Here's something interesting from MTV.com's Mixtape Monday this week:

Pharrell's been going back and forth between his hometown of Virginia Beach, Virginia, and South Beach, Florida, for a few years now — but if you ask the Neptunes producer, he's actually been drawing most of his inspiration from somewhere in between the two cities. P said he mixed some Baltimore club music into the production for Twista's new single, "Give It Up." "The Baltimore house [music] is incredible," he said. "[For] 20 years, that B-More stuff has been like insane and banging. So I wanted to do it on an artist and sort of bring it into the mainstream."

Along with his production partner, Chad Hugo, Pharrell said the 'Tunes will start to usher in the B-More sound throughout the rest of the year with a few more songs. But in true Pharrell fashion, he said expect the beats to come with his own personal twist. "I wanted to give my own interpretation of it, which is a little bit of Miami, a little bit of Baltimore house," he explained. "The way I'm doing it don't sound like B-More and don't sound like Miami. It just kind of [has] a lot of the remnants of the sounds of the things that I would use ... arranged with the mentality of the B-More stuff but with the low end of Miami. It's cool."

LOL @ them saying that Baltimore is between Virginia and Florida, nice geography lesson, MTV. Anyway I'm not surprised by this, since there was some talk a couple years ago of DJ Technics licensing some Baltimore club tracks to the Neptunes for some kind of deal, although I don't know if anything ever came of that. I think I'll wait and see how this plays out, though, because I've barely liked anything the Neptunes have done the last couple years, and Chad Hugo did a Bmore-style remix of "Can I Have It Like That" that I didn't think sounded right at all. So it's cool that they like Baltimore club and are influenced by it, but if they're just gonna put it through the same wackness filter that most of their recent productions have gone though, I'm probably just gonna cringe about it and hope they get Technics or someone to do real Baltimore remixes for 'em. Twista + Baltimore club is, in theory, the illest shit ever, but "Give It Up" sounds more like "Promiscous" than club music, the BPM isn't even fast enough. Skateboard P needs to do this shit right or not at all.

Labels: Baltimore club