The World's Famous Beatnuts
On the Beatnuts' debut album, Street Level, childhood frenemies, and the days when horns dominated hip hop
The Beatnuts are my favorite 90s rap group you’ve probably never heard of.1 Originally from Queens, New York (Corona and Jackson Heights, respectively), the group’s members are Juju and Psycho Les, both rappers and a production team. For a time, rapper Fashion was also in the group until he converted to Islam and decided calling himself an “intoxicated demon” and making songs with titles like “Lick the P*ssy” and “Psycho Dwarf” conflicted with his faith.2
Part of the Native Tongues,3 a collective of 90s Afrocentric, jazz-inspired rappers including A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, and Queen Latifah, the Beatnuts were like the wild-ass cousins of the family. The only Latinos4 in the crew, they were some of the first Latin rappers to release an album,5 along with Cypress Hill, Kid Frost, and Fat Joe. The ‘Nuts’ sound, especially on Street Level,6 is vintage, golden-era New York rap like Tribe or De La: dusty drums; sample-heavy melodies,7 mostly jazz, blues, and funk; and lots of scratching, but lyrically, the vibe wasn’t peace, love, and Black empowerment. Let’s just say, the Beatnuts weren’t leaving their wallets in El Segundo unless they ended up there on a bender or a drug run.
Street Level is pre-bling era, party rap, except the party wasn’t at the Tunnel or the Roxy. It was right outside the bodega in Corona, sitting on empty milk crates, “puffing on a fat one [and] guzzling a Guiness Stout.”8 Don’t get it twisted though. Psycho Les and Juju were some intoxicated demons. “Stare too long and your ass will get jumped.”9 On Street Level alone, they sent shots at Q-Tip,10 Redman,11 an unnamed A&R that passed on their demo, and said your mom was “a dirty custodian.”12 While Queen Latifah may have been calling for U.N.I.T.Y., if the Beatnuts “wanted you killed, you’d already be dead.”13
I learned about the Beatnuts not long after Street Level dropped from this kid named Andrew. Although we hung out on the regular for years, lived five blocks from each other, and went to the same middle school and high school, I wouldn’t call us “friends.” How could you be friends with a kid that made you flinch whenever he moved quickly because he was prone to cripple dudes with a vicious sack tap? From 6th grade, I knew I couldn’t trust Andrew after he came over to play Altered Beast and heard my mother call me “babycakes,” one of many embarrassing nicknames she had for me, then he went to school the next day and told everybody.
Andrew might’ve been my first real frenemy. Looking back, his friendship was like being friends with a Beatnuts’ song. Over the years, he “snatched up [my girl]”14 (at least he didn’t “take her to White Castle”15); got drunk and “pissed on the carpet”16 the one time my mother went away for a weekend17; and had no problem “smack[ing] me with [his] elbow,”18 sometimes for no reason at all. Like a true frenemy, Andrew and I had our ups and downs. By high school, we fell into a pattern where he’d talk some shit about me (or hook up with my girlfriend, etc.), we’d fight, he’d usually kick my ass, and then I’d be like, fuck him for a while until eventually we’d be cool again because we rode the same bus and train to school and sat at the same lunch table.
About all I got out of this friendship that spanned most of my childhood was Andrew introducing me to the Beatnuts. On the days we were cool with each other, I hung out at his house after school, listening to music and doing the type of dumb shit middle school boys left unattended did back then, mainly breaking stuff or setting it on fire. Andrew shared a room in the attic with his older brother, and when he wasn’t around to call us names that would come with trigger warnings these days, we raided his CDs, spinning them on his system that made the rafters rattle.
One day we were kicking it after school in the attic, and Andrew said I had to hear this song. He put on Street Level, skipped to “Lick the P*ssy” because… of course, he would. As the song played, Andrew rapped along over that smooth bass and horn sample from Tyrone Davis’s “In the Mood,” emphasizing his favorite bars about “fiending for a third leg” and “eat[ing] like a shark.” Andrew spit “Lick the P*ssy” with such conviction I would’ve believed he was an expert on the subject — not an oafish, towheaded middle-school boy whose sex-pertise was largely based on his older brother’s Penthouse collection. But I suppose that’s the power of music, to transport, to inspire.
Next, Andrew put on “Psycho Dwarf.” The song, which appeared in a slightly different version on Intoxicated Demons The EP, and later, was reprised on The Spot Remix EP, is vintage Beatnuts, a party jam for the dudes outside the bodega or on the stoop in hoodies and Timbs. Driven by a sped-up trumpet, the chorus kicks off “Psycho Dwarf”: “I wanna fuck, drink beer, and smoke some shit.” (I promise it’s infectious, particularly for a couple of middle schoolers who hadn’t fucked, drank, or smoked a single shit.) Andrew shouted the words like he was trying to take Fashion’s place in the crew while I nodded my head to the beat, laughing so hard when Juju spit, “I used to fart in church and tell the preacher kiss my ass.” (All these years later, that line still makes me chuckle.)
Since the ‘Nuts began as DJs,19 getting the party started came naturally to them. They’d always have a knack for catchy hooks and turning obscure samples into earworms, like their biggest hit, “Watch Out Now.” On Andrew’s favorite cuts, Psycho Les and Juju weren’t breaking new ground lyrically,20 but they were ahead of the game when it came to sampling, mining records other producers wished they got their hands on first21 or thought to flip it the way the ‘Nuts did.
Sitting on Andrew’s bed in that attic listening to the Beatnuts for the first time, I didn’t know any of that. I just thought it was funny when Psycho Les said he was “flippin’ through loops like a lunatic dolphin”22 and Juju rapped about giving somebody a Colombian necktie, a threat my friends and I made toward each other all the time. For me and Andrew though, Street Level wasn’t about the bars. It was about the sex rhymes,23 a world we otherwise knew little about beyond the Penthouses Andrew scrounged up. The ‘Nuts kept it rawer than any porno mag could with cartoonish sexcapades about “ostrich-sized dick[s]”24 and catching splinters from their “woodie[s] in the parking lot behind McDonald’s.”25 Who else but some middle school boys would find a bar like “I had to fuck up Fred ‘cause he caught me fucking Wilma donkey-style on his bed”26 piss-yourself hilarious? The Beatnuts had us convinced we wanted to be a couple of psycho dwarfs that “hate to smile… like to drink, bust shots, and act wild”27 despite the fact that our moms would’ve had our asses if we tried.
An oldhead now, Street Level is pure nostalgia, not for the long-ago days of setting stuff on fire in my best frenemy’s backyard but for that time when I could walk down the street in my neighborhood in Queens and hear the thump of a Q-Tip or DJ Premier beat rattling somebody’s trunk. The Beatnuts’ debut brings me back to that era in hip hop when hit rap songs had horns and all that mattered was how many mics you got in The Source. In those days, sample clearance wasn’t such a pain in the ass, assuming the samples were cleared at all.28 It gave crate diggers like Psycho Les and Juju the freedom to experiment and make music without needing bank to put it out.
Moving into the late 90s and early 2000s, as Big Willies grew into Williams, there was money to be made. Samples became big business after Puff lifted the Police and flipped Biggie’s murder into the biggest hit of his career. As costs got exortbitant, the sound of hip hop was morphing. Rap entered its shiny suit era, inching the genre closer to pop music where radio-friendly hits with simple loops were the norm (peace out horns). Atlanta hip hop pioneers, Organized Noize, producers of OutKast and Goodie Mob, rarely sampled, instead relying on live instrumentation for their beats.29 Meanwhile, Swizz Beatz had the streets on lock in ‘98 and ‘99, and he didn’t use samples at all. He made those Ruff Ryder anthems on keyboards.
On Street Level, the Beatnuts were their rawest selves, ready to have a good time but willing to “bum rush your ass,” some real frenemy type shit. Their debut represents a bygone era when rappers wanted to be demons and dwarfs, not the next Pablo Escobar. While the ‘Nuts may not get the same props as other 90s rap groups, they were part of the wave of golden-era producers that made sampling an art. They could bend a horn until it sounded more like a screen door, or loop a flute into the biggest hit on rap radio — and an even bigger hit outside the bodega.
Unless you remember “Jenny from the Block” — the Trackmasters, who produced the beat, pretty much wholesale jacked it from the Beatnuts, leading to the ‘Nuts releasing a song where they dissed them and J.Lo.
Rapper/producer the Mighty V.I.C. was part of the Beatnuts for a blip as well, though by Street Level, his contribution was a beat (“Are You Ready?”) and a quick verse on “Fried Chicken.” According to this interview, he stopped showing up for studio sessions after he heard Fashion was talking shit behind his back, which is exactly what a frenemy would do to you. Just sayin’.
The Beatnuts fell out with Native Tongues over a beef with Q-Tip who the ‘Nuts believed took a shot at them in the liner notes for A Tribe Called Quest’s classic, The Low End Theory. The Beatnuts would respond to Tip with a few bars on “Hellraiser” off Street Level. The beef must’ve been squashed soon after since the Beatnuts would sample two Tribe songs on their second album, Stone Crazy, and Q-Tip’s been known to shout-out the ‘Nuts as members of Native Tongues in interviews.
Juju is Dominican, and Psycho Les is Colombian.
The Beatnuts were some of the first to fuse hip hop with Latin music, sampling meringue, salsa, and cumbia.
Technically, the album is considered self-titled, but old heads like me call it Street Level because it says “Street Level” on the damn cover.
Long before “Mask Off,” the ‘Nuts were flipping flute samples, horns, keyboards, tambourine, cowbells, you name it.
Juju, “Ya Don’t Stop,” Street Level, 1994.
Psycho Les, “Superbad,” Street Level, 1994.
Psycho Les, “Straight Jacket,” Street Level, 1994.
Juju, “Props Over Here,” Street Level, 1994.
Psycho Les, “Reign of the Tec,” Intoxicated Demons The EP, 1993.
Psycho Les, “Reign of the Tec,” Intoxicated Demons The EP, 1993.
Psycho Les, “Story,” Intoxicated Demons The EP, 1993.
Honestly, it was a hardwood floor, but I still had to clean up the guy’s piss.
Psycho Les, “Superbad,” Street Level, 1994.
Originally, they went by the Beat Kings until the Jungle Brothers, another rap group in Native Tongues, told them they weren’t kings — they were nuts, and the name stuck.
“Lick the P*ssy” deserves props for being one of the first odes to oral sex, for sure.
They flipped Patrice Rushen’s “Forget Me Nots,” the same melody that the “Men in Black” theme song is based on, meaning I can’t hear, “Here come the Men in Black…” without thinking of the Beatnuts’ song, “Give Me Tha Ass.”
Psycho Les, “Psycho Dwarf,” Street Level, 1994.
90s sex raps needs to be a featured mix on Spotify. People offended by “W.A.P.” never heard Akinyele’s “Put it in Ya’ Mouth” or anything by 2 Live Crew.
Psycho Les, “Sandwiches,” Street Level, 1994.
Psycho Les, “2-3 Break,” Street Level, 1994.
Psycho Les, “Yeah You Get Props,” Street Level, 1994.
Juju, “Straight Jacket,” Street Level, 1994.
The Beatnuts’ second album, Stone Crazy, isn’t on streaming services because of sample clearance issues, like several other rap albums of their era.
Shout-out Organized Noize for producing maybe one of the best hip hop songs with horns ever, “SpottieOttieDopaliscious.”