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Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde: The Singles Collection Music Box 

May 17 2012

This limited singles box for the 1992 debut LP from the L.A. rap group Pharcyde highlights their dizzying mix of SoCal 420 culture, jazzy bohemianism, and self-conscious rap smarts.

First things first: if you don't own Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde, this box set does not replace it, and you really should own the full LP. And not just because you don't get "Oh Shit"Â or "Pack the Pipe" in the box. Like its contemporaries De La Soul Is Dead, Check Your Head, The Chronic, and Midnight Marauders, Bizarre Ride deserves to be heard in order, skits and all, for its full world-creating effects to be understood and felt. It needs to start with J-Swift's brief jazz-club intro, and end with the Doug E. Fresh throwback "Return of the B-Boy". You should expect "Otha Fish" to come after "Passin' Me By", and for the "um, um, well excuse me"s to come directly after the belched-out "duhhhh" that ends "4 Better or 4 Worse". You need to know that on their debut album, the same skinny stoners who freestyle a paean to the periodic visits of their outsize ex-con weed-provider Quinton were also world-wise enough to acknowledge the reality of rap music in the early 1990s-- "You're rappin' for the white man/ It's jigaboo time"-- and use "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos" as the jump-off for a tragicomic tale of the perils of driving around young, black, and unlicensed in Daryl Gates' Los Angeles. Nearly two decades after it was released, Bizarre Ride's dizzying mix of SoCal 420 culture, jazzy bohemianism, self-conscious rap smarts and postmodern pop-cult potpourri is still as entertaining and emotionally satisfying as ever, and with the benefit of hindsight, stands as a perfect snapshot of rap's rapid, diverse ascent to pop status in the early 1990s.

For fans of a certain age, however, the Pharcyde box-- released last month by Delicious Vinyl as a Record Store Day exclusive-- is a worthwhile throwback collectible for completists. It contains the album's five singlesÂ as multicolored 7" recordsÂ (two each of the canonizedÂ "Ya Mama", and "Passin' Me By", plusÂ "Soul Flower", "Otha Fish", and "4 Better or 4 Worse"), each packaged with the original art. It comes with a fold-out poster of the roller-coaster album art, a direct line back to both "Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids" and Overton Loyd's outlandish comic-book mythologies for Parliament's Motor Booty Affair and Funkentelechy vs. the Placebo Syndrome. The box fits perfectly on a bookshelf, and it even plays "Oh Shit" when you open it. Real dope, on the real. But anyway...

Released six months after the L.A. riots, Bizarre Ride is most often contrasted with the militarized West Coast gangsta rap that was terrifying conservative pundits andÂ suburbanÂ parents at the time. Reality, of course, is more complicated. While the Pharcyde were featured on theÂ MaraudersÂ album cover and shared more of a worldview with the heady Hieroglyphics collective than what was emanating from L.A. at the time, it's important to remember that they were embraced across the rap spectrum-- their first tours included opening slots for Ice Cube and 2Pac. They came together in South Central, a section of Los Angeles that John Singleton'sÂ Boyz n the Hood had taken to Hollywood in summer 1991, and which cable news had been publicizing to the world through its helicopter-bound journalistic sniper scope for months.

Their experience of South Central came from a slightly different perspective, however. L.A. club dancers Tre Hardson, Imani Wilcox, and Romye Robinson met rapper/producer Derrick Stewart and John Martinez, the talented son of a jazz musician, at an arts-centric after-school program called South Central Unit. Run by Reggie Andrews, an R&B producer-turned-teacher, SCU was the foundation of the Pharcyde. When they weren't digging through the mounds of old jazz and rock records in Andrews' garage, they worked out routines and adopted stage names: Hardson became SlimKid Tre, Wilcox turned into Imani, Robinson adopted Bootie Brown, Stewart became Fatlip, and Martinez, the group's svengali producer, would be known as J-Swift. Before long, the quintet moved in together in a big house on on West 24thÂ and South Budlong, on the outskirts of South Central. They called it Pharcyde Manor.

Their 1991 demo, recorded mostly in SCU, included a rough version of their first single "Ya Mama". A kaleidoscopic take on the dozens, one of the oldest African-American traditions, it feels less like folklore and more like a direct transmission from a blunt-hazed living room with "The Simpsons" on mute in the background. Over an Al Kooper organ loop and the "Synthetic Substitution" drums, each of the four members one-ups the others with outlandish, nonsensical snaps that perfectly capture kids teetering on the precipice of adulthood, and which remarkably remain funny 20 years later. "Ya mama looks like she's been in a dryer with some rocks," "what a pity, got a glass titty, filled up with Kool-Aid, just for the kiddies," "ya mama's got a wooden leg with real feet," and Fatlip's richly detailed capper: "she was beatboxin' for Lou Rawls, in some bright red boxer drawers." A hit in June 1992, "Ya Mama" could easily have been the gimmick-rap alpha and omega of the group's career.

Thankfully, that same demo also had "Officer" and "Passin' Me By", on it, completing a triptych perfectly outlining the group's penchant for virtuosic dicking around with a roguish, melancholic take on cops and girls. "Passin'" is the song that caught the ear of Mike Ross, co-owner of the upstart L.A. rap label Delicious Vinyl that had brought pop rap to the mainstream in 1989 with Tone-Loc's "Wild Thing" and Young MC's "Bust a Move". He signed the group on the spot, giving them full creative control on their first LP.

You don't need me to tell you this, but "Passin'" is an absolute masterpiece, the too-smart-by-half class clowns ruminating on their romantic insufficiencies. It's the group's biggest hit, and the primary reason to call Bizarre "one of the most joyously heartbreaking albums ever," as Ernest Hardy did. Powered by Fatlip's impassioned howl on the chorus (which J-Swift claims in the box-set liners was a playful Jim Morrison impression arising from The Doors playing at the crib), "Passin'" is half-rapped, half-sung soul music made by a group of kids remarkably unafraid of seeming uncool or wussy. Fatlip emerges as the star, singing the hook and delivering one of rap's all-time greatest climax verses. It opens with the lovely bit of lyrical hopscotch "now there she goes again, the dopestÂ Ethiopian," and concludes with two bars that firmly situate the song in a litany of pop sentiment, nodding toward Rodgers & Hart, and sending two shouts to Elvis at his most lovelorn. Buffeted by high rotation on "Yo! MTV Raps" and BET's "Rap City", the song's arty black and white video (which Ross recalls being beat out by Onyx's "Slam" as MTV's one regular-rotation rap clip) made the Pharcyde a hit with rap fans and Buzz Bin acolytes alike. "If we got that MTV slot," Ross remembers, "I can only imagine how big that song would have gotten."

Yet while "Passin'" is the group's canonical classic single, "Otha Fish" is the Pharcyde's best song. Back to back on Bizarre Ride, the two constitute one of the greatest 10-minute stretches in rap history, and it's exactly this sort of artful expression of romantic doubt and anguish that separates them from the 1992 rap class-- hell, from the 2012 rap class.Â Where Fatlip shone brightly on "Passin'", SlimKid Tre proves to be the Pharcyde's best rapper here, absorbing the spotlight with three fluid verses of splendid remorse. Over the high, lonesome saxophone lick from Herbie Mann's "Today", Tre effortlessly bridges the emotional chasm between Marvin Gaye's "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" ("why ain't you climbin' up?") and Here, My Dear's "When Did You Stop Loving Me, When Did I Stop Loving You?" Kevin Kerslake's video for the trackÂ didn't do much to assist the vibe, though its aesthetic similarity to his "Come As You Are" clip got the attention of Alternative Nation (they'd play Lollapalooza in '94). Along with "Passin'", I'm convinced that "Otha Fish" is the key to Kanye West's naming Bizarre Ride his favorite album ever. He's yet to record anything quite as open-hearted and vulnerable about the opposite sex, though.

"We're serious about certain things, but everything is basically a joke. We live through hard shit, but we can laugh about it." Tre told Rolling Stone in 1993. This dialectic encapsulates the group's perspective perfectly, which is on full display across the second and last singles from Â Bizarre Ride, "Soul Flower" and "4 Better or For Worse". The former track was written for the group's first release, the finale of Delicious Vinyl's Brand New Heavies coming-out party Heavy Rhyme Experience Vol. 1, which paired the UK funk group with some of the hippest of the '92 rap class--Gang Starr, Masta Ace, Black Sheep, and Kool G. Rap. The remix from Bizarre RideÂ is better than the Heavies version (which the box set doesn't include anyway). It's the group at its giddy best, freely mixing James Brown's "Soul Power" with a refrain copped from the Jetsons and a final line that turns The Announcement into an eye-popping opportunity for a hilariously personal confession. The track for "4 Better or 4 Worse" is J-Swift at his best-- it's mostly his own keyboard work-- though as is his wont, Fatlip steals the show at the end of the group's darkest moment. If you want to trace Tyler, the Creator'sÂ GoblinÂ back to a single source, well, you could do much worse than his nasty, prank-calling-a-girl-he-likes verse (which was freestyled in the studio).Â It's creepy, but far from nihilistic: the immediate "okaaaay, I think we've gone a little bit overboard..." response brings things immediately back to reality, like a news reporter properly recontextualizing a live-shot gone awry.

Bizarre Ride would go gold by 1996, but the band's own dissolution-- typical inter-squad bickering and "creative differences"-- would start before the album was even released. J-Swift would abandon the group before the next album,Â Labcabincalifornia (they hooked up instead with a promising kid named Jay Dee), and a nasty crack addiction would trigger a sad spiral from which he's still recovering. Labcabin was a very good album, but it also came at the start of the dizzying, dark mook-rock moment in the late 90s, which would wind up with the band opening for Korn (and Tre later dropping a guest verse on 1999's Follow the Leader). It's hard to kick "Somethin' That Means Somethin'" in one of the most aggro, apolitical times in pop's history. The Pharcyde's lack of a followup to Bizarre Ride isn't a slight against the band's legacy at all, but much more a testament to the incredible capacity of five kids to refract a politically and culturally tumultuous era into a work that, remarkably, transcends its context.
