Fresh Outta Chicken....

...at Bosko's Chicken & Beats, major knock is the special of the day.

Talent or tacos, u betta bring sumpn to the table if u fuckin with Bosko. I brought tacos.

  But before it got to that point, I had to track down super-producer Bosko Kante, the beatmaker behind salty mouthpieces such as E-40 and WC. It’s like trying to contact motherfuckin Inspector Gadget; it takes me a half-hour to dictate to his messaging service, as I pause to spell vocabulary landmines like “scrillion”, “bossalini” and “crackalatin”. Is there spellcheck for a gangsta?

To my surprise, the wireless angels relay my words along with the quickness, and before I know it I got Bosko in my earpiece. He’s giving me directions to the shack, and now I’m the one trying to spell – Spanish street names and shit.

Less than an hour later I’m cruising thru the Silverlake suburb of Los Angeles. I’m both early and hungry, so I stop to round up a taco plate right quick. Food in hand, I begin to push up the hill into the elevated rent district, where Bosko’s shack is actually a mini-mansion tucked back from a quiet residential street. As I head up the driveway looking like a G’d-up delivery boy with my food, I admire the SUV custom-airbrushed with an image of Bosko and his group DBA, which stands for Doing Business As… I eyeball my reflection in the twilight tint, and I’m beginning to see how thoro bizness is being done. This ain’t no small b-boy affair – the doorbell should play “For the Love of Money”. I test it.

BEHIND GATES

I don’t aplolgize for havin’ thangs, and I don’t expect Bosko do either. Maybe they can’t understand back in Portland, but he left that scene a long time ago for the city where dreams get lived. Somewhere way back in Ghana, another young boy can see himself behind the wheel of a Range, living that rap life. He just ain’t made it across the globe to L.A. yet.

A bespectacled, dumpy G answers the door. “Bosko?” I inquire like a true schoolgirl. He nods and leads me inside. Not ten steps thru the door, I turn a corner and stumble upon a team of individuals seated at a table laden with gizmos and gadgets. They regard me evenly. The man seated in the middle, hunkered over a laptop, appears to be Derek Fisher with a natural. The eighth dwarf who answered the door introduces me, and Derek-Fisher-with-a-natural greets me, in turn identifying himself as Bosko. Eureka! I’d been duped, just like in Superman 2 when the three supervillains demanded to see the President. It wuz the loyal footsoldier who pretended to be the boss, or in this case, the Bos’.

Mistaken identity cases solved, I retreat to the kitchen to eat while the team in the war room figures out who to select with their number one draft pick. Or sumpn. Presently Bosko joins me, looking like he wanna escape from the bizness for a minute. He loiters conspicuously close to my tacos. Like a motherfucker, I offer him one, never expecting this rich-ass rap nigga to stoop so low. A second later, I’m one taco short of a fiesta platter, like the bitch on Weakest Link would say. This is the price I must pay for access behind gates.

We share taco-talk to begin to scratch the surface of who Bosko Kante is and where he came from. “I started out rappin’ with everyone else,” he explains, “but nobody else could make beats. So if there’s eight niggas that can rap and one cat that can make beats, then I’ma end up making beats.” Flipping logic like that at a young age, it ain’t a surprise that Bosko has hustled up his own business – Bombay Entertainment – and attracted the corporate backbone of Universal. Earlier this year he released a full-length from DBA (Bosko, Poppa LQ & Cool Nutz), which boasts a full slate of big-name guests and ain’t far from being a major compilation. Bosko attracts heavy hitters like stink do flies, but at the moment, the traffic thru his rooms is minor.

Next, my all-access taco gets me into the home studio, where some of rap’s most gangsterous game-spitters have laid em down. Only by word-of-mouth do you make it this far, where Bosko crafts the tracks and coaches the vocals. “I ain’t gonna have a cat in here all night tryin’ to record one verse cuz he can’t say it,” he deadpans. In other words, the couch don’t pull out. And it don’t clean itself in the aftermath of sessions where blunt ashes are spread like someone’s remains at sea, and forty bottles lie around waiting for someone to plat sumpn in em – the consequences of lettin’ niggas spit where you eat. But, sez Bosko, things may wobble but they don’t fall down.

“Knock on wood.”

The more dust you kick up in Bosko’s presence, the more money you betta kick in. But most of the time, it’s straight pleasure interacting with his clients. He witnesses behind-the-scenes action aplenty:

“You might see an artist get into an argument with his woman, see him goin’ thru baby mama drama….you see it all. It’s cool to see them step into the booth and transform into the star. At that point, I become a fan. I’m basically watching my favorite artist do a show just for me. And I get a hand in it.”

Don’t get it twisted: he got a hand, a foot and twelve toes in it. Basically, he’s knee-deep in makin’ bomb beats, using the best of the old and the new. A self-proclaimed “techie”, he not only uses the latest gadgets to contact folks, he lines the studio with toys to make noise. As a yungsta, Bosko had an Atari ST computer and did beats on a Mirage before samplers wuz the thing. As a grown-ass, he uses a Sequence Logic instead of the MP, and plays guitar, bass, and keys. “I wouldn’t consider myself a musician,” he clarifies. “I’ve developed the skills to play the stuff I’m tryin’ to write.” He’s gone thru all the phases – from playing everything live, no sampling, to sampling jazz to his funk phase – and along the way he’s become tangled in a raunchy affair with the freshest instrument God created: the talkbox. Shown how to freak it by an OG in the game, Battlecat, he’s blown a distinct life into it, and mobbed-out countless jams. And pleezbaleev that he bristles at the suggestion that he bit.

“How the fuck is any hip-hop producer gon’ bite another hip-hop producer on the talkbox? Roger is the talkbox. Anyone doing the talkbox is emulating Roger.”

“We don’t have Roger any more,” he continues, “but we still need the talkbox. We ain’t gon’ throw out the guitar cuz Jimi Hendrix died.”

 ZOOM

Never let it be said that Bosko Kante got his game from a hoe or his name from a hoe. The name comes from his father, a native African and human conduit for musical talent. Blessed as he is, Bosko can afford to sit back and daydream how his life could be different if he gave his name to, oh, maybe gal like Whitney Houston…

“I would be a lot richer right now,” he oozes. “It wouldn’ta been Rodney Jerkins doin’ her last album, I’ll tell you that.”

Strictly speaking, he wouldn’t be rich as he is if he hadn’t jumped ship off Big Beat/Atlantic, who signed him and released his first single back in ’95. He stopped producing outside acts and sunk all his chips into making a full-length that would never see the light of day. Soon after Big Beat added Junior Mafia to their roster, everyone else started getting the dick, beginning with Atlantic’s entire West Coast offices, and trickling down to artists on the label from coast to coast. Bosko saw his music and his energies dry up like the sweat on a benched baller. It took him three years to get back in the game.

When he did come back, he looked a lot like Derek Fisher – he had the touch. No one had to scrape the rust off his black ass, and staying in shape like that has allowed him to liquidate his marbles, translate his dividends into a small empire. As I emerge from the rabbit hole and head back to my everyday life I think about where I just came from. Bosko’s crib is like an embassy – tho it’s smack on American soil, it’s African territory. It’s a mecca for knowledge of self, and houses treasures that have been co-opted back from European conquerors. It’s a waypost between Hollywood and the land of his birth, the land of his father, the land where Bosko’s rap life reality is more rare than white tigers. For Bosko, however, returning to Africa and seeing original roots is his diamonds and jewels.

“It’s given me another perspective on being black. Africans have been subjected to the same kind of brainwashing that Africans in America have gotten. They watch euro-centric TV and that’s where they get their images of black people from,” the jig, young CEO sez without a trace of irony. “Having been there, I don’t have the problem of self-hatred that you see in [black] people here, becuz I’ve seen where my culture came from. I never thought everyone wuz in mudhuts and throwin’ spears…

…which is cool, cuz I got some relatives right now that’s livin’ in mud huts,” he finishes candidly. “Maybe they not throwin’ spears, but they got some.”

END

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