THE LEGACY OF A BIG BEAR

it all began (for me) in 2008. i was in france with subtitle. and Briefcase Rockers, the label subtitle started that would later release several juan huevos projects, was getting repped to the fullest. our whole crew, along with its affiliates, etc. were part of the umbrella group known as B.E.A.R.

Business
Espionage
Audio
Recordings

obviously, bears were a recurring theme in label artwork, and we had all kinds of bear-themed pics on our myspace page.

i don't remember how i came across this, i may have been google searching "bear" images or maybe the homey lockjaw sent it to me, since he always puts me up on hilarious rap ish.



this is amazing for lots of reasons. it not only contains bears, but it also has a connection to a line from one of my songs (gittinz hot) that became a mantra for me and my tour mates: "you should do a lot of thangs". i popped my head on it and flipped the title.



i posted the picture in various locales on the interweb. then something caught my eye on facebook. a certain bearded music writer had his own flip!



it seemed like my knowledge of this very crev-looking album cover was not as exclusive as i imagined. were hip white guys like myself passing around the photo like a viral video, getting our kicks at the thought of an ursine-friendly rapper hanging in a cave with his silk-clad bear homeys, smoking cubans and eating nuts and berries? was it becoming a blogged-about sensation? was i going to run out of hyphens describing it? holy sh-t, did i just realize his name was written in honey?

i haven't thought about it much since then. but the homey lockjaw just hit me the other day with this absolutely CLASSIC link of hip hop album covers "remixed" to have comic book characters in them. easily recognized flips of The Great Adventures of Slick Rick and Illmatic and Straight Outta Compton make up the bulk of these, but i couldn't believe that this made the cut, further supporting the theory that the Big Bear cover had made some kind of impact on music nerds for its sheer genius.



there is even a british (college?) student's flip of it (with MS paint) out there.



one may ask, "well, how does the music sound?" i checked out a bit of it, not bad, but nothing special. it came out in the late 90's ... reminds me of 8Ball & MJG but nowhere near as timeless. i think this whole episode is best summed up with the outro to an online review of the Big Bear record: "A mediocre representation of two styles of southern rap in the 90's, Doin Thangs isn't worth its weight, and the only 'thang' it's 'doin' is getting laughed at for its cover." but i would switch out 'laughed at' with 'appreciated' ... word.