(1993, Loud Records)
I had for a long minute lived with a crazy girl in college we still refer to as The Bi-yotch, and she had a stereo that I used for the records I would play and the tapes I would buy. Well then I finally slid away and moved in with some dudes, including my man Boogie Brown, and it was your normal shitty Richmond house with one dude per room and overpriced rent and lots of weed smoking and beer drinking. When first living there, I hadn't shifted out of buying records, because I already had such a large collection, you had to be constantly adding something to it, because a record collection lives and breaths on shelves and inside of milk crates and wants to be fed and trimmed down and shuffled and fingered and all that. The first time I heard Tha Alkaholiks was on a King Tee single (which I think is on this list later actually), and it was some good shit. Their first group single, with Tash finally on it (he was in "Club County" at the time of the King Tee recording), so I had to have this shit when the full-length LP was at Willie's. But I didn't even have a record player. My wacked-out super-brain roommate Crazy Jai had gotten one of those little kids record players, a Sesame Street one, no shit, with a Big Bird head on the arm with the needle. So there I was, in my shitty room, mattress on the floor (eventually to rest inside a 2x4 frame on some milk crates in lounger fashion, till I broke that shit fucking a chick one night... yeah, that's how I roll), with my brand new Tha Alkaholiks full-length LP playing on a Sesame Street turntable. It was one of those moments too goddamned retarded to really imagine correctly in a visual way, which I seem to get a lot of in my life. But Tha Liks were the shit.
Looking back, amazing to think that Loud Records started out with only two groups - these guys and Wu-Tang, making it automatically better than pretty much any rap label in existence nowadays. I mean seriously, everybody has mixtapes or myspaces now and gets hyped up as some real flavor. But here was Loud, actually finding acts that had something to do that was original, and doing it. Even Tha Liks, the whole concept of being drunk asses, that would be a song concept to a modern allegedly great rapper. They took it as a whole schtick, but it didn't get played out (at least not on this first record).
Secondly of note, this album contains "Turn the Party Out" featuring The Lootpack, which was the first song that came out produced by Madlib (who I think might've produced another track or two as well, maybe "Mary Jane" off this LP). It's just crazy to think how much smaller hip hop was then, with Tha Alkaholiks being brought out by King Tee - a west coast legend, on the same label as the Wu-Tang - an impending shapeshifter of hip hop, and getting production from a friend in Madlib who'd become underground rap deity. But at the same time, I doubt hip hop was all that much smaller back then, so much as it was more discriminating. Every fucking wack ass 15-year-old couldn't just pop open the laptop and set up a myspace and start throwing shit at the world until something magically sticks, often times due to its retardedness not its greatness.
But I digress. Suffice it to explain my personal hip hop preferences in that when I used to make mixtapes and would use "It's My Thang" by EPMD with that bassline, I'd follow it up with "Only When I'm Drunk" by Tha Alkaholiks and not that stupid assed Jay-Z song with the bitch singing the corny R&B hook. Which one? Exactly.
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