White Men Can't Rap

I may have mentioned this before, but I'm nearly 17 years older than my brother. Being born like he was in 1977, he started becoming aware of music about the time that rap music became popular. Naturally, he started rapping on his own, in reflection of this influence. Everything he did, he had to get me interested in, too, and since I was already into all kinds of music on my own, I naturally gravitated toward rap myself. Gravitated a little, that is. It's still not my most favorite musical genre for expression, but it does have it's attractions. So, one thing led to another, and my brother and I began writing and recording our own rap songs.

Now, if you're going to record rap music, you have to be rappers. Or at least sound like you're rappers. And that means you have to have a cool name, one that you definitely wouldn't be christened with at birth. And being as I knew how to run the recording equipment, I got to be the rapper front man and he became what is known in rap circles as my "deejay." And also being as the only white guy I'd ever heard of at the time that rapped, (around 1990, or so) was called "Vanilla Ice," the name I chose was only natural for me. You have to know that I love baking cookies, so I chose the moniker of "Vanilla X-Trac" for my name, taken from the flavoring vanilla extract, only I made it look cool by changing the spelling. My brother's rapper name was Sir DJ Rappafellow.

We recorded several songs back then - I never did really keep track of how many at the time - and they just remained "in the can," so to speak. Well, quite a few years drifted past and by chance, I came across them and thought they would make a nice little Christmas gift if they were all gathered up and burned on a cd. I did just that, and made a cool looking rapper cover and gave them out to family members about 3 years ago for Christmas. Of course, I had to play it for the whole family gathering! Everyone got a kick out of it, because they were mostly recorded in a funny matter. Some were serious, but most were not.

Therefore, it is with pride that I offer one of the songs from our album for download: X-Trac's The Man. And as a bonus, I'm including another track, one that I hadn't located in time to make it on the album, so you get a rare unreleased song, too! Here are Shook Up and X-Trac's The Man as recorded by Vanilla X-Trac and Sir DJ Rappafellow. Pictured below is what the album cover looked like:

As always, comments are quite welcome, but please take into consideration that these tracks were recorded in fun and are not meant to rival Tone Loc or Young MC in any way!