Growing up in San Francisco skateboarding the hills, tagging Muni busses, and listening to Eric B & Rakim
while drinking 40’s in the park is a damn fine childhood for any city kid, but there comes a time after floundering
around for a few years after high school, surviving jail and car wrecks and a few earthquakes, when one either
has to get a “real life,” or “turn pro,” as Hunter S. Thompson says. Tommy Guerrero and Gadget have most
definitely done the latter, with Tommy running Real Skateboards and Gadget manning Function 8 Records
respectively. They channel their love for their hometown into beautiful, jazzy hip-hop soundscapes full of samples
and snippets of life on the edge of the West Coast in these our times. Defiantly downtempo, the tracks on
Hoy Yen Ass’n draw on influences from Tommy’s guitar blues (“RF Interference,” “Seems Like Old Times,”
a tad similiar to songs from his solo CDs Loose Grooves & Bastard Blues on Galaxia and this year’s
A Little Bit of Somethin’ on Mo’Wax), to soundtracks (2 Days Later, Mechanism) to weird midnight
Tom Waits meets The Mermen excursions (“JusDis’ Boy,” “Cold”) and even to classic 80’s party jams
(“Out The Village”). There’s the raggamuffin intro from MC Litall Toney and a two part French rap from
Selavie. Also included are the first two critically acclaimed 12″s, Weed on the Tree, Forty on the Floor
and Mechanism, both of which sold out multiple pressings and received much college radio airplay
(“Weed on the Tree, …” charting at #38 in CMJ RPM). This release is an Enhanced CD with an interview,
photos, abstract/remix loops from the CD and information about the making of Hoy Yen Ass’n with all the
collaborators. To check it out plop it in your CD-ROM drive and double click on HYA (mac) or HYA.EXE (pc).
If you have a PC with Quicktime 3 or 4 please go to Function 8 for an update
on the interview that may not work on your system.
