A few years ago, we featured DJ Eclipse’s amazing, minimalist remix to O.C.’s “Born 2 Live” off Omar Credle’s 1994 debut/magnum opus, Word…Life.
Eclipse blessed us with the original remix which differs slightly from the version that’s currently out there. In his words:
I did the original version of the remix at home. I took the 12″ test pressing acapella and sampled it into the Akai S-1000 and then did the beat on the S-950. I had recently been commissioned by Columbia to submit a remix for Nas’ “Life’s A Bitch,” so I had the acapella of that and decided to take the “My physical frame is celebrated cause I made it” line and use it for the chorus. Made perfect sense with the song plus at that time O.C. and Nas were part of our whole Serchlite camp, so I was trying to keep it in the family.
Everything was sequenced in Performer on an old ass Macintosh SE computer. I made a cassette of it and brought it in to work. Everyone around the office (Wild Pitch) had liked it, including O.C. whose response was “Damn, why didn’t you do this before we put the 12″ out?” Can’t remember exactly if I had gave a copy on cassette directly to Pete Rock, but one way or another him and Marley got hold of it and played it on Future Flavas. The following week they played it again saying something like “This is the most requested record from last week”. So we all got hype back at the office and decided to go ahead and press it up.
If I remember correctly, we did 500 promo copies. The funny thing though is that when I went to Power Play to actually lay down the remix officially, Wild Pitch had sent me with the reel for the Organized Konfusion “Born 2 Live” remix (which is also on the album). Problem with that is it’s a totally different version than the one that Buckwild did. It was a few BPMs faster. So I had to sit there with Dino Zervos (the engineer) and pitch all the samples up to make it fit this new version. So although nobody knew that, that’s why this OG version is slower and also has some different sequences in it. You’ll also notice the “Shit like that was mad deep” line actually echoes out. Can’t remember why it didn’t in the final version, but it was supposed to.
