Pooch Pound (Demo Tape)

In a Rolling Stone interview published on the April 17, 2003 issue of the magazine, Mike Shinoda talked about how he took his first steps towards hip-hop music when he was about 13 years old. He said, “I didn’t know anything about old-school rock & roll or blues, but I’d hear a B.B. King song and just think it was the greatest thing ever. I always ended up taking those influences and making hip-hop beats out of them. So I put my bluesy piano to a sampled beat and, eventually, I started rapping over it.” And then described the type of music he was making: “For the most part, we made a lot of joke songs. Gangsta rap had just poked its head out, and we made a lot of joke gangsta-rap songs. They were all about smoking weed and being pimps, and those were two things we were totally unfamiliar with. Like with a lot of suburban kids, there was an element of voyeurism there – I had never been down to Long Beach, y'know?”

Mike Shinoda used to make joke songs with Mark Wakefield on the weekends in high school and college and this was before Xero had formed. It was a just-for-fun project featuring spoof covers imitating Snoop Dogg, Tha Dogg Pound, Wu-Tang Clan and other big hip-hop records of that era. There was a member of Wu-Tang Clan (Cappadonna) whose stage name was originally Cappaccino, so one of them went by the name “Frappuccino” when recording.

They usually skipped parties to record those songs, but sometimes they would arrive at the end of a party with a cassette tape and play it in the car for their friends, who would usually be pretty high and laugh at anything. They had a reputation as the guys who made funny songs.

The demo tape containing those songs was first mentioned by Mike Shinoda on August 12, 2015 during a AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) on Reddit: “I once made a demo tape of joke gangsta rap songs called “Pooch Pound” that included a song called “North Coast Killa” where we executed all our Canadian gangsta rivals.” This exact same quote was repeated during a chat with Product Hunt on October 9, 2015.

Ryu from Styles Of Beyond commented on the tape saying, “Yes I do I remember the Pouch Pound demo. I believe I still have the tape. I’m not 100% sure that it was Mark Wakefield on the songs, but I think so. I remember the songs being parodies of big rap songs that were out at the time and they were hilarious.”