House Shoes & Drugs Beats
The Gift Drugs Beats (Volume 10)
- Released
- 2015
- Format
- Vinyl, LP, Album, Limited Edition, Stereo
- Label
- Street Corner Music (2) · SCM 010
dilla-timedetroit
Hip Hop Instrumental
View on Discogs ↗ Related titles
-
J Dilla Donuts House Shoes was Dilla's main DJ in Detroit — this record is one of the things he has done in the years since to keep Dilla's legacy in circulation. -
Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth Mecca And The Soul Brother Pete Rock's description of Dilla — "the only producer in this game that was just as serious" — is the same seriousness that House Shoes absorbed watching from the DJ booth. -
The Pharcyde Labcabincalifornia House Shoes was pushing Slum Village sides in the late '90s when Dilla was still James Yancey — the same Detroit underground that eventually produced Labcabincalifornia's producer.
Michael Buchanan (House Shoes) was the resident hip-hop DJ at Saint Andrew’s Hall in Detroit in the ’90s. Charnas describes him sitting on the stage edge and changing into his namesake L.B. Evans plaid-insole slippers before sets. He was Dilla’s right-hand DJ, the person who pushed Slum Village’s earliest sides (“Me and Those Dreamin’ Eyes of Mine,” pressed in 1,000 copies in the late ’90s) before anyone outside Detroit knew who James Yancey was.
The Gift Drugs Beats series is House Shoes’s ongoing archival project: mixing across the Dilla legacy and the Detroit underground that produced it, keeping the music in motion. Volume 10 is a continuation of the same impulse that led Pete Rock to arrange and mix Jay Stay Paid, that led Hitchell to finish the cv313 and Huckaby sessions. The people who were closest to Dilla keep making records that are partly about that proximity.