“I Would Sometimes Make Six or Seven Tracks a Day”: Revisiting City Slick’s ‘The Money and His Fool’ with Fluent
Though the Greem Llama crew is often associated with their most esteemed member Dibia$e, there are a slew of talented emcees and producers in the collective including Decay, Ill Don, Fluent, Tone Liv, Nasrockswell, Vincent Price, Selfish, B Stilt, Varan and Butta Verses.
Employing sounds and styles unlike any other cabal of artists, the Llama squad released an abundance of collaborations, solo albums, and side projects over the years. One impressive joint effort to emerge from their collective archives is City Slick, a group consisting of Pennsylvania-based producer Fluent and Chicago-based rapper Decay.
The two artists first connected when Fluent came across some tracks Decay made with another producer. Fluent was immediately impressed with his keen ear for choosing beats. “Decay has a high level beat selection skill, which is an undervalued talent for an emcee,” he tells me. “That’s actually how I first got turned on to his music. I heard this ultra raw beat he was on and then when his rhymes came in, it was over!”
“Nobody really knows this, but I’d say 85–90% of my beats are actually live performances.”
The spark for their 2011 album The Money and His Fool started between 2009 and 2010 with Fluent’s small press beat tape Cookiez, which he made during a manic streak of creative energy. “I made a bunch of those joints over the course of a few days of furious inspiration, which is often how I worked back then,” he explains. “I would sometimes make six or seven tracks a day for a few weeks, or even put together some poorly constructed album in a day or two.”
After Fluent sent a copy of the tape to the Llama inner circle, Decay was taken with several of the tracks and wanted to use them on the album. “He picked the tracks like ‘The Hustle’, ‘They Won’t Get Me’, ‘A High Note’, and more from that tape alone,” Fluent remembers. “The rest is history.”
For any additional beats needed to flesh out the album, Fluent and Decay kept up constant email communication during the track selection process. “I always approached the creative collaboration as an equal split,” Fluent explains. “When I work with an emcee, I never want to totally control everything.’”
“I would sometimes make six or seven tracks a day for a few weeks.”
To avoid this kind of imbalance, Fluent would flood Decay’s inbox with material while giving him the creative license to do as he saw fit with any tracks that caught his ear. “I would just send the beats — often several a day, probably hundreds over time, and just send them every day via email,” he says. “The furthest I might go was to send a named beat, and often D and Self would take that title and build around it in a creative way.”
This free flowing back and fourth helped Fluent establish a strong creative bond with both Decay and fellow Llama member Selfish. “I was hands off on how they approached the tracks,” he remembers. “I encouraged them to just go wild creatively with each, and I trusted whatever they did. They extended the same to me and it just worked well for us.”
To compose the instrumentals for The Money and His Fool Fluent employed some interesting and unconventional methods. “Nobody really knows this, but I’d say 85–90% of my beats are actually live performances,” he says. “I learned early that I did not have the patience to sit and program a sequencer for hours to get everything how I wanted it — especially on an SP-505, or worse, the 303.”
“That was a microcosm of how we worked, just feeding off each other’s actual recorded audio and not discussing what we were going to do. Telepathic stuff.”
Frustrated by the sequencing process, Fluent developed his own system for playing his beats out and utilizing improvisation to his advantage. He describes his methods while explaining the “Hostage” beat. “I would get all of my chops, loops, effects, etc., all laid out on the pads and then lay down a recording,” he says. “So for something like ‘Hostage’, it was really laying out the loops and stuff on my SP-505, playing them live, and seeing where it takes me.”
Though playing beats out live isn’t necessarily the cleanest process, the end result is always interesting. “A lot of times I don’t know what I’m going to do exactly as I’m playing,” says Fluent. “Sometimes it works out, other times I might need to re-record it because I messed it up too much. But ‘Hostage’ came out cool.”
On “The Believer” — another one of the album’s standout tracks — Fluent credits an unnamed electronic record that became a repeat sample source for giving the song its gritty, haunting vibe. “I was always into digging for ill loops and things that sounded unique to me, and just made my ears perk up when I heard it,” he says while reflecting one the digging process that led him to the record.
“The Believer”, which employs generous use of the SP-303’s time stretch feature, is a shining example of the subconscious creative forces at work during the making of The Money and His Fool. “Sometimes I like to add a small, succinct vocal sample that I hear in my head that I think would fit on the beat, so I added the Jay-Z line at the beginning,” explains Fluent. “D ran with it, and he added the, ‘We don’t believe you, you need more people,’ line at the end. That was a microcosm of how we worked, just feeding off each other’s recorded audio and not discussing what we were going to do. Telepathic stuff.”
“A lot of times I don’t know what I’m going to do exactly as I’m playing. Sometimes it works out, other times I might need to re-record it.”
Though the telepathic connection still exists, seven years have passed since City Slick dropped a full length project. Despite the time gap in between releases, Fluent remains optimistic about more Fluent and Decay albums in the future. “Decay kept folders and folders full of raw beats of mine that he planned on using for possibly more City Slick albums,” he says. “We had at least five more classic albums in the archives. D had a line saying, ‘I could have penned a triple album without the help of squad,’ and I have no doubt that shit is true. We’ll see what the future brings.”
After reflecting The Money and His Fool along with Green Llama’s collective body of work, Fluent still marvels at what the crew was able to do through sheer creativity and drive. “Looking back, I have no idea how we got it done,” he says.
Regardless of what Green Llama achieves moving forward, Fluent remains proud of what they’ve accomplished so far.
Connect with Fluent on Bandcamp and on Twitter @fluentsworld. Connect with Green Llama on Twitter @greenllamamusic.
If you enjoyed this piece, please consider following my Micro-Chop and Bookshelf Beats publications or donating to the Micro-Chop Patreon page. You can also read my work at HipHopDX or follow me on Twitter.
