RIFF MARKET

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Dark knights! You know it's been a minute since I've been back in old fang country--Wu Wear HQ whaddup!--coasting the ferry parking lots on my 'goose, bunnyhopping over boxes of ganked Yankee farmteam merch till Ma Liberty killed the moonlights, my man Don Pollyanna riding on my back pegs looking for half-smokes to puff, the Jack Sparrow of this shit if there ever was one--it has been a minute!! So what I'm going to do is take it back for you, when the internet was just a thing I drew on Mario Paint, when a man was a man when the second after Boy Meets World finished up 9pm, he was in the bathroom getting his quiet riot on to Topanga's hot asian friend in that doubledate episode with all the frenching. IT HAS BEEN A MINUTE!!

LADIES AND GENTLEMAN THIS IS A JAZZY PHANG INTRODUCTION: MY MAN DON POLLYANNA IS IN THE BUILDING!! CHECK IT OUT!

ALSO CHECK OUT:
YEAR IN RIFFS: P. COLTON SPIDERFANG
YEAR IN RIFFS: THE REAL JAKE THE SNAKE

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YEAR IN RIFFS: DON POLLYANNA
Ambler Campus

What would Johnson, Frodo, Ranger or Jones be without Boswell, Tonto, Sam or Short-Round? Well, what would a canvas be without an easel? I first learned of the sidekick and their rich tradition while studying at Temple University's Ambler Campus; auditing course called Ill Get That, Boss: Behind Every Great man, Another Man. But to know how I joined this regal fellowship, and how I met the great man, and how I would become the man behind him, one most go back 10 years, to hip-hop's raging days of puberty.

They say only bastards and frozen yogurt come from New Jersey and in 1995 I found a dark metaphorical truth to the cliché. For, in my soul, I was just a recently-orphaned child, wandering through a gargantuan TCBY, looking for, in the parlance of the time, for someone to shove.

I was a pauper then. I had lost a small fortune in the great angel dust crash of 91, and had squandered the rest of my savings in an ill advised investment in the Troop clothing line's first foray into the men's fragrance arena (blunt smoke...perhaps you recall it). I found myself in a barren way, so I took to wandering the garden state for revival of finance and spirit.

It was on the periphery of the set of New Jersey Drive that I met Spiderfang. The location for the under-appreciated Nick Gomez film had become, ironically, something of a Wailing Wall for the region's most enterprising car thieves, as well as any other man of nefarious intentions. On the outskirts of the film's motor pool we created our own Moss Eisley space port. It was a band of brothers. We sang the blues.

'Everybody on the Isle knows I'm the original “Incarcerated Scarface.” Raekwon got no fucking respect for intellectual property!

“1989, right? I was in the bing for stealing the stereo volume knobs out of Mercury Cougars, cause my thieving game was so fucking personally tailored to the wants and needs of the Tri-state stolen auto accessories consumer. I got sent on an up north trip. Not my first. And I didn’t give a fuck because I was in my Chippewa Indian zone, and bars can't contain the motherfucking Little Sturgeon!’

This brief digression was hardly an inconsequential. I would later find that Spider considered the Wu-Tang Clan to be kleptomaniacs when it came to his ideas. In the early 90’s, upon his release fro Valhalla, Spider was in the process of raising a 9-man rap ensemble, the iconography and vocabulary of which were rooted in his fascination with the Chippewa tribe. Spider’s vision for the group, which he had dubbed War Eagles, was to include a no doubt potent mix of Chippewa imagery, shot through the lens of the trife life he had lived on the streets of Staten Island.

When the Wu-Tang Clan commenced their Sherman’s March into the American consciousness, Spider was crestfallen.

‘Staten Island is a small fucking place. Bitches talk. It’s like Designing Women,’ he told me, in his inimitable style. In his view point, one I share, as if it needs to be stated, the Rza had appropriated the mythological infrastructure of War Eagles, replaced the Native American spirituality with the Orientalist, zen-warrior mysticism of Kung-Fu films, and deftly sold it to the youth of White America who were desperately looking for a version of rap that wasn’t so dogmatically concerned with reality.

“Enter the 36 Chambers…Squaking Buffalo of the High Country…you telling me that’sa coincidence?

So the seeds of lifelong feud with members of Wu-Tang were already sowed before Raekwon got his cocaine dusted hands on another piece of Spider Fang’s personal history.

“One day in the weight lifting area, some dude cut the line for the 20-pound dumbbells. So I told him if he didn’t respect the order of the yard I was gonna take that dumbbell and examine his prostate with it.! I ain’t gay! But you need to let these sluts know the pecking order!

“This little fucking Gremlin whips out an Oral B 24-Soft fashioned into fucking Excalibur. I shouted, ‘Not the face!’ And you know what happens next? He cut my face! But I respected that. Never let another man tell what is and isn’t possible!’

His disfiguration was not without its charms. Prison puts a high value on empirical evidence of one’s mettle (or so I’m told). And nothing says, ‘I’m a superconductor of violence’ like a scar from a crude blade/oral hygiene tool, bisecting one’s face. Spider became the stuff nightmares are made of; there was chatter: “Spiderfang, the scarface from C-Block, he’ll give you a colonoscopy with a dumbbell and he won’t even ask nicely before he goes in.”

Upon his release, and his return to Shaolin (as it was by then re-christened) the legend of the ‘Incarcerated Scarface’ grew. Spider did little to temper the rumor mongering, paying no heed to those who might be in the business of appropriating the legend for their own purposes. Spider liked to invoke Charles Foster Kane, “You can't buy a bag of peanuts in this town without someone writing a song about you. AND THAT’S WHAT THAT BURGLAR SHALLAH RAEKWON DID! BUT HE DIDN’T ADD, “DEDICATED TO AND INSPIRED BY THE ORIGINAL RIVER FROM WHERE MY CREEK OF A CAREER IS DRAWN, THE ARACHNOID MC SPIDERFANG; MY ARTISTIC FATHERFIGURE UNDER WHICH I SUFFER THE GREAT ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE!”

You could’ve heard a Dutch being split.

97 S'FANGS

Labels: year-in-riffs-2007