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After being reminded of this misguided attempt at Saltine Rap pride from 1993, it’s only right to give Paleface his second 15 seconds in the spotlight. It’s safe to assume that this guy was ignored by Ice Cube and therefore nobody outside of the Vibe magazine office ever heard this ‘industrial rock/rap’ track aimed at O’Shea. Shout-outs to Caesar for finding the scan and saving me having to dig through the torn-up magazine crates.
Thanks for posting this!!!! Now I know in 2014, a white rapper or a rapper making a diss song is business as usual. But in ’93 this was craziness. A white dude dissing Cube at the height of his powers and even threatening him with physical violence. Adding to this mystery is the fact that nobody to this day has ever heard the song. It’s as if Vibe magazine created this guy out of thin air, before the internet existed to do basic fact checking.
Now that I think about it, why wouldn’t Vibe magazine use a real picture? An artist getting their first national exposure would warrant at least a tiny press photo, wouldn’t it? Instead we get a solarized image of a white guy with type over his face disguising his identity. Could be anyone.
@Caesar: Maybe Paleface was just some kid who worked in their mailroom and they tried to generate him some buzz in the hopes that some record label would come looking for him?
^^ most likely still working that mailroom too lol
What’s especially funny/retarded about this is is there was a contemporary NYC ‘folk’ or ‘anti-folk’ dude banging hard on acoustic guitar also named Paleface who had cult following, friends with mothefucking Beck, released records etc… became major label flop & came back, nobody cares but…
Not to ever underestimate the stupidity of rap media outside Unkut but it’s amazing they jacked folk Paleface’s name at the same time his career was in ascendancy.
I’m calling for the CRC to launch an official investigation into this matter. Something’s not adding up, 21 years later this is still bugging me.
Maybe we can track down the author, Billy Jam, and beat him senseless for a few leads.
Maybe Paleface was actually Billy Jam’s secret alias?
I lived in S.F. at the time and I never heard of this guy, which doesn’t mean a lot necessarily, but Billy Jam’s legit. The only mention I found on discogs is that scratched into the runout area of a white-label comp of Motion Man demos is “The Only known appearance of MC Paleface…and thank God for that!”
hah hah – hilarious that I stumble upon this piece as I was searching for something totally different. @ Ceasar no need to beat me senseless for leads :) – will go digging over the next few days to see if I can find notes on this as I archive everything – so should have it somewhere….but might take a while…But yeah the guy was real (not an alias of mine :) and think from the Bay too (the Motion Man reference by BC Thunderhud would further indicate this). He was not a great artist by any means but so out there in his attitude (especially at that time) that I was drawn to the story – plus I was also into archiving and reporting on “cracker rap” at the time……..As far as I remember it was the first issue of Vibe magazine and I pitched them on a few stories – this one they chose…and edited it down to a short piece. I also sent them all the full art (cassette only I think – and likely a demo-tape type – hardly sold and no barcode) and then the editors at Vibe over in NYC (as far as I can recall) altered the image to make it appear as seen above from mag pages (doing a negative print thing on the original pic) Am going to go look – and if I figure it out repost here…Thanks for memories and the laugh – billyjam
update a few minutes later: that was easy – found it/cassette in one go! Also after rereading the VIbe piece it states (I wrote) he is/was from SF….It was a 6 song tape only release and featured both DJ Pause (Mordred at time) and DJ Quest (BPSH/Live Human) on cuts. As I speculated in previous comment the image of the artist on the tape cover was not hidden -that was Vibe magazine’s art department flipping image into a negative. I just scanned the cassette J-Card cover but realize cannot post images here – so will probably just write a story about this and follow up with Quest and Pause (since am in touch with them both) for quotes and see if I can find the artist too (his 1993 phone digits might still work :) )..I will publish the story on the Amoeblog (Amoeba Music website) so if anyone is interested in follow up, go there – might run a thing on WFMU too…if so it will be archived. thanks guys!
I still have the Cassette tape my cousin Paleface gave me almost 20 years ago. Believe it or not it’s actually pretty dope! Gotta give him props for trying though because apparently he was the only white boy that had the balls to express himself in that type of way. Haha- I still don’t know to this day why he tried beefing with O’Shea because everyone loves Ice Cube Paleface must’ve been havin a bad day.
I just won the infamous Paleface tape on eBay yesterday for $89! Case closed! It’s arriving next week so I’m pulling the tape deck out the closet and making sure it doesn’t eat my $89.
Billy Jam, that’s very insightful stuff. Would love to read the unedited version of your story, maybe give it to Robbie for his book.