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Citypaper Article
From: citypaper.net
Article by: Hamida Kinge
Date: 8th August 2002
People Under the Stairs: true school addicts
"This beat has fingerwaves and a knife on its belt." So alleges Double K - the pudgy-faced, vintage boom-box-toting, L.A. Dodgers cap-wearing gentle giant who was probably blunted madly at the time - in the album notes about the song '8 Is Enuff,' from People Under the Stairs' newest and third full-length, O.S.T. Rappers Thes One and Double's capacity for maintaining an ongoing state of amusement and silliness is as rare a bird in hip-hop as the rarest grooves of vinyl by which they constructed every element of their three albums.
Case in point is Finding Bin Laden: Episode I, a wickedly stoopit animated movie, appearing on their website, that the two wrote while under the influence of 80 ounces each. In it, Thes and Double accept a mission from a coke-snorting George W. Bush and a Mystikal hook-reciting Colin Powell to find Bin Laden and stop him from bombing the American airwaves with wack beats. The flick, in which Afghani soldiers wear dookie ropes attached to automatic weapon pendants, is too absurd (and damn funny) for me to be tricked into my usual deconstructing and dissing commentary - although their way of dealing with the subject matter does seem a lazy cop-out to the frightening reality.
What is, however, a responsible angle of PUTS is their advanced art of vinyl research and implementation. Thes makes it clear that he does not just dig for beats but instead delves into each album's content and context for a lesson in musical (and political) history. The two Los Angeles natives met six years ago in a record shop and often spent the rent money on their mutual obsession; they currently boast a collection of 15,000 records between them. They're an independent team that rhyme, produce, record and engineer their albums (Question in the Form of an Answer, their second, was recorded in Thes' bedroom on an eight-track). Rare, spare jazz and drunken, funk-ridden loops sustain blissful boom-bip beats and crackling cuts to personify their sound. And a nerdy ear like mine can even spot vinyl high points like a jazz version of the old English folk song 'Scarborough Fair' ("parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme"). Yep.
