were feeling like at that time.
For those who want to know, Bunny is the one with the accent on tracks, and the one who wears skirts in photos. She's a nurse in Indiana and has 4 kids. Tigra moved back to Miami and is a partner in a clothing line. Tigra's recording for fun with friends (she recently guest appeared on tracks with Avenue D and Larry T).

I like the 1st two albums better than the last one too. The girls sounded less confident on the 3rd album because they were. They were discouraged that their creative freedom was being stripped from them, they'd go into the studio and find that their lyrics had already been written by some label guy. They prefered to abandon the album than bastardize their sound. I like "What's the Story" on that album because Tigra explains what the girls were feeling like at that time.
For those who want to know, Bunny is the one with the accent on tracks, and the one who wears skirts in photos. She's a nurse in Indiana and has 4 kids. Tigra moved back to Miami and is a partner in a clothing line. Tigra's recording for fun with friends (she recently guest appeared on tracks with Avenue D and Larry T).

OMG Lady Tigra as guest on the Super Music Friends Show in new Yo Gabba Gabba! episode Band, singing a cover of "When I Hear Music"! already had a crush, but now all a... she looks and sounds better than ever.

she has this up on her myspace: https://myspace.com/theladytigra