Tribute to Jersey pt. 1

When most people think of New Jersey they think of Guidos from the Shore, the Sopranos, homosexualty in the Governor's mansion, and the Turnpike. If you've lived here you'd know that New Jerz is also home to a lot of life's finer things: easy women and dope hip hop.

From the mid-80s to the present day NJ has been a hotbed for hip hop tallent. There are a lot of dope scenes out here. Trenton was making a lot of noise in the last 80s and early 90s, Joe Buddens is holding it down, Eminem came here to rock with the Outsidaz, Canibus grew up here, and Jus Allah reps the most dangerous city in America- Camden (the city where I teach high school).

One of my favorite clicks in New Jersey is PPP. What a lot of people don't know is that PPP is the Pistol Poppin' Posse. Hailing from Newark they opperated much like any other street gang and unique to them (MFC aside) is the fact that certain members of PPP rapped but most were thugs and street cats getting paid the illegit way.

In 2000 I left NJ to go to school in Delaware. It was there that I met a member of PPP whose name I can't mention for a number of legal reasons. He had warrants back home and his cousin set him up with a job cutting hair in Dover.

For those that don't know, PPP is who Redman, Tame One, and most of the original Outsidaz run with. A lot of them are family members. Redman and Tame One are first cousins and on the other side of the family bloodline is Pace Won. For today's update I uploaded the aptly titled Family Day. Our nameless friend hooked me up with the vinyl after I recognized his tattoo- a bottle of champaign with PPP written in script on the label. Let's put it this way, if you are a street cat in Jersey you know what the fuck that tattoo means. PPP is big in Newark, they move a lot of shit from shottys to blow. Shit is very real. Real recognized real and then shit was on an poppin'. A few days later we were taking some L's to the head like "aaaahhhhh" and money pulled out one of these:



Family Day is a dope concept. Govna Mattic, who a lot of people might remember from the Ghetto Red Hot 12' with Diesel Don and Redman (the cover had the three men breaking up a few pounds of trees, weighing, and bagging up in front of a map of the world) is one of Redman's lesser-known cousins and obviously his rap career is a hobby. He got Red, Tame, Pace, Roz (Red's baby sister), and Young Zee to contribute to the song. The beat is slow and reminds the listener of a slow, lazy summer afternoon complete with BBQ and fat bags of trees. It was originally from Govna's album Hell Up In Newark but the track was pressed on a limited amount of vinyl (two pressings, maybe 300 copies total) and sold hand to hand in 1997. The song wouldn't appear again until Govna's album came out in 1999 and was also sold hand to hand. If anyone was wondering why a track with so many heavyweights would go unoticed now you know why: zero distribution.

As for the album- it's not bad at all and it has a lot of nice tracks. I intended to only upload one track today but in case anyone is interested Govna Mattic's full length I've uploaded that as well. You can find that motherfucker right here.

Interesting fact: my nameless friend is a member of the now-defunct Outsidaz. He ghost wrote a lot of verses for other rappers from NYC and people signed to Ruff House Records at the time but we won't go there because I don't think any of it was released.