Needle Kineval: It's Yours - White Label and Hard To Find

The Lone Ranger aka Q-T!p - It's Yours / z/s/h/a/r/e
And 1: T-La Rock - It's Yours / z/s/h/a/r/e

Oh shit it's classic time. T La Rock has historically been slept on yet regarded as one of the best MCs in the game. Q-T!p paid homage back in '98 to one of the highly revered and respected tracks in hip hop history. Wanting to avoid trouble with his then label "Jive" he released this 12" under the gise of The Lone Ranger. There wasn't much info on this record other than the fact that it was Q-T!p. The belief was that this was Q-T!p's first solo record and pointed to the end of A Tribe Called Quest. There was abundant speculation at this point regarding an eventual break up and solo projects from both Phife Dawg and Q-T!p followed in subsequent years. The Lone Ranger did not stick long and Q-T!p remained Q-T!p. Regardless this was a hard 12" to come by and had no promo nor press to back it when it dropped.

I bought this 12" for a modern take on a old school classic. Undoubtedly T La Rock's original version had sounded a little "out-dated" beatwise by the '98s and grabbing this 12" allowed me to drop it alongside other current jams and re-introduce such a classic to the next generation of hip hop heads. In any case, T!p smashes the cover version.

In 1984, T La Rock and his brother Special K (of The Treacherous Three) wrote "It's Yours," which was the first song ever produced by Rick Rubin and his fledgling Def Jam company. "It's Yours" 12" (Cat. PT-104) was the very first Def Jam record. Although some might argue that LL Cool J's "I Need a Beat" 12" was the first, this is not exactly true. The "It's Yours" recording was something Rick Rubin put out on the Streetwise Records subsidiary label Party Time Records, a few months before joining forces with Russell Simmons. The song was the first single to feature a Def Jam Recordings logo, but it was released through producer Arthur Baker's independent label Party Time, which was the hip hop division of his dance music label Streetwise Records. The recording was never part of Def Jam’s collection of master recordings.

In a 1996 interview with The New York Times, Def Jam co-founder Russell Simmons commented about the effect T La Rock and "It's Yours" had on the early hip hop scene:

“It ["It's Yours"] was big, big in the underground. T [La Rock] started the trend and a new direction in hip-hop. He used 40-letter words. He created a special poetry. LL Cool J was the second release on the label. He borrowed ideas and attitude from T. LL would agree.”

The influence of T La Rock's "It's Yours" has been seen in sampling by hip-hop group Public Enemy in "Louder than a Bomb" from its 1988 release It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back; emcee Nas in "The World is Yours" from his seminal 1994 album Illmatic; by many sample-based house-music tracks by Todd Terry, and by emcee and DJ Edan in "Fumbling over Words that Rhyme" from his 2005 album Beauty and the Beat. The song was later in the soundtrack of the video game Grand Theft Auto IV, in the old school hip hop radio station the Classics 104.1. It was also used by the Beastie Boys on their song Paul Revere off their famous 1986 album Licensed to Ill, an album also produced by Rick Rubin off Def Jam.

On the strength of "It's Yours," T La Rock was signed by Fresh/Sleeping Bag Records and released two albums: Lyrical King (From the Boogie Down Bronx in 1987, and On a Warpath in 1989. Lyrical King was produced by T La Rock and DJ Louie Lou, while Todd Terry produced On a Warpath. [source]