Too Fly
Dwele
CDR, 2000
The image above is pre-Subject (Dwele’s first album) but isn’t actually the art for this song. To my knowledge there isn’t any. The history of this song is a little hazy so if someone knows more about the actual history of the song (not just my story about it), like if it just circulated on CDR or if it came out on 12″ and what got it from a Detroit bedroom into the hands and minds of big European DJs, please leave a comment and I will add an update to the post.
It took me 2 years to figure what this song was and 4 more to get it. The story starts in early 2000 when I was just about to leave my job at Sony and Ben Dietz handed me a copy of the British release of (mix cd) the INCredible Sounds of Gilles Peterson (very recommended) which Sony was going to release in the US in a few months (thank you Ben). I had no idea who Gilles was at the time but I put the CD on and was appropriately wowed; it was everything that was missing from my musical experience working there.
Fast forward to July 2001, after my very short tenure at my second record label job, I was working in non-profit (and reading All Music Guide bios and album reviews of 70′s soul and funk for literally 6 hours a day) and starting to dig for records to augment my meager LP collection. This is when my family took a trip to London. Having read in the liner notes of the Gilles Peterson album that he had a weekly party at Bar Rumba, I decided to go. He wasn’t actually there the night I went but whoever was holding it down for him played this song. It’s the only song I remember because while it was playing I had a moment where I stopped and thought, “there are a room full of people full out jamming to this hypnotic night-timey R&B song that they all seem to know (and I wish I knew) after midnight on a Monday!” It was something I had never seen in NYC.
Now to 2003(?), I was working at Giant Step (a marketing company/label and one of the labels that put out the American version of the Gilles Peterson album) where I was introduced to Dwele via an advanced CDR of his Subject album but I was warned that his music had veered towards major-label smoothness and was missing the raw feeling of his early stuff…which someone had…at home. I never followed through.
Somewhere between then and now I connected that the “raw early stuff” mentioned at Giant Step contained the magic song from Bar Rumba but it was until DJ Scribe played it in Sweden last month that I finally got my hands on it.
Ok, that was a lot of build up…oh well, played it loud.
>> songs are available for two weeks (192 kbps) [7.6 MB]
>> songs are available for two weeks (320 kbps) [12.7 MB]
