Sheila E and Sha-Rock have never shared a stage. Maybe the closest they came is an Indonesian bootleg tape of ‘Purple Rain‘. They’re both survivors and living legends – fully deserving of a little more attention.
Sha-Rock was once the female member of the Funky Four Plus One – the plus one. Her real name is Sharon Green. She was a rap pioneer and always kicked it in a determined, low-key and dope style. Seemingly effortless dope no less.
If you want living, breathing history that still slams home four decades later… if you want to see parity and equality (albeit if you ignore the name) then:
Head to 6:27 on this as proof.
She still makes a hell of a lot of sense. Here’s a recent podcast on which she guests and talks knowledge about her forty years in the game. One of the two co-hosts is Rah Digga – another lone female who proved herself live and on wax.
Sheila Cecelia Escovedo aka Sheila E. is a wicked drummer. And a cool singer too.
Prince knew it and worked with her for five years, starting with ‘Erotic City’. She was in his band as a fiery drummer and then an astute musical director for two years. This period was amongst his most prolific and successful, musically and otherwise. Later, similar to Michael Jackson, Prince tried to get down by including rap stylings. Didn’t really work.
What did work was ‘Holly Rock’ on the soundtrack to ‘Krush Groove‘ which starred Sheila E. and hip hop’s Three Stooges, The Fat Boys.
And now Prince’s original version of ‘Holly Rock’ featuring Sheila E. has been posted with a lovely graffed comic book video. It’s grimy, JBs-sounding and rough. Yeah!
All hail the ladies (and the Purple one).
As with the London Posse, Gunshot and the other British crews around at the tail end of the Eighties-start of the 90s, Caveman used their own accents and steered clear of boasting about their Tims or pretending they were from the Five Boroughs. Before grime and dubstep stars Stormzy, So Solid, Man Dem Crew et al spat about the ends – and long before Roots Manuva talked of‘eating his cheese on toast’ on Witness – Caveman had ‘rhymes so crisp like Golden Wonder’ over a sped-up version of D-Nice’s All About Me. This was decent rhyming over a solid production that held its own alongside the tunes now deemed classics.
A squealing sax reminiscent of the opening cut to Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing with Rosie Perez frugging animatedly on screen, was squeezed over JB wails and horns with a tease of wah-wah guitar. Lyrically, Caveman could hold their heads high alongside peers like Jungle Brothers’ Afrika Islam and Prince Be of the similarly open-minded duo PM Dawn with their positive exhortations, mentions of black pride and praise of God on Introduction To A Caveman.
But it was Diamond J who arguably had the most success of all three members, going on to showcase his best hamsters on Sexy MF for Prince’s Love Symbol LP.
He also landed a producing credit alongside Trackmasters, the green-eyed bandit himself Eric Sermon and Havoc on Def Jam’s soundtrack to the 1997 film How to Be A Player.