Juice & the Machine, Mass Hysteria, Dirty Digital, Qualo, Que B.I.L.L.A.H., Dude Nem
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Juice won that battle, but in the ten years since, he’s had little luck translating his freestyle notoriety into record sales. He’s put out a handful of albums, most recently All Bets Off in 2005, but none has made much of a splash. He says he’s ghostwritten raps for major-label stars, but since he won’t break the unwritten rule against naming names–that’d likely get him blacklisted–he can’t parlay that work into a deal of his own. Skills alone won’t make any rapper famous, except among the hardcore hip-hop faithful who cherish battle prowess over studio style–and since that audience isn’t too impressed by an MC who just claims he’s not reading preprepared lines in the booth, the few freestyle albums you’ll find are almost always live battle recordings. Getting on the pop charts requires an undefinable combination of technique, production, personality, and timing that makes improvising entire verses look simple by comparison. Not even Supernatural, widely considered the best freestyler ever, has managed to make the leap. “There hasn’t ever been a freestyle rapper who’s made great records,” says Juice, “other than Eminem.”
Many hip-hop fans don’t even have a clear idea what freestyling is. During the alleged freestyle segments on BET’s Rap City, for instance, someone from a rapper’s crew might jump on a mike and double the lines, making it obvious to any mildly attentive viewer that they’re written in advance. As a consequence, Juice says, an audience sometimes doesn’t realize he’s improvising until he starts working in references to the room. “When I start talking about that brick wall and that girl’s sick, y’all, then everybody believes it,” he says. “But when I don’t, people don’t believe it.”
The group has adapted some of the MC’s old tracks and started writing original material with him. The two backup singers are gone, replaced by Russoul, a past winner of V103 and WGCI’s Chicago Idol competition recruited by Juice. When I sat in on a rehearsal last week, Lincoln kicked off with a retro-funky R & B bass line and then the rest of the Machine jumped in, passing the lead between Getsug’s sax and Felix’s keyboard. They slipped into a heavy take on Dr. Dre’s “The Next Episode” that Getsug transformed–with a blaring “Rump Shaker” sax solo–into Jay-Z’s “Show Me What You Got.” Russoul traded lines with Juice, matching the MC’s freestyling with his own improvised melodies and lyrics–at one point he took my Reader business card and they both started riffing on it. I could feel everyone in the group pushing and pulling on everyone else, driving deeper into the groove. It didn’t take much warming up before they were playing with enough heat to scorch the green band you’ll see on the DVD.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/A. Jackson.
