Too $hort has been rapping longer than some of us have been alive. Heck, he may even be old enough to be your granddaddy!
Oakland to the core, Too $hort brought you hits like: The Ghetto, Freaky Tales, Blowjob Betty, I’m A Player, Gettin’ It and Way Too Real.
But, the hit that keeps the club jumping is Too $hort’s Blow The Whistle.
The beginning of the song is intoxicating:
‘I go on and on. Can’t understand how I last so long. I must have super powers. Rap two hundred twenty five thousand hours. Get it calculated do the math. I made a thousand songs that made you move your ass.’
Sound familiar?
That was also Drake’s opening line in For Free, his single on DJ Khaled’s Major Key album. Jay-Z also sampled that in his remake in 2008 when he let the world know that Oakland was like Brooklyn.
By the way, Part 2 of me and Too $hort’s interview on The Scoop B Radio Podcast will drop Monday morning. Subscribe on itunes, Google Play, Tune In, Stitcher and more. Visit ScoopBRadio.com for more info.
Some may think that Too $hort may have taken offense to both Drizzy and Hov borrowing his lines. $hort has no qualms about it. “So Blow the Whistle has been tapped into twice by other artists; one was Jay-Z and one was Drake,” Too $hort told me in part 2 of our interview on the Scoop B Radio Podcast.
“How would you feel about that sh*t? You know what I mean?”
Check Out Part 1 of Too $hort and Scoop B’s Chat On Scoop B Radio:
Too $hort added:
“Its nothing ill about it. There is nothing. I hear Drake’s song I hear that song so much a lot times I hear it, it’s followed by Blow the Whistle. It proceeds Drake’s song they play a little bit of Blow The Whistle and they play Drake in or the other way around. But it gave me all new fans and it gave my song more life and it also took a classic line; ‘And I go on and on and I can’t understand how it last so long,’ Just the first alert he took it and immortalized it. So that’s now a major part. Two hit records and it’s in people’s brains. I wrote those words; it’s on their brain forever.”
Not only did Too $hort discuss his happiness for Jay-Z and Drake carrying on the ‘Blow The Whistle’ tradition, he also discussed how his version became a smash hit. Apparently, Lil Jon was contracted to produce half of Too $hort’s album and was looking to recapture an ‘old school Too $hort sound.’ Too $hort says that Lil Jon stressed the importance of both the artist and the producer sitting in the studio and make the beats because it would create an authentic feel. He took heed: “He was saying something along the lines of, ‘I want to make a record that sounds like we found an old Too $hort record that we broke out of the vault and released a lost song.”
That’s where the two went to work and created magic:
“So he was trying to make an old Two $hort album so that’s why it sounds like basic thought. He tried to tap into the kind of stuff I was doing as a young artist. He had those Lil Jon beats, all these random ass sounds and one of the sounds he used was a whistle and it just appeared to me to be the hook. It just came out: ‘man blow the whistle.’ I took the whistle and the thing that gave it some substance was that I am using these sports metaphors slightly or anything I’m saying that anything you do that file we are going to blow the whistle on. So I am just naming all this shit that you can’t do all this shit like me. You can’t do it like the big dogs, cuz they are going to blow the whistle on you. You aren’t a big dog.”
The rest is history!
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