One of my main complaints about Wayne’s No Ceilings was the beat selection. It was strictly Wayne raps to the hits, like he watched MTV Jams for an hour and just wrote to each of those songs. A great mixtape isn’t just karaoke. DJs like Drama and Green Lantern have earned names for themselves because of their ability to find unexpected beats that fit the artists they are working with. I’m still digesting Jeezy’s Trap Or Die 2 but one of the early standouts is “Ill’in” which revisits this somewhat obscure Pharoahe Monch cut from the Soundbombing 2 comp. The sound is just so incredibly and naturally Jeezy. (It’s appropriate that the The Clipse show up too, themselves long standing masters of finding the right beat to jack.) Here Don Cannon doesn’t just throw on the instrumental, it sounds like he rebuilt the track by hand, even slipping in the opening piano from the original Lamont Dozier sample. Oh yes, down south digging is the theme for today. (You might also recognize the Lamont cut as the same source of Ghostface’s “Saturday Night” and G-Side’s “We Own Da Building.”)
After splitting from Relativity but before misspelling his own name at then neo-soul halfway house MCA, Coomon dropped this one off on the razor blade. “1999″ was the lead off for the Soundbombing 2 compilation and is a cool enough chin stroking conscious rap song with an always welcome Sadat X cameo, but it’s the B-side that wins (again) with Lonnie trying his hand at Buhloone era style De La recontextualized nostalgia. Except he was never quiet as smart as those guys so it comes off like the “I Used To Love HER” video if it was a song about songs and not a song about a person who was actually a genre. Still it’s a fun record and might just be the last great song that Common Sense the lyrically lyrical half drunk rap fanboy ever recorded. Presumably it never made it past the 12″ because it would have cost a fortune to clear all the vocal samples. “1999″ vid after the jump. (more…)
Mos Def performing “Universal Magnetic” at what appears to be the Black Star release party.
I’m still slowly going through all these Rap City pause tapes I made in high school. This mostly involves a lot of fast forwarding through regular old videos like “Triumph” and “Southern Hospitality.” It’s weird to think of an era time when taping a music video seemed like a necessity, out of a genuine concern that you might otherwise never see it again. One day we are going to have to explain to our kids what it was like in the pre-youtube era and they are going to look at us like we are retards.
I didn’t forget about this series. Today we continue to be that snail crawling on the edge of the Rawkus razor blade with the debut of Mr. Talib Kweli alongside producer Hi-Tek. This was truly the moment that Rawkus first entered the sociopolitical realm (unless you count Company Flow’s “independent as fuck” as a bold statement of individuality). Well, sociopolitical in the sense that these guys knew who Mumia was and weren’t afraid to mention him in a oddly constructed punchline. (more…)
