You know you’ve made it when you can afford to pay the best rappers of the era to make songs advertising your shit. There was that Biggie verse which later turned up as a song with Black Rob with the store name references muted (‘Jeans and Sneakers’), and of course this pristine snippet of prime-time…
Finally got my hands on a bootleg of this masterpiece, yet another casualty of the ‘Cop Killer’ fallout which resulted in any rap lyrics involving shooting police being either censored or the whole song getting pulled. DJ Premier really went all-in with that demented horn loop that recalls a squeaky screen door swinging in the…
This is a weird one. The cynical part of my brain tells me that Marley Marl is deliberately messing with Ced-Gee and the crew here, as he acts as if he’s never heard an Ultramagnetic record before in his life – despite the fact that they’ve been making some serious noise since 1986 with ‘Ego…
As the ancient philosophers’ once told us: ‘Sometimes you’re DJ Crazy Cortez, and sometimes your Jiggy’. Salutes to Noah Callahan-Bever, who drew this strip when he started out at ego trip before holding it down at Blaze, Vibe and Complex.
I present the first (and only) edition of M-Low News, possibly the finest collection of press clippings ever included in a rap single. M-LOW (aka Music Lovers of the World) was the Rocky Bucano’s first foray into the music business, before he teamed-up with Jazzy Jay to form Strong City. The first release from Wayne…
Click for full size scan Click for full size scan The world would be a far better place if Kool Keith’s Straight Outta Bellvue Into Creedmore album actually existed.
Back in the early days of Twitter, I complained about how DEZ interrupted KASE2 from rapping so that he could recite a bit of ‘The Message’ in Style Wars. The Drama King was frankly appalled that anyone would bring that up thirty years later, which is valid, but how do we know what kind of…
Soulshock and Cutfather are a couple of Danish DJ’s who both managed top three placings at the DMC’s in the 1989 and 1988 respectively, which served as something of a rite-of-passage for any DJ trying to make a name for themselves internationally. Wikipedia claims that this led to Soulshock getting booked to tour as Queen…
If you were hanging out at clubs in 1992, there was no way you could miss the impact of the SWV’s ‘Right Here’ [Human Nature Mix], which was also the second and final modern R&B tape I bought after the What’s The 411? album. Who could forget that video with ya gals suited up for…
Billed as ‘The World’s First Ever Live Rap Album’, this is taken from a showcase put together by the Music of Life label, recorded at Cafe de’Paris London March 14th 1989, featuring Tim Westwood and a bunch of UK performers such as Demon Boyz, MC Duke, Merlin and Daddy Freddy, as well as The 45…
This one is from years back, when Pete Rock and CL Smooth bootlegs were the popping up every other day. I’m assuming the title is an attempt at some cheap humour, since three of these songs had very much ‘come out’ on movie soundtracks, and ‘In The House’ is just a regular old song from…
I can’t seem to leave the house these days without tripping over a crate of rap bootlegs with 300 Yen price tags on the sleeve. Apparently Japanese record dealers have decided to unload all of the nineties rap white labels they bought by the container-load from Beat Street Records, and as a result the place…