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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Club La Vela, a sprawling hacienda on a swampy stretch of coast along the Florida Panhandle, claims to be the largest night club in the country, accommodating up to seventy-five hundred people in its many dance halls and bars. For several weeks each March--during the American college-age bacchanal known as spring break--Club La Vela's occupancy roughly equals the year-round population of the surrounding community of Panama City Beach. On a recent Friday night, the club was overrun with women in fishnet camisoles and halter tops and men wearing Kangol hats and thick strands of Mardi Gras beads and reeking of aftershave.
Movement in the corridors was practically impossible, but every hour or so the d.j. played a wildly popular new hip-hop song called "Tipsy," and, with a great heaving and sloshing, the crowd convulsed toward the main dance floor. As the opening beats blasted through the club, men took off their shirts and twirled them like lassos; groups of women climbed into an elevated iron cage to dance with each other. People began to chant the lyrics--"Urr'body in the club gettin' tipsy!"--and when the singer said, "Hands in the air if you cats as drunk as me," nearly everyone complied. "The beat is just so good that it makes me want to shake my booty!" a heavyset girl with a blinking penlight wedged into her bra said exuberantly.
Mark (Tarboy) Williams and Joe (Capo) Kent, a pair of hip-hop producers from St. Louis known as the Trackboyz, are responsible for "Tipsy" 's infectious beat, and they also discovered J-Kwon, the teen-age rapper who wrote and sang the lyrics. They produced thirteen of the fifteen tracks on J-Kwon's debut album, "Hood Hop," which will be released at the end of March by So So Def, the rap imprint of Arista Records. "Tipsy," the hit single, is currently No. 3 on Billboard's Hot 100 chart and is poised to become the ubiquitous party song of the season, playing in every night club, bar, and Taco Bell in America.
Both Williams, who is twenty-five, and Kent, who is twenty-six, started out as performers. Williams rapped, buying his background music, or "beats," from a producer in North St. Louis, who charged three hundred dollars for a four-minute track--too much, Williams thought, and decided that he needed to get his own equipment. He raised the money any way he could: "I had a job, sold drugs. I worked everywhere--bagging groceries, cutting the grass in the summer, handing out flyers. Anything that was a hustle, I did." He bought a keyboard and a drum machine and began selling beats at a discount--two hundred dollars a track--undercutting the competition. "That is basically how I cornered the market in St. Louis, selling beats to everybody for cheap," he says.
Williams was into drum machines, raw beats, and hard-hitting rap lyrics. In 1997, a rapper friend introduced him to Kent, who was raised in a family of musicians (his younger brother is an opera singer, his sister plays piano, and his father plays guitar), and preferred gospel music, percussion instruments,...
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