One MC who shows up on a lot of my old WYNU tapes is Half A Mill. I ripped a few of his freestyles from 1996 through 1999. There is one of them (Oct 96) where he rhymes for nearly 10 minutes without stopping. R.I.P. Half a Mill, one of BK's finest.
Half A Mil Freestyles (zip)
*includes Half a Mill Freestyles From WNYU 1996-1999
This post helped created a lot of buzz for Dirty Waters, and also gets a lot of re-up requests. I mostly remember this post for getting lifted and re-posted in a ton of other places, mostly with no credit. I gotta shout out to watchloud.com, though, for keeping the original link alive, and giving source credit. At the same time- how you gonna report that someone took their own life without fact checking? And also the things you cite about Half a Mill's life, through his lyrics, seem a bit distasteful. When you have someone's family pissed off from what should be a 'tribute,' you lose as a journalist.
Props for posting all these freestyles. Half A Mil definitely had a unique style on the mic. If I recall correctly on the same night as the WNYU 1997 freestyle they played a Half A Mil demo that sampled Nas verse on Verbal Intercourse...
ReplyDelete'From the womb to the tomb, presume the unpredictable...'
Can you dig that shit up? Props
good lookin. do you have any of his joints like make it hot or the demo dj scratch produced?
ReplyDeletei might have some of his demos, let me check see if I can find...
ReplyDeletethe beginning of the Mayfield sample must be the same used in Mase Feat. Total - What You Want
ReplyDeleteAre you serious with that Mase reference on this blog?!?! What is this Fisher Price my first samples?
ReplyDeleteright about the sample its Curtis Mayfield 'Right on for the Darkness' Mase and Total used it too, that track was ok.
ReplyDeleteanyone know where the Half a Mill track is from (with Curtis sample) I'm pretty sure its unreleased material but not sure..
By the way the track sounds I would guess that it was unreleased. Probably on a dirty DAT or tape. Most of his tracks played on WNYU sounded like that. There was another dope Half-A-Mil track that sampled Sade 'Kiss of Life'.
ReplyDeleteStraight Heat Rocks!!!!
ReplyDeleteGood lookin' on this. This cat had ridiculous talent. R.I.P.
5 or 6 years ago there was a kid on Soulseek who had a gang of Half-A-Mill demos. I grabbed some other shit with the thought of going back later for the demos but I never saw him on Slsk again.
I heard there was some good stuff on soulseek but not sure how to use it, is it worth downloading and all that?
ReplyDeleteYeah I don't really use it anymore, but in the pre-blog days it used to be a great place to find obscure music of all genres.
ReplyDeleteIt went downhill when the RIAA started cracking down on file-sharing, that considerably dried up the pool of users.
It's still aight, just not as many people around. Last I checked it was still a decent place to find old soul and jazz records.
Thanks for these Half a Mill freestyles. He was one of the nicest. I heard that he had an E.P. out after the "Homicide scene,Any day" single.Don't know if that's true but maybe them demos were on that.I remember hearing maybe 2 or 3 other joints from him back then.Dope blog.
ReplyDeleteHalf is among the elite. His knowledge is impressive. Smart Dude to say the least. Please post any unreleased half I need that for real!
ReplyDeleteyeeah please is possible reup the link? Bless RIP Milliatto
ReplyDelete