Wiki
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Length
3:23
“Survival Tactics” remixes the song of the same title by Styles of Beyond and produced by Vin Skully.
Joey borrows a lot of different flows from older artists to compliment the old boom-bap style he themes his work around across the mixtape.
It has been alleged that Cinematic Music Group, the label under which Joey released the 1999 album, credited Joey with this song to focus attention on him even though it was a collaborative work with Capital STEEZ.
According to an article by the Fader Magazine:
"“Survival Tactics” had initially been credited to Joey Bada$$ and Capital Steez—Steez had found the beat, and the song was his idea—but it had been rebranded as “Joey Bada$$ featuring Capital Steez” by the time the video made by Cinematic’s multimedia partner, Creative Control, was released."
"I wrote to the beat of MF Doom’s “Monkey Suit.” Steeze had out me on to Doom. It was almost like I went home and I started like studying Doom. I started falling in love with his rhyme schemes. Just his whole artistic style. Back then, I was big on not listening to songs, just going to the beats. I actually heard “Monkey Suit” once, like the actual song. But I just fell in love with that Madlib beat. And then I pull up the instrumental and I wrote this “Survival Tactics” verse to that.
The next day I came to school and saw Steeze in the lunchroom. I was like, “Yo. You gotta hear this verse, B.” I spit it for him or whatever. He’s like, “Yo that shit is hard but you should put it on this beat and let’s do it together”.
We went back to my crib probably like twelve deep, squished in my room. That’s why it was so much energy on that song. It was just a vibe. We were just jumping in, sharing our thoughts, sharing our expression.
Because I was going first, I’m trying to start off the song or whatever. I remember my energy not being right. So Steeze recorded his second verse. He was like, “Yo, look I got you. I got you.” ‘Cause he was like my big bro. He was like. “Yo bro. Do it like this.” And he spit his second verse. I was like. “Alright, bet”. Then I went back and spit my verse with like that energy that you hear on that track." - via Genius
"We knew that this shit was fire. We just knew this song was hard. It was the hardest song we recorded to date. We all were so excited about this song that we put it up out of excitement. We probably recorded in like September, when it was still like warm outside. And we just put it out in November. And then the video finally came in February of 2012. But we put this shit out in 2011. Like on our sound clouds and all that." - via Genius
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