Artist(s): Dirt and 7Lock
Song: Apocalypse Now
Word Count: 517
Producer: Fingaz
Recorded: Abbot Sounds
Album: Plague (Rescue rec.1999)

Dirts favorite Line(s): I really dig the whole track. But some of the things 7lock says are just straight dope! ‘left me flesh on the earth, for me knew it was cursed’ and ‘I wish I was a born again man said the Babylon man as the plagues ate his arms and his hands’.


Apocalypse Now is just straight ill!!
Its quite obvious what the track is about (end days, armegeddon, Revelation, ect.). I always loved the way 7Lock ripped his verse. He used what he called his ‘Jamaican style’ where he spit it all with a ‘rudebwoy’ slur. This added to his gruffy vocal tones made for a verse that was intoxicatingly ununderstandable! So many people tripped off of it, “YO! What was he sayin anyway!?”
GoldenChild was supposed to be on it too, but I couldn’t get my label to buy into the idea of spending the loot to get him on. Nowadays it’s a lot easier to just have some dope computer software and track these things yourself. But back in 96 the only way to do it was to pay bucks for a studio (which would have taken a lot added to the fact that GC lived in Florida). It was one of the major let downs of the album because he wrote a phat verse, and I really wanted him on it! In the beginning of the track I say some stuff that seems like I am giving a shot out to a ‘dead’ Goldenchild. Don’t worry he isn’t dead. But in a way I felt like the circumstances ‘killed’ his opportunity. So I gave that shot out in respect to the illness that he had written that would never be heard.
The vocal sample in the beginning is from some TV show about disasters (recorded in the same ghetto way as the sample from Theophilus!). The piece towards the end is from a mythology record that says ‘I must be perpetually on my God, lest that movement which sweeps everything along, should hurry me along also’. I thought was a nice touch. The last sample is actually the ‘end’ of the album. A Rasta friend of mine once gave me a tape from one of his trips back home to Jamaica. It was ‘the Gospels in Patwois’ (Patwois is the slang and terminologies used in the Jamaican ghettos). The story clipped in the song (Mark 4:35:41) is when Jesus and the disciples are on the boat and a big storm comes and threatens all their lives. But “Jesus stayed asleep in de back a de boat”. And his followers scrambled to wake him up. So he went to the bow of the boat and commanded the winds and the seas to be still (“cease, Seckle”). And they did! And according to the taped story, Jesus ends by saying, “You still no believe that me run tings!”
C’mon now! You gotta love that!
My verse is literally me rhyming a ‘clip note’ version of the book of Revelation and its prophecies in order as they happen according to the book. 7Lock then comes in and adds by explaining how it might feel to be part of the rapture! I feel this track was a powerful ending to the album. It was a good finish. Sometimes I will listen to peoples stuff and they start out good but it fizzles at the end. I like to try to cap it where I will put any tracks that lack a bit in the middle but the ill ones at both ends. I dunno, just the way dirty dirt likes to do it!
I feel the song moves through it’s ‘quitting point’ by the way Fingaz switched up the main loop halfway through my verse and then flipping back halfway through Lock’s.
If you listen to the sequencing of the whole track (I am peepin it as I write this) you can really respect the dope ear Fingaz had with music.
This was another track that was a crowd pleaser when me and 7lock got to perform it. In 99 was probably one of the last times we both performed it though. But as of recently I been doin a few of the ‘oldies’ again. Bringin back the ol skool! I took this songs instrumental and chopped it up so that I could spit my verse when I am solo but I added this crazy gunfight and bombs exploding in the middle! I performed it at Cornerstone festival ’02 and it went off hot!