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I blame Guitar Centre While cleaning out my record shelves and thinking about which records can be sentenced to the consignment crate at the local music shop, I happened upon Wu-Tang Forever. Back when this was released, I thought that that this 4 LP album was 3 LPs too long. Should I ditch it? I…
Take 6’s silky smooth harmonies set off the opening scene in Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing as ‘Don’t Shoot Me’ played behind Señor Love Daddy’s morning wake-up routine1, but thanks to the work of The 45 King, they also become part of an essential hip-hop breakbeat. ‘Spread Love’ was a popular a cappella single…
The origins of the first white label hip-hop remix can be traced back to a long forgotten film titled Running Scared, which starred Gregory Hines (who, amongst his credits as a top-shelf tap dancer and actor, dropped a solo album in 1986 with assists from Luther Vandross) and Billy Crystal (his first co-starring role in…
“You’re three feet and sinking/The tribes are lost and everyone’s breath stinkin’” – Kool Keith on Ultramagnetic MCs ‘Pluckin’ Cards’, 1992. As pointed out in Angus Batey’s revisit of Funk Your Head Up in 2012, Keith continued the Ultramag party line – first witnessed on Tim Dog’s ‘I Ain’t Takin’ No Shorts’ – that the…
These past few days, I started imagining an alternative timeline where Run-DMC released Tougher Than Leather in 1987 and how that might have changed the trajectory of their career. By no means do I believe it would have prevented the inevitable slide down from the top of the mountain, but it certainly would have softened…
Admitting to sampling Ultimate Breaks and Beats is one of the last remaining sacred cows of rap music. Ghostwriters and beat-jacking entire songs all seems to be fine and dandy these days, but the pride of claiming that you personally found every drum sound, horn stab and loop in the dollar bin of a ‘Mom…
From what I’ve been able to piece together, Dan The Beatman (aka DJ Danny Dan who made a record for Select with his girlfriend, The Female Dream) made the original beat and recorded it with Paul C. at 1212 Studios (as told to Big Daddy magazine for issue 12): Could this YouTube upload of an…
It took me exactly twenty years to get Godfather Don on the phone, which makes sense now that I know that by the time I started this site he had already changed his focus to playing jazz. This being my first phone interview since the ill-fated Just-Ice session in 2016, I had no idea how…
Hype stickers can vary from a mini-sales pitch to spruik the album you’re looking at, a bog-standard track listing or just the name of the producer who was paid twenty grand in the 90s to remix the single. Here are some I found in the shelves this morning and deemed worthy of a snarky accolade….
So I picked-up the 2015 edition 2LP of Peoples Instinctive Travels And The Paths of Rhythm, mainly in the hope of getting a nice loud version of ‘Footprints’. This was a dummy move, as it turns out it actually sounds worse than my single vinyl version. Blame not-so-great modern re-mastering, maybe? At least I finally…
One of the highlights of old J-Love CD’s was when he would flaunt his extensive collection of weapons – both medieval and modern. Pictured on the inner sleeves of these two albums we see a variety of maces, flails, clubs and axes. Were these close-combat instruments passed down through generations or is there a spot…
There’s been a lot of Melle Mel talk the past couple of days, so it seemed like a good opportunity to share some choice quotes that others have made about the legend himself – as found in the printed pages of A Decade of Unkut Interviews. Mikey D: I’d already won the belt, now they’re…