Holding it down for angry loners & the unemployable
I’m not sure if Tuff City Records plan on releasing a follow-up to the 33 1/3 Anniversary Box Set, but not long after the 1986 cut-off date of that collection is when things really got interesting, as the drum machine and repeated cartoon sample hooks gave way to the intricate drum chops and horn stabs…
Nine years after I made a bootleg of all of the tracks/demos recorded for the never-completed second Main Source album with Large Professor, it’s now available on record, tape, CD and Spotify. Unsurprisingly, this all of the same material presented with varying levels of sound quality, with some phone interview snippets sprinkled in between. Nice…
Fun fact I discovered recently – M.O.P.’s ‘Victim of the Ghetto’, first heard on the Marxman Cinema compilation, was originally slated as the final song on First Family 4 Life. After I included it on this week’s mix, it’s pretty clear that the song itself fell victim to the same fate as Da Lench Mob’s…
Here’s an hour of Select Records stuff that I rate, focusing on some of the less well-known releases as well as a few old favourites. Some great edit and dub versions in here, because as someone who focused my meagre funds on buying albums as a youf, I still marvel every time I find an…
You may remember the Bad Boys and K Love for their beatbox rendition of the Muppets song ‘Veronica’ and the Inspector Gadget themed ‘Bad Boys’ from 1985, or the jaunty delights of ‘Here I Reign’ from 88, but it turns out that they also hold the honor of being the first crew to rap over…
There I was, like a total rube, thinking I had this record. But nah, it turns out that this was incorrectly listed on the back cover of the Cappuccino 12″ but never pressed. Instead, this wonderful reimagining of a landmark Lyte moment is trapped in the purgatory of being a CD bonus track on the…
How is it that the inserts on these old bootlegs are always printed on the thinnest, facsimile-grade paper available? Cost savings, obviously. In this particular example, they author has gone all-out, managing to squeeze-in cutting-edge slang such as ‘hottest joints’, ‘phat reworking’ and referring to dedicated rap fans as ‘heads’. Here’s an hour of some…
Before he was a judge on the Danish X-Factor, Soulshock was getting busy on the proverbial wheels of steel as a DJ and remixer. Here’s an hour of his best rap stuff. Download: Soulshock Remixes Mix
King Tee will always be a firm favourite at CRC HQ, on account of having Act A Fool stuck in my Walkman for months when I was in high school. If I recall correctly, it was one of those metal TDK tapes that weighed as much as a can of 7Up, and I had Def…
Listening to the 2LP reissue of No More Mr Nice Guy from last year, I noticed that one of the bonus cuts was the dub version of ‘So What’, which I’ve never heard of (there’s also the unheard ‘Return of the Bass’ mix of the title track, which sounds better than the normal one just…
Going to try and knock these one-take vinyl mixes out once a week, since this is the closest I think I’ll ever get to podcasting or whatever you want to call it. Here’s an hour of unauthorised Mobb remixes, white labels and guest appearances with rapper dudes who wanted some of that magic thun dust…
Update: I lost the first version of this so here’s a new comp, plus a bonus quote from AG: ‘I definitely didn’t like Showbiz featuring AG, that little tape that they put out. I don’t know what PayDay was doing at the time, but it’s all good. We gotta lotta songs like ‘Ain’t No Fun’…