Photo by Virgil Solis
Words by Alexander “RTC” Fruchter
It’s Friday, November 19th. We’re at SoundScape Studios in Chicago, IL. The city is buzzing with activity, as Kanye West’s new album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, is set to hit stores in just a matter of days and the newest addition to his G.O.O.D. Music family is in Chicago set to make his debut at our Digital Freshness party on Saturday night. But we’re not talking about the impending performance, or Kanye’s album for that matter. Nope, not right now. In fact, nobody is doing much talking at all. A soulful and breezy instrumental has been playing on loop for the last couple hours, a full helping of Harold’s has been consumed, and CyHi is busy writing.
He is in his own zone, constructing rhymes, forming them into couplets, and rapping them to himself as the instrumental continues to loop. From time to time he breaks his silence to double check a reference, show his partner, Mike, a new text message from “someone out in Calgary,” or say something crazy like, “this is one of the best verses I’ve ever written.” It was statements like the latter that continued to give me the chills. I’ve been in the studio with a lot of artists, but none really like CyHi Da Prynce, and no other Closed Session felt like this one. I knew we captured lightning in a bottle, and however this song shaped up, it was going to be something special.
“What’s that dude’s name?” CyHi asked, “Dude that made ‘Exhibit C’? Jay Electronica…. This is gonna be like that,” he said, pretty much answering his own question. After finishing his first verse, he took to the recording booth. And you know what? He was right. One verse in and he nailed it. As he picked up his pen to begin verse number two, Mike received a call from G.O.O.D. Music. It was after all Friday, and for the previous few weeks Kanye and company had been dropping free music every Friday night, giving fans a chance to hear what they’d been cooking up in advance of the new album. “They want ‘Whoop De Doo,'” Mike said. “Tonight.”
And just like that, the gears shifted, an instrumental was downloaded, a phone call was made to Big Sean and the rest of our Closed Session was put on hold, with CyHi finishing it the following day before his performance. Of course though, we kept our cameras rolling the whole time, documenting the creation of “Whoop De Doo” as well as asking CyHi about its meaning. We never released the footage because the song didn’t make it out in time, and remained unreleased. That is until this week when CyHi included it on his recently released Royal Flush 2. Watch the video below to see it come together. And oh yes, we still got that Closed Session laying around somewhere.