Ying Yang Twins

There’s no question to whether or not the Ying Yang Twins can make it rain inside a smoke-filled shake joint with their hyperactive 808-infused tracks, mannish school boy theatrics and raunchy, sex-charged lyrics. But after five albums with two going platinum back to back, D-Roc and Kaine aim to make musical thunderstorms all over the world.

Meshing their signature down South booty shake with Caribbean-flavored twists, these two Atlanta-bred brothers from another mother team up with multicultural rap icons Wyclef Jean and famed producer Jerry Wonder for the Winter release of their Collipark/ TVT Records album, Chemically Imbalanced. On this momentous occasion in music history, the album will be executive produced by label CEO Mr. Collipark, Wyclef and Jerry Wonder.

“Every time we’ve came out, we never used someone else’s formula for success. And that’s what Wyclef told me,” D-Roc explains. “We gained our own success. He said ‘I just want y’all to bring me to your world.’ We wanna get to your world. The album came out to be magic.”

For their first musical magic trick, they set the stage for their hybrid blends of hypnotizing world compositions with the saucy lead single “Dangerous.” Atop repetitive guitar plucks, heavy metal riffs and Wyclef’s undeniable humming on the hook, D-Roc and Kaine admire the seductive poses of a money-making pole dancer.

The first ones at the club and the last ones to leave, they show even more love to A-town strippers on the breakout track “1st Booty on Duty.” Pledging their support for single mothers, they wave handfuls of 10s and 20s over a mid-tempo Mr. Collipark-produced banger.

“People used to laugh cause we talk about going to the strip club, but they used to tip toe and go there,” D-Roc explains. “If you go to the strip club, you see what you like, and you are able to drink. Every man, I hope, has been to the strip club when he got old enough. We just talk about what we do.”

Brought together as group some six years ago by label CEO Michael “Mr. Collipark” Crooms, Kaine and D-Roc had been long-time acquaintances in their native ATL. D-Roc had established himself on the local level as a solo artist but when they recorded a song together for Collipark’s (then known as DJ Smurf) album, he knew had struck gold.

“When they did that record together, it was crazy,” Collipark remembers. “I was like ‘you need to stay together. That sounds good.’ When I decided to start my label, they were the first choice.”

Their first hit as duo was “Whistle While You Twerk” from their 2000 indie debut Thug Walkin. They kept dance floors crunk with their well-received follow-up album Alley…Return of the Ying Yang Twins two years later, an album which featured club cuts like “Say I Yi Yi” and “By Myelf.” But they hit pay dirt with the platinum sales of Me & My Brother in 2003 and USA: United State of Atlanta in 2005, which kept last summer steaming with the Grammy nominated freak tale, “Wait.”

“We don’t really focus on the bling or any other material thing,” Kaine explains. “We try to keep the basic normal conversation. They don’t be conversations for everybody. They be conversations for the females at the stripper bars. Stripper bars are reality, and they get paid better in there than they do going to college for 10 years.”

While they have been known to stuff bills inside a g-string or two, Ying Yang Twins are more than just perverted pimps on wax. They do tackle the drama of life outside of the club.

“People try to look at us as one-dimensional artists that only speak upon the strip club,” says Kaine. “We really have a better variety of things we speak about that pertains to normal life.”

Proof is in “23 Hr. Lockdown” from U.S.A.., where they dedicated the track to fallen soldiers serving time behind bars. They bring that same consciousness to Chemically Imbalanced. On the insightful “Ain’t No Sunshine,” Kaine and D-Roc loom over a mixture of deep-bottom drum kicks and slinky Spanish guitars, they reminisce over loved ones who were taken away too soon. And on “Family,” they run down their family trees and tell of kinfolk who unfortunately followed the wrong path.

Offering a well-adjusted melodic diet made up of exotic dance grooves from around the world, grinding dirty dance music and real life situations, Ying Yang’s Chemically Imbalanced is a melodic concoction just wild and freaky enough to have us all off kilter.