I was lucky enough to grow up during the first flush of hip hop, when occasional forays tuning the radio could find Herbie Hancock or Curtis Mantronik. My early record collection was built around singles from Run DMC, EPMD, LL Cool J and the Fresh Prince. KRS-One, Chuck D, and Ice T were perhaps as influential on my political thinking as Minor Threat and the Dead Kennedys would later be. I think the peak was somewhere between Coldcut's 1987 remix of Eric B. and Rakim's "Paid In Full," a stunning song that I still use as yardstick for sampling and rhyme compositions, and De La Soul's 1989 debut, 3 Feet High And Rising. Later acts like the Young MC and Canada's own Maestro Fresh Wes and the Dream Warriors would round out my collection.
By the time I entered high school, the hip hop landscape was changing. The crime rhyme style of Ice T had been overtaken by the harder and more graphic NWA, and though I really liked Ice Cube's "How To Survive In South Central" from the Boyz n the Hood soundtrack, Straight Outta Compton never made it into my collection, since the whole PMRC warning sticker issue made it a very difficult album to find. 2 Live Crew also helped to shift things towards more explicit topics. The emergence of Vanilla Ice as a fabricated identity raised issues of authenticity that really troubled me. The MCs I admired the most engaged in social and political issues, whereas it seemed that by 1993 newer acts had divorced the substance from the style and seemed to celebrate the violence without representing its consequences.
The final blow, as trivial as it may seem, was the development of the West Coast "p-funk" style in the wake of the copyright infringement lawsuit directed at 3 Feet High And Rising. For me, hip hop was based around samples, be they the James Brown and soul samples of Public Enemy, or the heavy metal sounds of Ice T's Power or Iceberg albums. The Dr. Dre produced Snoop Dog albums just sounded like high-pitched whines to me, a kind of hip hop version of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music. With lyrics that seemed to be descending into caricature on the one side and music sterility on the other, the Beastie Boys' Ill Communication was perhaps the last "hip hop" album I bought in the 1990s until their Hello Nasty follow-up in 1998.
My discovery of the Ninja Tunes Record label helped to keep things alive during this period, as Ninja Tunes celebrated the anniversary of Coldcuts "Beats + Pieces" album opened up a whole roster of sample heavy DJs. Further, stumbling across What?What? on the Herbaliser's 1997 Blow Your Headphones suggested that there was still something meaningful in rap, and I fell in love with Ollie Teeba's jazz-focused rhythms. In fact, "Mr. Chombee Had The Flaw" has become a perennial favourite from this era.
Increasingly, as the decade ended, things started cropping up on my radar, such as Mos Def and Talib Kwelli or the Jurassic 5, but nothing that was strong enough to make me want to hunt it down on its own, though I think I might have come pretty close to purchasing k-os' 2004 Joyful Rebellion. In fact, it really wasn't until 2005's Breaking Kayfabe by Cadence Weapon that I finally bought another hip hop album. Between 1998 and 2005, my interest in Ninja Tunes had broadened into a more widespread affinity for electronica and DJ-work, but straight ahead MC-based hip hop was still something of an oddity. In fact, I didn't even notice that the Beastie Boys had released 2002's To The Five Boroughs until 2007's The Mix Up debuted.
By 2007 though, things had changed. I came back from SXSW with two new(er) Public Enemy records, New Whirl Order and How You Sell Soul to a Soulless People Who Sold Their Soul, and stumbled across Busdriver's 2005 Fear of a Black Tangent, along with miscellaneous things by Common, and eagerly anticipated Cadence Weapon's 2008 follow-up Afterparty Babies. The lead-off track, "Do I Miss My Friends" didn't disappoint and was one of my favourite songs, of any genre, in 2008. Last year saw my introduction to MF Doom's layered approach to identity in hip hop, and Mos Def's The Ecstatic entered my record collection, along with DJ Spooky's rap heavy The Secret Song, marking the first time in perhaps twenty years that I bought three brand new rap albums in one calendar year.
CCPS 2.0 is Live!
4 weeks ago
