Throughout the many segments of Best Albums, artists have generally chosen projects that have influenced them from greats such as Jay Z and Scarface. Mitchy Slick chose to go a different route and named his own Trigeration Station album as his choice. In an interview with Soren Baker, he explains why his debut LP stands out to him as one worthy of getting the title of Best Album.
“I got more information about how my record was put together than everybody else,” Mitchy Slick explains of the 2001 project. “My thing isn’t so much about the music, but it’s about the story behind it. So when I looked at everybody else’s album, how they put it together, I kept coming up with the answer that my record was my favorite album, it’s just how it was put together. It came from an original place and I did it basically on my own. The game was given to me from Sir Jinx. He didn’t know he was giving it to me, but I was living with Sir Jinx at the time and I was learning how to put together an album on a major level before I even learned how to do it on a minor level. So every song on my first album, I paid $1,000 to mix every song out of my pocket. So it ain’t so much about the music, even though I love the music, but it was the story behind how I put it together, how I brought all my homies together for this project.”
Mitchy Slick adds that the album has even greater impact because it opened the door for rap in San Diego to be put on a wider platform.
“It took my whole city and changed my whole city as far as hip-hop,” he says. “It might have been 10 rap albums before Trigeration Station came out. And after it came out, that basically opened up the game to my town.”
Even though Mitchy Slick is serious about putting on for Southern California, he reveals that the album actually has heavy influences from elsewhere. He wrote the entire album while listening to Jay Z’s “Hard Knock Life” and Lil’ Troy’s “Wanna Be a Baller.” He shares how those songs and certain experiences while he was in Atlanta gave him the moments he needed to craft the project.
“I was in the trap in the A at the time, in Atlanta and about a month prior, the feds had just came to my homeboy’s house, shoutout to the big homie Scarface, kicked the door off the hinges and came and snatched us up out the house and they was actually looking for him,” he says. “They wasn’t really tripping off us. We was little homies. We had cars and shit at the house, but they took the first version of Trigeration Station. It was all written. It’s when I was still writing. And they took it. I had like 20 songs written. We had just started recording, we had just left the studio and the feds came and took all my shit. I had to go rewrite the album over from remembrance. I did that all in the trap in the A. To those two songs, I wrote every song on Trigeration Station to those two songs.”
One of the standout songs on Trigeration Station to Mitchy is the album closer “Young Homies.” At more than seven minutes in length, the song showcases the San Diego rapper’s storytelling and desire to paint pictures of real life.
“‘Young Homies’ is so important to my neighborhood,” he says. “It’s little homies from my neighborhood that’s growing up learning how to be me and learning up how to structure their programs based off of that one song that I did on that album. That’s one thing that they all tell me, Trigeration Station Part 2, which I’m about to release in a couple months, they say you gotta do ‘Young Homies’ part two. ‘Young Homies’ breaks down the whole understanding and the relationship between young homies and older homies and the culture that we live in in Southern California. I hate to always talk about gang shit like that’s all I’m on. That’s not all I’m on, but if you know how prevalent that shit is in Southern California, they got Bloods and Crips everywhere, but it’s not like in Southern California where the kids might know what’s going on. But where your grandma know, ‘Boy you got on too much blue. Don’t wear that out.’ That’s where I grew up. So I hate to talk about the shit all the time, but I don’t like to talk about the shooting and the ignorance. I talk about the realities of it and in that song, it shows the relationship between young homies and older homies. Any hood in Southern California know right now that’s one of the biggest problems right now is the misunderstanding of one another to the point where homies in neighborhoods is even killing each other over this not understanding.”
Someone besides Sir Jinx who helped him understand the rap game was E-40. The Bay Area vet appeared on “Connected” and helped Mitchy understand how to treat those who looked up to him, but also boosted his confidence in himself.
“When I first met E-40 that’s when I learned the game,” he says. “That’s why when the young cats be coming at me talking about Slick, can I get a feature, can I do whoop de whoop, I be showing love. I get down for a couple thousand. 40 knocked me over the head for 10 bands right off the bat, first gate, boom 10 and I tore it off. I went up there, did the song, 40 showed up with a big-ass bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken and Carlo Rossi and what he told me is he said when he heard the song, he was like, ‘Damn, young homie. Ain’t nothing else for me to rap about.’ ‘Cause I touched all the shit. He didn’t know, he was my favorite rapper at the time. Now my favorite rapper’s me.”
After all he has done for the West Coast, Mitchy Slick feels like more people than just himself should view him as their favorite rapper. Or at least give him respect for his impact. Several of those who have worked with Sir Jinx are lauded as the cornerstones of California hip-hop and Mitchy asks why he isn’t in the mix.
“I don’t really understand none of the big dogs from the West Coast not fucking with Mitch,” he shares. “I mean I went through the ropes, homie. I went through all the ropes. I sat down with Jinx and got thoroughly smashed for five years about everything that had to do with gangsta rap from the beginning to the end. Sir Jinx was there from the beginning. Sir Jinx was on the scene and was one of the names in the circle of these cats when they was children. [Dr.] Dre came and got [Ice] Cube from Sir Jinx and Cube’s group. Dre and Jinx’s moms are sisters. So I was with Jinx getting all the bars, getting all the Yo-Yo bars, getting all the Del the Funky Homosapien secretly with Yo-Yo. I heard the demos. I sat there and watched Jinx talk about this mood box that he learned how to tune up and now Battlecat and [DJ] Quik and everybody used this box and it came from Jinx. If anybody know Jinx, Jinx a scientist with the shit. He’s a genius with it. Jinx taught me a lot from production, even learning how to make beats. I would make little beats and bring ’em to Jinx and he’s put the whoop on ’em and we’d make songs. I learn everything from Jinx in the beginning. Aside from me, I saw an interview where Cube was giving it up and said, ‘Yeah I used to rap off-beat and I was kinda whatever, but Sir Jinx got me on deck and showed me.'”
He does appreciate the salutes from Kendrick Lamar and YG when they use San Diego lingo. The title of Trigeration Station comes from the local slang and while some areas are very protective of their culture, Slick is happy to share the words.
“I look at it as love, that’s a connection,” he says. “They’re my brothers. We all brothers. We all cut from the same cloth. So for them to associate themselves with these words and the connection makes me know that it’s all love. So I ain’t got no problem with it. San Diego, we got our own vocabulary with a lot of shit. Trigeration was just one of our words. Trigeration comes from the word trickery. Then station, this is where the trigeration happens, trigeration station. Basically, Southeast San Diego is trigeration station.”
Trigeration Station created a mixed legacy for Mitchy Slick as he has been able to work with legends, but his transparency about his life in the streets has come back to hurt his business. Even though there are positives and negatives, he says he is confident in what he put out to the world.
“I wasn’t even a rapper at the time. I had stuff I wanted to get across and I wanted to introduce myself as this,” he shares. “The thing is, at the time, it was about who’s the most gangster, who’s the realest. Now, all that shit I did to prove that back then, it hurts me now. It kills me now because everything is so watered down. I been in the game since like 2001, so a lot of shit that was cool then. It was a competition of who could get shot the most and shit ’cause it was 50 Cent. I was like 50 Cent cracking? Oh yeah, I’m on. I did all of that. Master P, they selling dope? Oh yeah, I’m on, I’m next up for sure. But now, try to throw a show, they get to looking that shit up, and they google you, the first shit that come up is that shit. It’s bad. But you know for everybody who wanna book Slick and think Slick is a maniac, just know man, I do a lot of other things than just be on the block. I actually been to university. Me and Gladys Knight got songs. So if you see me and Lil Wayne talking about ‘What’s up Blood?” and all that shit, just know me and Auntie Gladys got real memorable classics as well.”
Beyond that, Mitchy Slick is proud of creating his art his way. He survived the streets and is happy he’s still around to see the impact of his story.
“It’s because it’s still from that era when it wasn’t no labels involved. It wasn’t nobody telling me I gotta rap about this or rap about that or whatever,” he says. “It’s straight from the heart. The rhymes is real as they could ever be. Ain’t nobody that saying this shit or talking this shit is free or out or alive. Everybody who could say the shit I said on Trigeration Station, they either dead, can’t say it that well or they in jail or something like that. It’s a hip-hop gangsta album. My homies, San Diego, we wasn’t worried about what nobody else was thinking. We weren’t trying to fit no trends, no wave, none of that. It’s straight original album straight from the heart and it’s talking about everything I know and of course I gravitate to because it’s stuff that I’m familiar with. It’s a complete representation of a city, untapped city that if you want to know about San Diego, all you gotta do is hear that record and you’re gonna hear it all.”