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Classic Nasty Millionaire right here - “(You Can’t) Stop Me Los Angeles” !!!
Ah, to write a song about the city you live in! In this case, it is a love-hate relationship. But I bet that is the case with most cities. I bet that is the case with most relationships in general. Love/hate.
Anyway – write about your city, paint about your city, sing about your city, appreciate the place where you live and express it!!
This was one of the first songs I did as Nasty Millionaire. It was a reaction to computers and the digital age. I dusted off my old four-track cassette machine (a recent tascam portastudio 404 MK11) and I set out to record a few simple rap songs. I wanted to be free and not care about mistakes. I didn’t want to write down any lyrics even. Just come up with a few catchy hooks and choruses, and then freestyle the rest.
I grew up listening to rap music (along with all other kinds of music, and admittedly most of the rap was 311 and Beastie Boys, plus some Wu-Tang and Dr. Dre, plus whatever was on the radio) and my first highschool bands were variations on rap music. After a while, I lost touch with rap and got into writing “singer-songwriter” style stuff on my acoustic. That lasted a while. So when I started up Nasty Millionaire, it was a return to the genre I had always had the most fun with. All my guitar-driven music tends to be kind of slow and sad.
I think this song works because it has a few catchy hooks. The most popular songs on the radio are the ones where almost any line could sound like the chorus.
I used my trusty Roland sp-808 groovesampler along with the ck-1 sampling keyboard. Most of the samples in this song are unrecognizable, except perhaps for the drum break, which is from “Between Love & Hate” by the Strokes.
The lyrics to the first verse:
“either I’m livin the dream or I’m livin in a dream / the time to act is now / and my vision is misleading / I don’t know how to leave without saying goodbye”…
Very kind of confused and ambiguous lyrics. Self-conflict. That is kind of who Nasty Millionaire is. He is kind of nasty in his own unique way, but he isn’t a terrible guy. More money, more problems.
The lyric “there’s too many cars and parties” is actually an homage to the Edith Frost song “Cars and Parties”. I saw her play at Spaceland and she played that song and I remembered it and wrote this song a few days later. I don’t even own any of her records, which now I feel bad about as I write this and think I should buy one. It was some vocal sampling shit. Except she’s singing about Texas. And her song sounds more country. Read her song lyrics here.
The “everyone told you not to do it” and “you can’t stop me los angeles” were taken from some journals that I had. They were general feelings that I was going through at the time. And perhaps I am still going through those feelings today. A sense of rebellion, an anger and frustration at the way things are supposed to be.
Just a four-track and a microphone. Sitting in my one bedroom apartment on Mariposa Street in East Hollywood.
I started a myspace page for Nasty Millionaire and this was the first song that I posted. To this day, it remains one of the most popular and well-known Nasty Millionaire songs. And now it is yours, free to own and distribute and enjoy.
