1. The
New Style – Beastie Boys
2. Public
Enemy No. 1 – Public Enemy
3. I’m
Not Going Out Like That – Run-DMC
4. Doomsday of Rap – Hijack
5. Stylin' Lyrics – J.V.C.F.O.R.C.E.
6. The Way We Swing – Digital
Underground
7. Pollywanacraka
– Public Enemy
8. Just
Kickin’ Lyrics – Above the Law
9. Wondrous Dream – L.A. Star
10. Youthful
Expression – A Tribe Called Quest
11. Let the Rhythm Hit ‘Em (45 King Club Mix) – Eric B & Rakim
12. Portrait of a Masterpiece (CJ's Ed-Did-It Mix) – The D.O.C.
13. No
Words (Pump ‘N’ Hip Hop - No Rif Raf Mix) – Three Times Dope
14. Wake Up (Reprise in the Sunshine) – Brand Nubian
15. Ebony
– Paris
16. Take
a Rest – Gang Starr
17. Guns
of Mind Alone – Silver Bullet
18. Humrush – KMD
19. The Funky Cypress Hill Shit – Cypress Hill
20. The Badman is Robin – Hijack
21. Morals
– UMC’s
22. 3rd Bass Theme A.K.A. Portrait Of The Artist As A Hood – 3rd Bass
23. For Pete's Sake – Pete Rock and CL Smooth
24. No Shame in My Game – Gang Starr
25. Theme From Marxman – Marxman
26. Stand Together – Beastie Boys
In 1987 my father took me and my brother
to Thornbury, where I was born, to see his old friend, Andy. Said friend had a
son called Richard, who I’d been mates with prior to my family leaving
Thornbury and moving to Plymouth in 1982. We’d met sporadically in the intervening
years but this was the first time I’d seen him since starting secondary school.
We still got on; played
football in the garden until it got too dark, whereupon Richard took me
and my brother to his bedroom to listen to music. I would have been into Prince back then, but not
much else. I liked music but not to the extent that I’d devote myself to a
particular artist, let alone want to look like them – I didn’t want to be
Prince. All that changed when Richard put on Licensed to Ill by the
Beastie Boys.
I was aware of the Beastie
Boys but hadn't liked their singles '(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to
Party!)' and 'No Sleep till Brooklyn'. I didn't like 'Walk this Way'
by Run-DMC either, released a year earlier. Loud guitars were not my thing. The
minimalism of tracks such as 'Posse in Effect', 'Slow Ride', 'Paul Revere' and 'Slow and Low' evidently were. On returning to Plymouth it materialised
that my friend Ed possessed the same album. I cannot say whether he’d owned it
since its release or if it had been recently acquired. In any case, he
made a copy for me and it wasn’t long before a poster of the Beastie Boys
together (forever) with Run-DMC adorned my wall, possibly to my father’s
horror. In 1988 I purchased the Run-DMC album Tougher than Leather.
The Beastie Boys and Run-DMC
were gateway bands. There were people who liked them who weren’t especially into rap/hip hop and others who got into rap/hip hop precisely through
listening to them. With Public Enemy it was different. You couldn't really be into them and ambivalent about hip hop; they were too earnest and musically more complex. (The same might be said of Eric B & Rakim.) I went through all
of 1987 oblivious to this and Public Enemy’s debut album, Yo! Bum Rush the
Show, escaped my attention, which is why my original four-part anthology begins in
1988 and 'Public Enemy No. 1' appears here. Moreover, the music I played didn’t necessarily direct me
towards the people I wanted to hang out with. For illustration, my three closest
pals were into Queen (Mike), Level 42 (Neil) and Eurythmics (Dan), and in
1987-88 I wasn’t adverse to any of these three groups either. I
remember other people in my class liking INXS, U2 and Bon Jovi. Who knows
what else kids were listening to in private.
These Bonus Beats are
a collection of tracks that I have gathered together retrospectively, some of
which I owned at the time and others I came across later. Because of this, my
fifth volume in the Golden Age of Hip Hop series cannot be ascribed to singular phases of my life. Individual tracks can but not the compilation as
a whole.
I don’t remember who
it was but somebody acquired a very bad copy of J.V.C.F.O.R.C.E.’s album Doin’
Damage. It sounds old school, but 'Stylin’ Lyrics' – as with 'Strong
Island' – contains the type of samples that would come to typify hip hop’s
golden age: a crescendo of horns and a lilting piano lifted from 'Ike’s Mood
1' by Isaac Hayes. [When I moved to London in 1993, I found a copy of Doin’
Damage on vinyl in Camden Market, and snapped it up.]
I never had a job while at school. This
might not seem so unusual now but back then it was. Mike had a paper-round
before picking up an evening gig behind the fish counter at his local
supermarket. Ed also had a paper-round, and Dan ended up working at Burger
King. Neil did not have a job, probably because his parents had a bit more
money than the rest of us and he could afford not to. Really, I did need one but couldn’t be
bothered. Time is scarce enough when you’re a teenager without having to give
up your Saturdays or get up early to deliver newspapers. I’d get by on birthday money and the fivers slipped to me by various relatives, and preferred to play
football above all else, which cost nothing. The downside to this was that I couldn't afford to
buy as much music as I would've liked. The only album I remember purchasing throughout the
whole of 1989 was Club Classics Vol. One by Soul II Soul. The next cassette
I bought was Sex Packets by Digital Underground in 1990.
In between I relied heavily on the radio – Jeff Young’s National Fresh –
and the generosity of friends. (I say generosity but so long as you provided
a blank tape nobody thought twice about recording stuff for each other.) So Sex Packets was probably the fifth actual album I
owned and only the second that fell under the umbrella of hip hop/rap, and I'd already turned 15.
Sex Packets is raunchy stuff, but 'The Way We Swing' is more a straight-up rap tune. It’s also quite long, so when I was putting together my anthology I went for 'Underwater Rimes' instead (see The Golden Age of Hip Hop Volume 1). (Both tunes evoke the build up to the 1990 World Cup in Italy – as does 'Pollywanacraka' by Public Enemy.)
When I found out about Above the
Law and A Tribe Called Quest in 1990, hip hop’s popularity had already peaked. (Released
in October, the Tribe's 'Can You Kick It?' was a mere aberration, albeit a successful one.) I included tracks from both these groups’ 1990 albums on The Golden Age of Hip Hop Volume 2, but when it came to putting together this
additional compendium I couldn’t resist dipping back into them. On
the other hand, 'No Words (Pump ‘N’ Hip Hop)' by Three Times Dope is a
recent discovery. In trying to establish the chronology, I uncovered a few of Jeff Young’s National Fresh sessions on the
internet that inadvertently led me to archive recordings of Tim Westwood’s show
on Capital, which is where I discovered this specific mix of 'No Words'.
I recorded Paris's debut single 'The Devil Made Me Do It' off of radio and included it on a mixtape I entitled National Fresh Volume 4. When Ed bought the album of the same name I then added the tune 'Ebony' onto Hip Hop Volume 5. The Golden Age of Hip Hop Volume 3 is cobbled together from the fragmented memories I
have of these original compilations, but I couldn't include both so opted for the former. The same goes for Brand Nubian. 'Wake Up' was
the first single from their pending album, followed by 'Slow Down'. 'All for One' was the third, and is more well-known. One way or another, I've incorporated them all.
'Take a Rest' was the second single to be taken from
Gang Starr’s Step in the Arena, but I don’t recall hearing it on
the radio. It’s now one of my favourite tunes on the album, which is saying
something because I loved that record from the off.
In my liner notes to
The Golden Age of Hip Hop Vol. 3, I write that Silver Bullet’s album Bring
Down the Walls No Limit Squad Returns is a highly sophisticated piece of
work and that any one of 'Raw Deal', 'Attitude Academy', 'Undercover Anarchist', 'Guns Of Mind Alone' and 'Legions Of The Damned' could have made it onto
my compilation. 'Legions of the Damned' did and so here you’ll find 'Guns
of Mind Alone'.
Cypress Hill is a very different
proposition to the group’s second album, the bass-heavy and overrated Black
Sunday. The first 10 seconds of 'The Funky Cypress Hill Shit' is a case in
point. It’s as if they’ve sought to use the most poorly recorded sounds – or to
re-record them poorly – to create a mise-en-scène that evokes the sounds of
1960s/70s Los Angeles. The samples flow thick and fast before settling on the
funk of 'Fencewalk' by Mandrill and the Latin-jazz of 'Hector' by The
Village Callers. Cypress Hill were part of a surge in the genre’s popularity that would
establish itself in 1992, by way of Ice Cube, Dr Dre, Eazy-E, Da Lench Mob,
Redman, Naughty by Nature, The Goats. In other words, the signs were there that
hip hop was getting harder, rougher and, ironically, more popular.
I have found an old diary from 1992, and it shows
me buying an album by Ice Cube on 16 January – presumably Death Certificate
– and then returning it on the 21st. I recall doing this sort of
thing when an album didn’t quite live up to my expectation. I’d make a
copy in between, and would then normally receive a credit note – I wasn’t
claiming that the goods were faulty in any way, just that I’d changed my mind.
The next entry in my diary (it wasn’t a ‘dear diary’ sort of diary, just full
of random notes and essay deadlines) tells me I’d acquired something by the Ruthless
Rap Assassins, which must have been their second album, Think, It Ain't
Illegal Yet. I wasn’t overly enamoured with this record either but the whole
buying and returning scam was by no means guaranteed to work, so I kept hold of
it.
The diary offers up other intriguing
vignettes: a trip to Torquay; pitch-and-put in Central
Park; haircut appointments; the Conservatives winning yet another general election; items
of clothing bought in Bristol;
scores from the European Championships in Sweden; the opening of Virgin
Records in Plymouth Centre and going there on the first day with Mike; seeing Ecuadorian folk group Huellas play at Plymouth
Arts Centre with Neil; the Olympic Games in Barcelona; turning out for Moses, a 5-a-side team some guys at school put together and for whom I provided the name; Argyle games attended, and numerous visits to some club called
Fliks, as well as Ritzy and Expose. Clubbing at this point was nothing more
than a rites of passage. The music these places played didn't interest me, which was generally house. The situation would improve significantly in 1993 when I discovered 'Jelly
Jazz' at the Quay Club, but in the meantime I’d have to go along with it and do my best to avoid getting punched by anyone looking for a fight,
which seemed to me almost everyone male outside of my extended social circle.
Cobi welcomes you to Barcelona.
I can remember reading about the Beastie
Boys’ new album, Check Your Head, in Hip Hop Connection. This would have
been early 1992, but I didn’t then buy the album and nor did I record it off of anyone. It wasn’t until 1994 that I finally got hold of it, off the back
of Ill Communication, which the lead-single 'Sabotage' had
propelled to the fore. An exploration of Paul’s Boutique ensued.
Brother J from X Clan once
said he could stand the Beastie Boys muscling in on hip hop because they
never posed as black men and behaved as who they were: white guys getting
drunk. The Beastie Boys dropped the getting drunk thing very quickly, but
they never adopted a persona that was outside of their own, which might explain
their longevity. It’s a shame that I didn’t return to them sooner, but I’ve
kept up with them ever since, conscious that it was the Beastie Boys who introduced me to rap music, even if it was Public Enemy that sealed the deal.
[Listen to here.]
