And now for something completely different: Old school hip hop extravaganza!

Other than a trip into hick hop last year hip hop hasn't featured here much, mainly because it doesn't feature very much in my musical life anymore. Me'n'hip hop go back a while and it's music that I mostly left behind, settling for sudden bouts of craving some "bomb beat from Dre" or other from time, mostly when I'm driving. A recent listen on a drive to work to en early version of this comp made me push to finish it and the accompanying write-up. 

Ah, it has been a good long while that this write-up has been kicking around as the beginning of a doc, but I never got around to finishing it, mostly because I wrote down thoughts and personal memories about some songs, but didn't see how to turn that into a text. The soultion: make these into liner notes! The ensuing problem: If I do it for a handful tracks, I should do it for all of them. So off to wrok (and work it turned out to be, foolish me...). The next ensuing problem: word count! I didn't think the longest write-up on this blog would involve hip hop! At a cool 2500 words plus, get ready to know more about my hip hop favotites from the late 80s to the early 00s than you ever dared to ask!

Fun fact: I added some fun facts to my liner notes!

Other fun fact: That of course made these liner notes even longer! 

OBG twenty years from now, listening to hip hop after all these years (artist illustration)

You will see that my predilection of hip hop tracks is as old school as most of these tracks, as a cool sample or hook will get me anytime. Great word play is the cherry on top of that. But yeah;, hip hop for me is a music that has to move and make you want to move when you listen to it. Which is why most odern rap variations (trap etc.) with their barely there grooves,  often somnolent rhythms and electornically enhanced beats really don't do much for me. When some of my young wards try to play a modern rap song to me, I'm mostly "Meh. That's not real hip hop, folks". But whaddayaknow, middle aged man and clouds... 

Anyhoo, since there is a lot of stuff to get through, let's get to it shall we?

Be Faithful

Let’s start the bash in style, with an absolute banger from my clubbing days. In fact, this was THE banger in the nightclub of my choice, the After Shave (RIP). Whenever the first beats of this kicked in, everyone stormed the (really small) dancefloor, followed the call-and-response type action, did the “engine no. 9” nursery rhyme and yelled “pick it up!pick it up!pick it up!”, and then went crazy when Scoop’s “let’s go!” brings the beat back, turning into human pogo sticks. Ah, good times. So, ladies, fellas: “If you got long hands, throw your hand up/if you got short hands, make noise!”

Fun Fact: Clearance issues of the copious samples and interpolations in the song prevented an official wide release of the (revised) track until 2003, but enterprising DJs around the world, such as the ones in the Aftershave, had it since it got first released in 1999.

Not Fun Fact: Sadly, Fatman Scoop died while performing last year, so also RIP.

The retro dancefloor of the Aftershave (notice the miniture mirrored disco ball!). This is where the party started, continued and ended... 

Cold Rock A Party

The soundtrack of my high school graduation. Fantastic sample from “Upside Down” that won’t let you keep your feet still. A buddy of ours with the best sound system would fire this up, open the trunk for mightier sound and then we would groove to that tune in the high school parking lot. My dance moves for this were inspired by John Travolta’s twist in Pulp Fiction. It was pretty fly for a white guy.

Fun fact: MC Lyte was the first female rap artist signed to an album deal.

X Gon Give It To Ya

DMX mostly passed me by during his heyday, but this banger – last year revived for an ad here in France – is what I like about my hip hop: irresistible hook, endlessly propulsive. Darkman's rough vocals aren't something I'd listen to all day, but for a one-off I'm all in.

Fun fact: The ad in question is for automatically passing the toll booths on France's paying highways...

Young OBG trying to impress with his hip hop dance moves (artist illustration)

Hit ‘Em Up [Single Shooter AK 47 Version]

Veteran music journalist Mikal Gilmore called this song in The Rolling Stone The Decades of Rock'n'Roll “the hardest-hitting, most eventful song...of Shakur's career...I had never heard anything remotely like Tupac Shakur's breathless performanceon this track in all my years of listening to pop music.It contains a truly remarkable amount of rage and agression – enough to make anything in punk seem flaccid by comparison”. He’s a hundred percent right. Whatever you think of its content, it’s an astonishing track. Tupac opens the hostilities before the music even kicks in and goes right for the throat (or the nuts): “So I fucked your bitch, you fat motherfucker!” he launches in the direction of Christopher Wallace a.k.a. The Notorious B.I.G. a.k.a. Biggie Smalls a.k.a. (insert a hundred other nicknames). And it doesn’t get any friendlier from there. This is essentially the sound of someone running amok verbally, and there is something perversely exhilarating about hearing Tupac unloading clip after clip of verbal ammo into Biggie and the entire Bad Boy crew.

The original version featured Outlawz, a group of young protegés Tupac tried to launch in the last months before his untimely death, but their guest verses are run of the mill bragging and threatening that distract from rather than add to Tupac's tour de force. So I got rid of all the Outlawz verses, . thus the “single shooter version” with only 2 Pac (you'll get the AK 47 part when you listen to it). “I don't even know why I'm on this track” he says at the beginning of the original version, but we know, Tupac, we know.

Paparazzi

My introduction to Xzibit, before he became way more known in Europe for MTV's Pimp My Ride series rather than his rap releases. Nothing much to say 'bout this one, just a very solid brag track dissing weak and wannabe MCs with a memorable hook.

Fun fact: Proving no one is safe, the operatic female 'backing vocals' are from a sampled Barbara Streisand!

"Hit 'em up...until they come and hit me up..."

Sunshine

Just a good, breezy rap track feat. prime support of Babyface on the sung chorus and Foxy Brown duetting/dueling with Jay-Z. I really like the beat (built on four samples) on this one.

Fun fact: One of the songs sampled is by Kraftwerk!

I Got 5 On It

Jordan Peele's interesting if uneven Us made great use of the spooky properties of Luniz' biggest hit. The hook, built on Club Nouveau's “Why You Treat Me So Bad” is just an absolute killer. I didn't get the lyrics about splitting up your bag of weed at the time, but it didn't matter, if was just a really cool groove to get into to a teenage OBG.

Funky Cold Medina

The oldest track on this comp and one that never fails to make me smile. Tone-Loc's deadpan delivery of his misadventures involving the can't seem to fail aphrodisiac of the title always cracks me up. It's also crackin' storytelling, a comedy of errors in which Tone-Loc's weary narrator gets from one uncomfortable situation into the next: “I got every damn dog in the neighbourhood breakin' down my door!”. “But when she got undressed, it was a big ol' mess – Sheena was a man!” et al. Funky and funny as hell.

"Don't worry guys, everything is going a-okay with that funky cold medina, easy peasy..."

California Love

“Well, let me welcome everybody to the wild wild west, a state that's untouchable like Elliott Ness”. The first time I heard Two Pac and Dr. Dre (two for the price of one!). The music video has the weird distinction of being a soul brother to Duran Duran's “Wild Boys” - as both rip off the apocalyptic imagery of the Mad Max universe, here riffing on Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. Dre's rumbling delivery and then Pac's rapid-fire second verse set up nicely their mission statement, set to a super funky hook made up of three samples, but especially Joe Cocker's “Woman To Woman”.

Gasolina

More proof that this music can be more about rhythm than lyrics, since I speak just enough Spanish to order a beer, yet the feel of the track is much more important than whatever Daddy Yankee says (it’s all about sex, man, or so I'm told). The video version was a weird sort-of medley with another, much smoother r'nb song, capped by a really cool, agressive rap section. So this newly created mix by yours truly is the single version with the rap verse from the longer version edited smack dab into the middle. This is the way the song should have been issued in the first place. Ladies and gentlemen: start your engines.

Everybody loves Raymond!...(he's a bit noisy and excitable, though)

Fire It Up

Busta Rhymes', uh, extroverted rapping style can become exhausting over the long run of an album, but be exhilarating for a single track, such as on my favorite track which brilliantly samples the theme from Knight Rider (why did it take so long for someone to do that?!?) which of course I was a fan of when I was young. Turbo boost!

Fun Fact: Busta mimics The Hoff talking to K.I.T.T. In the middle of the track.

Regulate

Another brillant sample, from the opening of Michael McDonalds' “I Keep Forgettin' (Every Time You're Near)”, proving once again how you can even make L.A. soft rock sound ominous and menacing in the right reworking. G-Funk, as Warren G dubbed his smooth style, promising 'a whole new era' (which, well, didn't necessarily come to pass), was an outgrowth of new jack swing, and indeed, even the gangsta rap part by Nate Dogg is incredibly smooth, rapping about shooting up people in a relaxed, even casual manner: “Now they're droppin' and yellin', it's a tad bit late, Nate Dogg and Warren G had to regulate”.

Fun Fact: The opening, explaining what a regulator is, is of course from better-than-you-think Brat Pack western Young Guns.

"We regulate any stealin' of this property..."

Ride Wit Me

Coming at the tail end of me actively listening to hip hop, this was pretty much inescapable during my college year in the US. Nelly, putting the midwest on the hip hop map, never was as big in ol' Europe as he was in the US, but the light, good-natured flow of this makes it a perfect bop along party anthem. Hey! Must be the money!

(Holy Matrimony) Letter To The Firm

When female rappers really broke through big in the mid-90s (not counting influential acts like Salt'n'Pepa or TLC before) most of the attention was focused on two very young ladies, Lil' Kim and Foxy Brown and their supposed rivalry (mostly invented at the time, but which later turned into a real one). I always largely preferred Inga Marchand a.k.a. Foxy Brown: her delivery was crisper and there's a smokey timbre to her voice that always gave her tracks the edge, in my humble view. Foxy has been cited by tody's reigning rap queen Nicki Minaj and Megan Thee Stallion as a major influence.

Fun fact: Quentin Tarantino had the good taste to put this into Jackie Brown, in the scene where Robert Forster's lovestruck bail bondsman Max Cherry goes out to buy a Delfonics cassette (!). It was of course also a cheeky callback to lead actress' Pam Grier's most famous role in a film nerd easter egg, thus very Tarantino kind of way.

"'Suggestive album cover' you say?...frankly, Mr. Shankly, I don't know what you mean..." 

Jump

One of my first exposures to hip hop outside of, erm, Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer. Unlike those two, the young Chrises from Kriss Kross had some legitimate mic skills, even at just 13 and 14 years old which explains the slightly squeaky voices, though most credit should probably go to producer Jermaine Dupri for coming up with “Jump”.The 'totally krossed out' gimmick, where the two would wear their clothes backwards – probably also mainstream's first exposure to extremely baggy baggy pants – was a nice touch, but this track is a banger with or without it. “Some of 'em try to rhyme but they can't...”

O.P.P.

Built on an immediately recognizable sample from the Jackson's “ABC”, I let Treach from Naughty By Nature take this one: “'O.P.P.' is about crazy messing with other people's girls...girls messing, guys messing...so everybody could relate, the fellas and the girls, and it's got a hook for the party and everybody can crazy groove to it”. What he said. Just a really good groover that burst into the pop charts and was one of the genre's first mainstream crossover hits outside of..you know..the aforementioned Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer.

"Gentlemen, absolutely no smiling, alright...remember your band name..."

Most listennnnnnn [skit]

What would a rap album be without a skid?

Well, probably a whole lot better, really, as skits were one of the banes of the 90s and 2000s rap albums, needlessly filling up space with stuff that either was never funny in the first place or skippable after one or two listens. Coupled with most rap artist overegging the pudding by wheeling out thirteen or fourteen tracks, most rap albums of the time are running close to or over 70 minutes which is awfully long to sit through relatively like-minded and similar sounding music.

Having said all that, there's a couple of skits that never fail to amuse me, including this diss from the G-Unit into the direction of Ja Rule. They're not even on the track, they have a radio announcer advertise a fake duets album of Ja Rule rapping over the mainstream hits of the day by Shakira, Pink, Britney Spears and Nickelback. The fake Ja Rule stumbling through these without any regard of rhythm or fit is never not funny. Hard clowning, but funny clowning. Hollaaaaaaaa!

99 Problems (Grey Album version)

Ah, The Grey Album, one of the first big mash-up releases that really caught on in the early aughts and in an instance made Brian Joseph Burton a.k.a. Danger Mouse into a household name in 2004. It was an ingenious idea, combining Jay-Z's vocals from his Black Album with samples from the songs on the Beatles' eponymous album, known to everyone and their mother as The White Album.

“99 Problems” is for me by far the strongest track from The Grey Album because it takes what is Jay-Z's best rap and marries it to the rock-based samples of “Helter Skelter”, giving the whole thing a propulsive energy that the original “99 Problems” simply doesn't have. The little “aaaahs”, the guitar riff and descending guitar line and furious drumming of Ringo – what a ruckus, over which Jay-Z spits some of his best rhymes, relating a driving while black encounter: “'Son, do you know what I'm stopping you for?' 'Cause I'm young and I'm black and my hat's real low? Do I look like a mind reader, sir, I don't know! Am I under arrest or should I guess some more?”

Fun Fact: Danger Mouse founded Gnarls Barkley with rapper Cee-Lo Green shortly afterwards, a duo you no doubt remember for their monster hit “Crazy.

Great concept, great cover art...no snark on this one

Changes

The first posthumous release in what turned out to be a huge amount of unreleased and then fnished after the fact recordings by Shakur. This is certainly one of the best, leaning hard into the hook from Bruce Hornsby & The Range's “The Way It Is”. The soulful backing vocals by Talent on the chorus are great, and Tupac is in peak form here, spitting out socio-economic rhymes about being young black men prone to a life of crime and violence in the city. It isn't quite “What's Going On” for the 1990s, but it's pretty close. And it of course ominously points to the end: “And as long as I stay black/ I gotta stay strapped / and I never get to lay back / 'cuz I always have to worry 'bout the payback / some young buck that I roughed up way back / comin' back after all these years/ rat-rat-tat-tat-tat / That's the way it is”. And that's the way it (almost) was.