here's 2 articles i found waaaaaay back that i dug up, probably like a year old haha
http://www.sfbg.com/39/24/x_sonic_reducer.html
Sonic Reducer
By Kimberly Chun
Team work
DEPEND ON THIS: the Oakland A's will mix fiscally responsible draft choices, good press, and a punk rock-underdog rep to put them in the same ballpark as the much-better-funded Giants, and bad hair-challenged Al Davis will tell a punchy Raider Nation that the team will throw the ball and throw it far. Go team.
Meanwhile Oakland's other club, the Team, are busy solidifying a few other truisms. For instance, never, ever swim, let alone wiggle an Adidas or whatev, in the gruesome goo of Toxic Beach at 24th and Third Streets, near San Francisco's Dogpatch. You know the spot, where the water tentatively fingers that muddy, murky zone resembling black death and riddled with shopping carts, tires, seagulls, and garbage. Some call it shoreline, for sho. But the Team's Kaz, a.k.a. Kyzah, isn't going anywhere near that gunk. " 'Toxic waste' is right," he mumbles as we lope around the edge of the tiny, rocky strip as a nearby Winnebago dweller whistles a crazy sonata. Beneath a phallic smokestack and bordered by a barbed wire-bedecked fence that has served as a graf sketch pad, dirty grass and creamy yellow wildflowers cling to the concrete like an afterthought.
Like so many athletically inclined players, the Team have a slicker ride (a Dodge Magnum) than me; a 2004 underground hip-hop album, The Negro League (Moe Doe), that's close to selling out its 7,500 run; infectious and commercial tracks like "It's Gettin Hot," so reminiscent of Dr. Dre's drive-by cool, that continue to get airplay and club time; and a deal with Universal to rerelease The Negro League with 10 new songs, which are still in the mixing process at Mike Denton's Infinite Studios as we speak and shoot pics for the cover of the Bay Guardian. Yeah, you go, Team, shuffling in the sun, playing with their Sidekicks (they write all their lyrics on them), and looking out over the bay at Oakland from this nasty little sliver of San Francisco – proudly gangsta yet so College Dropout athletic, rolling out rhymes about East Bay streets and malls (can I coin a genre called gangbanger bourgeois?). Despite Kaz's initial misgivings about the phrase "New Bay sound," Team-ster Clyde Carson knows where his loyalties lie.
"If it brings light to the Bay, we're with it," he says later from an Alameda barbecue house, taking a break from mixing. "I say, why not create something new? If you're coming out with something new and never been heard before, you'd call us New Bay.
"We don't want to disrespect 40 or Luniz or Too $hort. We young. We ain't coming out to offend anybody. But we don't give a damn about nothing but telling the truth. When Keak da Sneak is on TV, we get excited. Even when Green Day was on the Grammys and they shouted out 880 studios – just as long as it's the Bay."
The key was getting a tape with a song slid onto the desk of KMEL, 106 FM, music director "Big Von" Johnson a year or so ago, Carson says. "We was at the barbershop, and they said, 'Yo, we heard you on the radio last night.' And we said, 'Hell no!' "
So how did they make it on the air when others haven't? "There was some garbage coming out the Bay," he explains, bringing out the blunt stuff without missing a beat. "There was some crap coming out of it. I'm not saying that we're the messiahs – all I'm going to say is we're going to do our part to take it national, because if you're making hot music constantly, you can't be ignored."
And that means pleasing the people and providing the soundtrack for the sideshows with songs like "Moe Doe," which features Keak and refs to cruising the Coliseum. It's perfect for the white T's in the Corvettes, Corollas, and Chevelles who dip and do doughnuts through Foothill and East 14th, the group's East Oakland hood (though Team member Mayne Mannish is from Berkeley, and silent partner Jungle is from S.F.). "We're gonna give you what you appreciated most in the old songs. Really, we're giving you a taste of us, man," Carson explains. "We're giving you what we see. The Team is from Oakland, straight up."
http://www.sfbg.com/39/24/cover_short_takes.html
The Team
The Negro League (Moe Doe)
Guardian photo of the Team by Alexander Warnow Photography,
taken at San Franciscos Toxic Beach, at 24th and Third Streets.The Team are here, scoring highest when outfitted in the fat hand-claps and sci-fi gleams of a ShoNuff production. They have their athletic metaphors and similes ready, and the sports figures they cite – "Keep workin' flips like Dominique Dawes" and "She ain't nothin' but a runner like Jackie Jordan" – aren't just pulled from the baseball diamond and basketball court.
The Negro League is the kind of strong, versatile debut that holds potential for future greatness. Kaz, a.k.a. Kyzah, Mayne Mannish, and low-toned Clyde Carson trade verses on dis tracks ("Keep It G.A.N.G.S.T.A."), party anthems ("I'm on One"), and even ballads for the ladies ("Love to Love U"), and the album's second half finds them trying on some other styles for size. Beginning with a munchkin-voiced sample from the beginning of Aretha Franklin's "Angel," "I Got a Call" owes a debt to Jay-Z for its confessional mode. More impressively, "The Cycle" has the jazz cool and philosophical reach of A Tribe Called Quest.
Their style might have East Coast appeal, but there's no mistaking where the Team are coming from – Richmond, Oakland, 550 Barneveld, Mission Rock, and Bay to Breakers get name-checked. Keak da Sneak guests on "Moe Doe," and Left from the Frontline produces "The Hype," but studio whiz ShoNuff might be the secret MVP here. "Keep It G.A.N.G.S.T.A." 's fusion of bhangra beats and tremolo-laden guitar calls Ennio Morricone to mind, and on the KMEL-FM track "It's Gettin Hot," he manages to build a sound that's both big and sleek over a bass line so thick that it distorts. (Johnny Ray Huston)
