Arts & Entertainment
 

Slum village classic simply 'Fantastic'

by Chris Griffin
The Daily Cougar

Thank the heavens for Pharrell Williams.

The world renown music producer and front-man of the larger-than-life rock group N.E.R.D. recently appeared on Black Entertainment Television's 106 & Park, promoting the group's latest album. In an interview performed as unorganized as only hosts Free and AJ could do it, Williams was asked what producer he would kill to work with if the opportunity arose. Not a second passed before Williams replied, "Jay Dee from Detroit."

As "television's loudest audience" fell under an extreme silence, both hosts gave dumbfounded looks and questioned Williams as to why he would dare suggest a producer who was seemingly a nobody to the esteemed Free and AJ and the revered 106 & Park audience. 

"Do you know what Jay Dee has done?" Williams asked. 

What Jay Dee has done is produce records for the likes of Janet Jackson, Common, Erykah Badu, Busta Rhymes, A Tribe Called Quest and many others. But Jay Dee's production for his ex-group Slum Village is most notorious to many hip-hoppers and other artists. 

After rap fans realized that the "East Coast versus West Coast" battle of the mid-1990's was nothing more than a ploy to keep hip-hop under control, the creators of that battle came up with another trick shortly after, and "underground rap" versus "commercial rap" was born. But while the participants of this battle were busy judging each others clothes and images, a funny thing happened. Slum Village's Fantasic, Vol. 2 was released.

Jay Dee, T3 and Baatin collectively formed the original Slum Village, and left many baffled with their debut, because they couldn't be classified. They wore necklaces and talked about cars and women, so maybe they were commercial. Then again, nobody had heard of them and their sound was not normal, so they had to be underground. Right? The answer was neither, they were simply musicians. 

Jay Dee's astounding production, accompanied to perfection by T3 and Baatin's simple but effective rhymes amounted to a timeless masterpiece. Fantastic begins with a "Conant Gardens" ode to the Detroit slums. Similar to most classic albums of any genre, Fantastic's first song is very subtle, and serves only as an introduction to what is a pleasurable journey through music. By the fourth bar of production on "I Don't Know," Jay Dee has the listener hooked. But the surprise is not the brilliant sequencing of the song, or the clever James Brown samples throughout. The real gem here is the last five seconds of the song when the original sample creeps through the beat, which Jay Dee has been playing simultaneously.

"Climax," masterminded by Jay Dee, shows how the raunchy lyrics of T3 and Baatin were popular with male fans, but the melodic grooves of Jay Dee captured the fairer sex's attention.

Everybody's favorite song, "Players," is vintage Slum Village and is the jam of all jams -- the right ingredient to get any hip-hop event moving in a hurry. Jay Dee's signature hand claps and excellent bass programming, along with a catchy sample and SV's bragging makes "Players" possibly Slum's best effort. 

The song "2U4U," is perhaps Jay Dee's most intoxicating groove, and the lyrics are words to live by as T3 tells one of his ladies "Don't need a chick / to be my chick / gonna be my chick / then be my chick..." 

Near the album's end, "Go Ladies" puts the icing on the cake, demanding all the ladies to hit the dance floor. Jay Dee gives a treat in the last twenty seconds, as the beat unfolds into a drum program that sounds better than most live drummers. 

As wonderful as Fantastic sounds, the listener would think that it was carefully planned, but the members of the group admitted that it only took months to record. Most of the lyrics were never written, and Jay Dee's production was compiled on instinct -- the same method many other groups recorded classics with.

But all good things end, as Fantastic does, and ultimately Slum Village did. Jay Dee departed from the group very mysteriously and spontaneously. T3 and Baatin added rapper Elzhi to the group and released the album Trinity in 2002, which spawned the hit "Tainted." Slum Village gained some notoriety, but Trinity was just a futile attempt at music in comparison to Fantastic. 

Unwittingly, Fantastic served as a standard for records by other artists who soon followed, such as D'Angelo's Voodoo, Common's Like Water For Chocolate and Jill Scott's Words and Sounds.

Sadly, the term "neo-soul" was coined and many other producers offered watered down versions of Jay Dee's sound. But always, somewhere there's a party going on where "Players" is spinning, and the guys are beating their chests and the girls are looking nervous, or someone is listening to Fantastic and smiling from ear to ear, gaining inspiration.

Slum Village

Fantastic, Vol. 2

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