KingsOfKings
𝕄𝕒𝕕𝕝𝕚𝕓 𝕚𝕤 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝔾𝕠𝕒𝕥
'No Bammer Weed': The album that put SF rap on the map turns 30
The album drew up the blueprint for hyphy and West Coast gangsta rap.
In the fall of 1992, RBL Posse changed Bay Area rap forever.
They set off not one but two of hip hop’s most recognizable and enduring genres and helped create a new vernacular, “SFC” (Sucka Free City), for the region. Plus they breathed life into forgotten funk, jazz and R&B tracks by sampling in a way that became so ubiquitous so fast it got major record labels scrambling and demanding recompense.
… And, oh yeah, they squashed a multi-neighborhood turf war in San Francisco.
A pretty tall order for one group, much less a debut album. But the Hunters Point-based collaboration of young writers, producers, rappers and hustlers did just that. They invented a sound that would unite and shape the city, provide the key inspiration for the hyphy genre and help originate some of the beats and tropes that gave rise to gangsta rap on both coasts.
In tracks like “Don’t Give Me No Bammer,” “More Like an Orgy” and “G’s by the 1-2-3s” they did it by crate digging — blending never-before-used samples with the latest snippets from rap contemporaries — and even … Steve Miller Band, creating a gangsta-meets-party-starting sensibility and introducing an homage to everyone’s favorite frustration: bottom-of-the-barrel weed.
Along the way they redefined their neighborhood, their city, the bay and the West Coast forever.
So how come you don’t know about them?
I mean, I get it,” Tomie Witherspoon, aka DJ T.C. — a producer and sampling guru who helped cut a number of RBL’s first tracks in his family home in Bayview — told SFGATE. “Some people had better management and had better placement. People forget, every time our stuff came out it hit the charts: Detroit, LA, New York, Atlanta, we had those places on lock down …
“We never got chances, got sabotaged somehow.”
Lessons from the dawn of Bay Area rap
The album with a prescient title, “A Lesson to Be Learned,” celebrates the 30th anniversary of its release on Oakland-based In-a-Minute Records today, Sept. 16. The DNA of “A Lesson to Be Learned” has bled into mainstream Bay Area and West Coast culture and hip-hop writ large so much that listening to it today feels almost like a sample-heavy, lyrically divergent cheat code: the definitive instruction manual and the foundation for what was to come.
It started with the sampling, where Witherspoon bonded with Christian Matthews, aka Black C, the lead MC and producer for RBL.
“Black was like, ‘I got some samples.’ And I’m like, ‘All right cool.’ But in my mind I’m like, ‘Let’s see what he got,’” Witherspoon says, chuckling. “And he was playing some cool stuff, but some of it was falling off beat and all the intricate parts … he didn’t know. But he had it. He had it already, all the parts. It wasn’t a hard job to do, to make sure he did it clean.”
The samples crossed genres and traversed time on nearly every track. From Marvin Gaye’s flute on 1977’s “Intro Theme” to Samuelle’s “Get with the program” vocal from his 1990 R&B track “So You Like What You See” on “Don’t Give Me No Bammer”; from Parliament's 1979 hit “The Big Bang Theory” to Digital Underground’s 1990 smash “The Humpty Dance” on “More Like an Orgy” — it was all about blending old and new, making music and having fun, Witherspoon explains.
“No real expectations and we knew we was good,” he says. “We had the confidence with everyone that was there. But the regional thing, growing out from beyond us, the impact — we never thought about it.”
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