Today:

“Today” actually started off “Yesterday” for The Rush Entertainment. My Cousin Jay (aka J. Bridge) had just skated by and we were lounging smoking like usual at about..12 - 12:30am watching some episodes of “24” and what not and we started thinking about “today”, the first majorly BIG day for us; The Rush Ent. “Today” was the name of the day that, through culmination of connects and performances, handouts, etc, could change our lives forever. That was the day we had a show at Giants Stadium in the Meadowlands. 85,000 People expected, Hot 97.1 and Power 105.1 covering the event, who knows who’s A&R’s and managers out there scoutin – man, on all levels it was big for us and we simply couldn’t afford to fuck it up. We were still behind schedule and with Ox’s mix CD going around, we needed more press, specially since Ox didn’t have J’s tracks like I did, and now some of the tracks on my First album “101%” seemed to be headed in a direction I didn’t want to aim myself so it was time to get on the grind. We planned and prepared for most contingencies in out minds and some-how weed-schemed up an elaborage juggle of 1: getting the 100+ Blank CD’s. 2: Burning em and attaching to the rear of 101%’s packaging. 3: Getting J’s school project knocked out that night (thank you Google!!) which saved us an hour by him not having to run to school and 4: Still get to the show before the estimated 2pm launch and still rip it. Well…too bad we didn’t know about the pitch-black cloud of “Fuck You!!” about to consume us like fat chicks do chocolate. Sexy ,“Rush” flavored chocolate.


Me and Jay resolved to say “fuck 24” and just record the tracks that night, burn em to the second CD that we’d glue onto the original 101% packaging, label with standard postage labels and let em say “THE RUSH ENT. Winter 2005 Sampler. Featuring J. Bridge and Apexx”. Bong, done deal. I set up the mic and levels and J finished writing one track and rehearses two of em, “Air Force None” and “The Image” as I do my two verses for “Come Get Ripped”, lay the adlibs and engineer the monkey piss outta it in like 20 mins (attributed to a new method I use to write my lyrics so I never forget the delivery, avoiding that “re-learn” phase before recording, prolly saved me about 30% of my time and made for a WAY better track) and chipped away at “Stay High” which I aint’ even rehearse really (still written to my old style w/out the notes) so I cut it at the first verse (which is 32 bars in it self) and got J on the mic to kill his two which he did like I’ve personally never heard him spit before. I dunno what happened, but the new mic and J are like separated at birth. It musta been optimized for people with voices like his because it brought out all this texture and color out of his voice that I don’t even hear talking to him live! He killed Air Force None first and brought the session home with “The Image” and we were happy as shit that we’d taken this route. We went to sleep not too long after that (J crashed here on the couch) at about 5:30 with 3.5 new tracks laid brining the total to 10 and set our cell-phone’s alarms for around 10:00am convinced that were on easy street and shit man, by all accounts, we were!. Pftt, yeah, I wish that was the case.

“Un-possible”

At about 9:35am I get a call from Ox breaking the tragic news that the tickets to the event are sold out. As in gone. They were all gone about three and a half weeks before the show, so we (J and myself) were pretty-much assed out. But not just us, but about 2 car-loads of people that were en route to see us. Our only hope was to go in at the same time with Ox and explain to em that we were in the performance, but immediately found out that that wasn’t gonna happen since someone came in last year the same way and was discovered to have a gun. This fucked EVERYTHING up. Now all the prep and planning, recording, everything was hanging in the balance from a dangerously thin strand we called “scalpers”. That was our last chance to get into the compound and that still ain’t guarantee that we’ll catch Ox before the show or even see it at all, so we went from one long shot to another, then to another which manifested as losing about an hour between phone-tag and “what? We cant’ do that now? Aight Aight..how about..” times about 12. As J said it, “with all these variables and shit, plus how behind we are, this shit’s lookin straight up Un-possible”. Me and J split to start bangin out the CD’s anyway since that was a must. We cut down the amount from100 to 30 in the sake of time and ran with it. Finshed up the CD that I had mastered about 8 of the 10 that morning, still on the same 4hrs of sleep I’m running on as I type this, then assembled everything, tested everything, hopped in the whip and peeled off in the direction of the Meadowlands Giants Stadium. Here’s what the final product looks like:


The supplemental CD packaging is affixed to the rear of “101% Reloaded” in the white sleeve.

As we made our way through the metal and plastic conga-line of traffic at the corresponding Exit 16W, we chiefed on the clip of the longest L either of us had ever seen which I rolled in my trademark “triangular L” style which hits PERFECT till that shit’s about 1/4” long and damn near unsmokable anyway. The funny shit is that this “Moby Spliff” wouldn’t even fit in the Garcia y Vega tube!! I used ALL of the inner paper and outer leaf to roll it about 1/4” thick and had to rock that GV tube convertible style till we took a bit off of it, and even after being “clipped” it was STILL longer than the normal L’s. It felt like smoking a stretched limo. Shit was straight-up immaculate. Shit had us feelin it after about the 2nd or third set of hits a piece and that’s when it all came to us; That this was one of the best days of our lives, win lose or draw. In the face of traffic out the anus, no sorta certainty, and a pretty large amount of potentially wasted dollars on the line, this shit was one of the best days of our lives. Hell, it was our first collective show and it was already at a venue with 85,000 people present. It really hit when we were stuck on the toll lines and I looked over to jay and said “yo, you realize that everyone around us in every car that we can see is gonna hear our music today?”. I put the finishing touches on the ‘Ree-box full O’ CDs’ and had to soak it all in.



Mind Blowing. So like we said man, win lose or draw, we were already miles ahead of the game. But! - We gonna win. Why? Because we have to. Period!!



“Bridge and Apexx: 1. Obstacles: 0”

We arrived at the massive compound and as you can see in the picture below, the stadium’s tail-gate party was nothing short of staggering.


These 12 dudes here are actually rating the women as they walk by.

What you can’t see in this picture is a parking lot filled with cars and about 2000 people just beyond those bins and at least another 1500 behind me. And there were 50 parking lots (we were at 17E) that were exactly like this surrounding the entire stadium. It didn’t even feel like a Football game was about to take place. It felt more like a “Black Cultural Celebration” along the caliber of the Million Man March was taking place with everyone’s proud faces, sociable conversations and Tail Gate Party Barbecue Pit scented self satisfaction. The air there was thick with the smell of some good ol-fashioned home-style real food and you could still feel the bass vibrating the molecules all around you from who knows how many systems that were rockin out there. Simply Epic. But just then, what do I see out the corner of my eye? Something even more epic. A Scalper!! We reverse back after bussin a huge sigh of relief then mentally prepared ourselves for the rape-job these tickets were gonna cost. We pull up to the shifty lookin guy and he says prys the cellphone off his face and says “Sup, yall lookin for tickets”? The natural response was “hell yeah!” and he hit us for 30/each which was a STEAL for what we were getting from em. That’s a BIG play for the home team and big shouts to the scalpers man. Saved us today and that’s word.

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