12" - 1998 - Mars Ent.
In 1998 , this 12" was released by a hip-hop trio named 3rd Degree from Piscataway New Jersey, about an hour outside of New York City. The group consisted of Terrence Eldridge a.k.a Ill-Technique, Scott Mack a.k.a Macadon and Randy Sconiers a.k.a UCZ (pronounced Uceez). The 12" is composed of 2 tracks named "Nobody's Bizness" and "Travel Through The Darkness" available in their Radio, Street and Instrumental versions.
If you want to dig this, you need to know that the wax is really hard to find online for a descent price and I've never seen one in a record store...
UCZ : "Tek and Mac are cousins that grew up together. I met both just walking to school around the age of 13 as I was new to the town. They were already doing music and I was already doing music so it was an instant connection. We were all creatives with a love for Hip-Hop Culture and it just started ! The 3 of us formed the group and the rest is history. We have so much music together as we recorded everything ourselves. Mars Entertainment was our label that we created. It was under that umbrella that all of our work was released.
UCZ :"We definitely had intentions on putting out the album and had so much material but we started doing side projects, producing for other artist, and it never materialized until we released an album called 'Mars Stars', which was a Mix Tape album with 3rd Degree and our artist. There was so much fire on that but we just didn’t push it enough. We’re thinking about releasing it on I-tunes cause it’s such a dope album. All produced by us.
Ill-Tek and I have produced for Scienz of Life. Tek actually did a few joints with them and it’s on their Best of Scienz of Life album as a producer.
UCZ :"We grew up with JR, ID, so it’s dope to see JR still doing great work. We mainly did stuff for local artist out here. Born, B-Rock, L-Wyze, Naypalm, and some other local talent including singers as well. Our studio was also a business so we always had artist coming through for beats. We were selling beats/studio time back then with our ASR-10 Keyboard...that was our foundation.
We used to do Beat Battles and Showcases out here in Jersey so that was dope to showcase ourselves as producers as well. We were similar to the Beatnuts in that regard... 3 man team of MCs and Producers."
In 2016, Kyle Lilly uploaded a video recorded in 1998 with a full interview of 3rd Degree and a Showcase performance with 2 unreleased songs from the album. The video comes from a show called 'Video Explosion'. For those who don't know it, it was a Hip Hop/R&B/Soul/Reggae and Pop video program produced and directed by Haywood "Hollywood" Oakman. The program debuted in Queens, NY in 1991 and was shot in all boroughs of NYC, and New Jersey.
UCZ : "At that time we just did everything through word of mouth. We put up stickers and sent the 12" to Stretch & Bobbito and they played it and some other stations locally played it as well. It still getting posted on YouTube. We see people talking about it which is cool. We definitely wished we would have worked it more!"
Unreleased tracks coming soon on the blog... stay tuned !
Mad Props to Randy NewSteps Sconiers ... thanks for your time Bro.
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