Latino Platino

By 1989 I inked a solo deal with Delicious Vinyl, an independent record company based out of Los Angeles. One day I went to the studio with Muggs and I met the people at Delicious Vinyl, and they said we’re giving out record deals.  I told them I could rap, and I could rap in Spanish too.  They really dug that.  They told me to come over the next day and dropped me on a beat, which would become my first single called “Mas Pingon”.  They felt it and gave me a $5000 record deal, which was good for me at the time for two reasons.  For one, I was running the streets, and I pretty much would have been homeless at the time, if it wasn’t for the homeboy Greg O’s mom who put me up at the crib.  The second reason was the fact that Latinos hadn’t really been represented at a level to the masses. I felt there was a way to build from that and parlay it into a major situation, which I was later able to do.

I was opening up for T-LA Rock in San Diego when a rep from Capitol Records by the name of Kenny Ortiz stepped to me after the show and said that Capitol had really dug what I was doing with the Spanish stuff.  So he gives me a card and tells me to give him a call when I get back to LA.  I did, and shortly after Capitol bought out my contract from Delicious Vinyl for somewhere in the neighborhood of $45,000.

I got in the studio with Tony G and started recording the new album.  Tony G was a DJ on 1580 KDAY, and he is the equivalent of a Grand Wizard Theodore out here on the West Coast; he was also sharpening his skills at producing.  Being that he was Cuban, and I’m Cuban, it made a perfect fit in the studio.  By the time we got to “Mentirosa”, which was the last song we recorded for the album, he said to me, “Yo, Mellow this next record that we do, you got to do it bilingual. I don’t care how you do it, but when you come back in the studio it’s got to be written bilingual.”  I don’t know how many people know, but it had never been done up to that point.  Either I was rapping in Spanish completely, or I was rapping in English completely.  So it was with that record that we experimented.

It took awhile. I remember having to puff a big chocolate Thai joint with B-Real outside the crib one day just to get the flow right.  B-Real was very instrumental in that he wrote the “Check this out baby” part. Then, as we were drinking 40s and puffing the el, I had to go to the bathroom and relieve myself. That’s when I heard my next door neighbor, a kid by the name of Alvaro, say something to his mother.  It was something so simple that it was in front of my face the whole time. It was the language that we use everyday.  He says, “mama, I’m going to the liquor store, orita vengo.” Which basically means – I’ll be right back.  That’s when it clicked – there’s the style, now all you have to do is write the song in that fashion, making an English word rhyme with a Spanish word. 

Got back to the car and B-Real was waiting on me. From there it just seemed to flow like water. A story about the girl running wild in the city, it just came like a faucet opened up in me, like it was destiny, like it was made to happen. Once I wrote it, I went back to the studio and we laid it down. Capitol Records heard it and loved it.  That was 1989, and the record dropped in 1990. “Mentirosa” became the second single off that record. 

The first single was called “Rhyme Fighter”, which we chose thinking we would come on the underground tip. We really didn’t know what we were doing at the time so it was very experimental.  That record was all over the place, and the video had no direction since we were just starting out on making videos. By the time we got to “Mentirosa”, Capitol suggested that we run with the whole Latino thing, and kind of be more focused on that.  When I heard this I loved it, I was able to become the first Latino to bring something to the people of Latin races, yet not exclude anyone else.  I think the beauty of that record was that it taught white and black folks how to speak Spanish and get at girls in the club on a whole different level. I remember that they played it on LA’s Power 106 on the Make It or Break It segment; I went up against Madonna, Janet Jackson, and New Kids on The Block. I beat all their records for two weeks straight.  That’s when I knew that I had something special.  I just want to thank all the fans that requested that record at that time in 1990; you have helped me to live out my dreams. 

“Mentirosa” was very ground breaking. It was the first record to go gold and platinum in the United States and Mexico, the first rap record to reach three different charts on  Billboard – the Hot 100 Singles, the black R&B chart, and the Spanish Contemporary chart.  It was a very monumental record at that time. I’m real proud of that record, it’s opened a tremendous amount of doors for me and allowed me to see the world. Not just me, but my Cypress Hill crew, and even Funkdoobiest.  I’m real thankful for that release.

Due to the success of that record, the media put many titles on me such as pioneer, the legend, and the godfather of Latin rap. I had no choice but to run with these titles and carve my niche in Hip Hop.  If you watch MTV or BET, you’re not going to get a Latino experience when they go back and do the history of Rap music. They always leave the Latino aspect out of it. So it became one of those “each one teach one” situations, where it is up to us to teach the next generation about Mellow Man Ace, and the Latin Rap movement - basically another title that the media put on us. We were just making Rap music that felt good to us; the media came and gave it its own genre, they made it Latin Rap.  But just know that to me and my crew, we were just making rap music that felt right to our neighborhood.

For more info check out MellowMan Ace.com, or go to the store and cop Mellow Man’s album with his brother Sen Dog of Cypress Hill, The Reyes Brothers’ Ghetto Therapy.