Known for putting a hole in the hoe-zone, the Ying Yang Twins & Mr. Collipark have teamed up with Wyclef Jean on their new album,
Chemically Imbalanced. Prepare for global warming.
STORY carlton wade | PHOTOGRAPHY michael blackwell
When Michael “Mr. Collipark” Crooms got wind that Wyclef Jean and Jerry “Wonder” Duplesis wanted to make music with him and the Ying Yang Twins, it was beyond his wildest imagination. Sure, the slapstick rap duo Kaine and D-Roc have had the South sewed for some time now with happy-feeling club jams like “Whistle While You Twerk” and “Say Yi Yi Yi.” They even pushed their 808 bass-originated booty music to the American masses with the sexually seductive “Wait (The Whisper Song)” and the two back-to-back platinum albums Me & My Brother in 2003 and USA: United State of Atlanta in 2005. But to them, Wyclef had built a reputation that exceeded just rap music.
“Wyclef Jean and Jerry Wonder have been making world music for quite some time now,” Kaine insists between frames of a photo shoot for their sixth album Chemically Imbalanced in a northeast ATL sound stage. “We’ve been making music that has been appealing to the world. There’s a difference.”
Up until now, the man most responsible for the Ying Yang’s sound and appeal has been Crooms. A DJ by trade, Collipark (re-named after his bordering hometown suburb College Park) is a master in getting parties started. Under the moniker DJ Smurf, he got his feet wet on the local music scene as a mixtape and club jock. Spinning everywhere he could to get his name circulated, he was introduced to the record business by down South bass pioneer MC Shy D.
In the 1990s Smurf landed a deal with national distributor Ichiban after dropping two independent albums. One of which spawned classic 1997 booty shake single “Pop That Pussy and Shake That Ass.” For his 1998 national debut, Dead Crunk, he gave A-town a precursor to the city’s now signature rowdy sound.
Around the same time Smurf was coming up, so was D-Roc as a soloist himself. The same year that Smurf’s debut dropped, so did Roc’s Englewood 4 Life—an album with the club hit “Bounce Shorty Bounce” and accompanying dance Bankhead bounce.
“I did a remix for one of [D-Roc’s] albums,” Collipark remembers. “And I wanted him to get on one of my albums. When D-Roc came to do the record, his cousin was supposed to do it with him. They fell out and he brought Kaine. When they did that record together, it was crazy. I was like, ‘That shit sounds good. Y’all need to stay together.’ When I decided to start my label, they were the first choice.”
A wise decision. Their career as a duo has been made up of ascending stepping stones from their 2000 breakthrough indie smash “Whistle While You Twurk,” to being in heavy rotation talking dirty after dark.
Six years later they are looking to go boldly where no rap group has gone before. As odd as it just may seem to outsiders, the combination of Ying Yang and the Haitian born multi-instrumentalist is just crazy enough to work.