Like It Was

This Pablo Eskobear is the reason why we created our Groovy Beats playlists. "Like It Was" is that soul-driven power beat to put a smile on your face each morning.

The US producer stirs up tasty pots of boom bap hip hop with spicy funk/soul samples. A self taught drummer from the age of 12, the groovy beat-maker just dropped his debut album Regurgitated Rhythms - a collection of feel-good productions that pay homage to old school funk and soul music. One thing I also want to shed the light on is the actual name. I had a good amount of laugh reading Pablo Eskobear the first time he popped in my feed, so... here's the back story.

On 12/23/1985, the NY Times reported about a 175-pound black bear that had died of an overdose of cocaine in Georgia’s Chattahoochee National Forest. 3 months earlier, drug smuggler Andrew Thornton II had dropped large quantities of drugs from an airplane over that area, before jumping from it himself. Unfortunately, Thornton got tangled in his parachute and fell to his death in someone’s yard, in Knoxville, TN. He was on a coke-smuggling run from Colombia when he dropped 40 plastic containers full of cocaine in the National Forest.

But instead of cocaine worth tens of millions of dollars, police found just 40 open containers with traces of cocaine in them, and a dead black bear. The animal had feasted on the entire load and subsequently died of an overdose. Its stomach was literally packed to the brim with cocaine. There isn’t a mammal on the planet that could survive that. The bear had cerebral hemorrhaging, respiratory failure, hyperthermia, renal failure, heart failure, stroke. You name it, that bear had it. The Cocaine Bear, later nicknamed Pablo Eskobear was then gifted to the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area, where it was displayed in the visitor center, behind a plaque, without any mention of his special origin