So as we usher in the era of FADER 34 we must usher out the heady times of FADER 33. We hope you enjoyed the online exclusives from the issue we've previously let loose, and we'll give it a final peace out with some choice outtakes from our Greatest Songs You Never Heard feature. Dig the anecdotes and retell them at cocktail parties like you got them straight from the source. We won't narc on you.
LES
We were working on Nas’s second album [It Was Written], the record was called “It Was A Lady Cop Sucking A Thug’s Dick, It Was Some Thug Shit, Some Bug Shit.” That was the chorus. That beat was crazy. I was using the Brethren drums and some guitars that were multi-layered. It was like the Nasty Nas. It was like one verse and a hook. It didn’t come out probably because it wasn’t completed. The way Nas does songs, it doesn’t have to be completed. He doesn’t need to do three verses and a hook. “It Ain’t Hard To Tell” doesn’t have a hook because he couldn’t come up with one, Large Professor just put the horns in as the hook. Growing up in the hood we used to be harassed by the police so much and there used to be a lot of lady cops out there. It was just about the fantasy of fucking one of them, like how she chases everybody else off, but fucks him. She fucks with nobody else but dude.
SADAT X
Clark Kent did the remix to [the Notorious BIG collaboration] “Come On”, but the original was done by Lord Finesse. I had met Biggie prior to that. One day Bad Boy called me to come on in. Puff was there and it was me and Big—we had a box of Phillies, we just brainstormed and we did it. I found out it wasn’t going to be on the album when [Ready To Die] came out. It was probably out of Biggie’s control, so I wasn’t mad. It did make it to a couple mixtapes, it did get around the underground. They called and told me they were going to put it out [Clark Kent’s version] on [the posthumous] Born Again. I like the original beat, but I was in no position to contest. That was the one song on the album that was actually done with Biggie, most of them were recorded by other people later.
I did a song with Jay-Z that the Neptunes produced that never came out. Jay called, I didn’t believe it was him at first. I was waiting and waiting for them to send me the plane ticket to go down to Virginia, then I got a call from him that a car was coming for me. It picked me up and took me to an airport out in Jersey. I got on the private plane and went down to Virginia. I don’t know what happened with that. I got paid for it so I never got mad.
GE-OLOGY
The Mos Def is one of the things that everybody is buzzing about right now. We did it a little less than two years ago. The song wasn’t really completed, but it is still rocking as is. It doesn’t even really have a title at this point. I got a text from this dude from Chicago and he was like, “Congratulations on the ‘Superstar’ song you did with Mos.” I knew exactly what he was talking about. I don’t know how it got out. I don’t even have the ProTools session for it yet, but I do have a copy of the rough version. I play it when I go DJing, and cats go crazy about it. It’s funky. It’s like some Curtis Mayfield shit chopped up. I hear people talking about it on OkayPlayer.
LARGE PROFESSOR
I did a Slick Rick remix for “Behind Bars” that I really liked, but they picked the Warren G remix over mine. Basically I used a Priscilla Olyphant “Get Out of My Life Woman” sample behind it. Then when I heard the remix that they put out it was definitely a lot cleaner, the bass was a lot clearer. With Slick Rick he has a traditional kind of dust sample feel to his sound. I felt like I laced it with that traditional sound. Def Jam were calling different producers to remix the song. I guess they were just seeing which one was coming out the best.
LIL JON
One record that never came out was one me and Korn did together. We covered “Fight The Power”, but my label wouldn’t clear me to be on the track, so they had to take me off. [Lead-singer] Jonathan Davis said he wanted to do a record for their greatest hits album. I emailed him my drumbeats, he took my drumbeats and laid guitars to that, then we vibed on that. Then he came to the mansion in Miami and we started laying vocals at the crib. At the mansion we ain’t got a real studio, we got equipment, but we’ve got a mattress up with pillows over the top for the vocal booth and shit. So the track is done we try to get it on the greatest hits, but my label is tripping and acting like bitches or whatever. So they can’t use the song, but then Davis wants to use it for XXX: State Of Union and the label is like you can’t have it for XXX either. So they ended up taking me off and they put Xzibit on. It’s the same beat we did, but it’s not the same as what me and Jonathan did together. Me and Korn doing “Fight The Power”, that’s a lot of energy.