1. Rise
‘N’ Shine – Kool Moe Dee
2. Flavor
of the Month – Black Sheep
3. Transformers – Leaders of the New School
4. Peace is Not the Word to Play – Main Source
5. How I Could Just Kill a Man – Cypress Hill
6. I
Had to Serve You – Hijack
7. Hangman – II Tone Committee
8. Gettin' Looped / Dress
Code – WC & the Maad Circle
9. It’s
Gonna Last – UMC’s
10. Check The Rhime (Mr. Muhammad's Mix) – A Tribe Called Quest
11. Pissin' on Your Steps – Del Tha Funkee Homosapien
12. The Choice is Yours (Revisited) – Black Sheep
12. The Choice is Yours (Revisited) – Black Sheep
13. White
Green – Funkytown Pros
14. Shut
‘Em Down – Public Enemy
15. Make
it Happen – Ultramagnetic MC’s
16. It’s
a Boy (Remix) – Slick Rick
17. Ruff
Ruff – Boogie Down Productions
18. Jussummen – Das EFX
19. Generals
– Fu-Schnickens
20. It’s
Like That – Pete Rock & CL Smooth
21. Flip
the Script – Gang Starr
22. Ya Mama – The Pharcyde
23. Kickin' Jazz – Outlaw
24. Qui
Sème Le Vent Récolte Le Tempo (Gang Starr Mix) – MC Solaar
Martha
Gellhorn wrote that, 'summer in England is largely imaginary,' and it is possible
that I have imagined the summer of 1991. GCSEs over, we had time on our hands, and a lot of it was spent outside, kicking a ball about, playing tennis
in Hartley Park, pitch-and-putt in Central Park, or just wandering around town.
What the weather was really doing is moot, but in my mind the sun was always shining.
'Rise ‘N’ Shine' is the perfect summer rap record. Kool
Moe Dee had peaked by the time Chuck D and KRS-One agreed to lay down vocals
for the track, and the accompanying album, Funke Funke Wisdom didn’t do so well. Nonetheless, anybody who can get Chuck and
KRS-One on board is worthy of consideration, and 'Rise ‘N’ Shine' was worthy of their time, reaching no. 1 in
Billboard Magazine’s weekly ‘Hot Rap Tracks’ chart.
The latest group causing a stir was Black Sheep.
The single 'Flavor of the Month' testified to the duos’ witty wordplay, the trumpet sample from Herb Alpert’s 'In a Little Spanish Town' their
musical savvy. The album A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing was
released in October 1991, quickly followed by their second single 'The Choice
Is Yours (Revisited)', which was massive. In 1998, US hip hop magazine The
Source rated A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing as one of the ‘100 Best Rap
Albums Ever’. I wonder if they stand by this now? I would like to think that
they would.
Still no sign of that Main Source album, but plenty of singles.
Released in October, 'Peace Is Not the Word to Play' was the fourth (and
much better than the album version) but I’m sure Pete Tong was playing it a
long time before that. I don’t know which of my compilations this track
appeared on but the chronology suggests it could have been Hip Hop 6, which, if
memory serves, was a C60, rather than the more usually deployed C90.
Leaders of the New School was another group getting rave
reviews. I didn’t care for the singles 'Case of the P.T.A.'
or 'Sobb Story', but when Tong played the album track 'Transformers',
which blatantly lifts the driving Hammond organ off of 'I’m a Man' by the
Spencer Davis Group, I sort of got it. Nobody I knew owned a copy of their
album A Future Without a Past... but the reviews were good, and the
group would later make a guest appearance on A Tribe Called Quest's hit single 'Scenario',
which made the case for Busta Rhymes as a solo artiste.
I
studied for my A-levels at the same place I took my GCSEs, yet sixth form was something of a revelation. We still had to wear a uniform but our
blazers were now black, instead of bottle green. Our ties were also less
conspicuous, and so you felt less like a chattel slave and more
someone going about their own business. The way we interacted with our teachers changed. You there because you wanted to be, not because you had to, and were treated accordingly.
Our timetable was more forgiving. I only had one
lesson on a Friday – history in the afternoon – and rather than spend all day
confined to the study area, a few of us would venture into town to drink tea
(cheaper than coffee) at Coffee Plus in Plymouth’s Armada Centre, and to browse through
records in the newly opened Virgin Megastore on Cornwall Street. In the summer we might catch the Cremyll Ferry over to Mount Edgcumbe. Didn’t even
bother attending school assemblies much. Instead, I’d find someone willing to
cruise the classrooms, drawing faces and writing ‘Beard is Weird’ or ‘Por La
Raza’ on as many blackboards as I could find. At the end of the day I would
make regular detours via the city centre to see if Rival Records on Royal
Parade had anything to tempt my fancy. It was a charmed way of living when compared
to the regular school life I’d been accustomed to.
Shortly after hearing 'How
I Could Just Kill a Man' on the Tong’s Rap Selection, I was delighted
to find an imported American copy of Cypress Hill’s debut on the shelves at Rival
Records. If there was ever such a thing as lo-fi hip hop then this surely was it, and for a while Cypress Hill was probably my favourite group. [Years later I was lucky enough to chance upon an
immaculate, reasonably priced vinyl copy of Cypress
Hill, either in the Music & Video Exchange in Greenwich or Reckless Records
on Berwick Street in Soho. Whichever one it wasn’t may have been where I picked
up an equally immaculate copy of Bazerk,
Bazerk, Bazerk by Son Of Bazerk.]
British hip hop never made much of an impact over in the
States, but for a brief moment it appeared that Hijack might buck the trend.
Ice T signed them to his Rhyme Syndicate imprint, but that went belly up and
Hijack were stuck with parent company Warners, a record label that didn’t much like their
sound. By the time The Horns of Jericho
had been cobbled together it felt like they’d lost much of the mystique that
made them so appealing in the first instance. 'I Had to Serve You', though, harked back to the impenetrable image I
had of Hijack back in their early days when they’d posed in Berghaus puffer
jackets on derelict land. It’s an interesting track, not your usual
verse-chorus type of thing, just Kamanchi Sly issuing forth a single stanza followed by some slick turntable action.
'Hangman' by
Glasgow’s II Tone Committee is pure Britcore. I think Tong played this tune
just once. It’s so obscure that I’ve no reason to think he’d have afforded them
any more time than that. To be fair, Tong did his fair share for British hip
hop, playing stuff by the likes of Gunshot, Katch 22, First Frontal Assault,
Son of Noise. What would ultimately kill off this particular British
brand of hip hop was not neglect but dance music: the rave scene and acid house.
I don’t remember hearing WC & the Maad Circle being
played on the radio, but I do know that Anthony Cambridge lent me a copy of
their debut album Ain't a Damn Thang Changed. I was a little underwhelmed,
until 'Dress Code' kicked in – or rather, the first bar of 'Black' by
Stax Records session-band The Mar-Keys, repeated over and over. 'Dress Code'
carries all the hallmarks of West Coast rap at the time: heavy bass, minimal
sampling, a certain attitude.
Off the back of the single 'One To Grow On', my brother attempted
to purchase a copy of Fruits of Nature by UMC’s. Unfortunately the
mail-order company he ordered it from went bust and he lost his money. Anthony
Cambridge stepped in with very bad recording, which was better than nowt. It is
a very good record, in a similar to vein to A Tribe Called Quest’s early stuff,
or Gang Starr at their most playful, very much of the moment, and 'It's Gonna Last' is sublime.
A Tribe Called Quest’s second album The Low End Theory
manifested a more pared down sound than its predecessor, although there’s still
plenty of jazz to be found here: Art Blakey, Miles Davis, Cannonball Aderly,
Grant Green, Jack McDuff; the record was a commercial success without compromising the group’s integrity. In fact, it is regarded to this day as one of the
greatest rap records of all time. Personally, I prefer their first album, as well favouring the single version of 'Check the Rhime'.
My chosen
A-Levels were History, English, and Design and Technology. It was a full gone
conclusion that I’d choose to study History and English, and I figured that
Design and Technology would allow me to learn graphic design, which I had vague
notions of pursuing. It didn’t. Mr. Morris, who was a gentle soul, taught us
the theoretical stuff – engineering, I suppose – while Mr. Penton, who had
taught me GCSE Design and Communication, was supposed to divulge more practical
skills. Early on, myself and the four other guys in my class – including my
friend Mike – turned up to a lesson only for Mr. Penton to ask what we were
doing there. In fairness, we’d been lumped in with the upper sixth, who were
off that day, and Mr. Penton may not have realised this, although he probably should have. Anyway, for the rest
of the year, when it wasn’t Mr. Morris’s turn to instruct us, we spent most of
our time, completely unsupervised, mucking about unproductively on rudimentary computers. [I took the opportunity to smuggle yet more
artefacts into Mike’s bag; soldering irons, rolls of cotton wool,
electromagnets, and whatever else I could find lying about. His mother
later found a carrier bag full of this junk under his bed and demanded an
explanation. I couldn’t have wished for a better outcome than that.]
Come half term, Mr. Morris sent us on work experience to
various local manufacturing firms. It never occurred to me that something like
this would be compulsory, until late on Tuesday when my parents received a call
asking where I’d been for the last two days (at my grandparents’ house in
Bristol, as it goes). And so on Wednesday off I reluctantly went. Having just
been to Bristol, where there were more numerous and better record shops, I’d recently
acquired the new album by Del the Funkee Homosapien, I Wish My Brother George Was Here, so I got stuck into that on the bus journeys out to Plympton and back.
The single 'Mistadobalina' had almost
charted, although Del’s record was less commercial than this implies – he was, after all, Ice Cube’s cousin. The association with an industrial estate is not one I wanted, so I’ve eschewed the popular choice for this
compilation and gone for the album track 'Pissin’ on Your Steps'.
Funkytown Pros were from Los Angeles but weren’t as abrasive
as many of the other acts who were. 'White Green' is a strong tune, but hip
hop such as this was slowly going out of fashion. As Hunter S Thompson put it, 'with the right kind of
eyes you can almost see the high-water mark – that place where the wave finally
broke and rolled back.'
Public Enemy’s fourth album, Apocalypse 91… The Enemy Strikes Black, is underrated. The sheer barrage of noise
that introduces it is as powerful as anything they’d done before, and they haven’t
really bettered it since. I actually prefer the opening three tracks, 'Lost
at Birth', 'Rebirth' and 'Night Train' to 'Shut ‘Em Down', but they
segue into each other and it’s impossible to pull them apart. The album itself
isn’t has dense as its predecessors. This has to do with: the introduction of live musicians;
the fact that the discs containing the material the group had been working on
went missing, or were stolen; producer Gary G-Wiz joining up with The Bomb Squad;
tensions within The Bomb Squad itself; the increasing cost of sampling.
Ultramagnetic MC's
were old hands but they’d been on something of a hiatus when 'Make it Happen' dropped in late ’91, although the single didn’t even feature on the
following year’s album, Funk Your Head Up. 'Make it Happen' juxtaposes the benign
horns of 'It's Just Begun' by The Jimmy Castor Bunch with the malignant
noise that begins Funkadelic’s 'Get Off Your Ass and Jam'. Add to that the eccentricity of rapper Kool Keith:
Keith is nice, Keith is dope, Keith is bad,
Keith is hype, now watch the X.
X'll get X-tra, X-tra X-trordinary
X-clusive, X-quisite,
X-amine the X flow, X-tra X-citing,
X-tremely, so dangerous,
Many can't hang with this, hmmm...
Slick
Rick released The Ruler's Back in
July, which spawned the single 'It’s a Boy'
in November. Tong wisely opted to play the Large Professor’s remix off of the
B-Side, which sounded a lot like Pete Rock had a hand in it. The sampled
vibraphone of Cal Tjader compliments Rick’s soft, singsong cadence very
nicely. Unfortunately, by the time it was released Slick Rick was serving time
for second-degree attempted murder.
A guy I knew from around the way, called Ed, had previously made me copies of The Devil Made Me
Do It by Paris, Mr Hood by KMD, and the eponymously titled Young Black Teenagers
album. We didn’t consciously take turns, but my brother had been buying his fair share, and I was passing on whatever Anthony Cambridge could
provide me with, so when Boogie Down Productions put out their fifth
and final album Sex & Violence in February ‘92, Ed duly obliged. (My brother disputes this and reckons it was him that bought it.) The
album didn’t sell so well, possibly because KRS-One had rubbed a few people in
the industry up the wrong way. 'Ruff Ruff',
featuring Freddie Foxxx, and 'Duck Down' are the
standout tracks.
On the other side
of the tape on which I recorded Sex & Violence, I made a copy of F.U.
Don't Take It Personal by the Fu-Schnickens. A Tribe Called Quest
co-produced this album – they were Jive Records label-mates – and Phife Dawg served up guest vocals on 'La Schmoove',
the group’s second single. 'Generals'
is indicative of the approach: sparse beats, fast-paced raps, and references to martial art films (way before Wu-Tang
Clan made this sort of thing fashionable). Das EFX, who came slightly after, had a similar approach to rhyming but presented with a harder edge, which might explain why they're regarded as the more influential act of the two.
In
1992 my musical tastes began to diversify. I started off with my dad's old jazz records, by the likes of Wes
Montgomery, Jimmy Smith, Errol Garner, Oscar Peterson. I then moved on to Acid Jazz – Corduroy, Mother Earth, The Brand New Heavies, Galliano. Meanwhile,
I acquired a number of rap albums that failed to meet with my high expectations: Return of the Funky Man by Lord Finesse,
Zhigge by Zhigge, and Arrested Development’s 3
Years, 5 Months and 2 Days in the Life Of... which was all right but wore
thin after repeated listening (although 'Mama's
Always on Stage' still cuts it).
My disillusionment was short-lived. In May Gang Starr
released Daily Operation. Because it
wasn’t available to buy in Plymouth, I bought my copy via mail order (along
with a vinyl pressing of Brand Nubian’s One
For All, despite already having it on tape). I remember the morning Daily Operation turned up and putting it
on before leaving for school. I got as far as the first two tracks and could
barely contain my excitement. The rest of the album did not disappoint, but the
opening two numbers – 'The Place Where We
Dwell' and 'Flip the Script' – are
still two of my favourites. They’re minimal pieces: jazz drums,
ambient crowd noise, and in the case of 'Flip
the Script', two looped organ stabs lifted from the Grover Washington tune 'Lock it in The Pocket' (the keys come
courtesy of James 'Sid' Simmons). It’s a travesty that neither were included on
the double-compilation album Full Clip: A
Decade of Gang Starr.
Within a couple of months, Pete Rock & CL Smooth finally
issued their debut album, Mecca and the
Soul Brother, which I purchased from the now defunct Replay Records in
Bristol. I wasn’t sure about it at first but it quickly grew on me. It’s now
one of my favourite rap albums, but my preferred track then is still my
preferred track now – 'It’s Like That'.
My next acquisition was to be Heavy Rhyme Experience, Vol. 1 by The Brand New Heavies, featuring
the likes of Main Source, Gang Starr, Black Sheep, The Pharcyde. I decided against including any of these
collaborations here because they are live compositions recorded with actual
instruments, but without this record it’s possible that I may never have
purchased Bizarre Ride to the Pharcyde some
five months later. Like Gang Starr’s 'Flip
the Script', 'Ya Mama' is built
around a single sample: Mike Bloomfield, Al Kooper and Stephen Stills’ version
of 'Season of the Witch', and
specifically Al Kooper’s organ. Bizarre
Ride II the Pharcyde was/is a beautiful object – great artwork, translucent
vinyl; one disc blue, the other yellow.
I acquired The Rebirth of Cool Too [sic] in May, a compilation put out on the label Fourth & Broadway featuring the likes of Gang Starr, Brand Nubian, Main Source, Pete Rock & CL Smooth, Outlaw Posse. Outlaw Posse also recorded under the name Brothers Like Outlaw but are credited here simply as Outlaw. The reason for this is probably because the track 'Kickin' Jazz' is a completely different version to the one that appears on the band’s album, remixed as it is by Patrick Forge and Simon Richmond. It’s an improvement on the original and indicative of how jazz-rap wasn’t just a stateside phenomenon.
The final track on this compendium is taken from Talkin’ Loud Two,
a cheap cassette designed to get people interested in the record label Gilles
Peterson’s set up after leaving Acid Jazz Records. MC Solaar’s original version
of 'Qui Sème Le Vent Récolte Le Tempo'
was released in France in 1991, but Gang Starr’s remix was put out by Talkin’
Loud in 1992. One wonders whether DJ Premier regretted not keeping the groove
for himself.
It was
probably 'Jump Around' by House of Pain that set the alarm bells ringing, a
truly awful tune. Then came 'Nuthin' but a 'G' Thang' by Dr Dre, which was
just boring. By the time Cypress Hill released 'Insane in the Brain' in
June 1993, the game was well and truly up. It would be another four years
before I bought a (new) rap record (Dr. Octagon's in 1996), which is not say that
I stopped listening to hip hop entirely, or that I didn’t record Ill
Communication by the Beastie Boys off of my brother or listen to the Wu-Tang
Clan in other people’s houses, or recognise that Nas was the real deal. Part of me thinks
it’s a shame I didn’t stick with hip hop, but the excessive swearing, macho posturing, and an obsession with guns and cannabis wore thin very quickly. Moreover,
as the industry became ever more litigious, sampling became harder, the music
sparser and less experimental.
