Usual Suspect: Zo! the Musical Architect
What is your favorite 80s song?
With so many dope 80’s joints to choose from… I’m gonna have to say that my favorite is “Don’t Disturb This Groove” by The System. One of the first reasons is that I get so wrapped up in nostalgia every time I listen to it. You know how you listen to a joint and it automatically takes you to a certain place or time period in your life? Well, I have a series of 80’s songs that I call “Saturday Car Wash Joints” because they remind me so much of being outside and helping my Father or my Godfather who lived across the street from us wash the whip on a sunny Saturday afternoon. Normally I would take my little radio outside or they would just have the radio blasting from inside the car. Any of those bright sounding 80’s, ‘Jheri Curl’ joints like “Happy” by Surface, “Curious” by Midnight Star, “The Finest” by S.O.S. Band ALL put me in the same place… right in that driveway as a kid, helping my peoples wash the car on the weekend. But out of all those joints, “Don’t Disturb This Groove” always stood out to me simply because to me, there is no other joint that sounds like it. I mean, you’ve got this syncopated ‘one-two’ drum machine beat with some synth chord stabs that hit before the count surrounded by these melodic notes added in as the “extra candy”. Finally, you have the synth bass that just bounces around the music basically counteracting with everything else that’s happening flowing into a chorus that serves as the song’s climax…multiple times. Plus, all in all… It’s one of those songs that just feels good and it actually has aged well.
How about the last dream you had?
I actually had a couple of weird ones the night before last. In the first one, I was somewhere out about to get on the stage to play a gig and someone told me about not one… not even two… but THREE people in my life who had passed away. The bugged out part about it was that there were folks in the room who were close to the same three people and they were acting like nothing had even occurred – they were looking at me like, “You ready to hit this stage?” Oh word? Kats passing away in 3’s and y’all are just trying to hit the stage, huh? Needless to say, I woke up from that dream extremely relieved that everyone in the dream was alive and doing okay. So, I turned over and went back to sleep after waking up from that one and I fell right into another odd storyline. This time I was had a music room that I would teach music in (which is what I do in real life as well). The room was set up just like my current classroom with various instruments available and ready to play from drums, to keyboards, to guitars and percussion instruments. So I guess one night I happened to walk in the room after hours and discovered that it had been cleaned out, I’m talking about EVERYTHING was gone – equipment, wires, GONE. The crazy thing was, whoever did it was still sneaking around outside. Now, we all know that when dreaming, our everyday thinking and rationale are both WAY off, right? With that being said, the ONLY way that I felt that I could remedy this situation was to hop in my car and try to run his ass over. Not find him and beat him up, not call the cops out…none of that. I was concentrating on getting in my car so that I could chase dude down and crush him with the car. But when I got outside…dude had stolen my car too! Probably packed all the room equipment in there and got the hell up outta dodge. Woke up after that ready to kick one of my students’ asses…
Worst date you’ve been on?
The “Right Out of College” dating era was the worst simply because that’s when I found out that everything I did and every move I made with a girl had to come with a ‘definition’ talk…
…….a ‚Äòwhere are we‚Äô talk. The hell? Everybody was reprogrammed during those college years. A lotta folks lost their innocence and the experience may have tainted them so much that you had to damn near go through a scanning process to even engage in a conversation with a young lady. I can‚Äôt think of any one date that could add up to the series of silliness that would happen on a variety of ‚Äòdates‚Äô.
Like the time I was out to eat with a girl…who took me back to her apartment so that she could go through her roommate‚Äôs things in order to find something with her social security and driver‚Äôs license # because she was afraid that the girl was gonna leave her with a ton of bills. She actually found one of the two she was searching for, then had the nerve to turn to me and say, ‚ÄúYou don‚Äôt think I‚Äôm crazy do you?‚Äù *looks for nearest exit*
Or another time that I was out with a girl who was disgusted with me for enjoying Chris Rock’s stand-up comedy because he used the word “nigga”. So because I didn’t appreciate the fact that there were being rules set on a first date, I proceeded to use the word a couple of times in our conversation at the table because at that point I already knew it wasn’t going past that night. I just remember her saying… “What did I tell you about using that WORRRD BROTHA?” It was most entertaining to me, and still is.
Hands down best internet experience?
At the end of June 2008 while waiting for our ‚ÄúZo! & Tigallo Love the 80‚Äôs‚Äù album to be manufactured, Phonte and I decided to get things moving on our end with some promotion. After discussing it via IM, we finally took the cover art for the album and leaked it a couple of places on the net just to kind of see what everybody would say, I guess. I think we put it up on OkayPlayer, The Justus League‚Äôs message board, and made it our profile pics on MySpace. The overall response itself let me know that we were sitting on something special. After about 5 minutes, the joint had landed on about 3 or 4 blogs already. After about an hour, my phone started ringing with calls and texts w/folks crackin‚Äô up talking about how much of some fools we were for rockin the jheri curls… Maaaaaan, how would that look if we had a current cover for a joint that says that we love the 80‚Äôs? Our thinking behind it was to go ALL the way 80‚Äôs with it. Thinking back on it, I wish we would have recorded the photo shoot for it, because we took about 200+ shots for it and acted a FOOL the entire time, so the pictures told only half of the story. But I do think that releasing that cover art first took whatever interest there was for the album and put it over the top for us. People still ask me about that album cover to this day‚Ķ
