Hip Hop Pit Stop: Nashville’s Starlito and Blow Pop Crew
Hip hop connoisseur par excellence, Academy lecture host, and the blogger behind Cocaine Blunts, Noz visits a different city off the beaten path each month to discover the backstories behind the beats. First stop? Nashville.
In its earliest incarnation, hip hop culture mostly traveled like a secret. Recorded from NYC park jams, hand to hand dubs found their way across the Hudson and beyond by way of cousins of cousins or transplanted teens echoed popular routines throughout the nation. Though Nashville, Tennessee is best known as a country music city, hip hop, too, had wiggled its way into the Ville's youth culture by the late 70s. One of the city's earliest hip hop adherents, a South Nashville teen by the name of Walter D, was working an after school job at a local YMCA when a patron slipped him a Spoonie Gee record. His friend, to be later known as French Toast, heard a New York transplant beatboxing. Naturally, Walter and French bonded over this new found love and, in linking with a third friend, nicknamed Blow Pop, they became early participants. Their breakdance routines and casual ciphers gave way to the formal unit that would eventually become Blow Pop Crew.
"We used to rap in the parks, rap where we could rap," says French Toast, who was then still just a teen. "This guy named Henry Dotson, who would later become our manager, saw us and said 'Hey, I want to do a record with y'all." Dotson was a local concert promoter of some acclaim and hooked them up with their first show opening for Oran "Juice" Jones and Midnight Star, the profits from which went to the recording of their debut single, "Drop The Bass."
First sketched on a Boss Dr. Rhythm, "Drop The Bass" was then fleshed out by way of Fairlight and Roland 808 at Nashville's Castle Recording Studios - an actual castle, allegedly built by Al Capone as an underground casino in the 1920s. "Drop The Bass" fused the deliberate tag team shout chants of Run DMC or the ShowBoys sui generis "Drag Rap" with the punishing low end that the title alludes to. "We got it together on a Thursday and did it on a Saturday," French Toast recalls. "We went into the studio, did it in one or two takes and pressed stop." (Its more simplistic b-side, "Rock It" - "which was horrible," according to French Toast - was also recorded during that same session.)
Though French Toast paints the Nashville of the mid 80s as a microcosm of the old school New York hip hop scene - park jams, inter-neighborhood rhyme battles, allied crews like Desire & The Ville Posse - "Drop The Bass" was more informed by the Def Jam thump than Sugar Hill funk. In that way it feels like one of the earliest iterations of Southern Rap as we now know it.
It certainly wasn't the first rap record to come out of the South. By that time Houston and Miami had already firmly established a handful of indie rap imprints while smaller markets like Atlanta and Dallas were beginning to nip at their heels. But the Houston scene was mostly taking their cues from the sample driven rap of New York while Florida was still locked in the upbeat, electro-inspired bass paradigm. Instead "Drop The Bass" predicted the slow-and-low stuttered 808s that would come to dominate the South for nearly three decades to follow. (Neighboring Memphis was definitely taking note - "Drop The Bass" became a standard jam for pioneering M-Town DJ Spanish Fly, whose tapes weaned second generation Memphis club legends like Three 6 Mafia.)
Blow Pop Crew dominated in their time, too. With a rising hit and the Dotson connection, they landed gigs opening for groups like Mantronix, NWA and 2 Live Crew. "We was right there with everybody," says Walter. "We testified at Luke's trial!" Their live shows, during which they sometimes threw actual Blow Pop lollipops into the crowd, were said to be particularly rambunctious. A series of grainy Youtube clips support these claims. Emerging from darkness to the tune of their DJ Dew's cut up and 808 enhanced approximation of "Also Sprach Zarathustra" before they stomp their way though "Drop The Bass."
The tours caught the industry's attention. BPC fielded offers from Jive and Sleeping Bag records but ultimately decided to stay independent. "'Drop The Bass' was so big at that time, we had no idea. We [were] still in high school," says French Toast. "We didn't want no money, if we could just get the girls liking us that's all we was going for at that time."
The group's integrity also frayed from such immaturity. On the heels of their success, Walter split from the crew briefly, but they reconciled long enough to record a follow-up single for a new label and, more notably, with an outside production team. "King Of The Block," and its b-side "Rhyming & Stealing," both were strong traditionalist rap records, but lacking the idiosyncrasies that fueled "Drop The Bass."
By the time "King Of The Block" saw a release, the unit had dissolved once again, and under a series of tragic circumstances including the unexplained murder of their manager and Blow Pop's incarceration on an unrelated manslaughter charge. (Both French and Walter are unclear about the specifics of Blow Pop's situation, only that a fellow childhood friend ended up dead by his gun.)
French Toast stayed in Memphis after the fallout, forming a dance-rap group called Playhouse with a BPC back up dancer, while Walter D did sign a solo deal with a West Coast label, moving to California and adopting previously unreleased Blow Pop routines like "Sex" and "9 MM" for his misleadingly titled 1989 LP The Streets Of LA. "People thought I was from the West," he laments. "[The label] wouldn't even let me mention that I was from Nashville."
But Nashville rap moved forward. The seeds that the Blow Pop Crew helped germinate with "Drop The Bass" eventually birthed local heroes like Kool Daddy Fresh and Pistol, and even one national star and former G-Unit signee, Young Buck. Today the most fascinating heir to this long tail legacy might just be Starlito.
At 27, Lito was barely out of diapers when "Drop The Bass" dropped and while Blow Pop's grind was top down and hit driven, Lito's success has been a drawn out product of mixtape-era hustles. He cut his teeth in the early part of the century, slanging mix CDs out of a backpack throughout East Memphis Tennessee State University. In those days he was known as All Star, rasping punchlines through a sound that reflected the menace and thump of the then burgeoning trap rap community. Imagine a more thoughtful Young Jeezy.
His slow-grind eventually landed him a deal at Cash Money Records through Memphis rapper Yo Gotti. There he produced a minor hit in "Grey Goose". Too minor, it would seem. Despite a fair share of critical acclaim and a snowballing fan base, his project sat on the shelf as the label focused on more bankable sellers.
Where some might let their career crumble along with their expectations, Lito returned to his indie roots, weathered by the experience. His rhymes turned darker and more introspective, his flow slowed and his voice strained, making every phrase feel like an unanswered question. He also began to break from the aggressive trap style of production in favor of more appropriately soulful and sample-driven selections. (His 2009, DJ Burn One produced "Alright," reaches into the typical Southern rap toolbox with a chunk of "Drag Rap" but turns its usually riotous effect inward by melding it with a bassline swiped from Memphis soul-folkie Lou Bond.)
Lito's recently released For My Foes EP might seem slight on first listen - it's just four songs, all set to popular radio instrumentals - but further listens reveal a strikingly complex agenda. Puns on top of puns unfold as some genuinely heartfelt honesty is baked around them.
This is Lito's greatest skill - the ability to weave a web of ideas without ever flaunting the result. His wordplay is understated and rewards repeat listens. "Believe It Or Not" snatches its frame from Frank Ocean's "We All Try" and finds Lito balancing relationship woes with OCD tendencies and, as if to prove that he really lives this obsessive lifestyle, he bends the names of soap brands into his rhyme a la GZA's "Labels": "I showed her the finer things / she was greener than Irish Spring / tried to Leave-her 2000 times…"
This sort of sly wordplay is a far cry from the brash proto-crunk of the Blow Pop Crew, but maybe the future of the city - and, perhaps, of rap itself - lies not in any specific local heritage but in the individual quirks of brilliance that rappers like Starlito embody. And it's not completely impossible to imagine one or some of those quirks eventually growing to help define an entire region.
The Blow Pop Crew are planning a reunion tour for this Summer, as well as an accompanying CD compilation. Starlito's 'For My Foes' is available at Bandcamp, along with several other tapes.
