Tonight (Thursday April 5th) at SOM Bar in San Francisco, along with DJ Quest, Marc Stretch, & DJ Stef, I am going to be spinning an all Miami Bass booty-shaking DJ set as part of a one-off all Miami Bass night that should be a lot of fun. Free before 10pm. $5 thereafter at the Mission District club. All four of us DJs have a passion for this music that originated (as its name implies) in Miami, Florida in the latter half of the 80's and continued to proser into the 90's. An 808 drum machine driven music, with layers upon layers of booming bass (some records even carried "speaker warning" stickers), it was geared for both booty shaking (dancefloor) and bass booming speakers (the club and the trunk of the car - such as L'Trimm's "Cars That Goes Boom" off their 1988 album Grab It. )

Miami Bass or "booty bass" took hold in Miami Florida and was a direct continuation of NYC's early 80's electro funk hip-hop in much the same way as the 1980's LA electro hip-hop similarly took its cue from Afrika Bambaataa and the other New York City electro pioneers from earlier in that decade. But, as distinct from West Coast and the original NYC electro,  Miami Booty Bass music had its own unique identity. Rather than being political or Afro-Centric with tales of ancestry of Egypt, Egypt or even early gangsta rap - the music from Miami was more simple, chant along, and in many cases much more sexually explicit - as proven by the most popular of the Miami bass groups who became prominent nationally in the latter 80's - The 2 Live Crew. With explicit lyrics laced songs like "We Want Some Pussy," the 2 Live Crew had a major influence on this music - both lyrically and in choice of samples.  Most Miami Bass, a singles driven genre, was released on small indie labels with majors selectively picking up the songs that had proven to be regional hits and hence likely to become commercial national hits.