Let me just tell you this… When you see a sealed 90s rap cassette of Hollow Tip’s debut album, Takin No Shortz, you gotta cop. You have to… Maybe not right away but you should at least be mulling it over in your head. You better be seeing if there’s something you can flip to get the cash… or do you just go hard and just lock it in quickly. I saw it on ebay… I watched it on eBay. I thought it about it at work… I thought about it in the morning… I thought about it when I woke up. I made that offer for $150 and I locked down one of my favorite 90s gangsta rap albums. Hollow Tip’s Takin No Shortz cassette had found its way to a new home fam.
I wish I could claim that I put Hollow Tip on the map with my OG crew but I can’t… That was George. We would go to Fam Mart down in east San Diego and come up on some rare 90s gangsta rap CD’s. We had the bootlegs… We got the promo posters… We were frequenting Fam Bam in hopes to get Brotha Lynch Hung’s Loaded album early, which we did. When the Makaveli bootlegs hit the glass shelves, we were in there like swimwear. We didn’t have much cash… Maybe enough for a CD. But Fam Bam had good deals so you knew you were walking out of that with fire. George came up on that fire.
George told me about Hollow Tip since he had the CD. He put me onto the good songs and we would listen to them at his pad in his boom box where he could pick the tracks to play. His little brother Jerry way way younger than us but we always made sure he was put on with the good shit. George and Jerry owned the Hollow Tip, Takin No Shortz experience and they were so hype to see my reaction to this CD. “No More Brains” was the first one for sure… “Steady Flossin” in the mix for sure. Jerry might be like… hey… let me press forward to a track… then “Ridin” would come on and we’d all be like, damn… this is hard.
Here were were like 16 or 17 straight mashing these tracks while looking at the artwork to the CD and the liner notes where we could learn about Hollow Tip aka J-Macc from Sacramento, CA. I learned what the 916 was from rappers like Hollow Tip, Brotha Lynch, Sicx, Gangsta Dre, X-Raided, C-Bo, and more.
Tracks like “Warlocc RIP” just hit different… It made me feel for Hollow Tip who lost his homie… Hollow Tip poured his heart out on the track and got feelings off his chest for the world to hear. Very brave and admirable to put yourself out there like that and maybe that’s why I gravitate to this album so much?
I’m just saying this… I’m guessing you missed this project but it’s not too late to get on… This shit knocks… Tracks like this below rattling in your car speakers is good for your soul… Don’t sleep on Hollow Tip’s album, Takin No Shortz… It’s way too dope.
And oh yeah… I got the sealed cassette now up for sale in the store… Go peep it and swoop in before it’s gone. $300 is a steal based on scarcity and the overall market for 90s gangsta rap out of Sacramento.