S.A. Smash | en

S.A. Smash was a hip-hop duo that consists of Camu Tao and Metro.

Remember the kids who jacked your new bike in 6th grade. Or the guy who stole your date at the prom? The motherfuckers who always seemed like they were having much more fun than you? Well, that's S.A. Smash, and shit ain't changed a bit. Ego's are about to get hurt. Thugs are about to get touchy. Everyone is going to be crying to they're mama. Be warned. Straight out of Columbus, Ohio, hip-hop's newest indie rap-star breeding ground, S.A. Smash has come to fuck up your state of mind.

With their full-length album, Smashy Trashy, which was released on June 3, 2003, Camu Tao and his main-man Metro have crafted a thump heavy, hilarious and unhinged album that will smash conventional attitudes about how Def Jukies get down. Camu has earned tremendous street cred as an MC and up-and-coming producer through his co-founding of both the new school posse MHz (also featuring RJD2), and the supergroup The Weathermen (also featuring El-P, Cage, Mighty Mi, Copywrite, and Vast Aire).

In '02 he rocked heads with the release of his debut Definitive Jux Records 12" "Hold The Floor", which was soon rotated regularly on indie turntables worldwide. Metro has ripped mics all over the country and is set to take off with the S.A. Smash debut as his first major album release. Keep your Rolex in the safe or it might get Juxed. S.A. Smash are here to party and bullshit. Smashy Trashy is the sound of two young, thorough hip-hop heads from the sticks let loose in the big city of dreams. Camu and Metro kick knowledge with the best, but Smashy Trashy is them at their bucwildest, fusing the memory of their formative hip-hop experiences – ripping open mics and getting wasted with college kids back in Columbus – with their more recent night crawler excursions in New York's glam-trash districts of the L.E.S. and Williamsburg.

Teaming up with fellow true-school celebrities Aesop Rock and Vast Aire (of Cannibal Ox), S.A. Smash lay down some of the wildest b-boy confessions on wax. Aesop drops a sly cameo on the on the horndog manifesto "Love to Fuck", while Vast flexes a newer, playalicious side on the clubby "Slide on 'Em". Camu and Met (aka "Mr. Fuck-A-Lot") have no trouble holding their own as they get grimy on bar brawling, heat-holding blackouts like "A.A." and "Clout", run game on third-tier groupies after the show on "Robot" and wake up hungover in yesterday's clothes not once, "Last Night II", but twice "Get Home (Skit)". El-P makes his affection for the wild affair known by lacing the impassioned anthem of wasted talent and life, "Illy", with head-nod soul.

Underneath all the blunt guts, Heineken empties and Trojan wrappers, these Smash brothers have a message in mind. They want to free the music they love. Hip hop is choking itself with artificial divisions: underground, commercial, conscious, gangsta; those are just buzzwords for marketers and lazy journalists. Actual rappers are three-dimensional people with frailties, contradictions and vices to grapple with. Or indulge as the case may be. S.A. Smash are new blood, ready to get dirty and raw, in the tradition of the Alkaholiks; all the rowdy-rowdy, none of the bling-bling. The underground can't hold S.A. Smash; They're outsized. Outsized concepts, outsized tracks, outsized appetites, outsized rhymes. This is bangin' street hop with all the attitude of Eddie Haskell if he grew up in the hood. You'll never have so much fun getting smashed and trashed. Camu Tao died on May 25, 2008, after a two-year battle with lung cancer. .