Need help identifying an unreleased Royal Fam track circa 2001
Back in 2001, I bought a streetball DVD set to rap music called “Ball Above All”. It appears an obscure, unreleased Royal Fam track is on this DVD.
Some background on my search. I always knew the song in question was a masterpiece. It was chosen to appear last on the DVD, kinda like an end banger for the DVD to go out on. About 5 years ago I tried some basic searches to identify the emcees but kinda gave up. It’s not until these last couple of months I have been serious in my search. Part of the problem why I initially came empty in my search is because I was searching for exactly a “Royal Family” rap group. Back then I was unfamiliar with the whole Wu affiliated music so I couldn’t piece it together at that point. The DVD music credits list exactly a “Royal Family-Bounce” song.
From my searches, a “Bounce” song is not in any of Royal Fam’s official discography, so it must be an unreleased song that never saw the light of day with the exception of this DVD. The link to the DVD is below and the track in question appears at the 7:47 minute mark and ends at the 10:47 minute mark.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=o6Pzmw1hRVE
The song has no hook and it features 3 emcees on 3 verses. What’s the history on this song and who are the 3 emcees? Who produced the song? I have asked around and some say it’s definitely Wu affiliated and it sounds like an Arabian Knight production or Y Kim production. The emcees don’t sound like the Royal Fam that we know of today.
From my research, I believe the 2nd verse emcee is the female emcee “Champaigne”. The 3rd verse emcee appears to be Paragone Celestial. The 3rd verse starts with “Champaigne, peep the way I just blaze mics”. The 3rd verse continues “Paragone stay on the rise just like a trail of water”. I still can’t identify who the first emcee could be. But if in fact Champaigne and Paragone are on this track, I am curious to know how the song gets credited as “Royal Family” in the DVD. Obviously they misspelled the artist, and this is not surprising because other songs in the DVD credits have small spelling mistakes as well, plus the music credits list a song that doesn’t appear at all in the DVD.
Some notable lyrics to mention.
1st verse - “Blake slaughtered it, recording source slash Orphanage”
2nd verse - “Blake’s the Heavyweight”
This has always eluded me. Who is Blake? He gets mentioned not once, but twice.
I’ll say it again, in my book this track is a masterpiece that has stood the test of time. The beat, the flow, the lyricism. It’s in my Top 5 “No Chorus” rap songs of all time list, up there with DMX’s Blackout and Diddy’s Reverse.
PS-Big shout out and thank you to “Bee 7” from Back2DaSource Records. For a while my search was coming up dry as far as emcees, the one day I asked him about this song and he quickly pointed out the 3rd verse emcee is likely Paragone Celestial. Then I put 2+2 together from there to identify Champaigne in the 2nd verse…1st verse emcee is still unknown.
PPS-For what it’s worth, I reached out to the emcee “Cashmere the Professional” to ask him about his track “Nunayall” which is the opening song on the DVD. He said the people who threw that track on the DVD grabbed it off mp3.com and Cashmere the Pro was unaware of it until the DVD was out for months.
