Happy 30th Anniversary to D-Nice’s debut studio album Call Me D-Nice, originally released July 24, 1990.
There aren’t many positives to be drawn from the global COVID-19 epidemic, but an unexpected one is that many more people now know the name D-Nice. The multi-talented artist and DJ has brought together tens of thousands of people at home on lockdown with his Homeschool at Club Quarantine Instagram sessions, including several of the world’s biggest celebrities. Those of us ingrained in the world of hip-hop culture for decades are not new to D-Nice at all, as he’s been around since the late 1980s.
Derrick “D-Nice” Jones first got his break as a loose member of KRS-One’s Boogie Down Productions (BDP) crew and was an unfortunate bystander in the series of incidents that led to the murder of BDP co-founder DJ Scott La Rock in 1987. D-Nice would no longer be associated with BDP by 1992, but his 1990 debut album does include an appearance from KRS-One, and both D-Nice and BDP were all signed to Jive Records at the time.
Thirty years on, Call Me D-Nice’s title track, which was also the lead single, still slaps hard. This is classic golden era braggadocious hip-hop with D-Nice spitting over a rumbling bassline at a level of self-confidence similar to that of his cohort, KRS-One. He finesses the microphone with lots of pretty talk and pulls it off as nicely as his name: “I start to think, a very big conscious all around me / Who will be the sucker MC to try to doubt me / Is it you, or you, or you, or you, or him / But I'm like a tree and every lyric is a limb.”
Like his peers of the time, D-Nice mixes these kinds of songs with more serious, narrative-driven cuts, like on “Glory.” Here D-Nice starts by talking about the plight of black soldiers in the civil war and through later generations and then relating it to what was happening in the streets circa 1990. The subject matter clashes with the beat, but its lyrics are among the sharpest and best delivered on the album. “Glory” also features a nice call-back to the BDP days with the line “You're sellin’ yourself short, that's ‘Self Destruction.’” It’s a nod to the song “Self Destruction” performed in 1989 by The Stop The Violence Movement—an all-star collective brought together by KRS-One to address inner-city violence. The song includes appearances by Public Enemy, Heavy D, and more, and KRS-One and D-Nice themselves.
KRS-One infused a lot of BDP’s music with Jamaican patois for hooks and ad-libs, and in elements of the production. D-Nice follows suit across Call Me D-Nice, especially on the KRS-One featured “The 808 Is Coming” and “Under Some Buddha.” I’ve personally never been a huge fan of hip-hop with a Jamaican swing, but the Blastmaster always managed to make it work on early BDP records, and I certainly don’t hate it on Call Me D-Nice either.
The title “The 808 Is Coming” refers to the Roland TR-808 Rhythm Composer drum machine, a staple studio tool used on many classic rap records and utilized heavily by D-Nice across Call Me D-Nice. He even refers to himself as the “TR 808” several times on the album, professing his love for the iconic bit of kit. He produced the whole of Call Me D-Nice himself, which is all the more impressive when you consider he was only 19 when it was made.
Weird aside about “Under Some Buddha”—if anyone thinks the short vocal snippet at the beginning of the track sounds like the annoying voice of man-child Pee-Wee Herman, that’s because it is. The 1985 film Pee Wee’s Big Adventure isn’t your average hip-hop sample source, but D-Nice saw something in it that the rest of us didn’t.
D-Nice followed Call Me D-Nice with To Tha Rescue a year later in 1991—another decent album. He hasn’t released a solo album since, but the multi-talented artist is still very much in demand. Even before the COVID-19 crisis, he was earning a decent living DJing at high-profile private and corporate events, and his schedule will no doubt be a lot more packed when life returns to normal, thanks to his well-earned new popularity as a DJ and curator.
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