(1998, Rawkus Records)
Man, I'll be honest right up front here and confess that last weekend, I was doing some tune-up work on both the family vehicles, so I dragged one of my monstrous 1970s speakers out of the camper, and threw this record on the turns table. It did not stand the test of time, and that's barely a decade ago. It was hard to get through any one side of any of the four maxi-singles, which is how they break up the hip hop albums so that it has fatter grooves in the vinyl for DJs to tear up upon with diamond-tipped needles. Still, as I didn't go back and revisit any of these records as I made a giant list and culled it down to a final top 100 over the course of a month this past spring, without going through the process of listening to everything like a fucking douche, sitting there and taking notes on highs and lows. I worked from memory.
My memory of this album is of it being the culmination of those early Rawkus years, when I was buying a good $40 to $100 worth of new vinyl every week, as I had no responsibilities otherwise, other than half of the rent on a $200 a month trailer. It was when the indie rap movement first started to creep into my area, and Willie's Records & Tapes (R.I.P.) would have strange white label jams mixed in with all the more commonly known shit. I got into a lot of great shit all at once at that time, with the indie labels popping up with good distribution, plus with rap music being still in the throes of Wu-Tang not yet having sucked shit completely and still having a lot of weird guest spots before guest spots were as common as some sort of stupid shit that's everywhere, even where it never should be, nowadays. And Rawkus was where I first heard Talib Kweli (before he started suffering from The Whispering Rapper Disease aka Bahamadius Suckashitus), Company Flow (when they still had a black dude to temper El-P's over-the-top LOOK HOW DOWN I AM!ness), Punchline & Wordsworth, Saul Williams (who was fucking amazing to me before Def Poetry Jammers became such a ridiculous stereotype), probably more. Shit, the first time I heard Eminem was on the B-side to an L-Fudge single on Rawkus, and he was ridiculously awesome at that point, still fresh and not yet a caricature of his own rhymes.
And this album was great, at that time, because it had a couple of high profile appearances, but it was mostly just underground shit, without the crutch of more famous compadres like the later Lyricist Lounges.
Nonetheless, like I said, when I played this the other weekend working on my truck, it fucking sucked. I plan on doing this every Presidential Election year (or every four years in the case of America hopefully dissolving into tribal bands of warlords and communes), and I doubt this will make it again. Those fond memories of having tons of discretionary income to waste on new vinyl, living in a shitty trailer, making mixtapes as DJ Spinebreaker (I traded one dreadlocked college kid a mixtape for a VHS copy of Master Killer, which I still have), just kicking it with my boy Rob the Black Clever Star... man, thsoe were fun ass days. It's too bad this album is so dated sounded and unfun that it doesn't generate a feel good memory vibe in me. I think that's what's been missing with a lot of hip hop music since like the very early '90s, is that sentimental timeless classic vibe. Not too much shit is timeless anymore; it's all such commercial bullshit that's here today #1 with a bullet and in the budget bins with a notch in the corner of the CD case in three weeks.
I am listening to the Sirius satellite's Soultown station right now actually, because I DJed this past weekend at my mom and her friends' redneck hippie Fall Fling party, and I had only brought three crates of records, mostly redneck funk type shit, to get feet scooting across the grass, but I let people come up and ask for songs, and people was into old soul like crazy, which luckily I had a couple of Atlantic Records comps and three or four Soul Train compilations, so we got 'em moving. That's some timeless ass shit right there. I don't think anyone's ever gonna mistake MosDef for Clarence Carter or Talib Kweli for Wilson Pickett. Or Otis Redding. Man, I wish all those hopeless child soldiers in Africa were into Otis Redding t-shirts instead of Tupac t-shirts, then maybe they wouldn't be raping enemies and having bad days all the time because they had to use their AK all the time.
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