When Rap Could Split Eardrums
The Live Guy With Glasses is one of hip-hop’s top shelf legends, and having worked on some of rap’s greatest ever albums – in addition to his own stand-out work as the front man for Main Source and as a soloist – he refuses to kick back and relax, continuing to bang out beats and…
Sometimes there’s more to being a legendary rapper than classic records. You might have heard Silver Fox on one of the three 12” singles he released as part of the Fantasy Three, but his legacy runs a lot deeper than a mere mid-80’s footnote. Having established a reputation as formidable MC through battling at parties…
Continuing my talk with “Super Rapper” T La Rock, we discuss the origins of his name, working with Mantronik, bootleggers and unreleased recordings. T is currently developing a biopic called ‘The T La Rock Story’ with “a very powerful producer from Hollywood” named Bonnie Timmerman (who was the Casting Director on Man On Fire, Carlito’s…
T La Rock is so entrenched into the history of hip-hop that he actually attended Kool Herc‘s first parties. After nine years of deejaying, breaking and emceeing locally in The Bronx, as well as introducing his brother Special K of the Treacherous Three to rap, T finally decided to take the next step and begin…
You can’t go wrong with this compilation, since even if you own most of the B-Boy Records discography on 12″, it’ll save you the trouble of ripping all them shits onto your hard drive. Not only that, but the Traffic crew have mined through some of the original reels to provide us with some unheard…
Another abrasive, scratch-heavy Shout Rap track? Why not. As Chilly B-Ware and G-Supreme declare, DJ R is “the quickest of the quick – anytime of the night!”. Not to be confused with the Ultimate Force that Diamond D started off with, these guys do a pretty good job of bigging-up their DJ while at the…
Back when Marley Marl was making records in his sister’s lounge room, slapping echo on everything to compensate for the fact that he didn’t have any reverb to play with, he cut some seriously raw, gritty tracks. 14 year old Percy (who was calling himself MC Jade at the time) used to bug Marl to…
Duke Bootee put in some amazing work following his contributions to both parts of “The Message”, most notably his production and powerful Linn drum programming for a number of Beauty & The Beat (his own label) and Profile singles. Records from the Point Blank MCs, MC Crash, K-Rob, Z-3 MCs and the Duke himself all…
In many ways, hardcore rap peaked in 1986. Despite lacking the lyrically complexity of 1988’s finest and the depth of production found in 1994’s best releases, hip-hop records from ’86-’87 took the abrasive, hard rock aesthetic championed by Run-DMC and pushed it to it’s ear-splitting, speaker-melting limits.