Little Clayway - Still Movin' Independently: The Takeover CD/DVD (Clayway Records)

The release party at Sonar was a good show, a lot of people came out to support Clayway. You gotta respect someone who's been on the independent grind in Baltimore for longer than most, dropping 5 albums since '99. Mullyman, Dirty Hartz, Tyree Colion, April Love, and some other people performed (I think D.O.G. was a no show, but he did perform at Style Warz a week later), and I saw artists like Skarr Akbar and Rod Lee and Tate The Arsenal up in there too. I got to meet Little and tell him that I wrote the City Paper review of his last album, and I talked to him some more at Style Warz. There's now a Clayway Records website, with links to order his older CDs from Morphius, and there's not a link to buy this one yet, but I guess there will be soon. In the meantime, the album is available at Sounds N Da Hood and other stores all over the city.

The album itself, I gotta say, is probably the best album I've heard out of Baltimore so far this year, and it's been a real competitive year. It's got his current single "Shake It," and a few songs from the older albums ("Go Head," "Call Me Clayway," "Got Me Fucked Up"), a new remix of "The Best" featuring April Love and Rod Lee, plus a lot of new songs. He really came through with the production (mostly by Fontane and Todd Baker), and the song concepts. His flow is nothing fancy but real conversational and easy to relate to, like he says, "I talk slow, so naturally I like to rhyme slow, so you can analyze every verse of my flow." Also, apparently on a certain number of copies of the album, there's an extra song called "Nothing Like Me," and people who buy a CD that has that song on it win a thousand bucks from Clayway Records, so that's another reason to cop it.

As for the DVD, there's 70 minutes of interviews, videos, performance, old footage of Little rapping way back in the 80s, and appearances by Cappadonna, Tim Trees, Comp, Pork Chop, Q, Tyree Colion, and C.D.S. It also includes Clayway's cameo on The Wire, I didn't know he was the guy who shot Dozerman. And as I mentioned in my last post, Clayway also appears in the Charm City movie, which will be released on DVD this Tuesday.

Little Clayway - "B-More Hip Hop" (mp3)
I heard this song a few weeks ago on Rap Attack and it really blew me away and I'd been waiting to hear it again ever since. This right here is a time capsule, someone who's seen the whole evolution of hip hop in Baltimore taking you through all the old venues and crews and radio stations that aren't around anymore, plus bits of club music history, taking you right up to the present day, all in under 3 minutes.

Little Clayway - "The Truth" (mp3)
On my other blog, Narrowcast, a couple weeks back I posted this old O'Jays song called "I Swear, I Love No One But You" and the songs on the new Ne-Yo and Mary J. Blige albums that sampled it. And then, I'll be damned, here's yet another track flipping the same O'Jays sample. Lyrically this is one of the deeper tracks on the album, too.

Labels: Dirty Hartz, Little Clayway, mixtape/album review, mp3, Mullyman, Rod Lee, Sonar