Editor's Note: Long Beach native Snoop Dogg, Priority's Creative Chairman, is overseeing the legendary label's 25th anniversary and their year-long catalog campaign starting with the Feb. 23 release of Snoop Dogg Presents: The West Coast Blueprint.
Priority distributed for a number of independent record labels that played a key role in hip-hop history: Ruthless, No Limit Records and Death Row. “I'm going to show you where this gangsta rap came from, who the originators were, and how it got to where it is now,” Snoop Dogg says in a statement. For the next couple weeks, Heard Mentality will be taking a track-by track look at the album.
King Tee, “Act a Fool”
There are many songs about getting fucked up. But few are as hilarious and eternally cool as this 1988 beauty by King Tee (aka King T). Over thwacking, synthesized percussion and a sample of Johnny “Guitar” Watson's “Lover Jones,” the rapper informs us how gangstas spend Friday nights on the mean streets of LA.
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“Act a Fool” is the title track of Compton rapper King Tee's 1988 debut full-length produced by DJ Pooh. The track became a minor hit, as did “Bass,” propelling the album to No. 129 on the Billboard 200 in 1989. Not bad considering that same year N.W.A.'s Straight Outta Compton–one of the most important records ever made–barely cracked the Top 40 on the same chart that year.
