I get my inspiration from… Mos Def & DJ Honda – “Travellin’ Man” remix
Basically this column is gonna be about what inspires me as a musician, a man, a friend and a lover of all things creative. Like cookbooks leaving out secret recipes, people often hold on to they inspirations- like if they were to share it would make them too vulnerable, too human. I declare here that I am a vulnerable human.
Baje has been openly admitting his affinity for things for years and I think that’s dope. So to start, I’m a share where the idea for my column comes from and one of the songs from that moment.
It was 1999; I was a young, weird kid. I hadn’t even started making beats yet, though I wanted to. This is a picture of younger me, (I’m in the middle) with Ted and Sternfeld:
My friends and I were a lil younger than the Nuk Fam cats so we didn’t hang out that much, but they were always nice to us.
It was me and my boy Ted walking by 3rd street, and our boy Gordon invited us to his folks’ house to chill. His spot was crazy, messy and full of people all the time. There was a bunch of folks there. One of the folks being the gentleman Kray, with whom I would make a record with ten years later under the name “Big Urban”. He had this cassette of a song he made. I was like “Yo! These older kids make music!?” The song was called “I get my inspiration from” and Kray rapped about how he got his inspiration from Kurt Vonnegut. That’s all I remember about the song, but I loved it. Big ups to anyone repping one of my favorite writers in a rap song. Baje probably has this song somewhere [1], but the inspiration from the experience is more important to me than hearing the song again (kinda like watching “The Goonies” as an adult, a little of the magic of nostalgia is lost).
Anyways, Kray also had a mix cassette with this Mos Def DJ Honda remix:
There are three versions of this song, all dope. Mos muses romantically on the life of a man on the road to better his and his families’ lives, much to the chagrin of his love. There is a music video of the original:
Kinda lo-fi, but beautiful. Mos Def would later make a song with Jay Electronica where Jay would big up Kurt Vonnegut [2], so it’s all circular.
Be well
Scott Thorough
[1] Young Baje One, owner of Modern Shark, and lover of scarves, is a crazy Nuk Fam archivist. In a closet in his house, are tapes and compact discs full of dozens of hours of unheard Nuk Fam music spanning fourteen years. He also has copies of every flyer, of every show, we did, ever, and videos.
[2] Jay Electronica also compared Raekwon’s Only Built For Cuban Links to the work of Dostoyevsky, which is also dope.
