My ultra-perceptive readers will notice that I always end up writing about Main Attrakionz whenever I’m in California. Right now is no exception, and I think it’s pretty cool that I happened to arrive in the Bay just days before MondreMAN’s birthday, which he celebrated by releasing two new mixtapes, one with a pretty surprisingly high price tag, the other with a variable one. I think this song explains better than the rest why this stuff ends up in such heavy rotation when I’m in San Francisco watching the fairy tale-level fog roll into the city over the mountain tops.
The other day Matt asked me if I could think of a rap album from 2011 that I liked more than 808s & Dark Grapes II from Main Attrakionz, and I honestly had trouble thinking of anything. There were some close contenders for sure, I loved Return of 4eva, NO YORKwas a very pleasant surprise for sure, Black Up was rock solid, but I’m not sure I could say with certainty that I liked any of those more than 808s & Dark Grapes II.
So I was pretty surprised and happy to find that half of that duo with possibly my favorite rap album from 2011 started following me back on Twitter yesterday! I keep up with a lot of rappers I like on there, but I wasn’t really expecting any of them to follow me, so when I saw that Mondre was returning the sentiment, I posted up this song on my Twitter page to shout out to him.
Then a funny thing happened. While I was searching for that track to post it, I found this, which I’ve been unaware of while listening to that Mondre album this whole time.
The coolest thing happened the other day! I posted this Rap Journey a couple days ago, and then out of nowhere I get this email from the producer of the song that got me started on the whole journey to begin with! Crazy! He hit me up to say thanks for writing about the song he produced (which is hot, by the way), and to let me know that he wasn’t intending to reference the Fabolous song that I pointed out used the same samples and stuff, he was actually unaware of it until reading my post. He just heard that Commodores track that finishes up that post I did and wanted to make a beat about it. This was like 5 years ago, according to him. It seems clear that Mondre knew about the Fab version (as I mentioned in the original post, he quotes the lyrics from it at the very beginning), but EPMDenny wasn’t originally intending to remake that song, it was just a coincidence for him. So I wanted to set the record straight with you all since he went out of his way to contact me about it, and to say thanks for reaching out to me and stuff I wanna post up my favorite EPMDenny production to date which is on Mondre’s newest mixtape.
MondreMAN – Belly of the Beast
Man I dig that beat. Thanks a lot for reachin out to me man, shouts out to EPMDenny. Go check out his music. I feel like he’s goin places.
