MC gives hip-hop a Vegas spin

Provincial enough to run for a seat in Congress, hip-hop long has been more geography-obsessed than the dudes at Rand McNally.

Each region has its own sound: There's the Parliament-indebted G funk of the West Coast, the bass-driven, call-and-response rap of the South, the grimy, hard-edged bravado of the East Coast.

But what about the Southwest? And more specifically, Las Vegas?

This area has never had a signature sound when it comes to hip-hop, mainly because there haven't been any breakout acts from here to define the terms, kind of like Nelly did for St. Louis.

None of this is lost on aspiring Vegas MC Tee Jay Blakk, who's been struggling to establish himself locally for nearly a decade now.

"I was making demos, mix CDs, trying to discover myself, and I was like, 'I'm starting to sound like everybody else,' " Blakk says from his home studio on the city's South Side, a small operation with a vocal booth in a closet. "That's when I started thinking, 'I need to come up with something that represents my region.' "

What resulted was "Sin City Shakedown," Blakk's latest disc, a mix of lounge music and hip-hop indebted to the golden age of Las Vegas swing. With a roaring brass backdrop, the disc is steeped in the finger snapping cool of the Rat Pack-era.

"I was trying to give Vegas its own sound, and I heard this song by Missy Elliott, 'Big Spender' (which samples Shirley Bassey's horn-infused, '60s pop nugget of the same name) and it totally clicked," says Blakk, dressed in jeans, a dark T-shirt and a black ball cap with a golden microphone emblazoned upon it. "Put that sound and hip-hop together, and I've got a new sound representing the city."

Prior to getting started on the project, its source material largely was unfamiliar to Blakk.

"I had to go out and buy CDs by Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett and all those guys," says Blakk, who's a supervisor at the Palazzo by day. "I tried to sample the songs, but jazz and swing is so happy compared to hip-hop, I had to really work it."

Of course, horn-driven hip-hop is nothing new -- Wu-Tang producer RZA long has incorporated vintage R&B samples into his work and Gangstarr always has pulsed with a jazzy edge -- but Blakk mines the peppier, poppier sounds of the '50s and '60s, the kind of stuff you'd hear in the Caesars Palace showroom back in the day.

Lyrically, "Shakedown" is also reflective of Las Vegas, with songs about gambling addiction and the nonstop hustle of a blue-collar nine-to-fiver trying to make it here.

This is a town posited on big dreams -- it's the defining attribute of this city -- and that's where Blakk fits in with his surroundings the most.

"I'm trying to be the first Vegas rapper to break through, if I can," he says. "It's kind of like a race, everybody's trying their hardest, 'Who's going to break Vegas?' It's an open field right now."

Jason Bracelin's "Sounding Off" column appears on Tuesdays. Contact him at 383-0476 or e-mail him at jbracelin@ reviewjournal.com.