CREATING SOUNDS OF TOKYO-TO FUTURE PART 10: RAPID CREW (CAN'T MOVE ME) (FT. TV-MA)

“RAPID CREW (CAN’T MOVE ME)(FT. TV-MA)”

Audio Track Count: 115 (there’s three separate beats… so yeah)

Favorite Sound: The screaming string (yes, that’s what it is) starting at 0:02

Cutting-Room Floor: The beat introducing TV-MA (2:13-2:20) was supposed to be more of an extended thing. I also thought about bringing my hook from the second beat back for an outro, but doing it over the third beat instead. Ended up keeping it instrumental.

Inspirations: The Prodigy’s “Music For The Jilted Generation” era (first beat), Treacherous Three and other hip-hop pioneers (second beat), Timbaland’s productions with Aaliyah and Missy Elliott (third beat). The aesthetic of Cube and the Rapid 99 gang from Jet Set Radio Future.

During the initial planning stage, I always wanted Sounds Of Tokyo-To Future to have a medley track. I thought “Tag Walls, Punch Fascists” from the first album was kind of like that, due to the way it transforms through a few beats, but I guess I wanted a more up-front medley. Something like “B-Boy Bouillabaisse” from the Beastie Boys album Paul’s Boutique (a classic if you like sampling!) where it’s clearly almost a dozen draft songs that didn’t become full things but were good enough to put on the album in this form, and make for a really memorable suite.

I didn’t have a dozen, but as I produced, I came up with six or seven ideas that I knew couldn’t hold for 3 minutes but were still good. I actually think I came up with over a hundred track starters for this album overall, and some of them may still appear in the future.

Over time, I started to accrue enough solid song ideas that it didn’t really look like I was going to have time for a big medley anymore–the album is what, almost an hour long? How often do you really get hour-long albums anymore? I didn’t want or need to add a big medley onto that, so the idea hit the chopping block. However, thanks to a creative blockage on “Rapid Crew”, I needed to switch up the beat and I think that my medley concept spiritually lives on through this track.

I’ve talked a lot in the blog about what songs were earliest, what songs I got most excited about first, etc. The first minute of “Rapid Crew”--the entirety of the first beat–is the oldest thing on the album. It was something I pretty much sat down and made in one sitting, then posted on the 18th anniversary of Jet Set Radio in full as the “sequel album teaser”. I don’t think that many people noticed that I had announced the second album was happening all the way back in 2018, but it’s all for the better because of the mass surprise when I dropped the reveal trailer and people found out they were gonna get a fully-formed album in like a month. If you want to hear a really early version of “Rapid Crew”, here that is–but you can see how it didn’t change that much.

This sample got me really pumped up to make the full album–I was already doing even more complex sample layers than what people had just heard on Memories, and new elements were being added every ten seconds. That shrieking string sound was unbeatable. I was flexing new types of synths, like the Korg M1 trumpet. I was chopping my vocals in a more advanced way, from the central “Can’t Move Me” to the “I can feel it” one added at 0:55. It was exactly what I intended the next album to sound like. Funny thing is, right after the point at which this teaser stops, I pretty much couldn’t figure out what was going to come next. For years.

As songs like “LUV 2 LUV”, “Sound Effects Record No. 27”, “Chainsaw Funk” and “I Wanna Kno” were completed, this early teaser was still only a minute long, ending on a cliffhanger. Despite having the head start on the rest of the album, it was actually falling way behind at this point. Times went by, everyone got older, but the vocal sample at the end of “Rapid Crew” stayed the same. “Your best bet is to back up off me”. Who was saying this? Who was backing up? What would be the consequences if you didn’t back up? It’s as if the answer was never to be ours.

UNTIL.

Once it was really crunch time on the album, I was making cuts and big decisions left and right. Boss Mello was coming in to tell Creative Mello how it was going to be. Those are the 2 Mellos that my name references, of course. When you mainly work alone, you basically become two people–one free-wheeling creative individual who is pure ambition, and one realistic and grounded individual who knows what your bank statements look like and keeps track of time. Boss Mello and Creative Mello aligned in this case–there was no more direction for the first beat of Rapid Crew, and we needed a whole song switch. Beat-switching, as I always say, is the best way to make a lack of ideas for track evolution look impressive.

Once I freed my mind of having to do something with the first beat, I was able to really quickly throw together this old school hip-hop track with a lot of the same inspirations that I spoke of on “Dance With U Long”. A warm vibe with guitar, bass and electric piano were the core, but I kept certain elements from the first half of “Rapid Crew” like the vocal samples and the drum beat for consistency. It’s a pretty simple beat to leave room for my vocals. Guess I’ll do my little rundown of my lyrics here, too.

“Down with the crew you know it” - if you’re tight with me you won’t have to ask, if you’re on my creative level you don’t have to ask, you can just feel it in both cases. “Rapid Crew” in general is a reference to the gang Rapid 99 led by the character Cube in Jet Set Radio before she left to head up Poison Jam. This gang has almost no story besides being rivals to the protagonist’s gang, but “Rapid 99” is just an awesome name. If I had to pick a collective term to describe some of the artists that inspire me now and when I was making this album, “Rapid Crew” would not be a bad one. The Rapid Crew are creators with impressive momentum who won’t slow down in their inventiveness and output. For me, it’s not for me to say that I myself have those things, but I try to rapidly change my style and inspirations and always put out stuff that’s different from the last time you heard me.

Cube in the Poison Jam sewer lair. This is where I imagine my album gets played really loud.

“Like what we do then show it”--kind of a reference to “If you like the fresh beats, pay somethin” line from “Say Somethin’” on the first album. “Some motivated, go-get, some jack moves and blow it”--I feel this is really self explanatory, but there are creators who are taking their influences and making something that is all their own, and there are creators who will try to ride on popular waves or copy what other artists are doing. It’s not necessarily a bad thing (and you can learn a lot by replicating work in private to figure out how it’s made), but being able to do the work for the former gives you much more longevity than doing the latter. If you get noticed mostly for riding a wave, people are only going to know you from that one thing and you may not be able to sustain that. Thus, blowing it.

“Got a little problem with your groove…” these four bars are just describing techniques to liven up your music. “No solid objects” is just a reminder that you can grab sound, chop it up, reverse it, pitch it up or down, stretch it out, create dramatic volume changes–there’s so many options with every sound and we can’t start thinking of them as rendered in stone. “Rapid crew never stray from the goal of music, wack crew could betray for a creep dude, shit”: I got into music and games because I wanted to make the thing itself. I didn’t get into it to network or have power or defend shitty people. It’s been mind-boggling how people in creative industries will spend more time defending gross behavior or keeping nasty individuals employed than they do actually putting out impressive art and making people happy. It sometimes feels like nepotism and closed ranks is the job more than the job itself. I’m done with the idea of a “troubled genius” who is necessary to a team, or whose work is too important to hold them accountable for their actions.

“I just wanna crawl out of my shell and hit truth, build on the foundation of a lonely youth”: I spent a lot of time as a really quiet kid working on music and in the last few years, I’ve gotten to the point in my life where I want to start reaping the rewards of that spent time that I won’t get back. I want to start hitting places in my music that I’ve never seen before. “Capital can’t move me like you move me, self care costs money, it’s funny”: seeing someone inspired by my work or making something that inspires me, that’s worth more to me than any financial gain. Ruminating on things like that is better “self care” than the self care options advertised to us to make us spend more.

“You can’t take shit from me, I’m too strong now, why would I change shit on me, career long now”: I’m at the point where I’ve been doing things my way long enough and it’s been working well enough that I don’t need to change the way I conduct myself out of insecurity or outside pressure. And I don’t think I ever did. My self-esteem is a lot higher than it was when I started in creative industries. I get pitiful messages practically begging me to take the “politics” (vaguely described, but I know what they mean) out of my work and it’s hilarious, because on the other end, I’ve got people telling me “Tag Walls, Punch Fascists” was the song that inspired them to hire me to work on a game.

I still receive wonderful advice on the regular, but there are certain things people have told me related to toning down your personality that I just don’t think they were ever right about. And now with a career that’s coming up on being ten years long (fuck), I have the proof. That kind of advice is pushed on you because those people don’t like who you are and want to change it, not because they actually care about you and want to be constructive.

“If you want it, just ask for it, way too empty in my passport, I’m bout to fill that shit”: I want to treat my friends to gifts, treat my collaborators right and go on vacations! That’s really it. My passport expires in just two years and I only have one stamp in it. “Return of the soul, don’t forget I’m still that shit”: The album Return Of The Soul has been through a lot, getting taken down from streaming services due to samples, but here I’m reaffirming that I still very much value it as part of my personal expression through music. “And if you’re working on a goal I hope you kill that shit, Mello out”: Just as it says. I hope you can also make whatever you set your sights on a reality, whether it’s an artistic endeavor or something else. Join the Rapid Crew.

I’ve wanted to get TV-MA on a song for a while, and ever since I broke through my creative block on Rapid Crew and started the second beat, I thought it could support a second verse. I asked them to be on it and they were down, and I loved the style of delivery that they came up with so much that I did a thing you should absolutely not do in the final days of making an album: I started on a third beat to better match their flow. And folks, that’s how Rapid Crew became a medley. Creative Mello won out over Boss Mello here and I knocked the beat out in a couple of hours total, adding one more thing to this huge album.

I had been listening to a lot of Timbaland beats around the time, specifically his work with Missy Elliott, and I just naturally started making that kind of beat. I find Timbaland’s production to be a masterful blend of clean digital artificiality and a human touch (the beatbox percussion, organic samples and careful arrangement of elements). It’s funny how he comes up twice in a row in this blog series.

I sent “Rapid Crew” over to TV-MA and they were really into it, both the new beat and the way I kind of delivered them into it with the bit from 2:13-2:20 (does that bit count as the FOURTH beat of this song?). Being that I’m usually just making music for myself, it felt nice and different to “produce” someone else in this way and garnish it with all the little once-appearing effects throughout. But that’s enough from me on it, TV-MA has been kind enough to write up a little bit on the experience and get into the meaning of their own lyrics on the song. Enjoy!

SOME WORDS FROM TV-MA:

Mello & I became friends a few years ago over discord, back when he used to regularly post Ableton Live snippets on Twitter. There was one beat in particular I loved and I asked him if I could rap over it. I did and he thought it was cool so in 2020 he asked me to rap on one of his tracks for his upcoming album. The original beat he gave me sounded really old school and was in a style I wasn’t used to rapping over. It was challenging and a big shock when he changed the beat to something completely different. The new beat fit my vibe a lot more, but it took some getting used to. My flow would’ve been a lot different if I was given that new beat first, so it’s fun that we ended up with something I never would’ve even considered.

The lyrics I wrote revolve around feelings of being underestimated both physically and spiritually. I’m a 4 ft 11inch (150 cm) non-binary transmasculine chicano in real life so strangers never take me seriously. I have experienced a lot of street harassment, not in a catcalling way, but dudes will try to bully me or violate my physical space because it’s funny to pick on the “little boy.” It sounds cliche, but usually these will be big burly men! I have a napoleon complex and I’m a scorpio so I’ll either scream at them, threaten them physically, or spit on them, anything to get them to leave me alone and to teach them not to fuck with small people. The first part of the verse is me trying to encapsulate those situations.

The second part is about my experience coming from a disadvantaged background, the expectations, and ways trying to “rise above” your status can pigeonhole you. There’s this movie called Stand and Deliver about a high school teacher who despite all odds, gets his poverty stricken POC students to pass the AP exam for college. Growing up I felt like one of those students, where every teacher and adult around me could see my situation and wanted to be the ones to “fix me.” Despite getting support in pursuing music, I was to focus on going to college, turning it into something practical, and forming a backup plan. Fast forward to spring 2021 when writing these lyrics: I was burning out at my major entertainment studio admin job and feeling a certain way about the 9 years I had wasted choosing practicality while barely making a livable wage. We’ve reached a point in history where practicality is not going to save us from our wages heading in a downward spiral. The only hope we have is in our support systems, our relationships, and coming together to demand more power from the systems trying to take everything from us. So might as well pursue that rock star career, right?

Please check out TV-MA’s website and all their links here.

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Thanks to TV-MA for contributing to the blog entry on “Rapid Crew” and delving just as deep as I do on lyrics and the music’s background! The last thing I have to say about the song is that it’s remained one of my favorites because of how late it came together in the production. By the time I was making that third beat, I already knew what the rest of the album sounded like. I think more than half of it was mixed and finalized. Th is was one of my last chances to add one more different sound to the mix, and having this new part in the track order made my constant mix check listens exciting again. I would be driving around town blasting the mixes in my car and tensing up with anticipation whenever we reached “the Rapid Crew moment”.

And that’s the surprisingly lengthy story of “Rapid Crew (Can’t Move Me)”. I don’t think I expected that to be one of the longest blog entries, but I guess it makes sense with a song that has so many phases. I’m so glad I got this ambitious and varied song to the finish line, and I hope you’ve enjoyed it too.

Above: Full view of the “Rapid Crew” mixdown in Ableton Live. Due to the sonic difference between the first, second and third parts of the song, it actually had to be split into two separate projects and mixed with two different mastering chains. I had to take two pictures to show all the tracks here. Most DAW programs arrange music from left to right on the timeline, so the left end is my intro and the right end is my ending, with every sound placed in a linear fashion. The rows of color are audio tracks, and the tighter multicolored bands of audio tracks are collapsed Groups.

2 MelloJanuary 19, 2023