Cold Flamez
Over the last two decades Hip-Hop fans have become quite familiar with the streets of Long Beach’s Eastside. Some of rap’s most well known names have brought the vivid street accounts of the area to the forefront of popular culture. Even though the neighborhood is still burdened with the working class realities that helped cement hardcore rap music into our collective consciousness, the Eastside’s gangsta rap stories aren’t the only tales to be told.
As youngsters, the Cold Flamez blazed through the same streets made famous by Warren G, Crooked I, Daz, Nate Dogg and of course, Snoop Dogg. But Long Beach’s gritty skateboarding culture helped shape the worldview of D-Real, his little brother Mic 3rd and their homie Dash just as much as the neighborhood’s native sounds.
After meeting in middle school, D-Real and Dash linked up and spent their free time skateboarding. “You can’t even walk down the street here without seeing kids on skateboards,” explains Dash. “And we talking about black kids on skateboards. But in Long Beach, the same kids that’s on skateboards will be the same ones that shoot at you.” “The kids who skated when they were young grew up and started gangbanging,” adds D-Real. “It just all mixed and collided into one big ass Eastside type thing.”
When they weren’t shredding, the trio was listening to 50 Cent and Lil Wayne and rapping to impress the girls at school. But when D-Real headed off to Louisiana’s Grambling University, Dash and Mic 3rd began to take the art more seriously, recording on a makeshift set up at Dash’s transitional living quarters in Compton provided upon "graduating" from his former group home. After his semester-long shot at higher education, D was on his way back to Long Beach to join his crew. “I was out at school partying and doing all the wrong things. I never opened a book,” recalls D-Real about his semester long shot at higher ed. “It was just too much fun, so I ended up coming back.”
The music that came from this "wild" period in their lives earned them a reputation with residents, monitors and security personnel alike. The acclaim was proof positive that they were on the right path, but there were costs. “We had the whole complex. They was respecting what we was doing so much,” says Dash. “We were sacrificing so much back then. I actually got kicked out for having the homies over past curfew to make music.” After their eviction, the group moved into the home of D-Real and Mic 3rd's family in a small house. It was these living conditions that motivated Cold Flamez to actively manifest their own destiny by taking their music to the masses via the Internet with “Miss Me, Kiss Me” as the launch-pad. The minimalist, sinister production combined with gratuitous autotuned bantering was perfect for the Flamez' hedonistic peer group. The group targeted the audience of the budding Jerk music movement and posted their song to each fan's Myspace profiles causing the song to catch like wildfire. The group attended massive Jerk parties where they bore witness first-hand to how the crowds enthusiastically responded to their seedy music. Eyeing an opportunity, they created T-shirts emblazoned with their moniker "Cold Flamez" in a hope to brand themselves and shift their notoriety and influence from cyberspace to the streets. This was around the same time lightly choreographed jerk dance videos that utilized their song began popping up on YouTube by the minute, capitulating the song's Myspace plays well into the millions. Shortly thereafter, the calls from promoters across the country began pouring in requesting live performance bookings. But perhaps their greatest accomplishment was when "Miss Me, Kiss Me" broke into rotation on hometown radio station Power 106FM.
Cold Flamez are gearing up to release their as yet untitled debut, but debunk any attempt to label it as a "jerk album." “A jerk crew is a crew that dances, and a jerk artist would talk about jerkin’,” says D-Real. “We never rap about jerkin’ and we don’t jerk dance. Our intentions were not to make jerk music. But the jerk community picked it up and loved it!” “There’s nothing wrong with jerking at all. That is so popping. We support it 100%,” finishes Dash. “But that’s just not what we do. We do our own thing.” Adorned with streaks of bleached hair, body piercings, a mosaic of tattoos and those infamous jeans, the group does not fit the typical connotations of Eastside LBC. The result of a post-Tha Carter III and 808s & Heartbreak world, Cold Flamez are ambitious to bring their self-described “cold-hearted music” to the world and join their local predecessors in the hip-hop hall of fame.