The summer of love died in Queens in 1993, between Bush Sr’s betting ban and the Beatnuts’ first LP. By that point the Native Tongues crew had come apart. During the heatwave they were a superstar group that ran through the borough with a new sound – a collective of young rappers and producers that included Black Sheep, A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul and the Jungle Brothers. They created an aesthetic that hadn’t been heard so far – one that mixed jazz samples, a light, playful tone of MCing and lyrics that dealt with the fleeting concerns of a kid growing up in New York City.

While those halcyon days came back to haunt Dres from Back Sheep, right now they taste sweet. June sees the release of his From the Black Pool of Genius album, which features contributions from four members of the dispersed click: members from A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, Jungle Brothers and the Beatnuts all contribute with verses and beats, while DITC crew member Showbiz, who produced KRS-One’s Sound of da Police also features.

Speaking to me from Astoria, Queens, Dres is excited: “I’m just finishing the mastering, and I feel great. I took my time and worked hard with the project. Being back in the recording studio with heads like Q-Tip [A Tribe Called Quest], Dave [De La Soul] and Mike Gee [Jungle Brothers] is a trip.”

Black Sheep released their seminal golden age album A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing in 1991. Cuts like The Choice is Yours [from where Fatman Scoop sampled fresher’s week rallying cry “Engine engine number nine / one the New York transit line” in ‘Be Faithful’] and particularly Flavor of the Month sealed their trademark – heatwave-languid MCing and trumpet and double bass-sampling production, with lyrics like ‘I don’t punch girls / and I don’t punch a clock’ echoing the simplicity of classic boom-bap.

There are certainly traces of Q-Tip’s flow in Dres’s voice, but then again – with years coming up in the same crew, feeding off each other, pad in hand, one ear on the bass bin…we should be thankful there’s enough of it to spread around. Dres remembers: “It all started when Lawnge [his partner at Black Sheep who departed in 2006] met DJ Red Alert when he was in North Carolina. Red Alert came down to do a show there with Sparky D and the Real Roxanne. Lawnge was cutting up before the show, and Red took note that this cat, who was so small he was standing on milk crates, was scratching quite precisely. Lawnge called him when he was in New York. Through he wound up being in the studio for the Jungle Brothers’ first album – Lawnge did the cuts on Buddy [A classic De La Soul cut featuring Q-Tip, and Jungle Brothers].

“That’s how I met everybody in Native Tongues. We all used to go to each other’s studio sessions we were always building together. And they were real selfless sessions, you know you could comment on anything, and everybody would build on it, nobody was egotistical – it was a real cool time and space when we were all just young cats, and artistic and everybody would help each other out and everybody would have an opinion on anybody’s session. If the beat sounded hot, we’d all grab pens and paper, someone would come up with a concept and we’d build around it.”

Parody is a device Dres’s used a few times in his hip hop – from the excellent U Mean I’m Not from ’91 which lampoons the ultra-violent gangsta rap that Schoolly D and Ice-T had sparked back in the 80s to his most recent Forever Luvlee which does the same job on bling.

Dres maintains that, 17 years after bling was first ‘coined’ in rap with 3^rd Eye’s verse on the Super Cat Dolly My Baby remix, the genre is dying out. ““Hip Hop in New York was just beautiful back in the day – much more so as opposed to now. I think overseas, in the UK and Europe, you get purists, cats are more into the real elements of hip hop, whereas in the US it’s not. However I’m definitely seeing it going towards cats making character statements and being less money driven, and that’s what it’s about for me.”

Dres was a popular guy coming up, and would branch out beyond Queens neighbourhoods like his native Astoria, Queensbridge, Flushing and Jamaica to the other boroughs, and would always party in Manhattan: “Clubs like Powerhouse, The Tunnel, Nell’s, Red Zone, there was all kinds of spots that we used to run through, to have a good time, or rock a mic, or have a go on the turn tables. Me and Lawnge would DJ at a weekly party at this spot called Mars.”

Black Sheep were always a little more gangster than their Native Tongues spars, with their grandpa shirts and twistie dreads – however for a golden moment in the early 1990s there was a unifying force of felt hip hop about peace and fun. The later, conscious likes of Mos Def and Talib Kweli have never quite did the same; recaptured the status that allowed Natives Tongues to snatch the crown from all the cash-stacked gat-strapped claptrap.

http://www.clashmusic.com/feature/black-sheep-interview

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