Audio By Carbonatix
Every Wednesday Crazy Hood Productions’ various members, friends, and associates meet in a warehouse office in Kendall to talk about their many projects. These meetings aren’t staid, sit-down affairs, though. Generally they’re an excuse for the crew to hang out, drink copious amounts of Bacardi rum and Coca-Cola, smoke a blunt or two, conduct brutally funny “snapping” sessions, and catch up on each other’s lives.
Tonight the crew — rap group DA ALL (Eric “DJ EFN” Narciandi, Paul “Weird Thoughts” Londano, Hector “Heckler” Cruz, and Adrian “Drain” Enningham), solo MC Michael Garcia, and a handful of business support staff, including Charles Ribero and Eddie Larronde — is reminiscing about its long involvement in Miami’s stop-start hip-hop scene. “I’m getting old,” rues the burly, jersey-clad Weird Thoughts, who sounds a bit disingenuous considering how he’s only in his late twenties. Then, abruptly shifting gears, he starts bragging about how C.H.P. won a basketball tournament held by The305.com, a popular local hip-hop Website, last May. “A lot of people made jokes…’Aw, y’all old motherfuckers gonna need air tanks,'” he laughs. “And we went there and we whipped they ass!”
With the exception of the physically thin and emotionally reserved Drain, C.H.P.’s members are big. They look big and they talk big. They press up T-shirts with their initials written in upper-case lettering; they record promo spots for radio stations like WVUM-FM’s (90.5) Thursday night “Hip-Hop Shop” and WMIB-FM’s (103.5) “The Beat.” They organize events and promotional giveaways for Def Jam and the high-powered marketing agency Buzztone; recent projects include release parties for the films 2 Fast 2 Furious and Malibu’s Most Wanted as well as rappers Joe Budden and Keith Murray. Earlier this year they hosted Def Jam Wednesdays, a networking event for local hip-hoppers, at the Marlin Hotel. C.H.P., in the words of rapper Weird Thoughts, is the bridge between the “superstars, locals, grimeys, nobodies, unknowns, and surprises.” More important, it’s the only crew that is just as likely to throw a party at a swank South Beach club like Code as to rock a show at the Slak Lounge in front of a room full of backpackers.
For sure C.H.P. puts in work, but as a label it has yet to achieve a national profile on the scale of Slip-N-Slide Records or even the hipster cachet of Counterflow Recordings. Its first full-fledged release, DA ALL’s debut album Who’s Crazy, compiled various tracks the group has recorded since 1996, including a single released on Landspeed Records in 2001, “That’s Crazy”(featuring Garcia and Noreaga). As a result, it sounds somewhat uneven, though held together by the rowdy, aggressive voices of Weird Thoughts, Heckler, and Drain. But Garcia’s forthcoming debut, Anti-Social, is an improvement — the beats, also produced by Drain, are stronger, and Garcia’s rhymes are consistently compelling. Chief among its tracks is “None of Dem,” an autobiographical cut that earned considerable airplay on local radio stations earlier this year. “Some label me a thug in an effort to prejudge,” he raps. “Not trying to be something I’m not/I’m just an everyday kid from an average block/ripping the spot.”
C.H.P. aren’t pretty boys, but they aren’t gangsters, either. They occupy an uncertain middle ground between mainstream hip-pop and underground backpacker rap, subscribing to the party-rockin’ techniques of Redman and the Beatnuts that usually earn a lot of respect from heads but little financial reward. “We’re going to be us,” says EFN. “People ask, ‘Why aren’t you smokin’ them dirties like Trick, or why don’t you kill more people in your songs?’ No! We don’t want to kill anybody. We’ll fuck some people up in our songs, because we have fucked up some people; we’ll fuck some sluts in our songs because we have fucked some sluts. But we won’t overly kill nobody.”
As its de facto leader, DJ EFN is a prime example of C.H.P.’s — and by extension Miami’s — complex relationship with the New York rap industry. Earlier this year the 28-year-old won the Justos mixtape award for Best New Mixtape DJ, making him the first non-New Yorker to receive the honor. The award capped EFN’s slow, steady rise, a journey that has netted him several guest spots on BET’s Rap City: The Basement over the past two years; more recently his latest mixtape, Volume 28:
Built For This, was mentioned in the June 30 episode of MTV’s “Mixtape Mondays” feature on the Direct Effect music news program.
Hosted by one-time Def Jam star Keith Murray, the 28-track Built For This compiles popular underground cuts like 50 Cent’s “8 Mile Road” remix; freestyles by Joe Budden, German Lugar, and Pitbull; and original songs by Ghostface Killah (“Pay Checks”) and Trick Daddy (“Represent”). Through a dab of quick mixing and interludes by the aforementioned Murray, Built For This bangs from beginning to end, sustaining a momentum comparable to any aboveground album.
EFN’s ability to rope in popular NY MCs like Budden and Ghostface Killah on his mixtapes stems from the Big Apple’s gratitude toward Miami’s hip-hop community. It’s movers and shakers like him who takes care of the big stars when they come down to record in local studios and party in South Beach nightclubs.
But the love only goes so far. The seemingly ubiquitous presence of multiplatinum rap celebrities like Jay-Z and P. Diddy has led to job opportunities and all-important industry connections for local artists and promoters. Thanks to videos filmed here like P. Diddy’s “I Need A Girl (Part Two),” rap fans all around the world view the Magic City as a place to live the good life and partake in the pleasures of beautiful, scantily clad women. “South Beach has become little New York,” growls EFN, a place where transplanted Brooklynites cavort and support out-of-town acts while ignoring Miami artists. “But [these kids need to] realize that they’re out here to live, and they gotta pay their bills out here, and they should help the scene out here. If you like the kid from BK, cool, but try to uplift some local dudes.”
Then there’s C.H.P., the “bridge” between the locals and the out-of-towners; and, as Garcia put it, “you can’t cross the bridge without bumping heads with us at one point or another.” It’s a crew EFN started back in 1993 with Sunset High School friends Weird Thoughts, Heckler, and Drain. The “hood” is for the hooded sweatshirts that were popular at the time, while, says EFN, “at the time, I felt a little crazy, so crazy came into my head.”
“As soon as he thought of it, I patted him on the back said, ‘Yeah, good idea,'” says Weird Thoughts back in the office, generating peals of laughter from everyone else. “We’ve all been there from the get-go, except for Garcia, who went to another high school.” Garcia, for his part, connected with the crew in 1996 when they began meeting at a Kinko’s Copy Center in Kendall where he used to work. “This guy I worked with at Kinko’s passed E my demo, then E basically introduced me to everybody else,” he says.
Around that time, C.H.P. began throwing illegal parties in warehouses around Kendall, including one at a car-body shop. “It got shot up,” says Heckler. “That shit happened, and then 5-0 came, and they saw flyers that said, ‘C.H.P.’ They said, ‘Who’s C.H.P.? All right, we’re going to have to keep an eye on that name.'” According to C.H.P., the police have kept an eye on them ever since, from pulling over their van for illegal searches on the streets of Miami to occasionally raiding their warehouse.
For sure C.H.P.’s members have lived rough-and-tumble, hip-hop lives. Heckler now has a wife and two children; Weird Thoughts, though separated from his wife, has three girls of his own. The crew is still draped in XL T-shirts and baggy pants, talking mad shit and bumping the latest underground rap joints. But, as Heckler says, the clock is ticking on their careers. “It’s not like we got ten, twenty years on our clock and shit,” he notes. “We’re stressed for time.”
EFN, for one, says he doesn’t mind if C.H.P. never attains widespread fame. Being part of the crew has allowed him to work with many of his hip-hop heroes like Guru of Gang Starr and Redman. For now, that’s enough. “We’ll sleep okay if we never make it in the music business, knowing that we didn’t have to compromise ourselves,” says EFN confidently. “We’ve benefited in other ways.”
