random old rap you are loving

I made this playlist two years ago for a friend who wanted to explain her rap palette. I've been spinning this a lot lately as it's a microcosm of what I like about hip-hop.

Some obvious, lots of album cuts, and somewhat missing the Golden Age of hip-hop (not intentionally, I think I just figured I'd get to it later)

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1vK7oYXE9RxcxbZ8rQYjg2?si=gLiHn7puRAyvY7wYnN-jRg

xp mos def famously a big fan of that wonderful song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTBIvIDnnv8

Mos Def OTM, hilarious song

rip raheem "tame one" brown

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARkoJwm0qhA

brick city kids (a/k/a artifacts) - "what what" (1997)

(he passed back in november, just now heard the news)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1P90NkYgruI

"art of facts" (1997)

and of course-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d2X0WXcQZI

"wrong side of da tracks" (1994)

one more. you know i had to post the david axelrod beat!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljjv7gNI_6k

artifacts feat busta rhymes - "c'mon with the get down (buckwild remix)"

weird coincidence, had been listening to brick city kids the past two weeks, but their other track, the self-titled one that starts the first soundbombing “mixtape”, was thinking of posting it but everyone’s heard it million times …

there’s a funny line in it though, something like “high tech like inter-net web sites / downloading mega bytes every time i touch the mic”

didn’t realize he’d passed, must be why a bunch of expensive copies of the single (the one with “brick city kids” and “what what”) suddenly materialized on discogs (which is why i had been listening to that track, actually)

Been listening to Snoop's overlooked 2017 album Neva Left, uneven of course but some cool old school west coast vibes on it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4y99h3Dlt0A

i skipped it at the time, so checking it out now. the list of features is promising.

ahhh man, this is damn solid. really appreciate all the nods to east coast hiphop, but definitely feels like a quintessential l.a. album. older i get, the more i like snoop.

also how did snoop and too short never get around to doing a collab record!? at least an ep or something.

neva left was solid for sure

bush is still my fav latter day snoop album, but neva left was very solid

Never checked out Bush will do

I love that s l o w e d down sample of Billy Joel's 'Rosalinda's Eyes'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMH_05ez1Y4

tenashus reppin sacramento and the verbatum crew-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yc4IXeyNKOA

"aeonian" (early 2000s)

that choclair beat rules

brings a smile, brings a tear

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwAcM8BiBck
Lil Fame x Sade By Your Side

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gf5dTsdQJxM
abstract tribe unique - through these streets

a group i slept on completely. heard ab rude guesting on some of the living legends stuff but yeah, my bad.

was just listening to another Ab Rude project: Haiku D'Etat. He's always an enjoyable listen

that whole scene (ab tribe unique, freestyle fellowship, etc) is so underrated. i was there at the time and chose to sleep on all of them. these days everything i hear sounds great. big sigh. have wondered on and off over the past few years just how familiar the top dawg crew is with that stuff. seems like a big progenitor of the whole "black hippie" thing kendrick was doing for a while.

quarterbackin is one of e40s best, and the quik remix is really fun
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGUVJvNGcTQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89ED2DNja90

Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth - Appreciate

^^satisfying as hell

there's no dogg pound topic!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bajNCewcAXE

tha dogg pound feat tray dee — "reality" (1995)

thought about polling this album but since snoop got the rights to death row, none of it's on streaming!

Let's Play House is a fav

And "Dogg Pound Gangstaz"

about 90% of the album is still damn good. "respect", "smooth", and "so much style" were always my favorites.

this beat is so dreamy.

pete rock+large professor — "the rap wrld" (1996)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQs_HJ7szXQ

in retrospect large professor was pretty trash on the mic.

*"the rap world"

also yeah, that's a grap luva cameo.

aaw I like those verses

good vibes

he didn't want to ill
he just wanted to chill
and keep his hand around a hundred dollar bill

(+do some of best production of the era, whatever)

(speaking of...)

LONGPOSTING

this post was inspired by voodoo chili's shout for "in these streets." thank you!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bq95c8x0jOE

the grouch — "over/evaluation" (1998)

growing up the way i did where i did, i figured most music fans of similar preference had a similar path. all across the world, we all knew about the same records and you chose what you chose and all paths would have a similar outline or arc. the theme of that —"everyone will always understand the context of everything i do, physically and emotionally, because their experience exactly and explicitly mirrors my own"— was my basic upbringing. but on my own, i applied it to music fandom with specific value because, well hi i'm posting here.

it's a fundamental flaw in the way i was raised and i've spent my entire life sorting it out. besides the obvious mental health issues it raises, it manifests in the weirdest, most idiosyncratic ways sometimes. in regards to music, it caused me to hear things and understand them as "this is objectively good and emotive music for _______ reasons" and when i encountered people who simply didn't like it and maybe casually passed it off as "yeah whatever" or "not my thing" i took them as actually making vicious insults because they were feeling the same emotive things i felt, but chose to exclude me. almost like damn, "devs made these npcs pricks. this game is gonna be hard af." the implication also being that i was breaching "unauthorized" territory by mentioning things such as "i like independent hiphop."

but i digress. (this will not be the first time you hear this. i apologize.)

that recent pitchfork 90s list made me think about all this stuff for the first time in several years. i was so dysfunctional back then with regards to how i thought about everything around music and i can't help but think my "i like independent hiphop" phase was the genesis of all that. it bred insularity. in one of my favorite songs of the 90s, it's the grouch's entire fucking thesis. and he usually had two or three tracks like this on all of his albums. and those albums were usually 60+ minute affairs, originally released on cassette only, once a year. like his crew living legends you could find the them pretty easily in larger city record shops all up and down the west coast, as long as they did consignment or dealt with one-stop distributors. this track is the closer on his fourth album, fuck the dumb (did i mention anything about insularity in the scene?).

even though outhouse did eventually do vinyl and cds, it was music that was best served by cassette. my car, like most back then, had a cassette player and an am/fm radio and i mean fuck the radio. so the lopey mpc/asr beats and small budget aesthetic were the soundtrack to about 75% of my late high school and early college drive time. i always liked certain songs in that context a lot, but whenever i'd try to put them into a mixtape or (cringe) dj set at the club, instant vibe kill. another thing i internalized and figured i was just wrong about.

but ever since that list, i've had this running thought in my head: i was like the perfect age range for "the 90s pop experience™©" and i had a completely stupid path lol. how did i fuck that up so badly?! for a further video game-esque analogy: i feel like i got so far into an obscure sidequest that i forgot how to get back into the main area for a little while. but goddammit, i figured that sidequest the fuck out. seriously, how did i skip nirvana completely at the time (and even now, i don't like that music) but end up unconditionally loving stuff that they were a clear influence on. something something sound of the era, "music of their youth resonates with dementia patients", etc.

but i digress.

my black and white attitude about music at the time lead me to believe that some things, simply for aesthetic reasons, and even those that i had previously liked, were all bad. "over/evaluation" has many strikes against it. everyone in living legends pretty much did their own beats and wrote their own raps and yeah: it was DIY. the grouch was always my favorite. he had the best beats. like a lot of 90s producer/mcs, his raps were not the most impressive. he was also my favorite in legends because he seemed the most personable. ultimately considering when and where these guys were doing their thing, it all ended up a little self-indulgent. i mean, it's a good "perseverance!" vibe he's conveying in the song, but like any 90s rapper worth anything, he has to mention his genitals within the first verse. and that's probably the most interesting thing he talks about in the entire song. sigh.

so it went for most living legends stuff. they had some larger distribution for a while in the early 2000s and murs (who pretty much made his own name by doing outside collabs) was affiliated with them, so that raised their notoriety for a bit. i tried to revisit whole albums recently and it's mostly pretty boring music. the catalogues are kind of in piecemeal; only one mystik journeymen album is on streaming. they didn't have much to say, were simply proficient at productions, and i get the impression that a lot of them were heavy hallucinogen users or at least 24/7 weed smokers (independent hiphop: difficult mode).

but every once in a while, one of them would capture something quite earnest and remarkable. even this song, with the grouch babbling about his dick and not much else, has a really strong sense to it and i just _like_ the narrator. he's chill. i'm chill. i put it on after a very long drought recently and it was a hair raising moment. this is a really good song —and yeah, the beat is doing a lot of that work— BUT EVEN NOW, go `head and talk about yer dick bro. it's a vibe and i get it! tell me more about doing the dishes lol. idk, it just works here. good summation of indie and self-released music in general: not all great, but worthwhile if you're into it and may occasionally hit on something.

those guys kept going and they're still around. haven't checked them out in the last 20 years. i dunno, i guess i always had the sense back then that i didn't do drugs, i had never been to college, and i didn't know what anything they were talking about was like so i had no business listening to that music in the first place. i thought for sure that there was no way anyone who didn't already like that stuff could take it seriously. it was still an important musical step (+lesson) and i have to think that at least the grouch, much like his east coast counterparts, had impeccably good taste in his samples.

(that's also a donald byrd sample in "over/evaluation" btw)

anyway, thanks for reading if you have. this is probably my "POO" living legends track. i still don't know the main sample, but it has that wonderful time-stretched sp1200 glaze and that's what i'm here for. anyone else ever hear living legends? the folks who introduced them to me were an odd lot; libertarian hiphop types. i also got connected to the sacramento indie hiphop scene of the time through collabs and stuff on legends tapes. there were some weirdoes in that scene.

/LONGPOSTING

epilogue:
i beyond am relieved to find that my old reviews of fuck the dumb and making perfect sense seem to have not survived internet erosion.

i beyond

yep, leave the idiot typos for the short post. sure thing!

good track austin, thanks

you might relate to this booming post by tim f on the 77 tracks thread

People on ILM talk a lot about subjectivity, but usually in a high-handed and (TBH) narrowly-conceived way that doesn't really go far enough. It's not merely that people like different things for different reasons. It's also that every interaction we have with music is shaped by every single experience we have ever had that led us to that interaction, that we could have taken a small number of different steps in our life that might lead us to raise up Wet Leg and cast down Dry Cleaning rather than the reverse, and that would still be us, just a marginally different version of us; the terms in which we engage in the act of doing one or the other are really just a roadmap to our current state of being that no one else can precisely follow.

Realising this should prompt a certain humility in our taste, not just in the face of all the people who might feel differently, but perhaps more importantly in recognition of all the different versions of ourselves that also might have done so. And the act of critiquing music, increasingly for me at least, is less about asking "what is it in this music that allows me to enjoy it" and more about asking "what is it in this version of me, right now, that allows me to enjoy this music?"

definitely love that! thank you.

here's some other mid-90s west coast indie from seattle:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiDP0eGKi4Y

these dudes were more native tongues inspired and the beats are prrrreeeetttty fuckin dope across the board (thx for the jaco sample). free on bandcamp!

sorry that's the do the math compilation on the tribal music label. 1996.

(fav tracks are the ghetto children ones: "equillibrium" + "who listening" especially)

ctrl+f found no instance of VONTEL. stumbled on this lost g-funk gem from phoenix AZ, album is full of dj battlecat beats and a few troutman features

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpAB16lVE04

https://www.passionweiss.com/2015/08/19/vontel-vision-of-a-dream-battlecat-g-funk/

not at all random but I caught the Pharcyde (minus Bootie Brown) yesterday, very joyful, and wow what a jam Runnin' is - those kicks!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwHuEDCM7xs

In Dilla Time, Dan Charnas recounts the story of the attempted subterfuge of Dilla’s first major beat placement. As crafted by the young producer, “Runnin’” feels wholly different from anything else from its era, mainly thanks to its unconventional kick drums, which hit in unexpected places and don’t repeat in a discernible pattern. But Fatlip didn’t think they sounded right. So during the session for the song, when the rest of his Pharcyde cohorts were out of the studio, he moved the kicks to fall in predictable places. When group member Tre returned, he was incensed. He and Fatlip came to blows over it. “All this over a beat?” Dilla thought to himself. But when the dust settled, Tre’s viewpoint won out. “We’re not changing it,” he told Dilla. “That’s your signature.”

https://www.theringer.com/2022/2/1/22911750/40-best-j-dilla-beats-common-jay-dee-de-la-soul-tribe-donuts

never heard that vonte before! i love battlecat. listened to the whole album last night.

Yeah! Surprisingly above average MC and solid production. Love the Chaka interpolation on Don't Nobody.

That article above speculated on some "funded by drug money" lore and digging into the label Fo Life's discog it seems not at all shocking. Their only other full length release, "Stressin" by Bookie is chockfull of Battlecat beats, features Kurupt, E-40, Kool G Rap and Vontel himself. And is mastered by...Bernie Grundman!? lol. unfortunately not streaming but can be heard in full here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBTp1T7XgiI

been missing bankroll fresh lately. guy could write a song. rip

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5CIhUyJLmw

a long time ago somebody told me one of my beats sounded like nujabes and i never took the cue to check him out. rectifying that...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orZdl3KqgzU

nujabes feat shing02 - "luv(sic) pt 2" (mid 2000s)

...and yeah, they were absolutely right. sadboi jazz chords+stiff drums is what i wanted to hear, so that's the kind of beats i made. granted, nothing near as stellar as this. shing02 is passable on the mic, but with a beat that dope he could've been rapping ABCs and it would've worked.

elsewhere, nujabes gets tf down-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XJFSTYryv4

nujabes - "world's end rhapsody" (2005)

not really relevant to the main topic here; essentially a re-edit of a northern soul 45. but much too hot of a jam not to post.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KV11KxIF6hM

Chill Rob G - Rob's World (unreleased)

I'd somehow never heard this epic before. Produced by--and featuring!--Stevie Wonder!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bglEOTeBtqM

This article references plenty of random old rap

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/08/magazine/hip-hop-deaths.html

pretty insensitive way to frame this article, man

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsIu8RN7ivU

Prob not random enough but i'm liking EPMD's Strictly Business a whole lot lately.