Go FLAC Yourself
If I had a dollar for every time some Real Hip-Hop Truther lost their shit because something only came out on CD, I’d have enough money to buy a hand-numbered, ALDI-brand Roc Marciano wannabe’s Obi-Strip Rap album from France at 2AM because rap music has long since been co-opted by Hypebeasts who speculate on how much the caviar colour way will be worth in twelve months.
At various points in human history, records reined supreme, then tapes ruled the world before being crushed under the cold, steel boot of compact discs. This was great for record companies, because CD’s cost absolutely fuck-all to make so they had more money to waste on dodgy computer graphics in TLC videos, but it didn’t mean shit to me as child with nothing but a Sony Walkman to my name and occasional access to the family turntable to record LP’s onto a TDK D-90 (or SA-60 if I was being fancy).
This was the era where I decided to skip a whole day of school to pick-up my pre-ordered copy of BDP’s By All Means Necessary, catch the train home and proceed to hope that bad boy was less than 45 minutes long so it would fit on one side of a tape (turns out it was 47 and a half minutes but losing the final half of ‘Necessary’ wasn’t exactly the end of the world, since that and ‘Nervous’ are basically extended skits). It didn’t take me long to figure out that just buying the tape version meant I could listen to the music as soon as I bought it.
CD’s had already hit the scene, but the portable CD’s players (Discman? What is this, Tron?) were kinda flakey and expensive, so I was Team Tape for most of high school. This only really paid off a handful of times, where the cassette releases had exclusive songs like on the first Digital Underground and the third Stetsasonic album, but you’d still get some extra pictures compared to the bare-bones vinyl packaging so it wasn’t a total loss.
Years later, after having already acquired my own turntable in the mid 90’s and starting to buy LP’s again, I got onto the internetS and found a bunch of online spots that were selling old rap CD’s for a couple of bucks. By this stage, I had a car courtesy of my job and it had a decent factory CD system installed, so I was able to relive all types of 90s rap – but now with bonus songs, 32 page booklets sporting expensive photo shoots and ads for the artist’s t-shirts and hoodies, and even this CD-ROM enhanced joints like on Mobb Deep’s Hell On Earth where you could call numbers on a virtual phone box in a pixilated recreation of Queensbridge!
Returning to the second BDP album again, I just threw the tape and CD on the ol’ trusty Panasonic boombox and noticed how much louder the effin’ cassette sounds compared to the CD, but they both sound good. The real difference is how much better the cover looks – you can see the BDP logo on KRS’ custom tracksuit pants now!
In 2025, you can still get some stuff on tape, a decent amount on CD and fifteen variations of every LP and EP, as well as a cottage industry in 7” re-issues and bootlegs to get us to buy the same songs all over again. The real casualty in all of this has been the near extinction of the greatest format of them all – cassingles! No, hang on…I mean the mighty 12”.
Who can forget the excitement of trawling through all five versions of LONS’ ‘The International Zone Coaster’? It turns out that the Re-Remix Edit, Remix, Ultra Shandilere Tango-Trixx Mix, Zone Flight Z9ZU Mix and the Radio Edit all have different music! There wasn’t even room for an instrumental on that insane platter! Not to be outdone, some mentalist over at EastWest records approved a double 12” of remixes for Champ MC!? And what about stuff like this late career Bobby Brown 2×12” that covers everything from House, Miami Bass, R&B to Bridge Rap mixes – aka the old ‘throw everything at the wall and hope that something sticks’ method.
Obviously it makes no financial sense to press-up 12” singles in this day and age, but if I was to be fired into space via a giant cannon to live underground on Mars with my pal Johnny Cab from Total Recall and could only take a box of possessions, I’d be loading up a crate of rap 12” singles with ‘Dub’ mixes edited by Chep Nuñez and every eighties rap CD I own.
As a ‘Team CD’ early adopter, the loss of DU’s “Hip-Hop Doll” was a bitter pill
I was a tape/rec/CD kid and occasionally trial-subscribe to digital streamers like Spot, Apple, AMZN just to see what they have (songs not on streaming are still aplenty).
What pleasantly surprised me was—some tapes I had just assumed ‘sounded’ a certain way because of the format—still sounded that way on the streaming version (mostly), and it really reminded me that the shortcomings of cassette had more to do with media durability, and (mostly) poor playback devices (lots of Hi-Fi gear tape decks were the bare minimum of construction, and have more to do with dodgy playback than the tape itself).
Love doing A-B-C playbacks of tape, CD, mp3s in a good listening environment. ‘90s low mastering’ is way more apparent on CD. Some content gets remastered before entering digital distribution, some digital versions still remain ‘low mastered’.
This really hit home when I was trying to organize my records and grouping 12” singles by year of release – it just drops off a cliff at a certain point. Seems like people now sell $100 obis with less music on them than some of those golden age singles.
And it’s tough to get that same “bang for your buck” excitement from overpriced 45s with inferior sound quality which seem to be the move these days but such is life. Never did I ever suspect cassettes would make a comeback, though, so I suppose there’s still some hope for all the future CJ Mackintoshes out there.
Another problem is that some of the remastered versions have the loudness cranked-up so high that there aren’t any mids left, so it’s usually worth owning the old CD for the quieter mastering and the new one for the extra songs, like with the first four Run-DMC albums.
I’m still holding out for ‘Sound of the Underground’ to get released from tape purgatory as well.
It wasn’t all beer and skittles back then either, with labels like East/West and Tommy Boy spreading mixes over multiple versions so that sometimes a remix or instrumental is only on the promo 12″ but you want the uncensored vocal? Now you’ve gotta find the retail single as well…
That would be a win! I don’t think I’ve ever heard the three cassette only bonus tracks on ‘Blood, Sweat & No Tears’.
Just had that LONS vinyl single on my rotation. I was also surprised after years of having it I did not realize the mixes were different.
I will always be a vinyl guy but in the 90s a lot of bonus tracks appeared separately either on vinyl, cd or tape. Also over the years I have found some clean versions of albums have vocals re-recorded with new lyrics – which I am now trying to hunt down. Anyone got that Mr Scarface Is Back clean version?
I have their discog on various formats so I’m going to check that out. Looking around on digital streamers—I like when I see something like “2010 remastered version” on a past release. I suspect some catalog owners simply ‘normalized’ the original files rather than having the recording truly remastered—as in professionally mastered in a mastering studio acoustically designed for this purpose.
A great write up. ❤️ it. Until I read it in one of your posts I never knew about the xtra cuts on the Stet album or the DU. It’s a shame that there only one streaming single release these days with no additional remixes. I just miss reading the credits.