![]() ![]() Squeeky’s thundering, rat-a-tat beats define the early era of Memphis rap. If Spanish Fly was a blunt catalyst for musical change, DJ Squeeky was the precision instrument. Boundaries were pushed, if not entirely shattered. ![]() In isolation, his rigid rapping style was no revolution – it owes a lot to New York – but his hammering 808’s and lurid subject matter catalyzed a shift away from Yankee sensibilities. Fly’s work is Memphis, but Memphis at the very beginning of its transition to darker, subterranean grooves. On the claustrophobic “Getting Away With The Medicine,” Fly raps about a dope-dealing paranoiac running from the police over Geto Boys and Isaac Hayes samples – like Scarface, the unnamed second-person protagonist is “pushing rocks on the block.” “Smokin’ Onion,” which borrows the motley “oooh” chant from the Beastie Boys’ “The New Style,” is a tribute to – you guessed it – smoking weed. And if you want to argue that DJ Zirk, Blackout, La Chat, DJ Sound, Shawty Pimp, Tom Skeemask, the Gimisum Family and Lil NoiD should be here, well, you’re not wrong. ![]() Below are a few names that are indispensable to any discussion of Memphis rap – more lodestars to help you chart the constellations. In the twinkling Memphis rap cosmos, though, they are just the brightest of seemingly endless celestial bodies. Of those rappers who came of age in the early and mid-’90s, a few became stars: Three 6 Mafia, 8Ball & MJG and, to a lesser degree, Project Pat. It happened in tumbledown shotgun shacks, in dizzying roller rinks and in parking lots jammed with peacocking young men and their thudding subwoofers. It was lo-fi music from an embattled city made for – and by – people on the margins. Helpfully, if you wanted to book an artist, their phone numbers were usually printed on the tape. ![]() These crackling, sibilant tapes were often unmixed, unmastered and free of art of tracklists, though they contained plenty of too-wild-to-be-true confessions. If you wanted to know approximately which crimes your nearest dope boy was committing, you could buy a cassette for that, too. In Memphis in the early 1990s, if you needed to know exactly which songs your pals gangsta-walked to on a balmy Saturday night, you could buy a cassette of the mix. ![]()
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