TiRon & Ayomari Featured on Jay Z's Life + Times

goronnie:

In the ’80s and early ’90s, the art of the hip-hop love song was a beautiful thing. Emcees from LL Cool J, to the late Heavy D could whirl tales about the opposite sex in a manner that was smooth enough for the ladies and just cool enough for the fellas to get into. Somewhere down the line the hip-hop love song got lost in a stew of hyper-sexuality and raunchy innuendo where the love washed away into a sea of lust. Although they may not admit it, the release of California duo TiRon andAyomari’s ode to the opposite sex A Sucker For Pumps hearkens back to the days where you can kick a rhyme about romance without being branded as emo or soft. Life+Times caught up to the duo to discuss their impressive album and rekindling the art of the hip-hop love song.

L+T: This wasn’t recorded in a big expensive studio but the album has a unique sound texture to it that proves you pay attention to detail.
T: Back in the ’60s and ’70s albums had a certain texture to them. Pink Floyd had Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall and Marvin Gaye had his sound. When you are recording on tape there is a lot of character. On War’s “Why Can’t We Be Friends” you could actually hear them miss a key at the beginning of the song. In this day and age, artists chase perfection with their recording sound and quality that there no character in the music anymore. Everything is mastered, mixed and compressed the same way. I wanted my previous release MSTRD to sound dirty. J Dilla chased that aesthetic with his Ruff Draft so shout out to him on that. I mixed the whole project myself. We could have hired a musical engineer but there’s a certain kind of feel that goes along with it that I didn’t want to cheapen or lose. Music isn’t about being perfect. It’s about the feeling.

Read the rest over at Life + Times

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