Laquan - Notes of a Native Son 1990

New Edition - Word to the Mutha! 1991

MC Lyte - Eyes Are the Soul 1991

MC Serch - Return of the Product 1992

I fall for it everytime. There’s this song that ever so often sneaks its way into the playlists of local radio stations and music channels even though it’s already a few years old. Whenever it comes on, I can’t help but approve of its opening sequence. But after five or six seconds I snap out of it and curse myself for even paying attention to that awful Crazy Town song. “Butterfly” samples, so I’m told, “Pretty Little Ditty” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers (I thought it was something else). It opens up with this dream-like sequence consisting of an echoing guitar and deep undercurrents of bass. Nothing wrong with that. I am taking offense to the predictable rapping and, to a lesser degree, to the token, pop-accepted hip-hop beat. But even so I have to admit that as far as simple pop with a simple hip-hop twist goes, “Butterfly” is expertedly crafted. It’s trash, but it doesn’t necessarily sound trashy. (And believe me, as a European I know all about trashy pop/hip-hop/rap/rock fusion formulas).

It was only recently that I found out that one of Crazy Town’s members, Bret ‘Epic’ Mazur, used to be part of the production duo Wolf & Epic (AKA Peace Productions), which had caught my attention in the early ’90s with their approach to pop-influenced hip-hop. They were responsible for rapper Laquan’s “Notes of a Native Son” in its entirety in 1990, and were soon all over the place with production and remixes for Bell Biv DeVoe, Prince, MC Lyte, Ralph Tresvant, Sheena Easton, Seal, Nia Peeples and MC Serch. By 1994 they seem to have gone separate ways, Richard Wolf working on CeCe Peniston’s “Thought ‘Ya Knew” and NKOTB’s “Face the Music,” Epic contributing scratches to Blood of Abraham’s “Future Profits.”

There is sufficient reason to believe that Wolf was older than Mazur, as his discogs credits go all the way back to 1981. Epic on the other hand, according to the Crazy Town biography attended high school in California with Ice Cube, Divine Styler, Everlast and Danny Boy, ‘was briefly DJ for House of Pain’ and apparently worked with the Atban Klann-era Black Eyed Peas before taking a timeout and re-emerging with Crazy Town. Wolf probably felt too old to do the rock star thing and today is an accomplished composer, having scored music for TV shows such as ‘ER,’ ‘Charmed,’ ‘X-Files,’ ‘Felicity,’ ‘The Jamie Foxx Show,’ ‘Friends,’ ‘Chicago Hope’ and ‘Law and Order,’ and even winning an Emmy in 2004 for “Outstanding Music Composition & Direction in a Daytime Program” (for the animated program ‘Static Shock’).

If Wolf & Epic set out to create a fusion of sorts, we can assume that Wolf, handling keyboard, guitar and vocal arrangement, brought in a more traditional musical understanding nurtured by rock, pop, funk and soul, while Epic, usually credited for drums and programming, was responsible for the hip-hop edge. Melody and rhythm, not just the basic elements of any piece of music, but particularly for a mixture of R&B and hip-hop. Coincidentally or not, the turn of the decade were the heydays of swingbeat. Yet although Wolf & Epic did work with new jack swing artists, they can’t be pinned down to that genre, as you’ll be able to tell from our audio files.

We start with Laquan’s “Notes of a Native Son”, which evolves from a jazzy jam session into a soulful stormer. Then a (relative) new jack myself, I remember thinking, “So that’s what a rapper backed by a band sounds like” when I first heard this one (the line-up includes John Mayall on harmonica). (On a sidenote, Laquan would later turn gangsta as Poppa LQ on Rap-A-Lot and still later thug it out with Yukmouth as a member of the Regime.) The New Edition joint was BBD inviting the rest of the crew to their “Poison” album. The original was the longwinded “Ronnie, Bobby, Ricky, Mike, Ralph & Johnny (Word to the Mutha)!” whereas the version presented here is off their remix album “WBBD Bootcity!” MC Lyte’s airy “Eyes Are the Soul” marks the Brooklynite’s initial steps into pop territory with her “Act Like You Know” album (which also contained the Wolf & Epic-produced “When in Love”), which backfired to the point that she came back extra hard in 1993 with “Ain’t No Other”. Still, “Eyes Are the Soul” remains a particularly compelling example of the Wolf & Epic aesthetic consisting of equal parts soul, pop and hip-hop - finished with a touch of class. The album with the most Wolf & Epic beats besides Laquan’s is the Serch solo, where they share the spotlight with the mysterious T-Ray. There (especially on the title track featured here), they leave the identifiable instrumentation behind and opt for the abstraction of sound that hip-hop has always practised in some form or fashion. Unfortunately, the time of Wolf & Epic’s collaboration was brief and they didn’t pursue any of their ideas further.

Richard Wolf’s website
Richard Wolf on discogs
Richard Wolf on imdb