By the mid 90’s I was knee deep in the music grind. I had dropped out of college after 3 years to focus all of my attention on music. I was doing parties, making mixtapes, selling remix dub plates and working on being a producer. A high school classmate, Adante Ace, was an upstart manager and we began to work together. He had a new group he was working with and they were two Italian guys he met while in the Army. They were B Rockwell and Cody aka C-Love aka The Rap Gustapo and they would be known as Nature Born. At the time I was making beats on a Gemini Scratch Master mixer with an 8 second sampler and a Lexicon Jam Man to layer the sounds to loop. I couldn’t save the beats but could only record the ideas to tape and then recreate them at the studio on better equipment . Before I bought my Akai MPC 2000 Cody had purchased an MPC 3000 and seeing I had a knack for production lent it to me so I could made beats for Nature Born. I made a few beats for them that they would record to and release independent singles with.
One day I came across a sample of some Italian music and I knew this could be something for Nature Born. I flipped it and they loved the beat when they first heard it. They had also linked up with another Italian MC from Yonkers named Genovese who had recently made an underground hit featuring the LOX named “Genovese Thesis” We all got together at D.R. Period’s studio in Bushwick and in short time we had created “The Sitdown”. We all knew this was a banger. It would go on to be a successful independent single and would get radio and mixtape play worldwide from DJ Clue & DJ Envy in NY to Phat Phillie in Croatia.
Years later while in Italy with Krazy Drayz of Das Efx doing a tour for his solo album “Showtime” we sat down for dinner with the team we were running with in Bologna. One of the guys gave me his phone and says, “This is my favorite hip hop song of all time”. I was shocked when I looked to see he was showing me “The Sitdown”. I told him I produced the song and he was equally as shocked. That experience showed me just how far reaching the influence of hip hop music is and just how small of a place this world truly is.
#TheSitdown #NatureBorn #Genovese #DJRondevu
