Regardless, it is one of the best tracks on the album. It makes you wonder what else has been chopped, cut and pasted. NY87 in its leaked form previously had a 2Pac verse included after Daz's. ( I Don't Care What People Say, Gigolo, Like Dis.) Songs like Every Single Day and NY87 have been heard before.
So when the music comes to abstract topics or the ladies, it doesn't always work. I like to think that Tha Dogg Pound sound best when just rappin' about some gangsta shit. That being said, Doggy Bag is my favorite Wide Awake/Death Row solo album release so far, but there's still some issues. The few good songs which are in the vaults have to be stretched out through multiple releases to maximize the investment return for wide awake. The problem with these releases is that there are hundreds of songs in the vaults but they're mostly there for a reason. Some have been better like their singles collection and a LBC Crew album. Most of these albums have been weak and handled poorly, Exampli Gratia: Crooked I, Snoop Dogg, Sam Sneed.
With Death Row's aquisition in '09 by Wide Awake Entertainment, they've been releasing several albums of unreleased material from the 90's at Death Row. Years and several mediocre solo and collaboration albums later, can this duo's early output still be appealing? Since first hearing Kurupts verse on Puffin' On Blunts and Drankin' Tanqueray, I knew he was something special. In the 90's, Dat Nigga Daz and Kurupt aka Tha Dogg Pound were one of the best groups to come out of the west coast gangsta era. I'll try to find something good to share with you soon. And remember the Russians? They took everything from us and claimed it as their own, even though it was blatantly obvious they took from us (maybe someday I will share the proof with you).Īnyhow, it's late on a Sunday evening, the record I was listening to just ended and I am tired. He was asking us to take something of his down (understandable) and yet, he does not realize that we made him famous all over the world after that. We had a virtually unknown rapper who had literally only sold 45 copies of his own record, and he came to visit our site. We had Los Angeles radio DJ's frequenting our site. We had so many visitors, everyone linked to us to connect with the best, and other bloggers left their own blogs to join ours.
It's hard to let go of something that was so special and we all knew it was special. Only a couple of us stuck around to see the slow demise and death of this once extremely active blog. The decision to shut it down did not come easy but it had to be done. And that's okay, I wish anyone and everyone the best of luck in their endeavors. Just doing a web search for HQ Hip Hop, it is clear to see we have copycats and others trying to build their own thing off what we built. We pushed around some ideas for some time and not much ever materialized. I can only apologize for not having content to share with this audience anymore. It's nice to know that we built something here that became so beloved by many and still brings you back if only for curiousity to know what we are up to. The fact that anyone still remembers this place is amazing. I am happy to see familiar handles from the past showing up in the chat box every once in a while. This blog could never again be what it once was. But the world changed and we changed with it. It's been nearly 10 years since this place was active at it's peak.