This July at RRC we present DJ Quik’s summertime classic 1995’s Safe + Sound. Quik’s third release is a stone-cold jam which showed his continued ability to pick out and create the finest funk and soul loops in the 90s gangsta rap G-Funk phase, which rivalled the genres creator Dr. Dre.
The album clocks in at 68 minutes and consists of 17 tracks which only gain strength as the album progresses. Quik was keen not to emulate the G-Funk master Andre Young, aka Dr. Dre, so he named his style P-Funk to honour the bands who helped create the music which inspired him, such as Funkadelic, Parliament, Sly & The Family Stone, and Roy Ayers.
DJ Quik was born and raised in the LA suburb of Compton, he used his albums to discuss raps about, sex, partying, and his enemies, namely MC Eiht, who was a target of Quik’s wrath throughout the 90s. The Quik/Eiht beef stemmed not only from the Quik’s initial diss of Eiht’s crew Compton’s Most Wanted on his debut mixtape The Red Tape but also from the gang affiliations the two held. These gang affiliations were and still are interwoven into the fabric of the neighbourhoods these two rappers came from, DJ Quik was a self-proclaimed Blood, while Eiht was a Crip.
Despite the sometimes lewd and childish raps of DJ Quik you cannot ignore his flow as he deftly touches on subjects in his unique nasal style, but it is his beatmanship that set him apart from the wealth of talent that came flooding out of the West Coast during the mid 1990s as labels looked to capitalize on the success of NWA, Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, Easy-E, Snoop Dogg, Souls Of Mischief, Hieroglyphics, and The Pharcyde to name a few.
Quik is an innovator who crafted his own songs and brought in other musicians to enhance his vision but not overwhelm it. Safe + Sound saw him take his music to another level creating a more dense and layered soundscape for the listener. What is most interesting is if you look more closely at the album notes Quik heralded the most famous, or should I say infamous blood Suge Knight, Suge was credited with an EP nood on the album, the head of Death Row Records who had the finest rooster of West Coast gangsta rappers in 1995 including Dre, Snoop, Dogg Pound, and 2Pac.
Despite being contracted to Profile Records this nod to Suge clearly showed that Quik was aligning himself with the power players of the gangsta rapper movement, and was present at the infamous Death Row Records Source Awards performance in 1995.
The album is a stellar piece of work, which provides stunning tracks throughout, including ‘Dollaz + Sense’ which is a chilled mid-tempo club banger which Quik uses to pull apart his rap nemesis MC Eiht, while clearly setting out his allegiance to the Bloods and explained why it’s DJ Quik and not DJ Quick, “There’s only one DJ Q-U-I-K, with no C”.
The album's title track ‘Safe + Sound’ is a ghetto history lesson, a review of Quik’s own formative years and how the ghetto poor strive to seek money, influence, and power, all behind a laidback, slick, and funky backbeat.
Quik brings his fellow Compton homies in on “Keep Tha “P” In It”, this track is a live band concoction which melds both P & G-Funk styles to create a jazz-infused style which allows his ‘Class of 91’ posse to shine, and this track shows that the posse held special chemistry unseen in other rap collectives of the time.
Thanks to a recent re-release from Be With Records we are happy to share this as our curated album for July.
Peace Out
Stu - RRC
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