Underground Vol. 1: 1991-1994

In the early ’90s, the epicenter of Memphis hip-hop was a nondescript brick building at the corner of Larkin and Cleveland Streets. Its awning had the cluttered look of a word-of-mouth business that didn’t need much advertising push. The peeling, Zenith logo-referencing “Z” of “Mr. Z Sound Express” was flanked by three bullet points: auto stereo, auto alarm, window tint. Saeed Zarshenas, aka Mr. Z, had emigrated to Memphis from Shiraz, Iran, in 1977 with a plan to study business at an American school and return home. But in November 1979, after Iranian students attacked the American embassy in Tehran and took 53 hostages, tensions flared between the two countries. Zarshenas found himself stranded in the U.S.

He jumped from menial job to menial job in the early ’80s, but, noticing a burgeoning public interest in beefed-up car stereos, started hawking aftermarket equipment on the side. In a few years, that side hustle turned into a steady living, and he opened a storefront in the Crosstown neighborhood. The crack epidemic hit Memphis hard, and by 1988, Zarshenas noticed a strange but serious uptick in business. “People were selling a lot of drugs, and they didn’t know what to do with their money,” he said in an interview with journalist Torii MacAdams for Vinyl Me Please. “They couldn’t spend it to buy a house, couldn’t put it in the bank, so they’d go buy a car for $300, $400 and bring it here, put a $1,000, $1,500, $2,000 system in each car.” Zarshenas figured these folks needed something to test their new stereos’ power, so he began selling mixtapes from local DJs Soni D and Spanish Fly.

Some tapes doubled as advertisements for Mr. Z Sound Express—DJ Spanish Fly cut “Going to Mr. Z’s,” a booming endorsement of Zarshenas’ services—but soon the stereo shop became a commercial nexus in an exploding, albeit insular, hip-hop scene. In the early ’90s, mainstream rap was a mostly coastal affair, and its biggest stars—the Notorious B.I.G., Wu-Tang Clan, Tupac, and Dr. Dre—came out of New York City or Los Angeles. There was little consideration for anywhere in between. Tommy Wright III, one of the architects of the ’90s Memphis sound, said as much to Complex: “I came up at a time when you pretty much thought you’d never get played in New York.” There were rumblings in certain pockets of the Deep South, though; Memphis powerhouses 8Ball and MJG, sensing Houston’s potential, decamped in 1992 to work with Suave House on their breakthrough, 1993’s Comin’ Out Hard. But most Memphis artists understood that whatever they built wasn’t likely to turn heads nationally. As scene legend DJ Zirk told Atlanta radio journalist Brian “B High” Hightower, when he was coming up, “The only thing you heard was local…We didn’t rock to everyone else’s music.”

DJs were the prime movers in Memphis, with pioneers like DJ Sound making mixes that featured rappers from around the way. If you had a four-track, a mic, and a connection to a DJ, your best bet for making a name in the city was to land an appearance on one of their tapes. A good look from a DJ could be a game changer, as Gangsta Pat (whose 1995 album Deadly Verses is another essential listen) pointed out to Memphian YouTube personality Z-Dogg: “[Listeners] wasn’t going to the artists, they was going to the DJs because they knew the DJ had picked through all the stuff [to find the] best.” In another Z-Dogg video, Homicyde, a member of early rap group Backyard Posse, recalled the organic network of backpacks and trunks through which music might end up on a shelf at Mr. Z’s. “When we did music back then, it was on a cassette tape,” he said. “If we gave it to a cousin or something, next thing you know, you hear this motherfucker on a mixtape.”

The Memphis sound was simple, intense, and effective: samples from Stax soul classics or horror movie soundtracks, booming 808 bass, metallic snare drums, and ticking hi-hats that occasionally skipped like a quickening pulse. It’s hard to accurately pinpoint the sound’s progenitors, but among longtime fans and the scene’s living elder statesmen, there’s a loose consensus that its initial innovators were DJ Squeeky and DJ Zirk. Kingpin Skinny Pimp, one of the period’s heavyweight MCs, specifically credits Squeeky for originating the ratcheting trap cymbals found in all manner of hip-hop production today. Both DJs traded in swampy murk, programming on rudimentary drum machines like the Boss DR-660 or DR-5. But Squeeky’s work emphasized melody while Zirk’s was darker, more textural. Their beats chugged along at a narcotic half-speed, enormous bass bursting through the limited frequency range of a dubbed cassette. If there was a unified theme, it was a bleak reflection of a city all but forgotten by the rest of the country, rife with poverty and plunging into violence.

The enduring (read: thankfully preserved) tapes, like Zirk’s 2 Thick and Squeeky’s Volume 9, folded the Memphis rap landscape in on itself, creating self-referential celebrations of the culture. Rappers from all over the city came together on these tracks, but an MC didn’t necessarily have to be in the room to appear on a song: producers might assemble a hook by sampling verses from other tapes. On Tom Skeemask’s “Niggas Watch Your Back,” DJ Squeeky lifts a few lines of DJ Zirk’s verse from Criminal Manne’s “Playaz in the Game” to create the chorus. Zirk’s track “2 Thick,” which features Tom Skeemask and Buckshot, is one of the most sampled tunes in the Memphis rap canon, with snippets appearing on tracks by Project Pat, Lord Infamous, Playa Fly, Lil Noid, and many more—its own hook cribbed from “Squeeze the Trigger” by Juicy J and Killa B. Listening to these tapes 30-plus years later, whether on YouTube or via small reissue labels, you can sense the urgency in this method. Each song provided building blocks for countless others; tracing the connections reveals a map of Memphis, an oral history—however incomplete—of a vibrant community that went largely undocumented at the time.

Though Underground Vol. 1: 1991-1994 isn’t a reissue of a specific lost tape, it’s a crucial part of that historical record. It provides context for how Three 6 Mafia, one of the few Memphis acts to build long-lasting careers out of the smoke-’em-if-you-got-’em early ’90s, developed into one of the biggest, most influential hip-hop acts in the South. It’s a showcase for the innovative, mesmeric production Memphians were creating with very basic tools, as well as a crash course in the despair that hung over the city like unbreakable cloud cover. For those without the patience to comb through the poor-quality bootlegs cataloged by a few intrepid YouTube channels, it serves as a bridge to an esoteric period, one of the vanishingly few slices of ’90s Memphis rap lore that’s easily accessible.

When Juicy J and DJ Paul, the pillars of Three 6 Mafia, met in 1991, both worked as DJs in different parts of town. Juicy, born Jordan Houston, was finding success in clubs on his North Memphis home turf, while Paul Beauregard was, as he put it to Vice, “the hottest on the South Side.” They became fast friends, enamored with each other’s production style. Juicy had been releasing tapes featuring plenty of Bluff City heavies, and Paul had been working with his half-brother, Lord Infamous, under the name Serial Killaz. Once Juicy entered the mix, the group adopted the name Backyard Posse and ballooned to over 20 members, including mixtape mainstays Kingpin Skinny Pimp and Lil Gin of Gimisum Family, Lil Fly (later known as Playa Fly), Homicyde, and La Chat. Realizing how cumbersome a large collective could be, they eventually slimmed membership down to an economical six: DJ Paul, Juicy J, Lord Infamous, Crunchy Black, Gangsta Boo, and Koopsta Knicca. The name Triple Six Mafia came from a tossed-off line at the end of Lord Infamous’ song “Silent Night”: “So when you try to test the Triple Six Mafia/.44 mag, infrared, and a silencer.” Paul thought it sounded cool and began sprinkling the line throughout their songs. The name eventually softened to the slightly more palatable “Three 6 Mafia” as the group’s profile rose beyond Memphis.

Conventional hip-hop history points to Mystic Stylez, their 1995 debut, as Three 6 Mafia’s undeniable masterpiece. An East Coast-West Coast rivalry had sparked at the end of 1994, when Tupac was shot five times at a New York City recording studio, an attack he blamed on Biggie and the Bad Boy crew. The ensuing media frenzy pitted slinking California G-funk and jazzy New York boom bap against each other, each competing to fully dominate the airwaves. Mystic Stylez was a seismic shift: It drew eyes away from the warring coasts and toward the mysterious sounds bubbling in the South.

The praise for Mystic Stylez isn’t overblown—the album was a cold-water plunge into the depths of a new Southern Gothic, a nightmarish vision of danger lurking in the abandoned corners of a collapsing American city. The group invested $4,500 in its recording, enough to clean up the grime left on their songs by cheaper equipment. The debut is much slicker than anything on Underground Vol. 1, updating the gloomy, sample-driven sound of their early work to incorporate the muddy funk that groups like UGK and OutKast were exploring (a style DJ Paul and Juicy J would perfect a year later on Kingpin Skinny Pimp’s classic King of Da Playaz Ball). Mystic Stylez portended the expansive, expensive-sounding bombast the group would become known for in the mid-’00s without sacrificing any of the hair-raising aura they’d established. Compared to the coarser, druggier sound of Underground Vol. 1, though, Mystic Stylez almost feels like the work of an entirely different group.

Underground Vol. 1 was assembled from early tapes issued by various iterations of Three 6 Mafia before they settled into their Mystic Stylez configuration, and even solid remastering can’t scrub these songs of their caked-on sludge. It’s brown-acid psychedelia, a harsh-sounding collection full of low-bitrate loops, drums that snap like cracking joints, and deadpan vocals washed in reverb, all blanketed in snowy tape hiss. Tempos feel like running in a dream, each thunderous bass drum landing like Nancy Thompson trudging up a melting staircase. The darkness is pervasive and suffocating, a nihilism that’s amplified by the escapist pleasures of sex and drugs (“Sometimes I wonder why come I commit all these murders when full of the ganja,” raps Lord Infamous on “Where Da Bud At”). It’s a harrowing, commanding, hypnotic listen.

By the time Underground Vol. 1 was released in 1999, Three 6 Mafia had become serious songwriters and minor hitmakers, which made Underground all the more jarring. The version of Three 6 Mafia that national audiences had become familiar with was more club-ready than club-swinging. It made Underground Vol. 1 confounding—the dreary, warped-tape sound of the early ’90s hadn’t broken out of the city, so listeners didn’t have context for its funereal darkness, and the group hadn’t yet moved so far away for the collection to provide a contrasting origin story. Now, given the breadth and scope of the Three 6 Mafia discography, Underground Vol. 1 offers a critical groundwork. We can trace the spellbinding, minimalist melody of “Sippin’ on Some Syrup” back to the otherworldly bleeping pattern that moves through “Talk Ya Ass Off” or find the chintzy keyboards of “Don’t Be Scared” reflected in the glassy FM synths of “Ghetto Chick.” Underground Vol. 1 shows how adept Three 6 Mafia were at creating a vibe, fleshing out the ideas initially put forth by forebears like Squeeky and Zirk to form the basis of Southern trap music.

Though there are far fewer verses on Underground Vol. 1 than any of their studio albums, every track has vocals. Some are rapped with a flat, almost lifeless affect, while some, like the trancelike “Paul With Da 45” and “Time for Da Juice Mane,” are collaged from snippets of other Memphis jams. The songs feel ritualistic, like incantations recited by cloaked figures in flickering candlelight. The writing on Underground tracks like “Now I’m High, Really High,” which they’d expand across Mystic Stylez, conveyed the realities of life in Memphis through exaggerated, almost cartoonish depictions of horror and bloodshed.

Unlike the violence depicted in more mainstream gangsta rap, which could sometimes border on glorification, the carnage in Three 6 Mafia songs floated in a dissociative haze, delivered with the dead-eyed drawl of someone unavoidably enveloped by it. When, in “Playa Hataz,” Lord Infamous asks, “Why must I inflict all these multiple stab wounds when grabbing the butcher knife?/Why come I must torture and paralyze victims before I’m truly satisfied?” he sounds as though he’s rapping from the bottom of a pill bottle. When paired with the shoutouts of Memphis neighborhoods, it adds up to a clear thesis: The cycle of brutality is as ubiquitous as it is perpetual.

Though it’s clearly of a certain moment, there’s a timelessness to Underground Vol. 1 that doesn’t apply to the rest of the Three 6 Mafia catalog. You can hear its direct influence everywhere, like Denzel Curry’s “Demonz On My Mind,” where he namedrops Underground opener “Ridin’ N’ Da Chevy” and references a line from Lord Infamous’ verse on “Now I’m High, Really High”: “I need the B, the L, the U-N-T.” Nickelus F’s “Dump You in a Rivah” samples phrases from Gangsta Boo’s “Hard Not 2 Kill” for a beautiful, trippy tribute to the vocal sample tracks on Underground. Isaiah Rashad’s “Lay Wit Ya” samples “Ridin’ N’ Da Chevy,” barely updating the original’s simple thump. You can draw a line from Underground’s dreamy, static-ridden production to Clams Casino’s hallucinatory lurch or Messiah Musik’s lo-fi, loop-driven crunch. Its tendrils reach everywhere, the sonic blueprint for three decades of rap innovation.

At some point in the late ’90s, Memphis distribution company Select-O Hits partnered with the MPD (unfortunately rumored to be at the urging of Juicy J and DJ Paul) to organize stings on supposed bootleggers—including stereo shops like Mr. Z’s. Zarshenas, wary of the $10,000 fine, bagged up his remaining stock of rap tapes and tossed them in a dumpster. Dedicated Memphis heads search high and low for these tapes; many have been successfully located and archived, but countless documents of one of the country’s most fascinating rap scenes are lost to the ages, slowly degrading in some West Tennessee dump. That makes Underground Vol. 1 that much more important. It’s an enduring cryptogram that links past and present, a key corner of a jigsaw puzzle from which many pieces have been irretrievably lost.