What If RIck James Had Become The Hulk?

(c) SA + LS | a Rick James + Hulk parody of the classic Marvel Comics "What If" series.

Eddie Murphy: Party All The Time (Video)

I trace Eddie Murphy’s alleged yet documented sexual union with Johnny Gill to the Put Your Mouth On Me (Columbia, 1989). With songs such as Boogie In Your Butt (Columbia, 1982) I dare you to contest me. With Eddie double-clapping every several bars I dare you to object.

Party All The Time featuring Rick James (Columbia, 1985) is only tenable, although composed by The King of Funk, once James Ambrose Johnson, Jr. (Rick's birth name) enters the track at 3:27 (per YouTube). Rick bears no formulations (mechanistic strutting) nor metronomic counting to catch the beat as Eddie depositions. Rick is no L7; conversely, Eddie is not Bustin' out of L Seven.

RIP Rick:
Cocaine is God's way of saying that you're making too much money.
Robin Williams

The Rick James Sex-Tape

Based on Rumor knowledge-base: Illseed:
The “Habitual Line-Stepper” posthumously is releasing a sex tape. The Rick James sex-tape bidding starts at $999.99 on eBay. Additionally, the sex-tape released by AONE Entertainment has Rick’s last recordings with songs like:
"Good Shit"
"Don’t Forget Me, I’m Rick James B***h" and
"So Blunted, I’m Just Too High".

+Video excerpts: YouTube: 1, 2 & 3

Below find AHH's 5-Part classic interview:

Rick James: Fire And Desire

AllHipHop.com: Where does your money come from?

Rick: Mary J. Blige, had a number one record last year with Ja Rule and Jennifer Lopez, Old Dirty Bastard, Will Smith, LL Cool J. That’s where it comes from.

AllHipHop.com: How much money did you get off of Hammer “Can’t Touch This”?

Rick: I don’t know $30-40 million dollars. It was an 80/20 deal; it ‘s the largest selling Rap record of all time. We sold like 100 million records.

Rick James Pt. 2: Fire And Desire

To AllHipHop.com: “Matter of fact a lot of Rap music has taken black people back 900 years. Whenever I hear black people say, “N***er,” it makes me sick to my stomach. Number one, the word has nothing to do with black people, it makes me sick to hear white people scream, “N***er,” because of the derogative term that it has come to be, which it wasn’t originally.”

Rick James Part 3: The Music Industry

AllHipHop.com: Who do you like?

Rick: There are so many people that I like, I am talking now about the esoteric part. I think Eminem is brilliant, I like Dr. Dre; I like Scarface, Tupac, Biggie Smalls. But when I heard the Fugees album, I threw it out the window.

Rick James Pt. 4: Politically Minded

AllHipHop.com: Do you consider the current war, a holy war?

Rick: No, it isn’t a holy war, it is a war based on money. The only reason we went over there was to kill Saddam to get the oil. It’s a shame, ‘cause Bush’s racist rother was stopping Blacks from going to the polls.

Rick James Pt. 5: Farewell Rick

AllHipHop.com: I’ma tell you because it’s true, but it’s not true. I interviewed Lloyd Banks, 50 Cent’s boy, and he had a lot to say…

Rick: All I know about 50 Cent’s is he got more bullets in him than Al Capone. He’s a player hater. He’s the only ni**a I saw sitting down at the fuckin’ [BET] awards show not giving props. To say something, you have to have something to back it up. You better have knowledge. I don’t care what you talk about, whether its politics, theology or whatever. You better have your times and your dates together. When dealing with these fake ass people or these politicians, and I fuckin’ be blowing their minds [and they are like] “So, you never even finished high school?” No, but I did something else, I read and I studied – So lets talk motherfucker!

O(+> Planet Earth

Various: While My Guitar Gently Weeps (George Harrison Tribute) Ft. Prince
From: Skidvid: YouTube

Few artists have created a body of work as rich and varied as Prince. In the '80s, he became one of the most singular talents of the rock 'n' roll era, capable of seamlessly tying together pop, funk, folk, and rock. Find out more about him!
Hear "Planet Earth" now!
Read Icon Series: Prince
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In other unrelated news:
Google Cookies will 'Auto Delete': BBC News I Playahata
Chimps on Treadmill Offer Human Evolution Insight: BBC News I Reuters I Playahata
China Experimenting with Rockets to Disperse Rain Clouds: ESPN I Playahata


*O(+> Prince
*Audio recorded with Total Recorder Professional Edition

Cold Blooded Unity vs. Pancake Serving Blouses

O(+>: I Hate U (Extended Remix)
From: I Hate U (CD Maxi-Single) (Warner Bros./ Wea, Sep. 19, 1995)

Thematically, my use of the song: I Hate U is to emphasizes the tension(s) between "Cocaine is a hella of drug" (Rick James) and "Blouses" (O(+>). Below find excerpts from five articles eluding to the Punk-Funksters festering disdain:

OBIT: BRINGING OUT THE DEAD
I'm Rick James, B*tch: The artist behind the Super Freak

By Tony Green
Posted Wednesday, Aug. 11, 2004, at 8:15 AM ET

A skilled instrumentalist, songwriter, singer, bandleader, and performer, James was an heir to the do-it-all mantle that Prince fooled everybody into believing was his alone. The classic "Rick James sound"—new-wavey synths spread over a barely discernible rock foundation (he shared bandspace with Neil Young early in his career and played a Rickenbacker bass more often adopted by rockers like Paul McCartney than funksters)—was just one color in his sonic palette. As a producer, he knew when to get out of Teena Marie's way, how to make the Mary Jane Girls sound even better, and how to distract listeners from Eddie Murphy's voice (on the Murphy vanity project "Party all the Time"). He could funk with the best of them ("Loosey's Rap") and craft the kind of slow-grind ballads ("Fire and Desire," "Ebony Eyes") that cause birthrate spikes. He fit in with both MC Hammer (whose "U Can't Touch This" spun off James' "Super Freak") and old school stalwarts like Smokey Robinson and the Temptations, both of whom he penned tunes for. Not for nothing did the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers honor him with a Lifetime Achievement Award in June.
Unfortunately, James' salad years coincided with the creation and consolidation of what Black Rock Coalition founders Greg Tate and Vernon Reid called "Apartheid Oriented Radio." It may seem hard to believe, what with urban culture leading the pop world around by its nose nowadays, but MTV didn't consider urban music part of the "rock 'n' roll" universe (read: everything that mattered) until Sony allegedly threatened them with a companywide boycott if they didn't allow Michael Jackson in their rotation. That opened things up for some other megastars—Prince, Whitney Houston, Janet Jackson—leaving the rest to fend for their own on urban-only outlets like BET. The iron curtain separating "urban" (black acts) from "pop" (white acts, and black crossover acts) spawned a whole subgenre of artists—many of them gold- and platinum-selling—who are household names to African-Americans and trivia questions to nearly everyone else: Kashif, Roger Troutman and Zapp, Levert. James crossed over, to be sure, but the core of his listenership still consisted of the ordinary working-class African-Americans who flirted with the jheri curl for a bit, chilled out with Canei wine, and looked at you funny if you didn't know who Donnie Simpson was.
The fact that 1980s funk and soul is still searching for its place in the retrospective pop timeline makes it even tougher to contextualize James. It was sandwiched between the '70s creative whirlwind (Sly, James Brown, P-Funk, the Isley Brothers, Stevie Wonder) and the mainstream rise of hip-hop and New Jack swing, which is kind of like being president between Reagan and Clinton. One reason for this is that the '80s spawned what writer Rickey Vincent dubbed "Naked Funk." It was still funk, but without the extra-musical calling card that helped it break out of the "urban" ghetto.
The great lie about music of the post-rock era is that it was something other than dance music at its core. Which is garbage, of course—the Rolling Stones aren't still touring because their fans are debating the meaning of "make some girl."
But the appearance that dance music is something other than "just dance music" has always been essential to success in a pop-music universe full of fans who haven't yet disowned critical oxymorons like "intelligent drum and bass." When you heard P-Funk or Prince, you felt were getting, at the very least, something more than just a call to shake your ass. On albums like Funkentelechy vs. the Placebo Syndrome George Clinton recontextualized extended dance jams as Star Wars-esque space epics with allegorical references to the corporate entertainment complex. Prince's mysterious (and sometimes creepy) take on sex and spirituality allowed you to think that your taste for armchair psychology was impelling you out of your seat. And more than one hip-hop scribe has ridden the "pain and roar of a disaffected generation" angle to mainstream status.
James, as good as he was, never really had that kind of cachet—his hedonistic funk-punkster played well, but it didn't obscure the fact that he was just an extremely accomplished, seriously prolific, outlandishly funky individual who had more of an effect on pop music than people give him credit for. That should be enough for people to try to scratch the surface of the Chappelle caricature, and "Super Freak" and all the other totems that we associate with his legacy. But in the real world, it isn't. And that's a bitch.

Remembering Rick James
by Adam Williams
10 August 2004

At his best and most creative, James was the consummate showman. Oozing the raw sexuality of James Brown, the confident cool of Jimi Hendrix and the intergalactic style of Bootsy Collins, James took his Super Freakishness to a new level of performance art. Appealing to an impressively diverse audience in concert, on radio and video, Rick James became the supreme ambassador of funk for the masses. As a result, he opened the door to mass market acceptance for Prince and later, Lenny Kravitz, and paved the way for the remarkable mainstream triumph of OutKast. Offstage, James lent his often underestimated studio expertise to acts ranging from the Temptations and Smokey Robinson to Eddie Murphy. Even James' work with the Mary Jane Girls merits mention as it closely resembles Frank Zappa's creation of the GTO's and predates Prince's efforts with Apollonia and Sheila E. Sign 'O' the Times (1987; dir. Prince) Published March 14, 2007 by M The camera then pans out her bedroom window and onto a stage where Prince begins singing "If I Was Your Girlfriend" . . . in a white fur coat. You gotta love the guy--extolling the virtues of monogamy while dressed as a pimp. No wonder Rick James hated him. That’s not the only reason, of course. As quiet as it’s kept in the wake of the closely timed double whammy of his death and his elevation as nationally beloved caricature in the hands of Dave Chappelle, Rick James was a very limited talent. Prince, especially by Sign ‘O’ the Times, seemed nearly limitless as a musician. The album demonstrated it flatly, and while the movie can be thought of as an extension of the album, and thus a like demonstration, it can also be seen as an attempt to do something grander. Sign ‘O’ the Times the album came together by concentrated work, yes, but also by happenstance, its initial three-album length shaved down unwittingly at first, the handful of binding concepts eventually jettisoned in favor of 16 songs that were both more various and more coherent. Sign ‘O’ the Times the movie, though, is anything but a scrapbook. Once Prince figured out the shape of his masterpiece, he could play with it, and he could also use it as a springboard to try to go beyond what he’d accomplished.

Prince and Rick James

Posted by jsmooth995
August 6, 2004 03:21 PM

A member of our extended DJ family, who shall remain nameless, was recruited recently to DJ for a few of Prince's afterparties on his current concert tour.
At one of the parties someone came over from the VIP area to ask if our friend had any Rick James.. he promptly fished out "Give It to Me Baby," but before Rick made could make it through the first verse one of Prince's assistants rushed over with a look of concern. "Prince doesn't like this song," she instructed him, "please mix out of it immediately."
When our friend pointed out the guest who had requested it she rolled her eyes and explained "Oh, that's Morris Day, don't pay him any mind." Evidently Morris knew what would happen, and was playing a little joke.

Part II: with Kevin Black
Interscope’s best kept secret

Chronicmagazine.com: “Take off your executive hat. As a lover of hip-hop, what do you think about beef in the game?”

Kevin: “Back in the old days, there was a lot of beef too. I remember when Prince and Rick James couldn’t even be in the same venue. Michael Jackson and Prince had beef. LL and Kool Moe Dee had beef. Artists beef. Beef has been going on for a long time. Do I promote [beef]? No. If the record’s hot, I’ll promote it. Period. I’m getting it seen as much as I can.”

*O(+> Prince
*"Cold Blooded Unity" and "Pancake Serving Blouses" refer to David Chappelle's Chappelle Show Charlie Murphy's True Hollywood Stories

L7's of the World: "Yes, So What!!!"

Rick James: Bustin’ Out (On Funk)
From: Bustin' Out of L Seven/ American Pimp OST (Motown/ Shout Factory, 1979/ Sep. 21, 2004)

Per YouTube vid:
Interviewer:
They are famous for chicken wings, a terrible football team and Rick James…

Rick James:
There was some women in the shower together
Yes
So What!!!
Yes
There was a women cutting another women’s hair in the living room
So What!!!
Yes
There was thighs and buttocks being shown [emphasis on words per Rick's enunciation]
HaHaHa!!!
So What!!!
Yes
There were two women fondling each other gently caressing each other hands in the video
You’re too straight for it?!
Then don’t watch it!
Turn the TV off!!!

Song Review:
Rick James (born James Ambrose Johnson, Jr) (February 1, 1948 – August 6, 2004) took the world of funk music by storm by adding a bad-boy attitude to the music that gave it the sleazy thrill of feral rock and roll. Unfortunately, the colorful image he cultivated often overshadowed his musical skills but a close look at his classic work reveals plenty of talent beneath all the posturing. A good example is "Bustin’ Out," an anthem to the party life that boasts a surprisingly complex musical backing. The lyrics are a fantasy where Rick James offers to help listeners break out of "this L-7 square" with his music. It’s built around the catchy refrain of "We’re bustin’ out on the funk/We’re bustin’ out on some serious funk" and also throws in a few of his typical references to marijuana: "Well, all right you freaks, it’s time you smoke/Fire up this funk and let’s have a toke." The music plays against expectations by pairing high-energy verses to a slinky low-key chorus instead of vice versa. Rick James’ recording takes this straightforward song into a new dimension by giving it a complex arrangement that layers on plenty of funk music ear-candy: jazzy horn charts swing in and out of the melody, burbling bass licks and thunderous power chords duel with the main melody and sudden chants of "la-la-la" pop up near the end that are underscored by slithery synthesizer lines. James holds this diverse collection of sounds together with an exuberant vocal that testifies gospel-style on the verses but stretches out its notes in a seductive style on the slinky chorus. The end result was probably a little too funky for the pop charts (it peaked at #71) but it became an impressive top-ten hit on R&B charts, thus solidifying James’ mastery of the style he dubbed "punk-funk."

* L-7/L7 - a square (combine the "L7" and it forms an obtuse square (rendering it simply a polygon) of sorts : a square is a cornball. Cornball's root is corny
*R.I.P. Rick James

Never Change One Single Grain of Sand

David Ruffin: Common Man
From: Single (Motown, 1973)

David Ruffin: Let Somebody Love Me
From: David (Shelved in 1971) (Hip-O Select, 2004)

The Temptations (1998) (TV)
My favorite quote:
"Ain't nobody comin' to see you, Otis! You wish you could work it the way I do, but you can't! Because there is only one David Ruffin. And without him, the Temps ain't nothin' but a group in SEARCH of a David Ruffin."

According to Otis Williams, David (actual name Davis Eli; also known as David Bush) Ruffin, born in Whynot, Mississippi as the youngest of three sons born to Opheila and Eli Ruffin , (playfully nicknamed "Ruff" by the group) was initially a natural comedian and a hard-working singer when he first joined the group. Ruffin's most notable non-vocal contribution to the Temptations was the masterminding of their trademark four-headed microphone stand.
By 1967, however, ego problems with Ruffin became an issue for the Temptations. Ruffin became addicted to cocaine, and began regularly missing group meetings, rehearsals, and performances. Refusing to travel with the other Temptations, Ruffin and his then-girlfriend Tammi Terrell traveled in a custom limo (with the image of his trademark black rimmed glasses painted on the door, no less). After The Supremes had their name changed to Diana Ross & the Supremes in early 1967, Ruffin felt that he should become the focal point of the Temptations, just as Diana Ross was for her group, and began demanding that the group name be changed to "David Ruffin & the Temptations." This led to a number of fights between Ruffin and the group's de facto leader, Otis Williams, who insists that he gave Ruffin fair warning that if he did not change his attitude, he would be fired. What is also seldom mentioned is that, in addition to the group's problems with David's ego, he was one of the first Motown artists to question where the money was going, and so Ruffin was also demanding an accounting of the group's money. This also caused friction between Ruffin and Gordy.
David Ruffin died of a drug overdose on June 1, 1991 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at the age of 50. Contrary to what Temptation Otis Williams claimed in his autobiography (later adapted into the Temptations television miniseries), Ruffin's body was not randomly found in the middle of the street, nor did it lie unclaimed in a morgue for over a week. Instead, Ruffin's chauffeur drove him to the hospital, identifying him as "David Ruffin of the Temptations". A few days later, Ruffin's children claimed his body.
Ruffin was portrayed by actor Leon Robinson in the 1998 television miniseries The Temptations. Leon won high praise for his portrayal of Ruffin, but Ruffin's family was upset by the way the miniseries portrayed Ruffin, and filed a lawsuit against the producers of the miniseries and also Otis Williams, whose memoirs had been the source material for the miniseries. The case was dismissed in favor of the defendants, with Williams later claiming that he had no control over the presentation of the material.
When Ruffin died in June of 1991, Michael Jackson partially covered some of his funeral expenses, at which Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder performed.

*Thank 2 Liter for the vid
*Other than Steve Arrington Ruff wears the illest textured afro
*David's Let Somebody Love Me was chosen to illustrate Ruff's uncommon man (exceptional) voice
*Lastly, I think Ruff could have placed second after Rick James for the "Habitual Line-Stepper" award